Download or read book Cities and Metaphors written by Somaiyeh Falahat and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introducing a new concept of urban space, Cities and Metaphors encourages a theoretical realignment of how the city is experienced, thought and discussed. In the context of ‘Islamic city’ studies, relying on reasoning and rational thinking has reduced descriptive, vivid features of the urban space into a generic scientific framework. Phenomenological characteristics have consequently been ignored rather than integrated into theoretical components. The book argues that this results from a lack of appropriate conceptual vocabulary in our global body of scholarly literature. It challenges existing theories, introduces and applies the concept of Hezar-tu (‘a thousand insides’) to rethink the spaces in historic cores of Fez, Isfahan and Tunis. This tool constructs a staging post towards a different articulation of urban space based on spatial, physical, virtual, symbolic and social edges and thresholds; nodes of sociospatial relationships; zones of containment; state of intermediacy; and, thus, a logic of ambiguity rather than determinacy. Presenting alternative narrations of paths through sequential discovery of spaces, this book brings the sensual features of urban space into the focus. The book finally shows that concepts derived from local contexts enable us to tailor our methods and theoretical structures to the idiosyncrasies of each city while retaining the global commonalities of all. Hence, in broader terms, it contributes to a growing awareness that urban studies should be more inclusive by bringing the diverse global contexts of cities into the body of our urban knowledge.

Download or read book Constructing Narratives for City Governance written by Alistair Cole and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-08 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together transnational perspectives on urban narration, this innovative book analyses how a combination of tales, images and discourses are used to brand, market and (re-)make cities, focusing on the actors behind this and the conflicts of power that arise in defining and governing city futures.

Download or read book Constructing Suburbs written by Ann Forsyth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-09-29 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1. Big projects in a time of uncertainty : facing the future in a contemporary urban development -- 2. Five images of a suburb : competing perspectives on the economy, environment, and family life -- 3. Visual rhetorics in growth debates : Sydney's future as a Los Angeles, Toronto, or Canberra -- 4. Formal planning process : the privileged language of professional planning -- 5. Hard and soft privitization : unequal impacts of government withdrawal -- 6. Urban development and the power of ideas.

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 238 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.

Download or read book Babylon or New Jerusalem written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-08-29 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today more than ever literature and the other arts make use of urban structures – it is in the city that the global and universal joins the local and individual. Babylon or New Jerusalem? Perceptions of the City in Literature draws a map of the concept of the city in literature and represents the major issues involved. Contributions to the volume revisit cities such as the London of Wordsworth, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf or Rilke’s Paris, but also travel to the politics of power in Renaissance theatre at Ferrara and to deliberate urban erasures in post-apartheid South Africa. The texts represented range from Renaissance plays to contemporary novels and to poetry from various periods, with references to the visual arts, including film. The role of memory in contemplating the city and also specific urban metaphors developed in literature, such as boxing – the square ring – and jazz are also discussed. The transformation of cities by legislation on cemeteries, by lighting or by projects of urban renewal are the subject of articles, while others reflect on images of the city in worlds specifically forged by writers like William Blake and James Thomson. The contributors themselves live and work in many varied cities, thus representing a dynamic and real variety of critical approaches, and introducing a strong theoretical and comparative element.

Download or read book Singapore s Park System Master Planning written by Raffaella Sini and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the evolution of Singapore’s parks system, from colonial to present times. Further, it contextualizes the design and planning of parks in the general discourse on western and eastern traditions: early twentieth century western conceptions ‘imported’ during colonialism; modernism; postmodernism, and the contemporary ecological debate. Park system planning products respond to national policies and result in structural urban elements and a range of park types. Global (western ideology) and local issues have influenced park system planning and the physical design of individual parks over time. However, in Singapore the eastern literature has not addressed the development of parks and urban green spaces in terms of historical perspective. The publication reveals the interrelations between visual representations and changing political ideologies. Singapore’s system of public parks is shown to represent an iconography created by the state. Its set of constructed narratives elucidates on the potential social, cultural and environmental roles of public parks. However, Singapore’s park system presents a novel paradigm for expanding Asian cities, characterized by evolving urban imaging strategies. In framing Singapore’s case study within the broader perspective of eastern applications of western planning and design practices, and constructions of nation in post-colonial countries, the manuscript establishes the contribution of the Singaporean model of design and planning of parks to the international debate.

Download or read book The Power of Urban Water written by Nicola Chiarenza and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Water is a global resource for modern societies - and water was a global resource for pre-modern societies. The many different water systems serving processes of urbanisation and urban life in ancient times and the Middle Ages have hardly been researched until now. The numerous contributions to this volume pose questions such as what the basic cultural significance of water was, the power of water, in the town and for the town, from different points of view. Symbolic, aesthetic, and cult aspects are taken up, as is the role of water in politics, society, and economy, in daily life, but also in processes of urban planning or in urban neighbourhoods. Not least, the dangers of polluted water or of flooding presented a challenge to urban society. The contributions in this volume draw attention to the complex, manifold relations between water and human beings. This collection presents the results of an international conference in Kiel in 2018. It is directed towards both scholars in ancient and mediaeval studies and all those interested in the diversity of water systems in urban space in ancient and mediaeval times.

Download or read book Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies written by Patsy Healey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-12-15 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies develops important new relational and institutionalist approaches to policy analysis and planning, of relevance to all those with an interest in cities and urban areas. Well-illustrated chapters weave together conceptual development, experience and implications for future practice and address the challenge of urban and metropolitan planning and development. Useful for students, social scientists and policy makers, Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies offers concepts and detailed cases of interest to those involved in policy development and management, as well as providing a foundation of ideas and experiences, an account of the place-focused practices of governance and an approach to the analysis of governance dynamics. For those in the planning field itself, this book re-interprets the role of planning frameworks in linking spatial patterns to social dynamics with twenty-first century relevance.

Download or read book Segregation Inequality and Urban Development written by Sara Dehkordi and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2020-07-31 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In present-day South Africa, urban development agendas have inscribed doctrines of desirable and undesirable life in city spaces and the public that uses the space. This book studies the ways in which segregated city spaces, displacement of people from their homes, and criminalization practices are structured and executed. Sara Dehkordi shows that these doctrines are being legitimized and legalized as part of a discursive practice and that the criminalization of lower-class members are part of that practice, not as random policing techniques of individual security forces, but as a technology of power that attends to the body, zooms in on it, screens it, and interrogates it.

Download or read book Grounding Urban Natures written by Henrik Ernstson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Case studies from cities on five continents demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The global discourse around urban ecology tends to homogenize and universalize, relying on such terms as “smart cities,” “eco-cities,” and “resilience,” and proposing a “science of cities” based largely on information from the Global North. Grounding Urban Natures makes the case for the importance of place and time in understanding urban environments. Rather than imposing a unified framework on the ecology of cities, the contributors use a variety of approaches across a range of of locales and timespans to examine how urban natures are part of—and are shaped by—cities and urbanization. Grounding Urban Natures offers case studies from cities on five continents that demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The contributors consider the diversity of urban natures, analyzing urban ecologies that range from the coastal delta of New Orleans to real estate practices of the urban poor in Lagos. They examine the effect of popular movements on the meanings of urban nature in cities including San Francisco, Delhi, and Berlin. Finally, they explore abstract urban planning models and their global mobility, examining real-world applications in such cities as Cape Town, Baltimore, and the Chinese “eco-city” Yixing. Contributors Martín Ávila, Amita Baviskar, Jia-Ching Chen, Henrik Ernstson, James Evans, Lisa M. Hoffman, Jens Lachmund, Joshua Lewis, Lindsay Sawyer, Sverker Sörlin, Anne Whiston Spirn, Lance van Sittert, Richard A. Walker

Download or read book Urban Design Thinking written by Kim Dovey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-02 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban Design Thinking provides a conceptual toolkit for urban design. Bridging the gap between theory and practice, it shows how the design of our cities and urban spaces can be interpreted and informed through contemporary theories of urbanism, architecture and spatial analysis. Relating abstract ideas to real-world examples, and taking assemblage thinking as its critical framework, the book introduces an array of key theoretical principles and demonstrates how theory is central to urban design critique and practice. Thirty short chapters can be read alone or in sequence, each opening a different kind of conceptual window onto how cities work and how they are transformed through design practice. Chapters range from explorations of urban morphology, typology, meaning and place identity to particular issues such as urban design codes, informal settlements, globalization, transit and creative clusters. This book is essential reading for those engaged with the practice of urban design and planning, as well as for anyone interested in the theoretical side of urbanism, architecture, and related disciplines.

Download or read book Politics of Urban Knowledge written by Bert De Munck and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-23 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses 'politics of urban knowledge' as a lens to understand how professionals, administrations, scholars, and social movements have surveyed, evaluated and theorized the city, identified problems, and shaped and legitimized practical interventions in planning and administration. Urbanization has been accompanied, and partly shaped by, the formation of the city as a distinct domain of knowledge. This volume uses 'politics of urban knowledge' as a lens to develop a new perspective on urban history and urban planning history. Through case studies of mainly 19th and 20th century examples, the book demonstrates that urban knowledge is not simply a neutral means to represent cities as pre-existing entities, but rather the outcome of historically contingent processes and practices of urban actors addressing urban issues and the power relations in which they are embedded. It shows how urban knowledge-making has reshaped the categories, rationales, and techniques through which urban spaces were produced, governed and contested, and how the knowledge concerned became performative of newly emerging urban orders. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of urban history and urban studies, as well as the history of technology, science and knowledge and of science studies.

Download or read book Constructing Gardens Cultivating the City written by Amanda Shoaf Vincent and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2023-05-16 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City is the first cultural history of major new parks developed in Paris in the late twentieth century, as part of the city's program of adaptive reuse of industrial spaces. Thanks to laws that gave the city more political autonomy, Paris's local government launched a campaign of park creation in the late 1970s that continued to the turn of the millennium. The parks in this book represent this campaign and illustrate different facets of their cultural and historical context. Archival research, interviews, and analyses of the parks reveal how postmodern debates about urban planning, the historic city, public space, and nature's presence in an urban setting influenced their designs. In sum, the city adopted the garden as a model for public parks, investing in complex, richly symbolic and representational spaces. These parks were intended to represent contemporary twists on traditional designs and serve local residents as much as they would contribute to Paris's role as a world city. The parks' development process often included points of conflict, pointing to differing views on what Parisian space should represent and fundamental contradictions between the characteristics of public space and the garden as it is traditionally defined. These parks demonstrate the ongoing cultivation of the city over time, in which transformed sites not only fulfil new functions but also engage with history and their surroundings to create new meaning. They stand for landscape as a form of signifying cultural production that directly engages with other art forms and ways of knowing. Just as the Luxembourg Gardens, the Tuileries, and the Buttes-Chaumont parks exemplify their eras' cultural dynamics, such parks as the Jardin Atlantique, Parc André-Citroën, and the Jardin des Halles express contemporary French culture within the archetypal space of their era, the city. Finally, they point the way to current trends in landscape architecture, such as citizen gardening and ecological initiatives.

Download or read book World Cities in a World System written by Paul L. Knox and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-07-06 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities such as New York, Tokyo and London are the centres of transnational corporate headquarters, of international finance, transnational institutions, and telecommunications. They are the dominant loci in the contemporary world economy, and the influence of a relatively small number of cities within world affairs has been a feature of the shift from an international to a more global economy which took place during the 1970s and 1980s. This book brings together the leading researchers in the field to write seventeen original essays which cover both the theoretical and practical issues involved. They examine the nature of world cities, and their demands as special places in need of specific urban policies; the relationship between world cities within global networks of economic flows; and the relationship between world city research and world-systems analysis and other theoretical frameworks.

Download or read book The Urban Condition written by Ghent Urban Studies Team and published by 010 Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does the Western city at the end of the twentieth century look like? How did the modern metropolis of congestion and density turn into a posturban or even postsuburban cityscape? What are edge cities and technoburbs? How has the social composition of cities changed in the postwar era? What do gated communities tell us about social fragmentation? Is public space in the contemporary city being privatized and militarized? How can the urban self still be defined? What role does consumer aestheticism have to play in this? These and many more questions are addressed by this uniquely conceived multidisciplinary study. The Urban Condition seeks to interfere in current debates over the future and interpretation of our urban landscapes by reuniting studies of the city as a physical and material phenomenon and as a cultural and mental (arte)fact. The Ghent Urban Studies Team responsible for the writing and editing of this volume is directed by Kristiaan Versluys and Dirk De Meyer at the University of Ghent, Belgium. It is an interdisciplinary research team of young academics that further consists of Kristiaan Borret, Bart Eeckhout, Steven Jacobs, and Bart Keunen. The collective expertise of GUST ranges from architectural theory, urban planning, and art history to philosophy, literary criticism and cultural theory.

Download or read book Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy written by Mary E. Mills and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-10-26 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together aspects of contemporary study of cultural geography and selected passages from prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament. The aim is to identify how the image of the city helps to construct meaning inside the biblical material. In order to carry out this task relevant textual narratives are analysed and then read from the viewpoint of space, place and urban studies. This latter category includes the works of Lefebvre, Bachelard, Soja, Massey, Amin and Thrift and Pile, among others. A major finding is that urban imagination is a tool by which the texts manage the experience of political and social events in a time of radical change.

Download or read book Understanding Urban Ecosystems written by Alan R. Berkowitz and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-05-29 with total page 547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nowhere on Earth is the challenge for ecological understanding greater, and yet more urgent, than in those parts of the globe where human activity is most intense - cities. People need to understand how cities work as ecological systems so they can take control of the vital links between human actions and environmental quality, and work for an ecologically and economically sustainable future. An ecosystem approach integrates biological, physical and social factors and embraces historical and geographical dimensions, providing our best hope for coping with the complexity of cities. This book is a first of its kind effort to bring together leaders in the biological, physical and social dimensions of urban ecosystem research with leading education researchers, administrators and practitioners, to show how an understanding of urban ecosystems is vital for urban dwellers to grasp the fundamentals of ecological and environmental science, and to understand their own environment.