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From Great Britain, Belgium, Finland, and Italy to Russia, Kazakhstan, and China, cities are shrinking everywhere. While urban-planning debates of recent years have mainly focused on the growth of the megalopolis, in other places zones of shrinkage were actually developing. Enormous population losses and high unemployment contribute to this process, which is further(...)
Shrinking cities, volume one : international research
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From Great Britain, Belgium, Finland, and Italy to Russia, Kazakhstan, and China, cities are shrinking everywhere. While urban-planning debates of recent years have mainly focused on the growth of the megalopolis, in other places zones of shrinkage were actually developing. Enormous population losses and high unemployment contribute to this process, which is further accelerated by globalization and the transition to post-Socialism. This book examines the causes and dynamics of the shrinking process for the first time on an international level. Citing concrete examples from Manchester and Liverpool in Great Britain, Detroit in the United States, Ivanovo in Russia, and Halle and Leipzig in Germany, it compares living conditions and cultural change in shrinking urban regions. Artistic intercessions help sensitize the public to a global phenomenon which poses a completely new social challenge.
Urban Theory
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Amidst city concrete and suburban sprawl, Americans are discovering new ways to reconnect with the natural world. From community gardens in New York's Lower East Side to homeless shelters in California, the search for a more sustainable future has led grassroots groups to a profound reconnection to place and to the natural world. Studies of the health consequences of(...)
Urban place : reconnecting with the natural world
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Amidst city concrete and suburban sprawl, Americans are discovering new ways to reconnect with the natural world. From community gardens in New York's Lower East Side to homeless shelters in California, the search for a more sustainable future has led grassroots groups to a profound reconnection to place and to the natural world. Studies of the health consequences of renewing a connection with nature support the urgency of providing green surroundings as cities expand and the majority of the earth's population lives in urban areas. Medical research results, from groups as diverse as healthy volunteers, surgery patients, and heart attack survivors, suggest that contact with nature may improve health and well-being. Engagement with nearby natural places also provides restoration from mental fatigue and support for more resilient and cooperative behavior. Aspects of stronger community life are fostered by access to nature, suggesting that there are significant social as well as physical and psychological benefits from connection with the natural world. This volume brings together research from anthropology, sociology, public health, psychology, and landscape architecture to highlight how awareness of locale and a meaningful renewal of attachment with the earth are connected to delight in learning about nature as well as to civic action and new forms of community. Community garden coalitions, organic market advocates, and greenspace preservationists resist the power of global forces, enacting visions of a different future. Their creative efforts tell a story of a constructive and dynamic middle ground between private plots and public action, between human health and ecosystem health, between individual attachment and urban sustainability.
Urban Theory
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In "Cities and complexity", Michael Batty offers a comprehensive view of urban dynamics in the context of complexity theory, presenting models that demonstrate how complexity theory can embrace a myriad of processes and elements that combine into organic wholes. He argues that bottom-up processes -- in which the outcomes are always uncertain -- can combine with new forms(...)
Cities and complexity : understanding cities with cellular automata, agent-based models, and fractals
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In "Cities and complexity", Michael Batty offers a comprehensive view of urban dynamics in the context of complexity theory, presenting models that demonstrate how complexity theory can embrace a myriad of processes and elements that combine into organic wholes. He argues that bottom-up processes -- in which the outcomes are always uncertain -- can combine with new forms of geometry associated with fractal patterns and chaotic dynamics to provide theories that are applicable to highly complex systems such as cities. Batty begins with models based on cellular automata (CA), simulating urban dynamics through the local actions of automata. He then introduces agent-based models (ABM), in which agents are mobile and move between locations. These models relate to many scales, from the scale of the street to patterns and structure at the scale of the urban region. Finally, Batty develops applications of all these models to specific urban situations, discussing concepts of criticality, threshold, surprise, novelty, and phase transition in the context of spatial developments. Every theory and model presented in the book is developed through examples that range from the simplified and hypothetical to the actual. Deploying extensive visual, mathematical, and textual material, "Cities and complexity" will be read both by urban researchers and by complexity theorists with an interest in new kinds of computational models.
Urban Theory
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Standards and codes dictate virtually all aspects of urban development. The same standards for subdividing land, grading, laying streets and utilities, and configuring rights-of-way and street widths to accommodate cars (rather than pedestrians) have been adopted in many areas of the world regardless of variations in local environments. In "The code of the city", Eran(...)
The code of the city : standards and the hidden language of place making
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Standards and codes dictate virtually all aspects of urban development. The same standards for subdividing land, grading, laying streets and utilities, and configuring rights-of-way and street widths to accommodate cars (rather than pedestrians) have been adopted in many areas of the world regardless of variations in local environments. In "The code of the city", Eran Ben-Joseph examines the relationship between standards and place making. He traces the evolution of codes and standards and analyzes their impact on the modern city and its suburbs, arguing that it is time for development regulations to reflect site-specific and localized physical design.
Urban Theory
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City planning initiatives and redesign of urban structures often become mired in debate and delay. Despite the fact that cities are considered to be dynamic and flexible spaces- never finished but always under construction- it is very difficult to change existing urban structures; they become fixed, obdurate, securely anchored in their own histories as well as in the(...)
Unbuilding cities : obduracy in urban sociotechnical change
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City planning initiatives and redesign of urban structures often become mired in debate and delay. Despite the fact that cities are considered to be dynamic and flexible spaces- never finished but always under construction- it is very difficult to change existing urban structures; they become fixed, obdurate, securely anchored in their own histories as well as in the histories of their surroundings. In "Unbuilding cities", Anique Hommels looks at the tension between the malleability of urban space and its obduracy, focusing on sites and structures that have been subjected to "unbuilding"-redesign or reconfiguration. She brings the concepts of science and technology studies (STS) to bear on the study of cities. Viewing the city as a large sociotechnological artifact, she demonstrates the usefulness of STS tools that were developed to analyze other technological artifacts and explores in detail the role of obduracy in sociotechnical change. Her analysis distinguishes three concepts of obduracy: interactionist, in which actors with diverging views are constrained by fixed ways of thinking and interacting; relational, in which change is difficult because of technology's embeddedness in sociotechnical networks; and enduring, in which persistent traditions influence the development of technology over time. Hommels examines the tensions between obduracy and change in three urban redesign projects in the Netherlands: a renovated city center that fell into drabness and disrepair; a highway system that runs through a densely populated urban area; and a high-rise housing project, designed according to modernist precepts and built for middle-class families, that became a haven for unemployment and crime. "Unbuilding cities" contributes to a productive fusion of STS and urban studies.
Urban Theory
The city reader 4th edition
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The fourth edition of the highly successful The City Reader brings together the very best of publications on the city. Classic writings by such authors as Lewis Mumford, Ernest W. Burgess, LeCorbusier, Lewis Wirth, Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch meet the best contemporary writings of, among others, Sir Peter Hall, Richard Florida, Mike Davis, Michael Porter, Robert Putnam,(...)
Urban Theory
August 2007, London New York
The city reader 4th edition
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The fourth edition of the highly successful The City Reader brings together the very best of publications on the city. Classic writings by such authors as Lewis Mumford, Ernest W. Burgess, LeCorbusier, Lewis Wirth, Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch meet the best contemporary writings of, among others, Sir Peter Hall, Richard Florida, Mike Davis, Michael Porter, Robert Putnam, Andrus Duany, Saskia Sassen, and Manuel Castells. New to the fourth edition are important classic writings on urban economics by Wilbur Thomson and on bosses and machines by James Bryce, Jane Addams, and William L. Riordan, and new contemporary material on sustainable urban development , the creative class, metropolitics, occidentalism, Asian megacities, and urban futurism by The Bruntland Commission, Richard Florida, Myron Orfield, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Aprodicio Laquian, and Joel Kotkin. Fifty-seven generous selections are included: a combination of forty-six readings from the third edition and eleven entirely new selections. Structured to aid student understanding, the anthology features main and part Introductions, as well as individual introductions to the selected articles. Each selection is introduced with a brief intellectual biography and a review of the author s writings and related literature, an explanation of how the piece fits into the broader context of urban history and practice, competing ideological perspectives on the city, and the major current debates concerning race and gender, globalization, terrorism, the impact of information technology on cities, civic engagement, and postmodernism. The City Reader provides the comprehensive mapping of the terrain of Urban Studies, old and new. It is illustrated with over forty photographs and is essential reading for anyone interested in the city.
Urban Theory
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Why are there so many dogs in downtown? Does commuting makes you fat? Can government sell your house to a developer? Will art save your city? In 'On the Ground: Observations from Harvard' writer and journalist Tracy Metz investigates these and many other topical issues in land use and planning as practiced in the US. 'On the Ground' is a selection of the columns,(...)
On the ground : observations from Harvard
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Why are there so many dogs in downtown? Does commuting makes you fat? Can government sell your house to a developer? Will art save your city? In 'On the Ground: Observations from Harvard' writer and journalist Tracy Metz investigates these and many other topical issues in land use and planning as practiced in the US. 'On the Ground' is a selection of the columns, essays and interwiews she wrote as a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduated School Design.
Urban Theory
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Reaching Beyond the Gold assesses the influence of global events on urban developments. Six cities - Genoa, Barcelona, Athens, Bilbao, Shanghai and London - have been chosen as case studies. These have all recently hosted a global event or will do so in the near future. After an introduction of the characteristics and impact of global events in general the history of(...)
Reaching Beyond the Gold : the impact of global events on urban development
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Reaching Beyond the Gold assesses the influence of global events on urban developments. Six cities - Genoa, Barcelona, Athens, Bilbao, Shanghai and London - have been chosen as case studies. These have all recently hosted a global event or will do so in the near future. After an introduction of the characteristics and impact of global events in general the history of each city is sketched and the political and urban implications of the events are examined. Three key aspects - organisation, management and city marketing - are dwelt on at length. Over forty facets including site size, visitor attendance figures, investments, populations, stakeholders, aims and methods, are then compared. A timeline, pictograms and drawings together with clear definitions of the different categories of events are used to give the best possible conditions in which to compare and analyse the events in question. Reaching Beyond the Gold analyses the successes and the failures of host cities in the past. The conclusions it draws can put an end to the structural errors still being made when organising large-scale events.
Urban Theory
Energy Metropolis
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A comprehensive history of the development of Houston, examining the factors that have facilitated unprecedented growth--and the environmental cost of that development. Examines the steps Houston has taken to overcome laissez-faire politics, indiscriminate expansion, and infrastructural overload. An analysis of the environmental consequences of large-scale energy(...)
Energy Metropolis
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A comprehensive history of the development of Houston, examining the factors that have facilitated unprecedented growth--and the environmental cost of that development. Examines the steps Houston has taken to overcome laissez-faire politics, indiscriminate expansion, and infrastructural overload. An analysis of the environmental consequences of large-scale energy production and unchecked growth.
Urban Theory
Visualizing the city
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This anthology presents a range of interdisciplinary explorations into the urban environment, through film, photography, digital imagery, maps and signage. Contributors examine our fascination with the city through the history of art and architecture, urban studies, environmental studies, cultural geography and screen studies. Bringing together a wide spectrum of(...)
Urban Theory
January 2008, Abingdon, New York
Visualizing the city
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This anthology presents a range of interdisciplinary explorations into the urban environment, through film, photography, digital imagery, maps and signage. Contributors examine our fascination with the city through the history of art and architecture, urban studies, environmental studies, cultural geography and screen studies. Bringing together a wide spectrum of urban contexts, "Visualizing the City"’s diverse essays explore visual representations of urbanism and modernity reflected through the prism of global cultures using an engaging variety of methods and texts.
Urban Theory