Urban Transformations

Urban Transformations PDF Author: Ian Bentley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134796358
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Cities affect every person's life, yet across the traditional divides of class, age, gender and political affiliation, armies of people are united in their dislike of the transformations that cities have undergone in recent times. The physical form of the urban environment is not a designer add-on to 'real' social issues; it is a central aspect of the social world. Yet in many people's experience, the cumulative impacts of recent urban development have created widely un-loved urban places. To work towards better-loved urban environments, we need to understand how current problems have arisen and identify practical action to address them. Urban Transformations examines the crucial issues relating to how cities are formed, how people use these urban environments and how cities can be transformed into better places. Exploring the links between the concrete physicality of the built environment and the complex social, economic, political and cultural processes through which the physical urban form is produced and consumed, Ian Bentley proposes a framework of ideas to provoke and develop current debate and new forms of practice.

Urban Transformations

Urban Transformations PDF Author: Ian Bentley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134796358
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cities affect every person's life, yet across the traditional divides of class, age, gender and political affiliation, armies of people are united in their dislike of the transformations that cities have undergone in recent times. The physical form of the urban environment is not a designer add-on to 'real' social issues; it is a central aspect of the social world. Yet in many people's experience, the cumulative impacts of recent urban development have created widely un-loved urban places. To work towards better-loved urban environments, we need to understand how current problems have arisen and identify practical action to address them. Urban Transformations examines the crucial issues relating to how cities are formed, how people use these urban environments and how cities can be transformed into better places. Exploring the links between the concrete physicality of the built environment and the complex social, economic, political and cultural processes through which the physical urban form is produced and consumed, Ian Bentley proposes a framework of ideas to provoke and develop current debate and new forms of practice.

Designing Urban Transformation

Designing Urban Transformation PDF Author: Aseem Inam
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135006393
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
While designers possess the creative capabilities of shaping cities, their often-singular obsession with form and aesthetics actually reduces their effectiveness as they are at the mercy of more powerful generators of urban form. In response to this paradox, Designing Urban Transformation addresses the incredible potential of urban practice to radically change cities for the better. The book focuses on a powerful question, "What can urbanism be?" by arguing that the most significant transformations occur by fundamentally rethinking concepts, practices, and outcomes. Drawing inspiration from the philosophical movement known as Pragmatism, the book proposes three conceptual shifts for transformative urban practice: (a) beyond material objects: city as flux, (b) beyond intentions: consequences of design, and (c) beyond practice: urbanism as creative political act. Pragmatism encourages us to consider how we can make deeper and more systemic changes and how urbanism itself can be a design strategy for such transformations. To illuminate how these conceptual shifts operate in vastly different contexts through analysis of transformative urban initiatives and projects in Belo Horizonte, Boston, Cairo, Karachi, Los Angeles, New Delhi, and Paris. The book is a rare integration of theory and practice that proposes essential ways of rethinking city-design-and-building processes, while drawing critical lessons from actual examples of such processes.

Urban Transformation

Urban Transformation PDF Author: Peter Bosselmann
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1610911490
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
How do cities transform over time? And why do some cities change for the better while others deteriorate? In articulating new ways of viewing urban areas and how they develop over time, Peter Bosselmann offers a stimulating guidebook for students and professionals engaged in urban design, planning, and architecture. By looking through Bosselmann’s eyes (aided by his analysis of numerous color photos and illustrations) readers will learn to “see” cities anew. Bosselmann organizes the book around seven “activities”: comparing, observing, transforming, measuring, defining, modeling, and interpreting. He introduces readers to his way of seeing by comparing satellite-produced “maps” of the world’s twenty largest cities. With Bosselmann’s guidance, we begin to understand the key elements of urban design. Using Copenhagen, Denmark, as an example, he teaches us to observe without prejudice or bias. He demonstrates how cities transform by introducing the idea of “urban morphology” through an examination of more than a century of transformations in downtown Oakland, California. We learn how to measure quality-of-life parameters that are often considered immeasurable, including “vitality,” “livability,” and “belonging.” Utilizing the street grids of San Francisco as examples, Bosselmann explains how to define urban spaces. Modeling, he reveals, is not so much about creating models as it is about bringing others into public, democratic discussions. Finally, we find out how to interpret essential aspects of “life and place” by evaluating aerial images of the San Francisco Bay Area taken in 1962 and those taken forty-three years later. Bosselmann has a unique understanding of cities and how they “work.” His hope is that, with the fresh vision he offers, readers will be empowered to offer inventive new solutions to familiar urban problems.

The Feel of the City

The Feel of the City PDF Author: Nicolas Kenny
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442669063
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
At the start of the twentieth century, the modern metropolis was a riot of sensation. City dwellers lived in an environment filled with smoky factories, crowded homes, and lively thoroughfares. Sights, sounds, and smells flooded their senses, while changing conceptions of health and decorum forced many to rethink their most banal gestures, from the way they negotiated speeding traffic to the use they made of public washrooms. The Feel of the City exposes the sensory experiences of city-dwellers in Montreal and Brussels at the turn of the century and the ways in which these shaped the social and cultural significance of urban space. Using the experiences of municipal officials, urban planners, hygienists, workers, writers, artists, and ordinary citizens, Nicolas Kenny explores the implications of the senses for our understanding of modernity.

Cityscapes in History

Cityscapes in History PDF Author: Heléna Tóth
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317165756
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Cityscapes in History: Creating the Urban Experience explores the ways in which scholars from a variety of disciplines - history, history of art, geography and architecture - think about and study the urban environment. The concept ’cityscapes’ refers to three different dynamics that shape the development of the urban environment: the interplay between conscious planning and organic development, the tension between social control and its unintended consequences and the relationship between projection and self-presentation, as articulated through civic ceremony and ritual. The book is structured around three sections, each covering a particular aspect of the urban experience. ’The City Planned’ looks at issues related to agency, self-perception, the transfer of knowledge and the construction of space. ’The City Lived’ explores the experience of urbanity and the construction of space as a means of social control. And finally, ’The City as a Stage’ examines the ways in which cultural practices and power-relations shape - and are in turn shaped by - the construction of space. Each section combines the work of scholars from different fields who examine these dynamics through both theoretical essays and empirical research, and provides a coherent framework in which to assess a wide range of chronological and geographical subjects. Taken together the essays in this volume provide a truly interdisciplinary investigation of the urban phenomenon. By making fascinating connections between such seemingly diverse topics as 15th century France and modern America, the collection raises valuable questions about scholarly approaches to urban studies.

Urban Transformation

Urban Transformation PDF Author: Ilka Ruby
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783000248788
Category : Cities and towns
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
"[This book] evolved from a debate-platform, the Holcim Forum for Sustainable Construction on Urban Transformation, which took place in 2007 at Tongji University in Shanghai, China. For three days more 250 professionals from over 40 countries - architects, urban planners, engineers, scholars, representatives from business and governments - met in working groups and for panel sessions to discuss the challenges cities face today in respect to urban change."--Foreword (p. 10).

Imagined Cities

Imagined Cities PDF Author: Robert Alter
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300127073
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
In Imagined Cities, Robert Alter traces the arc of literary development triggered by the runaway growth of urban centers from the early nineteenth century through the first two decades of the twentieth. As new technologies and arrangements of public and private space changed the ways people experienced time and space, the urban panorama became less coherent—a metropolis defying traditional representation and definition, a vast jumble of shifting fragments and glimpses—and writers were compelled to create new methods for conveying the experience of the city.In a series of subtle and convincing interpretations of novels by Flaubert, Dickens, Bely, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka, Alter reveals the ways the city entered the literary imagination. He shows how writers of diverse imaginative temperaments developed innovative techniques to represent shifts in modern consciousness. Writers sought more than a journalistic representation of city living, he argues, and to convey meaningfully the reality of the metropolis, the city had to be re-created or reimagined. His book probes the literary response to changing realities of the period and contributes significantly to our understanding of the history of the Western imagination.

Planning and the Multi-local Urban Experience

Planning and the Multi-local Urban Experience PDF Author: Kimmo Lapintie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100057234X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
The starting point of this book is the observation that there is a discrepancy between the lived reality of human beings and the fabricated, planned, and governed ‘reality’ of the state apparatus at both the local and national level. The book posits multi-locality as an emerging spatial configuration. The author draws from various theoretical sources, such as Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of state or royal science, the Nietzschean critique of idealism, Hägerstrnad’s time-geography, Hintikka’s theory of modalities, Lefebvre’s urban society, Castel’s network society, Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, and Bhaskar’s and Sartre's theories of presence and absence. He also discusses the implications of Faludi’s post-territorialist critique of planning and governance, and of the failure to operationalise the concept quantitively, basing his arguments in the lived experiences of multi-locals as well. The novelty of the book is how it analyses multi-locality from such a wide theoretical perspective: what is the nature and meaning of the different multiple and coexistent places for people, and how is this spatial transformation related to their mobility, everyday practices, and work. How does the presence and absence of places form their identity and their citizenship? He also addresses the inconsistency between multi-locality and traditional statistics and the planning and governance practices based on the assumption of unilocality and discusses the implications of this incongruity. The book will be of interest to scholars in urban studies and planning theory, as well as practitioners developing more adequate practices replacing outdated ones.

Transforming Urban Nightlife and the Development of Smart Public Spaces

Transforming Urban Nightlife and the Development of Smart Public Spaces PDF Author: Abusaada, Hisham
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1799870065
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Public places are places where all citizens, irrespective of their race, age, religion, or class level (social or economic), cannot be excluded. It serves to improve the lifestyle experience of its inhabitants, as well as promote social connections. All citizens are responsible for it and are interested in it, and the intervention for change must be the responsibility of all without exception. As such, bottom-up urban planning is essential for urban environments and for transforming nightlife in public places in order to create more meaningful experiences and instill a greater sense of identity and community. Transforming Urban Nightlife and the Development of Smart Public Spaces analyzes the patterns of transformations of nightlife in public life. The book investigates urban nightlife transformations and the challenge of enhancing the sense of belonging in sensitive areas such as local communities and historical sites. The chapters present new insights to control the chaotic intervention related to the elements of traditional or digital technology, whether from citizens themselves or local authorities. The objective also is to document urban nightlife transformations that enhance the sense of belonging in historical sites. Important topics covered include urban-gamification, digital urban art, urban socio-ecosystems, and reimagining space in the urban nightlife. This book is ideal for urban planners, developers, social scientists, technologists, civil engineers, architects, policymakers, government officials, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students who are interested in urban nightlife and nightscape and the smart technologies used for transformation.

The New Urban Renewal

The New Urban Renewal PDF Author: Derek S. Hyra
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226366049
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Two of the most celebrated black neighborhoods in the United States—Harlem in New York City and Bronzeville in Chicago—were once plagued by crime, drugs, and abject poverty. But now both have transformed into increasingly trendy and desirable neighborhoods with old buildings being rehabbed, new luxury condos being built, and banks opening branches in areas that were once redlined. In The New Urban Renewal, Derek S. Hyra offers an illuminating exploration of the complicated web of factors—local, national, and global—driving the remarkable revitalization of these two iconic black communities. How did these formerly notorious ghettos become dotted with expensive restaurants, health spas, and chic boutiques? And, given that urban renewal in the past often meant displacing African Americans, how have both neighborhoods remained black enclaves? Hyra combines his personal experiences as a resident of both communities with deft historical analysis to investigate who has won and who has lost in the new urban renewal. He discovers that today’s redevelopment affects African Americans differentially: the middle class benefits while lower-income residents are priced out. Federal policies affecting this process also come under scrutiny, and Hyra breaks new ground with his penetrating investigation into the ways that economic globalization interacts with local political forces to massively reshape metropolitan areas. As public housing is torn down and money floods back into cities across the United States, countless neighborhoods are being monumentally altered. The New Urban Renewal is a compelling study of the shifting dynamics of class and race at work in the contemporary urban landscape.