Ordinary Cities

Author: Jennifer Robinson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134406940
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
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

Author: Bryson, John R.
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1789908027
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Book Description
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

Author: Suzanne Hall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136310614
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Book Description
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.

The Ordinary

Author: Rem Koolhaas
Publisher: Columbia Univ Graduate School
ISBN: 9781941332061
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Book Description
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

Justice and Fairness in the City

Author: Davoudi, Simin
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1447323378
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
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.

Ordinary Places/Extraordinary Events

Author: Clara Irazábal
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134326246
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
Clara Irazábal and her contributors explore the urban history of some of Latin America’s great cities through studies of their public spaces and what has taken place there. The avenues and plazas of Mexico City, Havana, Santo Domingo, Caracas, Bogotaì, SaÞo Paulo, Lima, Santiago, and Buenos Aires have been the backdrop for extraordinary, history-making events. While some argue that public spaces are a prerequisite for the expression, representation and reinforcement of democracy, they can equally be used in the pursuit of totalitarianism. Indeed, public spaces, in both the past and present, have been the site for the contestation by ordinary people of various stances on democracy and citizenship. By exploring the use and meaning of public spaces in Latin American cities, this book sheds light on contemporary definitions of citizenship and democracy in the Americas.

The Organization of Cities

Author: John R Miron
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9783319843186
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 537

Book Description
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. >

The Structure of the Ordinary

Author: N. J. Habraken
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262581950
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Book Description
The influential Dutch architect's long-awaited manifesto on the everyday environment as the first and best ground for establishing the significance and coherence of architecture. According to N. J. Habraken, intimate and unceasing interaction between people and the forms they inhabit uniquely defines built environment. The Structure of the Ordinary, the culmination of decades of environmental observation and design research, is a recognition and analysis of everyday environment as the wellspring of urban design and formal architecture. The author's central argument is that built environment is universally organized by the Orders of Form, Place, and Understanding. These three fundamental, interwoven principles correspond roughly to physical, biological, and social domains. Historically, "ordinary" environment was the background against which architects built the "extraordinary." Drawing upon extensive examples from archaeological and contemporary sites worldwide, the author illustrates profound recent shifts in the structure of everyday environment. One effect of these transformations, Habraken argues, has been the loss of implicit common understanding that previously enabled architects to formally enhance and innovate while still maintaining environmental coherence. Consequently, architects must now undertake a study of the ordinary as the fertile common ground in which form- and place-making are rooted. In focusing on built environment as an autonomous entity distinct from the societies and natural environments that jointly create it, this book lays the foundation for a new dialogue on methodology and pedagogy, in support of a more informed approach to professional intervention.

Becoming Jane Jacobs

Author: Peter L. Laurence
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812292464
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Book Description
Jane Jacobs is universally recognized as one of the key figures in American urbanism. The author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she uncovered the complex and intertwined physical and social fabric of the city and excoriated the urban renewal policies of the 1950s. As the legend goes, Jacobs, a housewife, single-handedly stood up to Robert Moses, New York City's powerful master builder, and other city planners who sought first to level her Greenwich Village neighborhood and then to drive a highway through it. Jacobs's most effective weapons in these David-versus-Goliath battles, and in writing her book, were her powers of observation and common sense. What is missing from such discussions and other myths about Jacobs, according to Peter L. Laurence, is a critical examination of how she arrived at her ideas about city life. Laurence shows that although Jacobs had only a high school diploma, she was nevertheless immersed in an elite intellectual community of architects and urbanists. Becoming Jane Jacobs is an intellectual biography that chronicles Jacobs's development, influences, and writing career, and provides a new foundation for understanding Death and Life and her subsequent books. Laurence explains how Jacobs's ideas developed over many decades and how she was influenced by members of the traditions she was critiquing, including Architectural Forum editor Douglas Haskell, shopping mall designer Victor Gruen, housing advocate Catherine Bauer, architect Louis Kahn, Philadelphia city planner Edmund Bacon, urban historian Lewis Mumford, and the British writers at The Architectural Review. Rather than discount the power of Jacobs's critique or contributions, Laurence asserts that Death and Life was not the spontaneous epiphany of an amateur activist but the product of a professional writer and experienced architectural critic with deep knowledge about the renewal and dynamics of American cities.

The City Reader

Author: Richard T. LeGates
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317606272
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 800

Book Description
The sixth edition of the highly successful The City Reader juxtaposes the very best classic and contemporary writings on the city to provide the comprehensive mapping of the terrain of Urban Studies and Planning old and new. The City Reader is the anchor volume in the Routledge Urban Reader Series and is now integrated with all ten other titles in the series. This edition has been extensively updated and expanded to reflect the latest thinking in each of the disciplinary areas included and in topical areas such as compact cities, urban history, place making, sustainable urban development, globalization, cities and climate change, the world city network, the impact of technology on cities, resilient cities, cities in Africa and the Middle East, and urban theory. The new edition places greater emphasis on cities in the developing world, globalization and the global city system of the future. The plate sections have been revised and updated. Sixty generous selections are included: forty-four from the fifth edition, and sixteen new selections, including three newly written exclusively for The City Reader. The sixth edition keeps classic writings by authors such as Ebenezer Howard, Ernest W. Burgess, LeCorbusier, Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, and Louis Wirth, as well as the best contemporary writings of, among others, Peter Hall, Manuel Castells, David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, and Kenneth Jackson. In addition to newly commissioned selections by Yasser Elshestawy, Peter Taylor, and Lawrence Vale, new selections in the sixth edition include writings by Aristotle, Peter Calthorpe, Alberto Camarillo, Filip DeBoech, Edward Glaeser, David Owen, Henri Pirenne, The Project for Public Spaces, Jonas Rabinovich and Joseph Lietman, Doug Saunders, and Bish Sanyal. The anthology features general and section introductions as well as individual introductions to the selected articles introducing the authors, providing context, relating the selection to other selection, and providing a bibliography for further study. The sixth edition includes fifty plates in four plate sections, substantially revised from the fifth edition.