Urban Histories in Practice

Urban Histories in Practice PDF Author: Jeffrey Kruth
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527587959
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This volume brings together ideas about the material and social transformation of cities by asking, “what is the relationship between history, memory, and the contemporary city?” The urgency of this question grows in the contexts of rapid urbanization in the Global South and urban decline in the deindustrializing areas of the Global North. Within these spaces, multiple disciplines shape our capacity to know the contemporary city. The work presented here invites the reader to undertake critical and creative approaches regarding how these disciplines might shape this process, ultimately making it more equitable and just. Using various methods, the contributors engage in critical readings of specific built and discursive legacies in numerous global contexts. Differing forms of a social agenda permeate each piece, but none is utopian or totalizing. Rather, the emphasis is on various forms of close reading. The authors begin with the city as found and address each context in specific and precise terms. The contributions here bring together histories in critical and creative ways, while also catalyzing future possibilities. In this way, these writings frame urban history and morphology discourse not only as arenas for theoretical posturing, but also as calls for action.

Urban Histories in Practice

Urban Histories in Practice PDF Author: Jeffrey Kruth
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527587959
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume brings together ideas about the material and social transformation of cities by asking, “what is the relationship between history, memory, and the contemporary city?” The urgency of this question grows in the contexts of rapid urbanization in the Global South and urban decline in the deindustrializing areas of the Global North. Within these spaces, multiple disciplines shape our capacity to know the contemporary city. The work presented here invites the reader to undertake critical and creative approaches regarding how these disciplines might shape this process, ultimately making it more equitable and just. Using various methods, the contributors engage in critical readings of specific built and discursive legacies in numerous global contexts. Differing forms of a social agenda permeate each piece, but none is utopian or totalizing. Rather, the emphasis is on various forms of close reading. The authors begin with the city as found and address each context in specific and precise terms. The contributions here bring together histories in critical and creative ways, while also catalyzing future possibilities. In this way, these writings frame urban history and morphology discourse not only as arenas for theoretical posturing, but also as calls for action.

What is Urban History?

What is Urban History? PDF Author: Shane Ewen
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509501347
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Urban history is a well-established and flourishing field of historical research. Written by a leading scholar, this short introduction demonstrates how urban history draws upon a wide variety of methodologies and sources, and has been integral to the rise of interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to history since the second half of the twentieth century. Shane Ewen offers an accessible and clearly written guide to the study of urban history for the student, teacher, researcher or general reader who is new to the field and interested in learning about past approaches as well as key themes, concepts and trajectories for future research. He takes a global and comparative viewpoint, combining a discussion of classic texts with the latest literature to illustrate the current debates and controversies across the urban world. The historiography of the field is mapped out by theme, including new topics of interest, with a particular focus on space and social identity, power and governance, the built environment, culture and modernity, and the growth and spread of transnational networking. By discussing a number of historic and fast-growing cities across the world, What is Urban History? demonstrates the importance of the history of urban life to our understanding of the world, both in the present and the future. As a result, urban history remains pivotal for explaining the continued growth of towns and cities in a global context, and is particularly useful for identifying the various problems and solutions faced by fast-growing megacities in the developing world.

Urban Humanities

Urban Humanities PDF Author: Dana Cuff
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262356996
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Original, action-oriented humanist practices for interpreting and intervening in the city: a new methodology at the intersection of the humanities, design, and urban studies. Urban humanities is an emerging field at the intersection of the humanities, urban planning, and design. It offers a new approach not only for understanding cities in a global context but for intervening in them, interpreting their histories, engaging with them in the present, and speculating about their futures. This book introduces both the theory and practice of urban humanities, tracing the evolution of the concept, presenting methods and practices with a wide range of research applications, describing changes in teaching and curricula, and offering case studies of urban humanities practices in the field. Urban humanities views the city through a lens of spatial justice, and its inquiries are centered on the microsettings of everyday life. The book's case studies report on real-world projects in mega-cities in the Pacific Rim—Tokyo, Shanghai, Mexico City, and Los Angeles—with several projects described in detail, including playful spaces for children in car-oriented Mexico City, a commons in a Tokyo neighborhood, and a rolling story-telling box to promote “literary justice” in Los Angeles.

Urban Practices

Urban Practices PDF Author: Annette Haug
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN: 9782503584614
Category : Cities and towns, Ancient
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Cities in the ancient world, much like in the modern era, were not simply a locus for population and a hub for social, cultural, and economic activity, but were themselves the products of urban practices. This volume draws together two often disparate fields - urban space and human practice - to explore the actors and actions that underpinned ancient cities and to offer unique insights into the lives of those who dwelt there. Placing particular emphasis on social practice theory, the contributions gathered together in this book seek to analyse the development of the city, especially public urban spaces, from the archaic period up to Roman Imperial times. A key focus is on infrastructure, public spaces used for politics (particularly the Forum Romanum), and the role of sanctuaries and the way in which they were shaped by cult activity. Through this unique approach, this volume is able, for the first time, to bring the inhabitants of ancient cities to the fore, and in doing so, to offer key insights into the development of spatial routines, the interaction of these routines with the material setting of a city, and the way in which cities themselves played an important role in shaping the people and practices within them.

The Power of Place

The Power of Place PDF Author: Dolores Hayden
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262581523
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Based on her extensive experience in the urban communities of Los Angeles, historian and architect Dolores Hayden proposes new perspectives on gender, race, and ethnicity to broaden the practice of public history and public art, enlarge urban preservation, and reorient the writing of urban history to spatial struggles. In the first part of The Power of Place, Hayden outlines the elements of a social history of urban space to connect people's lives and livelihoods to the urban landscape as it changes over time. She then explores how communities and professionals can tap the power of historic urban landscapes to nurture public memory. The second part documents a decade of research and practice by The Power of Place, a nonprofit organization Hayden founded in downtown Los Angeles. Through public meetings, walking tours, artists's books, and permanent public sculpture, as well as architectural preservation, teams of historians, designers, planners, and artists worked together to understand, preserve, and commemorate urban landscape history as African American, Latina, and Asian American families have experienced it. One project celebrates the urban homestead of Biddy Mason, an African American ex-slave and midwife active betwen 1856 and 1891. Another reinterprets the Embassy Theater where Rose Pesotta, Luisa Moreno, and Josefina Fierro de Bright organized Latina dressmakers and cannery workers in the 1930s and 1940s. A third chapter tells the story of a historic district where Japanese American family businesses flourished from the 1890s to the 1940s. Each project deals with bitter memories—slavery, repatriation, internment—but shows how citizens survived and persevered to build an urban life for themselves, their families, and their communities. Drawing on many similar efforts around the United States, from New York to Charleston, Seattle to Cincinnati, Hayden finds a broad new movement across urban preservation, public history, and public art to accept American diversity at the heart of the vernacular urban landscape. She provides dozens of models for creative urban history projects in cities and towns across the country.

Urban Transportation Planning in the United States

Urban Transportation Planning in the United States PDF Author: Edward Weiner
Publisher: Praeger Publishers
ISBN: 9780275925444
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
A definitive, brief institutional overview of urban transportation planning in the US from 1920 to the present. The book is a highly readable, nontechnical summary of a rich and diverse decision-making arena that mirrors faithfully the changing dynamic of urban life and politics in America in the late 20th century. The author, a highly authoritative career policy analyst with the US Department of Transportation, gives us capsule descriptions of each landmark event in urban transportation planning, emphasizing post-1960 happenings. . . . There is no comparable book. The quality of the bibliography, references, index, printing, and binding are excellent. . . . The book will appeal to students of urban transportation, urban policy, and recent urban and American history. Choice The development of U.S. urban transportation policy over the past 50 years illustrates the changing relationships between Federal, state, and local governments. This comprehensive text examines the evolution of urban transportation planning from early developments in highway planning in the 1930s to the shift to decentralization of authority in the 1980s. Focusing on major national events, the book discusses the influence of legislation, regulations, conferences, Federal programs, and advances in planning procedures and technology. It offers an in-depth look at the most significant event in transportation planning--the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1962.

Real Estate and Global Urban History

Real Estate and Global Urban History PDF Author: Alexia Yates
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108851762
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
Capitalist private property in land and buildings – real estate – is the ground of modern cities, materially, politically, and economically. It is foundational to their development and core to much theoretical work on the urban environment. It is also a central, pressing matter of political contestation in contemporary cities. Yet it remains largely without a history. This Element examines the modern city as a propertied space, defining real estate as a technology of (dis)possession and using it to move across scales of analysis, from the local spatiality of particular built spaces to the networks of legal, political, and economic imperatives that constitute property and operate at national and international levels. This combination of territorial embeddedness with more wide-ranging institutional relationships charts a route to an urban history that allows the city to speak as a global agent and artefact without dispensing with the role of states and local circumstance.

Animal Cities

Animal Cities PDF Author: Professor Peter J Atkins
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 140948338X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
Animal Cities builds upon a recent surge of interest about animals in the urban context. Considering animals in urban settings is now a firmly established area of study and this book presents a number of valuable case studies that illustrate some of the perspectives that may be adopted. Having an ‘urban history’ flavour, the book follows a fourfold agenda. First, the opening chapters look at working and productive animals that lived and died in nineteenth-century cities such as London, Edinburgh and Paris. The argument here is that their presence yields insights into evolving understandings of the category ‘urban’ and what made a good city. Second, there is a consideration of nineteenth-century animal spectacles, which influenced contemporary interpretations of the urban experience. Third, the theme of contested animal spaces in the city is explored further with regard to backyard chickens in suburban Australia. Finally, there is discussion of the problem of the public companion animal and its role in changing attitudes to public space, illustrated with a chapter on dog-walking in Victorian and Edwardian London. Animal Cities makes a significant contribution to animal studies and is of interest to historical geographers, urban, cultural, social and economic historians and historians of policy and planning.

Urban Design Practice

Urban Design Practice PDF Author: Sebastian Loew
Publisher: Riba Publishing
ISBN: 9781859464496
Category : City planning
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Urban Design Practice gives a fascinating account of the state of urban design practice across the world today. Packed with invaluable local knowledge from on-the-spot contributors, its global scope offers an armoury of background facts and figures to professionals interested in exporting their skills internationally. Along the way it reveals how urban design is practiced, identifies a multitude of key concerns and refines our understanding of what urban design (so often a nebulous concept) means. Aimed broadly at practitioners masterplanners, architects, landscape architects, planners, civil engineers and students and academics of these disciplines, twenty chapters analyse a different country's urban design context. Fully illustrated and structured in a similar way, each chapter features a case study, general background economic statistics, and a handy 'quick guide' to the types of work available, the underlying legislation and tips for securing work. Features chapters of the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, the Czech Republic, Dubai, Egypt, England, France, Germany, India, Italy, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, Sweden and the USA.

Queer Sites

Queer Sites PDF Author: David Higgs
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134724675
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
There are areas which can be described as gay space in that they have many lesbians and gays in the population. Queerspace: A History of Urban Sexuality, edited by David Higgs, offers a history of gay space in the major cities form the early modern period to the present. The book focuses on the changing nature of queer experience in London, Amsterdam, Rio de Janiero, San Francisco, Paris, Lisbon and Moscow. This book provides an interdisciplinary analysis of extensive source material, including diaries, poems, legal accounts and journalism. By concentrating the importance of the city and varied meeting places such as parks, river walks, bathing places, the street, bars and even churches, the contributors explore the extent to which gay space existed, the degree of social collectiveness felt by those who used this space and their individual histories.