Ordinary Cities

Ordinary Cities
Author: Jennifer Robinson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2013-07-04
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1134406940

With the urbanization of the world's population proceeding apace and the equally rapid urbanization of poverty, urban theory has an urgent challenge to meet if it is to remain relevant to the majority of cities and their populations, many of which are outside the West. This groundbreaking book establishes a new framework for urban development. It makes the argument that all cities are best understood as ‘ordinary’, and crosses the longstanding divide in urban scholarship and urban policy between Western and other cities (especially those labelled ‘Third World’). It considers the two framing axes of urban modernity and development, and argues that if cities are to be imagined in equitable and creative ways, urban theory must overcome these axes with their Western bias and that resources must become at least as cosmopolitan as cities themselves. Tracking paths across previously separate literatures and debates, this innovative book - a postcolonial critique of urban studies - traces the outlines of a cosmopolitan approach to cities, drawing on evidence from Rio, Johannesburg, Lusaka and Kuala Lumpur. Key urban scholars and debates, from Simmel, Benjamin and the Chicago School to Global and World Cities theories are explored, together with anthropological and developmentalist accounts of poorer cities. Offering an alternative approach, Ordinary Cities skilfully brings together theories of urban development for students and researchers of urban studies, geography and development.

Ordinary Cities, Extraordinary Geographies

Ordinary Cities, Extraordinary Geographies
Author: Bryson, John R.
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2021-08-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1789908027

This insightful book explores smaller towns and cities, places in which the majority of people live, highlighting that these more ordinary places have extraordinary geographies. It focuses on the development of an alternative approach to urban studies and theory that foregrounds smaller cities and towns rather than much larger cities and conurbations.

City, Street and Citizen

City, Street and Citizen
Author: Suzanne Hall
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2012-06-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136310614

How can we learn from a multicultural society if we don’t know how to recognise it? The contemporary city is more than ever a space for the intense convergence of diverse individuals who shift in and out of its urban terrains. The city street is perhaps the most prosaic of the city’s public parts, allowing us a view of the very ordinary practices of life and livelihoods. By attending to the expressions of conviviality and contestation, ‘City, Street and Citizen’ offers an alternative notion of ‘multiculturalism’ away from the ideological frame of nation, and away from the moral imperative of community. This book offers to the reader an account of the lived realities of allegiance, participation and belonging from the base of a multi-ethnic street in south London. ‘City, Street and Citizen’ focuses on the question of whether local life is significant for how individuals develop skills to live with urban change and cultural and ethnic diversity. To animate this question, Hall has turned to a city street and its dimensions of regularity and propinquity to explore interactions in the small shop spaces along the Walworth Road. The city street constitutes exchange, and as such it provides us with a useful space to consider the broader social and political significance of contact in the day-to-day life of multicultural cities. Grounded in an ethnographic approach, this book will be of interest to academics and students in the fields of sociology, global urbanisation, migration and ethnicity as well as being relevant to politicians, policy makers, urban designers and architects involved in cultural diversity, public space and street based economies.

An Ordinary City

An Ordinary City
Author: Justin B. Hollander
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2017-08-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319607057

This book paints an intimate portrait of an overlooked kind of city that neither grows nor declines drastically. In fact, New Bedford, Massachusetts represents an entire category of cities that escape mainstream urban studies’ more customary attention to global cities (New York), booming cities (Atlanta), and shrinking cities (Flint). New Bedford-style ordinary cities are none of these, they neither grow nor decline drastically, but in their inconspicuousness, they account for a vast majority of all cities. Given the complexities of growth and decline, both temporarily and spatially, how does a city manage change and physically adapt to growth and decline? This book offers an answer through a detailed analysis of the politics, environment, planning strategies, and history of New Bedford.

Justice and Fairness in the City

Justice and Fairness in the City
Author: Davoudi, Simin
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2016-04-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1447323378

With more than half the world’s population now living in urban areas, ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’ within the city are key concepts in contemporary political debate. This book examines the theory and practice of justice in and of the city through a multi-disciplinary collaboration, which draws on a wide range of expertise. By bringing diverse disciplinary and theoretical perspectives into conversation with each other to explore the (in) justices in urban environment, education, mobility and participation the book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of justice and fairness in and of the city. It will be a valuable resource for academic researchers and students across a range of disciplines including urban and environmental studies, geography, planning, education, ethics and politics.

The Ordinary

The Ordinary
Author: Rem Koolhaas
Publisher: Columbia Univ Graduate School
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2018
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781941332061

Rem Koolhaas : in conversation with Enrique Walker -- Denise Scott Brown : in conversation with Enrique Walker -- Yoshiharu Tsukamoto : in conversation with Enrique Walker -- Enrique Walker : retroactive manifestoes

The Organization of Cities

The Organization of Cities
Author: John R Miron
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 537
Release: 2018-07-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9783319843186

This book focuses on the relationship between the state and economy in the development of cities. It reviews and reinterprets fundamental theoretical models that explain how the operation of markets in equilibrium shapes the scale and organization of the commercial city in a mixed market economy within a liberal state. These models link markets for the factors of production, markets for investment and fixed capital formation, markets for transportation, and markets for exports in equilibrium both within the urban economy and the rest of the world. In each case, the model explains the urban economy by revealing how assumptions about causes and structures lead to predictions about scale and organization outcomes. By simplifying and contrasting these models, this book proposes another interpretation: that governance and the urban economy are outcomes negotiated by political actors motivated by competing notions of commonwealth and the individual desire for wealth and power. The book grounds its analysis in economic history, explaining the rise of commercial cities and the emergence of the urban economy. It then turns to factors of production, export, and factor markets, introducing and parsing the Mills model, breaking it down into its component parts and creating a series of simpler models that can better explain the significance of each economic assumption. Simplified models are also presented for real estate and fixed capital investment markets, transportation, and land use planning. The book concludes with a discussion of linear programming and the Herbert- Stevens and the Ripper-Varaiya models. A fresh presentation of the theories behind urban economics, this book emphasizes the links between state and economy and challenges the reader to see its theories in a new light. As such, this book will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners of economics, public policy, public administration, urban policy, and city and urban planning. >

Ordinary Cities

Ordinary Cities
Author: Jennifer Robinson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2013-07-04
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1134406959

"With the urbanization of the world's population proceeding apace and the equally rapid urbanization of poverty, urban theory has an urgent challenge to meet if it is to remain relevant to the majority of cities and their populations most of which are outside the West. Ordinary Cities establishes a new framework for thinking about urban development across a longstanding divide in urban scholarship and also in the realm of urban policy, between Western and other kinds of cities, especially those labeled third world. The book will consider the two framing axes of urban modernity and urban development which have been important in dividing the field of urban studies between Western and other cities. Tracking paths across previously separate academic literatures and policy debates, the book attempts to trace the outlines of a cosmopolitan approach to cities. It draws on evidence from Rio, Johannesburg, Lusaka and Kuala Lumpur to ground the theoretical arguments and provide examples of policy approaches and urban development interventions. Ordinary Cities argues that if cities are to be imagined in equitable and creative ways, urban theory must overcome these axes of theorization with their Western bias. The resources for theorizing cities need to become at least as cosmopolitan as cities themselves, drawing inspiration from the diverse range of contexts and histories that shape cities everywhere."--Back cover

Rethinking Feminist Interventions into the Urban

Rethinking Feminist Interventions into the Urban
Author: Linda Peake
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2013-05-29
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1136743510

In Rethinking Feminist Interventions into the Urban, Linda Peake and Martina Rieker embark on an ambitious project to explore the extent to which a feminist re-imagining of the twenty-first century city can form the core of a new emerging analytic of women and the neoliberal urban. In a world in which the majority of the population now live in urban centres, they take as their starting point the need to examine the production of knowledge about the city through the problematic divide of the global north and south, asking what might a feminist intervention, a position itself fraught with possibilities and problems, into this dominant geographical imaginary look like. Providing a meaningful discussion of the ways in which feminism, gender and women have been understood in relation to the city and urban studies, they ask probing and insightful questions that indicate new directions for theory and research, illustrating the necessity of a re-formulation of the north-south divide as a critical and urgent project for feminist urban studies. Working through platforms as diverse as policy formulations and telling stories, the contributors to the book come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds and geographic locations ranging through the Caribbean, North America, Western Europe, South, East and South East Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. They identify a range of issues (such as care, work, violence, the household, mobility, intimacy and poverty) that they analytically address to make sense of and reanimate resistance to the contemporary urban through articulations of new grammars of gendered geographies of justice.

The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies

The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies
Author: Anthony M. Orum
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 2919
Release: 2019-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1118568451

Provides comprehensive coverage of major topics in urban and regional studies Under the guidance of Editor-in-Chief Anthony Orum, this definitive reference work covers central and emergent topics in the field, through an examination of urban and regional conditions and variation across the world. It also provides authoritative entries on the main conceptual tools used by anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, and political scientists in the study of cities and regions. Among such concepts are those of place and space; geographical regions; the nature of power and politics in cities; urban culture; and many others. The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies captures the character of complex urban and regional dynamics across the globe, including timely entries on Latin America, Africa, India and China. At the same time, it contains illuminating entries on some of the current concepts that seek to grasp the essence of the global world today, such as those of Friedmann and Sassen on ‘global cities’. It also includes discussions of recent economic writings on cities and regions such as those of Richard Florida. Comprised of over 450 entries on the most important topics and from a range of theoretical perspectives Features authoritative entries on topics ranging from gender and the city to biographical profiles of figures like Frank Lloyd Wright Takes a global perspective with entries providing coverage of Latin America and Africa, India and China, and, the US and Europe Includes biographies of central figures in urban and regional studies, such as Doreen Massey, Peter Hall, Neil Smith, and Henri Lefebvre The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies is an indispensable reference for students and researchers in urban and regional studies, urban sociology, urban geography, and urban anthropology.