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Unbuilding Cities
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Book Synopsis Unbuilding Cities by : Anique Hommels
Download or read book Unbuilding Cities written by Anique Hommels and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008-08-29 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Unbuilding written by David Macaulay and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1980 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fictional account of the dismantling and removal of the Empire State Building describes the structure of a skyscraper and explains how such an edifice would be demolished.
Book Synopsis Unbuilding Cities by : Anique Marie Hommels
Download or read book Unbuilding Cities written by Anique Marie Hommels and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Death and Life of Great American Cities by : Jane Jacobs
Download or read book The Death and Life of Great American Cities written by Jane Jacobs and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-07-20 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty years after its publication, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning....[It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments." Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable. The author has written a new foreword for this Modern Library edition.
Book Synopsis Unbuilding Cities by : Anique Hommels
Download or read book Unbuilding Cities written by Anique Hommels and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 2005 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Citiescontributes to a productive fusion of STS and urban studies.
Book Synopsis Rethinking the City by : Vincent Kaufmann
Download or read book Rethinking the City written by Vincent Kaufmann and published by EPFL Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conditions for travel have changed and are still changing the world a world experiencing what John Urry calls the mobility turn . Since World War Two we have been moving faster and going further a fact that has profoundly changed our way of experiencing both the world and ourselves. The explosion of low-cost travel options has similarly had an important impact on the economy, adding to the globalization of markets and transformations in modes of production. It is no longer possible to think of nation-states as autonomous vis-a-vis one another, nor of cities or regions as homogenous spaces delimited by clear-cut borders. Societies, like Western cities, are redefining themselves through mobility. What does this mean for the city for its governability and governance? In this book Vincent Kaufmann assesses the urban implications of the mobility turn. He explores the modern urban phenomenon from the point of view of the mobility capacities of its players their motility. He asks that the reader consider the idea of a city or region as the product or an arrangement of a specific set of motilities. Re-Thinking the City seeks to identify how the motility of individuals, goods, and information acts as an organizing principle or rather, the organizing principle of contemporary urban change, and then aims to examine the consequences for urban governance by exploring the channels through which individual and collective motility can be regulated.
Book Synopsis Disrupted Cities by : Stephen Graham
Download or read book Disrupted Cities written by Stephen Graham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-06-10 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a rapidly urbanizing world, Disrupted Cities is the first book to explore what disruptions in essential energy, communication, water, food, transport and waste infrastructures mean for urban life.
Book Synopsis Key Thinkers on Cities by : Regan Koch
Download or read book Key Thinkers on Cities written by Regan Koch and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2017-05-22 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Key Thinkers on Cities provides an engaging introduction to the dynamic intellectual field of urban studies. It profiles the work of 40 innovative thinkers who represent the broad reach of contemporary urban scholarship and whose ideas have shaped the way cities around the world are understood, researched, debated and acted upon. Providing a synoptic overview that spans a wide range of academic and professional disciplines, theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, the entry for each key thinker comprises: A succinct introduction and overview Intellectual biography and research focus An explication of key ideas Contributions to urban studies The book offers a fresh look at well-known thinkers who have been foundational to urban scholarship, including Jane Jacobs, Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells and David Harvey. It also incorporates those who have helped to bring a concern for cities to more widespread audiences, such as Jan Gehl, Mike Davis and Enrique Peñalosa. Notably, the book also includes a range of thinkers who have more recently begun to shape the study of cities through engagements with art, architecture, computer modelling, ethnography, public health, post-colonial theory and more. With an introduction that provides a mapping of the current transdisciplinary field, and individual entries by those currently involved in cutting edge urban research in the Global North and South, this book promises to be an essential text for anyone interested in the study of cities and urban life. It will be of use to those in the fields of anthropology, economics, geography, sociology and urban planning.
Book Synopsis The New Blackwell Companion to The City by : Gary Bridge
Download or read book The New Blackwell Companion to The City written by Gary Bridge and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-02-23 with total page 786 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the state of the city and contemporary urbanisation from a range of intellectual and international perspectives. The most interdisciplinary collection of its kind Provides a contemporary update on urban thinking that builds on well established debates in the field Uses the city to explore economic, social, cultural, environmental and political issues more broadly Includes contributions from non Western perspectives and cities
Book Synopsis Creative Networks and the City by : Bas van Heur
Download or read book Creative Networks and the City written by Bas van Heur and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2014-03-31 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a fundamental contribution to the literature on the creative industries and the knowledge-based economy by focusing on three aspects: urban spaces as key sites of capitalist restructuring, creative industries' policies as state technologies aimed at economic exploitation, and the role of networks of aesthetic production in inflecting these tendencies. It simultaneously goes beyond these debates by integrating a concern with the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of the creative industries. As such, the book is relevant to researchers interested in the transdisciplinary project of a cultural political economy of creativity and urban change.
Book Synopsis Tropical Forest Ecology and Management for the Anthropocene by : Grizelle González
Download or read book Tropical Forest Ecology and Management for the Anthropocene written by Grizelle González and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2019-12-18 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Special Issue looks forward as well as backward to best analyze the forest conservation challenges of the Caribbean. This is made possible by 75 years of research and applications by the United States Department of Agriculture, International Institute of Tropical Forestry (the Institute) of Puerto Rico. It transforms Holocene-based scientific paradigms of the tropics into Anthropocene applications and outlooks of wilderness, managed forests, and urban environments. This volume showcases how the focus of the Institute’s programs is evolving to support sustainable tropical forest conservation despite uncertain conditions. The manuscripts showcased here highlight the importance of shared stewardship and a long-term, hands-on approach to conservation, research programs, and novel organizations intended to meet contemporary conservation challenges. Policies relevant to the Anthropocene, as well as the use of experiments to anticipate future responses of tropical forests to global warming, are reexamined in these pages. Urban topics include how cities can co-produce new knowledge to spark sustainable and resilient transformations. Long-term results and research applications of topics such as soil biota, migratory birds, tropical vegetation, substrate chemistry, and the tropical carbon cycle are also described in the volume. Moreover, the question of how to best use land on a tropical island is addressed. This volume is intended to be of interest to all actors involved in long-term sustainable forest management and research in light of the historical lessons and future directions that may come out of a better understanding of tropical cities and forests in the Anthropocene epoch.
Book Synopsis City of Extremes by : Martin J. Murray
Download or read book City of Extremes written by Martin J. Murray and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-20 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful critique of urban development in greater Johannesburg since the end of apartheid in 1994.
Book Synopsis Energy, Power and Protest on the Urban Grid by : Andres Luque-Ayala
Download or read book Energy, Power and Protest on the Urban Grid written by Andres Luque-Ayala and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-28 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing a global overview of experiments around the transformation of cities' electricity networks and the social struggles associated with this change, this book explores the centrality of electricity infrastructures in the urban configuration of social control, segregation, integration, resource access and poverty alleviation. Through multiple accounts from a range of global cities, this edited collection establishes an agenda that recognises the uneven, and often historical, geographies of urban electricity networks, prompting attempts to re-wire the infrastructure configurations of cities and predicating protest and resistance from residents and social movements alike. Through a robust theoretical engagement with established work around the politics of urban infrastructures, the book frames the transformation of electricity systems in the context of power and resistance across urban life, drawing links between environmental and social forms of sustainability. Such an agenda can provide both insight and inspiration in seeking to build fairer and more sustainable urban futures that bring electricity infrastructures to the fore of academic and policy attention.
Book Synopsis Staging Mobilities by : Ole B. Jensen
Download or read book Staging Mobilities written by Ole B. Jensen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text is about the fact that mobility is more than movement between point A and B. It concerns how the movement of people, goods, information, and signs influences human understandings of self, other and the built environment.
Book Synopsis Urban Sustainability Transitions by : Niki Frantzeskaki
Download or read book Urban Sustainability Transitions written by Niki Frantzeskaki and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-06-14 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Balanced Perspectives on Different Urban Ecosystems
Book Synopsis Beyond the Networked City by : Olivier Coutard
Download or read book Beyond the Networked City written by Olivier Coutard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-14 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities around the world are undergoing profound changes. In this global era, we live in a world of rising knowledge economies, digital technologies, and awareness of environmental issues. The so-called "modern infrastructural ideal" of spatially and socially ubiquitous centrally-governed infrastructures providing exclusive, homogeneous services over extensive areas, has been the standard of reference for the provision of basic essential services, such as water and energy supply. This book argues that, after decades of undisputed domination, this ideal is being increasingly questioned and that the network ideology that supports it may be waning. In order to begin exploring the highly diverse, fluid and unstable landscapes emerging beyond the networked city, this book identifies dynamics through which a ‘break’ with previous configurations has been operated, and new brittle zones of socio-technical controversy through which urban infrastructure (and its wider meaning) are being negotiated and fought over. It uncovers, across a diverse set of urban contexts, new ways in which processes of urbanization and infrastructure production are being combined with crucial sociopolitical implications: through shifting political economies of infrastructure which rework resource distribution and value creation; through new infrastructural spaces and territorialities which rebundle socio-technical systems for particular interests and claims; and through changing offsets between individual and collective appropriation, experience and mobilization of infrastructure. With contributions from leading authorities in the field and drawing on theoretical advances and original empirical material, this book is a major contribution to an ongoing infrastructural turn in urban studies, and will be of interest to all those concerned by the diverse forms and contested outcomes of contemporary urban change across North and South.
Book Synopsis A U-Turn to the Future by : Martin Emanuel
Download or read book A U-Turn to the Future written by Martin Emanuel and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-02-01 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From local bike-sharing initiatives to overhauls of transport infrastructure, mobility is one of the most important areas in which modern cities are trying to realize a more sustainable future. Yet even as politicians and planners look ahead, there remain critical insights to be gleaned from the history of urban mobility and the unsustainable practices that still impact our everyday lives. United by their pursuit of a “usable past,” the studies in this interdisciplinary collection consider the ecological, social, and economic aspects of urban mobility, showing how historical inquiry can make both conceptual and practical contributions to the projects of sustainability and urban renewal.
