Understanding Urbanism

Understanding Urbanism
Author: Dallas Rogers
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2020-07-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9811543860

Understanding Urbanism presents built environment students with the latest approaches to studying urbanism. The book is written in an accessible and easy-to-understand format by leading urban academics and practitioners with decades of teaching and practical experience. As students move through the chapters, they will develop a critical understanding of the different ways architects, urban and social planners, urban designers, heritage professionals, engineers and other built environment professionals design our cities. Importantly, the book shows how and why the built environment professional of the future will need to work within the Indigenous context of cities in countries like Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada.

Understanding Emergent Urbanism

Understanding Emergent Urbanism
Author: Sotir Dhamo
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2021-08-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030827313

The ideas presented in this book are a conceptual leverage to correct the rigidity of top-down practices and bring the real city, or the city of everyday life, closer to the city of conventional planning. Considering self-organization as the starting point at the base of complex systems, this book tries to understand how specific qualities emerge and evolve from this behavior. For this, the book discusses new ways of looking at and understanding cities by applying holistic methods and approaches based on the conceptual grounds of quantum, fractal, and complexity theories. The book highlights the fact that the information on how to transform and build a city is contained within the city itself. In this regard, some methodological steps to unpack complexities and translate the essential qualities of space into potential generators for city design and planning are provided. The book urges courageous experimentation and proposes a methodology where the computational nature of urban phenomena goes along with historic anthropological ideas, thus emphasizing the characteristics of a specific reality in a model. They do not exclude each other; in fact, they are part of the unbroken web of wholeness. Importantly, the proposed methodology supports gradual and natural coevolution process in the city through combining planned and unplanned actions and the involving multiplicity of actors, impacting on Urban Planning and Design Practice.

Messy Urbanism

Messy Urbanism
Author: Manish Chalana
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2016-06-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9888208330

Seemingly messy and chaotic, the landscapes and urban life of cities in Asia possess an order and hierarchy that often challenges understanding and appreciation. With contributions by a cross-disciplinary group of authors, Messy Urbanism: Understanding the “Other” Cities of Asia examines a range of cases in Asia to explore the social and institutional politics of urban informality and the contexts in which this “messiness” emerges or is constructed. The book brings a distinct perspective to the broader patterns of informal urban orders and processes as well as their interplay with formalized systems and mechanisms. It also raises questions about the production of cities, cityscapes, and citizenship. Messy Urbanism will appeal to professionals, students, and scholars in the fields of urban studies, architecture, landscape architecture, planning and policy, as well as Asian studies. “The rubric of ‘messy urbanism’ is a productive antidote to the binaries that have limited a productive discussion about urbanism in Asia. This book is a significant contribution in understanding the inherent nature of the built environments in aspiring democracies—an emergent urbanism that seamlessly embraces the incremental, temporal, and ephemeral as given conditions in the formation of Asian cities.” —Rahul Mehrotra, Architect / Professor of Urban Design and Planning, Harvard University “This book is of a high quality, with multiple examples from Hong Kong and China. The authors have covered the topic admirably and I expect the book to attract a wide readership.” —Vinit Mukhija, Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Urban Planning, UCLA

Understanding Urban Metabolism

Understanding Urban Metabolism
Author: Nektarios Chrysoulakis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2014-08-27
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317658663

Understanding Urban Metabolism addresses the gap between the bio-physical sciences and urban planning and illustrates the advantages of accounting for urban metabolism issues in urban design decisions. Urban metabolism considers a city as a system, and distinguishes between energy and material flows as its components. Based on research from the BRIDGE project, this book deals with how the urban surface exchanges and transforms energy, water, carbon and pollutants in cities. This book also introduces a new method for evaluating how planning alternatives can modify the physical flows of urban metabolism components and how environmental and socioeconomic components interact. The inclusion of sustainability principles into urban planning provides an opportunity to place the new knowledge provided by bio-physical sciences at the centre of the planning process, but there is a strong need to bridge knowledge and practice, as well as for a better dissemination of research results and exchange of best practice. This book meets that need and provides the reader with the necessary tools to integrate an understanding of urban metabolism into urban planning practice.

Understanding Cities

Understanding Cities
Author: Alexander R. Cuthbert
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2011
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0415608236

Understanding Cities is richly textured, complex and challenging. It creates the vital link between urban design theory and praxis and opens the required methodological gateway to a new and unified field of urban design. Using spatial political economy as his most important reference point, Alexander Cuthbert both interrogates and challenges mainstream urban design and provides an alternative and viable comprehensive framework for a new synthesis. He rejects the idea of yet another theory in urban design, and chooses instead to construct the necessary intellectual and conceptual scaffolding for what he terms 'The New Urban Design'. Building both on Michel de Certeau's concept of heterology - 'thinking about thinking' - and on the framework of his previous books Designing Cities and The Form of Cities, Cuthbert uses his prior adopted framework - history, philosophy, politics, culture, gender, environment, aesthetics, typologies and pragmatics - to create three integrated texts. Overall, the trilogy allows a new field of urban design to emerge. Pre-existing and new knowledge are integrated across all three volumes, of which Understanding Cities is the culminating text.

Latino City

Latino City
Author: Erualdo R. Gonzalez
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2017-02-03
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1317590228

American cities are increasingly turning to revitalization strategies that embrace the ideas of new urbanism and the so-called creative class in an attempt to boost economic growth and prosperity to downtown areas. These efforts stir controversy over residential and commercial gentrification of working class, ethnic areas. Spanning forty years, Latino City provides an in-depth case study of the new urbanism, creative class, and transit-oriented models of planning and their implementation in Santa Ana, California, one of the United States’ most Mexican communities. It provides an intimate analysis of how revitalization plans re-imagine and alienate a place, and how community-based participation approaches address the needs and aspirations of lower-income Latino urban areas undergoing revitalization. The book provides a critical introduction to the main theoretical debates and key thinkers related to the new urbanism, transit-oriented, and creative class models of urban revitalization. It is the first book to examine contemporary models of choice for revitalization of US cities from the point of view of a Latina/o-majority central city, and thus initiates new lines of analysis and critique of models for Latino inner city neighborhood and downtown revitalization in the current period of socio-economic and cultural change. Latino City will appeal to students and scholars in urban planning, urban studies, urban history, urban policy, neighborhood and community development, central city development, urban politics, urban sociology, geography, and ethnic/Latino Studies, as well as practitioners, community organizations, and grassroots leaders immersed in these fields.

Splintering Urbanism

Splintering Urbanism
Author: Steve Graham
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 516
Release: 2002-09-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 113465698X

Splintering Urbanism makes an international and interdisciplinary analysis of the complex interactions between infrastructure networks and urban spaces. It delivers a new and powerful way of understanding contemporary urban change, bringing together discussions about: *globalization and the city *technology and society *urban space and urban networks *infrastructure and the built environment *developed, developing and post-communist worlds. With a range of case studies, illustrations and boxed examples, from New York to Jakarta, Johannesberg to Manila and Sao Paolo to Melbourne, Splintering Urbanism demonstrates the latest social, urban and technological theories, which give us an understanding of our contemporary metropolis.

Transnational Architecture and Urbanism

Transnational Architecture and Urbanism
Author: Davide Ponzini
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 471
Release: 2020-05-28
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1351847236

Transnational Architecture and Urbanism combines urban planning, design, policy, and geography studies to offer place-based and project-oriented insight into relevant case studies of urban transformation in Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East. Since the 1990s, increasingly multinational modes of design have arisen, especially concerning prominent buildings and places. Traditional planning and design disciplines have proven to have limited comprehension of, and little grip on, such transformations. Public and scholarly discussions argue that these projects and transformations derive from socioeconomic, political, cultural trends or conditions of globalization. The author suggests that general urban theories are relevant as background, but of limited efficacy when dealing with such context-bound projects and policies. This book critically investigates emerging problematic issues such as the spectacularization of the urban environment, the decontextualization of design practice, and the global circulation of plans and projects. The book portends new conceptualizations, evidence-based explanations, and practical understanding for architects, planners, and policy makers to critically learn from practice, to cope with these transnational issues, and to put better planning in place.

The Option of Urbanism

The Option of Urbanism
Author: Christopher B. Leinberger
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2010-03-18
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1597267767

Americans are voting with their feet to abandon strip malls and suburban sprawl, embracing instead a new type of community where they can live, work, shop, and play within easy walking distance. In The Option of Urbanism visionary developer and strategist Christopher B. Leinberger explains why government policies have tilted the playing field toward one form of development over the last sixty years: the drivable suburb. Rooted in the driving forces of the economy—car manufacturing and the oil industry—this type of growth has fostered the decline of community, contributed to urban decay, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and contributed to the rise in obesity and asthma. Highlighting both the challenges and the opportunities for this type of development, The Option of Urbanism shows how the American Dream is shifting to include cities as well as suburbs and how the financial and real estate communities need to respond to build communities that are more environmentally, socially, and financially sustainable.

Ecological Urbanism

Ecological Urbanism
Author: Mohsen Mostafavi
Publisher: Lars Muller Publishers
Total Pages: 668
Release: 2010-04-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

With the aim of projecting alternative and sustainable forms of urbanism, the book asks: What are the key principles of an ecological urbanism? How might they be organized? And what role might design and planning play in the process? While climate change, sustainable architecture, and green technologies have become increasingly topical, issues surrounding the sustainability of the city are much less developed. The premise of the book is that an ecological approach is urgently needed both as a remedial device for the contemporary city and an organizing principle for new cities. Ecological urbanism approaches the city without any one set of instruments and with a worldview that is fluid in scale and disciplinary approach. Design provides the synthetic key to connect ecology with an urbanism that is not in contradiction with its environment. The book brings together design practitioners and theorists, economists, engineers, artists, policy makers, environmental scientists, and public health specialists, with the goal of reaching a more robust understanding of ecological urbanism and what it might be in the future. Contributors include: Homi Bhabha, Stefano Boeri, Chuck Hoberman, Rem Koolhaas, Sanford Kwinter, Bruno Latour, Nina-Marie Lister, Moshen Mostafavi, Matthias Schuler, Sissel Tolaas, Charles Waldheim