How To Think About Cities
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| Author | : Douglas W. Rae |
| Publisher | : Yale University Press |
| Total Pages | : 536 |
| Release | : 2008-10-01 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0300134754 |
How did neighborhood groceries, parish halls, factories, and even saloons contribute more to urban vitality than did the fiscal might of postwar urban renewal? With a novelist’s eye for telling detail, Douglas Rae depicts the features that contributed most to city life in the early “urbanist” decades of the twentieth century. Rae’s subject is New Haven, Connecticut, but the lessons he draws apply to many American cities. City: Urbanism and Its End begins with a richly textured portrait of New Haven in the early twentieth century, a period of centralized manufacturing, civic vitality, and mixed-use neighborhoods. As social and economic conditions changed, the city confronted its end of urbanism first during the Depression, and then very aggressively during the mayoral reign of Richard C. Lee (1954–70), when New Haven led the nation in urban renewal spending. But government spending has repeatedly failed to restore urban vitality. Rae argues that strategies for the urban future should focus on nurturing the unplanned civic engagements that make mixed-use city life so appealing and so civilized. Cities need not reach their old peaks of population, or look like thriving suburbs, to be once again splendid places for human beings to live and work.
| Author | : Deborah G. Martin |
| Publisher | : John Wiley & Sons |
| Total Pages | : 159 |
| Release | : 2022-11-29 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 1509536205 |
Cities are raucous, cacophonous, and complex. Many dimensions of life play out and conflict across cities’ intricate landscapes, be they political, cultural, economic, or social. Urban policy makers and analysts often attempt to “cut through the noise” of urban disagreement by emphasizing a dominant lens for understanding the key, central logic of the city. How To Think About Cities sees this tendency to selective vision as misleading and ultimately unjust: cities are many things at once to different people and communities. This book describes the various ways of seeing the functions and landscapes of the city as place frames, and the constant process of negotiating which place frames best explain the city as place-making. Martin and Pierce call for an explicitly hybrid perspective that shifts between many different frames for making sense of cities. This approach highlights how any given stance opens up some lines of inquiry and understanding while closing off others. Thinking of cities as sites of contested perspectives promotes a synthetic approach to urban analysis that emphasizes difference and political possibility. This mosaic view of the city will be a welcome read for those within urban studies, geography, and social sciences exploring the many faces of urban life.
| Author | : Jan Gehl |
| Publisher | : Island Press |
| Total Pages | : 284 |
| Release | : 2013-03-05 |
| Genre | : Architecture |
| ISBN | : 1597269840 |
For more than forty years Jan Gehl has helped to transform urban environments around the world based on his research into the ways people actually use—or could use—the spaces where they live and work. In this revolutionary book, Gehl presents his latest work creating (or recreating) cityscapes on a human scale. He clearly explains the methods and tools he uses to reconfigure unworkable cityscapes into the landscapes he believes they should be: cities for people. Taking into account changing demographics and changing lifestyles, Gehl emphasizes four human issues that he sees as essential to successful city planning. He explains how to develop cities that are Lively, Safe, Sustainable, and Healthy. Focusing on these issues leads Gehl to think of even the largest city on a very small scale. For Gehl, the urban landscape must be considered through the five human senses and experienced at the speed of walking rather than at the speed of riding in a car or bus or train. This small-scale view, he argues, is too frequently neglected in contemporary projects. In a final chapter, Gehl makes a plea for city planning on a human scale in the fast- growing cities of developing countries. A “Toolbox,” presenting key principles, overviews of methods, and keyword lists, concludes the book. The book is extensively illustrated with over 700 photos and drawings of examples from Gehl’s work around the globe.
| Author | : Alex Marshall |
| Publisher | : University of Texas Press |
| Total Pages | : 350 |
| Release | : 2000-12-31 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 0292792433 |
“Marshall writes with wit, reason, and style . . . An excellent resource on the history and future of American cities.” —Library Journal Do cities work anymore? How did they get to be such sprawling conglomerations of lookalike subdivisions, mega freeways, and “big box” superstores surrounded by acres of parking lots? And why, most of all, don't they feel like real communities? These are the questions that Alex Marshall tackles in this hard-hitting, highly readable look at what makes cities work. Marshall argues that urban life has broken down because of our basic ignorance of the real forces that shape cities—transportation systems, industry and business, and political decision-making. He explores how these forces have built four very different urban environments: the decentralized sprawl of California’s Silicon Valley; the crowded streets of New York City’s Jackson Heights neighborhood; the controlled growth of Portland, Oregon; and the stage-set facades of Disney’s planned community, Celebration, Florida. To build better cities, Marshall asserts, we must understand and intelligently direct the forces that shape them. Without prescribing any one solution, he defines the key issues facing all concerned citizens who are trying to control urban sprawl and build real communities. His timely book is important reading for a wide public and professional audience.
| Author | : Richard J. Williams |
| Publisher | : John Wiley & Sons |
| Total Pages | : 179 |
| Release | : 2019-08-08 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 0745691846 |
We tend to think cities look the way they do because of the conscious work of architects, planners and builders. But what if the look of cities had less to do with design, and more to do with social, cultural, financial and political processes, and the way ordinary citizens interact with them? What if the city is a process as much as a design? Richard J. Williams takes the moment construction is finished as a beginning, tracing the myriad processes that produce the look of the contemporary global city. This book is the story of dramatic but unforeseen urban sights: how financial capital spawns empty towering skyscrapers and hollowed-out ghettoes; how the zoning of once-illicit sexual practices in marginal areas of the city results in the reinvention of culturally vibrant gay villages; how abandoned factories have been repurposed as creative hubs in a precarious postindustrial economy. It is also the story of how popular urban clichés and the fictional portrayal of cities powerfully shape the way we read and see the bricks, concrete and glass that surround us. Thought-provoking and original, Why Cities Look the Way They Do will appeal to anyone who wants to understand the contemporary city, shedding new light on humanity’s greatest collective invention.
| Author | : Marcus Westbury |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 194 |
| Release | : 2015-08-01 |
| Genre | : |
| ISBN | : 9780992568740 |
In 2008, Marcus Westbury returned to his hometown of Newcastle, Australia, and found more than 150 empty buildings lining its two main streets. Three years later, the world's largest travel publisher named Newcastle one of the top ten cities in the world to visit. Creating Cities is about the unlikely events in between: of how a failed idea to start a bar morphed into a scheme that has helped transform Newcastle, launched more than two hundred creative and community projects across Australia, and is fast becoming a model for cities and towns around the world. In an engaging, thoughtful, and observational style, Westbury argues that most towns and cities are wasting their most obvious assets: the talent, imagination, and passion of the people that live there. In a globalised age, local creativity has access to new possibilities that most places have barely begun to grasp. In this book, Westbury explains how small-scale failures in Newcastle inspired a larger set of ideas and a 'why-to' strategy with potential applications around the globe. Creating Cities is a provocative and inspiring must-read for creative people, civic and business leaders, town planners, citizens, and anyone who cares about the communities that they live in.
| Author | : Andy Merrifield |
| Publisher | : OR Books |
| Total Pages | : 248 |
| Release | : 2018-11-01 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 1682191443 |
In often dreamlike peregrinations around his home towns of Liverpool, London and New York Andy Merrifield reflects on what cities mean to us and how they shape the way we think. As he wanders, Merrifield’s reveries circle questions: Can we talk about cities in the absolute, discovering their essence beneath the particulars? Is it possible truly to love or hate a city, to experience it carnally or viscerally? Might we find true love in the city? Merrifield does find love in the city: with his future wife, whom he takes on a date to see his hero Spalding Gray’s “It’s a Slippery Slope” at London’s South Bank and soon after moves in with, to a tiny place in Bloomsbury where they celebrate the brilliance of new romance by painting the walls turquoise and gold. And for the fellow urbanist Marshall Berman, another working class boy who went up to Oxford. Berman takes Merrifield under his wing and shows him the thrills available in Dostoevsky and Marx over cups of coffee in ordinary cafes on New York City’s Upper West Side. The mood music to these love affairs is provided by a rich repertoire of intellects, from Jane Jacobs to Mike Davis, from Louis Malle to Walter Benjamin. John Lennon, a pupil, like Merrifield, at Quarry Bank school in Liverpool, enters the story; so too the novelist and critic John Berger. And providing tonality throughout is the stripped down, razor honed talk about love in the stories of Raymond Carver. Andy Merrifield is the author of ten books including works on urbanism and social theory such as The New Urban Question and Magical Marxism, biographies of Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord and John Berger, a popular travelogue, The Wisdom of Donkeys, and a manifesto for liberated living, The Amateur. His journalism has appeared in the Nation, Harper’s, Adbusters, New Left Review, Dissent, the Brooklyn Rail, and Radical Philosophy.
| Author | : Robert A. Beauregard |
| Publisher | : University of Chicago Press |
| Total Pages | : 230 |
| Release | : 2018-03-19 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 022653541X |
We live in a self-proclaimed Urban Age, where we celebrate the city as the source of economic prosperity, a nurturer of social and cultural diversity, and a place primed for democracy. We proclaim the city as the fertile ground from which progress will arise. Without cities, we tell ourselves, human civilization would falter and decay. In Cities in the Urban Age, Robert A. Beauregard argues that this line of thinking is not only hyperbolic—it is too celebratory by half. For Beauregard, the city is a cauldron for four haunting contradictions. First, cities are equally defined by both their wealth and their poverty. Second, cities are simultaneously environmentally destructive and yet promise sustainability. Third, cities encourage rule by political machines and oligarchies, even as they are essentially democratic and at least nominally open to all. And fourth, city life promotes tolerance among disparate groups, even as the friction among them often erupts into violence. Beauregard offers no simple solutions or proposed remedies for these contradictions; indeed, he doesn’t necessarily hold that they need to be resolved, since they are generative of city life. Without these four tensions, cities wouldn’t be cities. Rather, Beauregard argues that only by recognizing these ambiguities and contradictions can we even begin to understand our moral obligations, as well as the clearest paths toward equality, justice, and peace in urban settings.
| Author | : Marina Alberti |
| Publisher | : University of Washington Press |
| Total Pages | : 302 |
| Release | : 2016-07-01 |
| Genre | : Architecture |
| ISBN | : 0295806605 |
As human activity and environmental change come to be increasingly recognized as intertwined phenomena on a rapidly urbanizing planet, the field of urban ecology has risen to offer useful ways of thinking about coupled human and natural systems. On the forefront of this discipline is Marina Alberti, whose innovative work offers a conceptual framework for uncovering fundamental laws that govern the complexity and resilience of cities, which she sees as key to understanding and responding to planetary change and the evolution of Earth. Bridging the fields of urban planning and ecology, Alberti describes a science of cities that work on a planetary scale and that links unpredictable dynamics to the potential for innovation. It is a science that considers interactions - at all scales - between people and built environments and between cities and their larger environments. Cities That Think like Planets advances strategies for planning a future that may look very different from the present, as rapid urbanization could tip the Earth toward abrupt and nonlinear change. Alberti's analyses of the various hybrid ecosystems, such as self-organization, heterogeneity, modularity, multiple equilibria, feedback, and transformation, may help humans participate in guiding the Earth away from inadvertent collapse and toward a new era of planetary co-evolution and resilience.
| Author | : Zlatan Krajina |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 1052 |
| Release | : 2019-09-23 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 1351813269 |
The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication traces central debates within the burgeoning interdisciplinary research on mediated cities and urban communication. The volume brings together diverse perspectives and global case studies to map key areas of research within media, cultural and urban studies, where a joint focus on communications and cities has made important innovations in how we understand urban space, technology, identity and community. Exploring the rise and growing complexity of urban media and communication as the next key theme for both urban and media studies, the book gathers and reviews fast-developing knowledge on specific emergent phenomena such as: reading the city as symbol and text; understanding urban infrastructures as media (and vice-versa); the rise of global cities; urban and suburban media cultures: newspapers, cinema, radio, television and the mobile phone; changing spaces and practices of urban consumption; the mediation of the neighbourhood, community and diaspora; the centrality of culture to urban regeneration; communicative responses to urban crises such as racism, poverty and pollution; the role of street art in the negotiation of ‘the right to the city’; city competition and urban branding; outdoor advertising; moving image architecture; ‘smart’/cyber urbanism; the emergence of Media City production spaces and clusters. Charting key debates and neglected connections between cities and media, this book challenges what we know about contemporary urban living and introduces innovative frameworks for understanding cities, media and their futures. As such, it will be an essential resource for students and scholars of media and communication studies, urban communication, urban sociology, urban planning and design, architecture, visual cultures, urban geography, art history, politics, cultural studies, anthropology and cultural policy studies, as well as those working with governmental agencies, cultural foundations and institutes, and policy think tanks.
