Improvised Cities

Improvised Cities PDF Author: Helen Gyger
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 9780822945369
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Beginning in the 1950s, an explosion in rural-urban migration dramatically increased the population of cities throughout Peru, leading to an acute housing shortage and the proliferation of self-built shelters clustered in barriadas, or squatter settlements. Improvised Cities examines the history of aided self-help housing, or technical assistance to self-builders, which took on a variety of forms in Peru from 1954 to 1986. While the postwar period saw a number of trial projects in aided self-help housing throughout the developing world, Peru was the site of significant experiments in this field and pioneering in its efforts to enact a large-scale policy of land tenure regularization in improvised, unauthorized cities. Gyger focuses on three interrelated themes: the circumstances that made Peru a fertile site for innovation in low-cost housing under a succession of very different political regimes; the influences on, and movements within, architectural culture that prompted architects to consider self-help housing as an alternative mode of practice; and the context in which international development agencies came to embrace these projects as part of their larger goals during the Cold War and beyond.

Improvised Cities

Improvised Cities PDF Author: Helen Gyger
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 9780822945369
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Beginning in the 1950s, an explosion in rural-urban migration dramatically increased the population of cities throughout Peru, leading to an acute housing shortage and the proliferation of self-built shelters clustered in barriadas, or squatter settlements. Improvised Cities examines the history of aided self-help housing, or technical assistance to self-builders, which took on a variety of forms in Peru from 1954 to 1986. While the postwar period saw a number of trial projects in aided self-help housing throughout the developing world, Peru was the site of significant experiments in this field and pioneering in its efforts to enact a large-scale policy of land tenure regularization in improvised, unauthorized cities. Gyger focuses on three interrelated themes: the circumstances that made Peru a fertile site for innovation in low-cost housing under a succession of very different political regimes; the influences on, and movements within, architectural culture that prompted architects to consider self-help housing as an alternative mode of practice; and the context in which international development agencies came to embrace these projects as part of their larger goals during the Cold War and beyond.

Improvised Lives

Improvised Lives PDF Author: AbdouMaliq Simone
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509523391
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 103

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Book Description
The poor and working people in cities of the South find themselves in urban spaces that are conventionally construed as places to reside or inhabit. But what if we thought of popular districts in more expansive ways that capture what really goes on within them? In such cities, popular districts are the settings of more uncertain operations that take place under the cover of darkness, generating uncanny alliances among disparate bodies, materials and things and expanding the urban sensorium and its capacities for liveliness. In this important new book AbdouMaliq Simone explores the nature of these alliances, portraying urban districts as sites of enduring transformations through rhythms that mediate between the needs of residents not to draw too much attention to themselves and their aspirations to become a small niche of exception. Here we discover an urban South that exists as dense rhythms of endurance that turn out to be vital for survival, connectivity, and becoming.

Urban Labyrinths

Urban Labyrinths PDF Author: Pablo Meninato
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003847250
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Urban Labyrinths: Informal Settlements, Architecture, and Social Change in Latin America examines intervention initiatives in informal settlements in Latin American cities as social, spatial, architectural, and cultural processes. From the mid-20th century to the present, Latin America and other regions in the Global South have experienced a remarkable demographic trend, with millions of people moving from rural areas to cities in search of work, healthcare, and education. Without other options, these migrants have created self-built settlements mostly located on the periphery of large metropolitan areas. While the initial reaction of governments was to eliminate these communities, since the 1990s, several Latin American cities began to advance new urban intervention approaches for improving quality of life. This book examines informal settlement interventions in five Latin American cities: Rio de Janeiro, Medellín, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Tijuana. It explores the Favela-Bairro Program in Rio de Janeiro during the 1990s which sought to improve living conditions and infrastructure in favelas. It investigates projects propelled by Social Urbanism in Medellín at the beginning of the 2000s, aimed at revitalizing marginalized areas by creating a public transportation network, constructing civic buildings, and creating public spaces. Furthermore, the book examines the long-term initiatives led by SEHAB in São Paulo, which simultaneously addresses favela upgrading works, water pollution remediation strategies, and environmental stewardship. It discusses current intervention initiatives being developed in informal settlements in Buenos Aires and Tijuana, exploring the urban design strategies that address complex challenges faced by these communities. Taken together, the Latin American architects, planners, landscape architects, researchers, and stakeholders involved in these projects confirm that urbanism, architecture, and landscape design can produce positive urban and social transformations for the most underprivileged. This book will be of interest to students, researchers, and professionals in planning, urbanism, architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, urban geography, public policy, as well as other spatial design disciplines.

Insurgent Public Space

Insurgent Public Space PDF Author: Jeffrey Hou
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136988025
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Winner of the EDRA book prize for 2012. In cities around the world, individuals and groups are reclaiming and creating urban sites, temporary spaces and informal gathering places. These ‘insurgent public spaces’ challenge conventional views of how urban areas are defined and used, and how they can transform the city environment. No longer confined to traditional public areas like neighbourhood parks and public plazas, these guerrilla spaces express the alternative social and spatial relationships in our changing cities. With nearly twenty illustrated case studies, this volume shows how instances of insurgent public space occur across the world. Examples range from community gardening in Seattle and Los Angeles, street dancing in Beijing, to the transformation of parking spaces into temporary parks in San Francisco. Drawing on the experiences and knowledge of individuals extensively engaged in the actual implementation of these spaces, Insurgent Public Space is a unique cross-disciplinary approach to the study of public space use, and how it is utilized in the contemporary, urban world. Appealing to professionals and students in both urban studies and more social courses, Hou has brought together valuable commentaries on an area of urbanism which has, up until now, been largely ignored.

The Urban Improvise

The Urban Improvise PDF Author: Kristian Kloeckl
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300243049
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
A book for architects, designers, planners, and urbanites that explores how cities can embrace improvisation to improve urban life The built environment in today's hybrid cities is changing radically. The pervasiveness of networked mobile and embedded devices has transformed a predominantly stable background for human activity into spaces that have a more fluid behavior. Based on their capability to sense, compute, and act in real time, urban spaces have the potential to go beyond planned behaviors and, instead, change and adapt dynamically. These interactions resemble improvisation in the performing arts, and this book offers a new improvisation-based framework for thinking about future cities. Kristian Kloeckl moves beyond the smart city concept by unlocking performativity, and specifically improvisation, as a new design approach and explores how city lights, buses, plazas, and other urban environments are capable of behavior beyond scripts. Drawing on research of digital cities and design theory, he makes improvisation useful and applicable to the condition of today's technology-imbued cities and proposes a new future for responsive urban design.

Improvised City

Improvised City PDF Author: Cole Roskam
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780295744780
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
For nearly one hundred years, Shanghai was an international treaty port in which the extraterritorial rights of foreign governments shaped both architecture and infrastructure, and it merits examination as one of the most complex and influential urban environments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Improvised City illuminates the interplay between the city's commercial nature and the architectural forms and practices designed to manage it in Shanghai's three municipalities: the International Settlement, the French Concession, and the Chinese city. This book probes the relationship between architecture and extraterritoriality in ways that challenge standard narratives of Shanghai's built environment, which are dominated by stylistic analyses of major landmarks. Instead, by considering a wider range of town halls, post offices, municipal offices, war memorials, water works, and consulates, Cole Roskam traces the cultural, economic, political, and spatial negotiations that shaped Shanghai's growth. Improvised City repositions Shanghai within architectural and urban transformations that reshaped the world over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It responds to growing academic interest in the history of modern and contemporary Chinese architecture and urbanism; the ongoing, shifting relationship between sovereignty and space; and the variegated forms of urban exceptionality'such as special economic zones, tax-free trading spheres, and commercial enclaves'that continue to shape cities.

City Atlas

City Atlas PDF Author: Martin Haake
Publisher: Wide Eyed Editions
ISBN: 1847807011
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 66

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Book Description
Take a tour of Toronto, look around Lisbon or hot-foot it to Helsinki with this global adventure in a book! 30 best-loved cities from around the world are brought to life with illustrations by Martin Haake, which show in fabulous detail key landmarks, famous people, iconic buildings and cultural icons for all the family to enjoy. A search-and-find game on every page helps young readers to explore every city and spot the hundreds of details that makes each place unique.

Cities That Think like Planets

Cities That Think like Planets PDF Author: Marina Alberti
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295806605
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
As human activity and environmental change come to be increasingly recognized as intertwined phenomena on a rapidly urbanizing planet, the field of urban ecology has risen to offer useful ways of thinking about coupled human and natural systems. On the forefront of this discipline is Marina Alberti, whose innovative work offers a conceptual framework for uncovering fundamental laws that govern the complexity and resilience of cities, which she sees as key to understanding and responding to planetary change and the evolution of Earth. Bridging the fields of urban planning and ecology, Alberti describes a science of cities that work on a planetary scale and that links unpredictable dynamics to the potential for innovation. It is a science that considers interactions - at all scales - between people and built environments and between cities and their larger environments. Cities That Think like Planets advances strategies for planning a future that may look very different from the present, as rapid urbanization could tip the Earth toward abrupt and nonlinear change. Alberti's analyses of the various hybrid ecosystems, such as self-organization, heterogeneity, modularity, multiple equilibria, feedback, and transformation, may help humans participate in guiding the Earth away from inadvertent collapse and toward a new era of planetary co-evolution and resilience.

Of Greater Dignity than Riches

Of Greater Dignity than Riches PDF Author: Farhan Karim
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 082298654X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Extreme poverty, which intensified in India during colonial rule, peaked in the 1920s—after decades of imperialist exploitation, famine, and disease—a time when architects, engineers, and city authorities proposed a new type of housing for India’s urban poor and industrial workers. As Farhan Karim argues, economic scarcity became a central inspiration for architectural modernism in the subcontinent. As India moved from colonial rule to independence, the Indian government, business entities, international NGOs, and intergovernmental agencies took major initiatives to modernize housing conditions and the domestic environment of the state’s low-income population. Of Greater Dignity than Riches traces multiple international origins of austerity as an essential ingredient of postcolonial development. By prescribing model villages, communities, and ideal houses for the working class, this project of austerity eventually reduced poverty into a stylized architectural representation. In this rich and original study, Karim explains the postwar and postcolonial history of low-cost housing as an intertwined process of global transferences of knowledge, Cold War cultural politics, postcolonial nationalism, and the politics of economic development.

Modernism’s Magic Hat

Modernism’s Magic Hat PDF Author: Ijlal Muzaffar
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477329501
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Examines the role of architecture in the history of global development and decolonization. In Modernism’s Magic Hat, Ijlal Muzaffar examines how modern architects and planners help resolve one of the central dilemmas of the mid-twentieth-century world order: how to make decolonization plausible without accounting for centuries of capital drain under colonial rule. In the years after World War II, architects and planners found extensive opportunities in new international institutions—such as the World Bank, the UN, and the Ford Foundation—and helped shape new models of global intervention that displaced the burden of change onto the inhabitants. Muzaffar argues that architecture in this domain didn’t just symbolically represent power, but formed the material domain through which new modes of power acquired sense. Looking at a series of architectural projects across the world, from housing in Ghana to village planning in Nigeria and urban planning in Venezuela and Pakistan, Muzaffar explores how architects and planners shaped new ideas of time, land, climate, and the decolonizing body, making them appear as sources of untapped value. What resulted, Muzaffar argues, is a widespread belief in spontaneous Third World “development” without capital, which continues to foreclose any global discussion of colonial theft.