Download or read book The Human City written by Joel Kotkin and published by Agate Publishing. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism and The New Class Conflict challenges conventions of urban planning. Around the globe, most new urban development has adhered to similar tenets: tall structures, small units, and high density. In The Human City, Joel Kotkin―called “America’s uber-geographer” by David Brooks of the New York Times―questions these nearly ubiquitous practices, suggesting that they do not consider the needs and desires of the vast majority of people. Built environments, Kotkin argues, must reflect the preferences of most people―even if that means lower-density development. The Human City ponders the purpose of the city and investigates the factors that drive most urban development today. Armed with his own astute research, a deep-seated knowledge of urban history, and a sound grasp of economic, political, and social trends, Kotkin pokes holes in what he calls the “retro-urbanist” ideology and offers a refreshing case for dispersion centered on human values. This book is not anti-urban, but it does advocate a greater range of options for people to live the way they want at all stages of their lives. Praise for The Human City “Kotkin . . . presents the most cogent, evidence-based and clear-headed exposition of the pro-suburban argument . . . . In pithy, readable sections, each addressing a single issue, he debunks one attack on the suburbs after another. But he does more than that. He weaves an impressive array of original observations about cities into his arguments, enriching our understanding of what cities are about and what they can and must become.” —Shlomo Angel, Wall Street Journal “The most eloquent expression of urbanism since Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Kotkin writes with a strong sense of place; he recognizes that the geography and traditions of a city create the contours of its urbanity.” —Ronnie Wachter, Chicago Tribune
Download or read book The City Is More Than Human written by Frederick L. Brown and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2017 Virginia Marie Folkins Award, Association of King County Historical Organizations (AKCHO) Winner of the 2017 Hal K. Rothman Book Prize, Western History Association Seattle would not exist without animals. Animals have played a vital role in shaping the city from its founding amid existing indigenous towns in the mid-nineteenth century to the livestock-friendly town of the late nineteenth century to the pet-friendly, livestock-averse modern city. When newcomers first arrived in the 1850s, they hastened to assemble the familiar cohort of cattle, horses, pigs, chickens, and other animals that defined European agriculture. This, in turn, contributed to the dispossession of the Native residents of the area. However, just as various animals were used to create a Euro-American city, the elimination of these same animals from Seattle was key to the creation of the new middle-class neighborhoods of the twentieth century. As dogs and cats came to symbolize home and family, Seattleites’ relationship with livestock became distant and exploitative, demonstrating the deep social contradictions that characterize the modern American metropolis. Throughout Seattle’s history, people have sorted animals into categories and into places as a way of asserting power over animals, other people, and property. In The City Is More Than Human, Frederick Brown explores the dynamic, troubled relationship humans have with animals. In so doing he challenges us to acknowledge the role of animals of all sorts in the making and remaking of cities.
Download or read book Introduction to Cities written by Xiangming Chen and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-06-25 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A complete introduction to the history, evolution, and future of the modern city, this book covers a wide range of theory, including the significance of space and place, to provide a balanced account of why cities are an essential part of the global human experience. Covers a wide range of theoretical approaches to the city, from the historical to the cutting edge Emphasizes the important themes of space and place Offers a balanced account of cities and offers extensive coverage including urban inequality, environment and sustainability, and methods for studying the city Takes a global approach, with examples from Berlin and Chicago to Shanghai and Mumbai Includes a range of pedagogical features such as a substantial glossary of key terms, critical thinking questions, suggestions for further reading and a range of innovative textboxes which follow the themes of Exploring Further, Studying the City and Making the City Better Extensively illustrated with maps, charts, tables, and over 80 photographs Accompanied by a comprehensive student companion site featuring a list of relevant journals, a guide to useful web resources, and an annotated documentary film guide, alongside a useful instructor companion site with further examples, case studies, and discussion and essay questions; instructors will find a link to the instructor website on the student website at www.wiley.com/go/cities
Download or read book Cities for People written by Jan Gehl and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than forty years Jan Gehl has helped to transform urban environments around the world based on his research into the ways people actually use—or could use—the spaces where they live and work. In this revolutionary book, Gehl presents his latest work creating (or recreating) cityscapes on a human scale. He clearly explains the methods and tools he uses to reconfigure unworkable cityscapes into the landscapes he believes they should be: cities for people. Taking into account changing demographics and changing lifestyles, Gehl emphasizes four human issues that he sees as essential to successful city planning. He explains how to develop cities that are Lively, Safe, Sustainable, and Healthy. Focusing on these issues leads Gehl to think of even the largest city on a very small scale. For Gehl, the urban landscape must be considered through the five human senses and experienced at the speed of walking rather than at the speed of riding in a car or bus or train. This small-scale view, he argues, is too frequently neglected in contemporary projects. In a final chapter, Gehl makes a plea for city planning on a human scale in the fast- growing cities of developing countries. A “Toolbox,” presenting key principles, overviews of methods, and keyword lists, concludes the book. The book is extensively illustrated with over 700 photos and drawings of examples from Gehl’s work around the globe.
Download or read book City of Inmates written by Kelly Lytle Hernández and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration. But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation's carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.
Download or read book Human Smart Cities written by Grazia Concilio and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-13 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the most recent discussion on smart cities and the way this vision is affecting urban changes and dynamics, this book explores the interplay between planning and design both at the level of the design and planning domains’ theories and practices. Urban transformation is widely recognized as a complex phenomenon, rich in uncertainty. It is the unpredictable consequence of complex interplay between urban forces (both top-down or bottom-up), urban resources (spatial, social, economic and infrastructural as well as political or cognitive) and transformation opportunities (endogenous or exogenous). The recent attention to Urban Living Lab and Smart City initiatives is disclosinga promising bridge between the micro-scale environments, with the dynamics of such forces and resources, and the urban governance mechanisms. This bridge is represented by those urban collaborative environments, where processes of smart service co-design take place through dialogic interaction with and among citizens within a situated and cultural-specific frame.
Download or read book Human Cities written by Barbara Goličnik Marušić and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Human Cities: Celebrating Public Space' combines theoretical, practical and artistic approaches related to public space.
Download or read book Transport in Human Scale Cities written by Mladenović, Miloš N. and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-27 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely book calls for a paradigm shift in urban transport, which remains one of the critically uncertain aspects of the sustainability transformation of our societies. It argues that the potential of human scale thinking needs to be recognised, both in understanding people on the move in the city and within various organisations responsible for cities.
Download or read book Introduction to Cities written by Xiangming Chen and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revised and updated second edition of Introduction to Cities explores why cities are such a vital part of the human experience and how they shape our everyday lives. Written in engaging and accessible terms, Introduction to Cities examines the study of cities through two central concepts: that cities are places, where people live, form communities, and establish their own identities, and that they are spaces, such as the inner city and the suburb, that offer a way to configure and shape the material world and natural environment. Introduction to Cities covers the theory of cities from an historical perspective right through to the most recent theoretical developments. The authors offer a balanced account of life in cities and explore both positive and negative themes. In addition, the text takes a global approach, with examples ranging from Berlin and Chicago to Shanghai and Mumbai. The book is extensively illustrated with updated maps, charts, tables, and photographs. This new edition also includes a new section on urban planning as well as new chapters on cities as contested spaces, exploring power and politics in an urban context. It contains; information on the status of poor and marginalized groups and the impact of neoliberal policies; material on gender and sexuality; and presents a greater range of geographies with more attention to European, Latin American, and African cities. Revised and updated, Introduction to Cities provides a complete introduction to the history, evolution, and future of our modern cities.
Download or read book Designing More than Human Smart Cities written by Sara Heitlinger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-04 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate change, rapid urbanisation, pandemics, as well as innovations in technologies such as blockchain, AI and IoT are all impacting urban space. One response to such changes has been to make cities ecologically sustainable and 'smart'. The 'eco smart city' for instance uses networked sensing, cloud and mobile computing to optimise, control, and regulate urban processes and resources. From real-time bus information to autonomous electric vehicles, smart parking, and smart street lighting, such initiatives are often presented as a social and environmental good. Critics, however, increasingly argue that technologically driven, and efficiency-led approaches are too simplistic to deal with the complexities of urban life. Sustainability in the smart city is predominantly performed in limited ways that leave little room for participation and citizen agency despite government efforts to integrate innovative technologies in more equitable ways. More importantly, there is a growing awareness that a human-centred notion of cities, in which urban space is designed for, and inhabited by, humans only, is no longer tenable. Within the age of the Anthropocene - a term used to refer to a new geological era in which human activity is transforming Earth systems, accelerating climate change and causing mass extinctions - scholars and practitioners are working generatively by acknowledging the entanglements between human and non-human others (including plants, animals, insects, as well as soil, water, and sensors and their data) in urban life. In Designing More-than-Human Smart Cities, renowned researchers and practitioners from urban planning, architecture, environmental humanities, geography, design, arts, and computing critically explore smart cities beyond a human-centred approach. They respond to the complex interrelations between human and non-human others in urban space. Through theory, policy and practice (past and present), and thinking speculatively about how smart cities may evolve in the future, the book makes a timely contribution to lively, contemporary scientific and political debates on genuinely sustainable smart cities.
Download or read book Public Spaces and Urbanity Construction and Design Manual written by Karsten Pålsson and published by Dom Publishers. This book was released on 2017 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking examples from major European cities, 'Public Spaces and Urbanity' is a practical guide demonstrating what urban development with a human face might look like. This involves renewing and enhancing humane cities using architecture on a human scale while taking their history into account. Thus the book follows the tradition established by Jan Gehl that regards urban space as a framework for people to live in and socialise. The European tradition of the dense classical city marks the point of departure for this book. Special emphasis is placed on physical and spatial parameters, on development patterns and building types, on the guiding principles governing access, and on interconnections with public roads and pathways --all of which form the foundations of urban life as well as cities that provide safety and security. The book is divided into ten thematic chapters, each providing a definition and general outline of core challenges together with proposals for meeting them. An historical outline of urban development and the practically organised thematic structure underlying concepts discussed allow the examples given to greatly broaden the field of understanding around this topic.
Download or read book People Cities written by Annie Matan and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last 50 years architect Jan Gehl has changed the way that we think about architecture and city planning--moving from the Modernist separation of uses to a human-scale approach inviting people to use their cities. People Cities tells the inside story of how Gehl learned to study urban spaces and implement his people-centered approach in car-dominated cities. It discusses the work, theory, life, and influence of Gehl from the perspective of those who have worked with him in cities across the globe. It will inspire anyone who wants to create vibrant, human-scale cities and understand the ideas and work of the architect who has most influenced urban design.
Download or read book Planning Wild Cities written by Wendy Steele and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-04 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book critically engages with the contemporary challenges of planning wild cities in a climate of change and will be of particular interest to students and scholars of planning, urban studies and sustainable development.
Download or read book Cities Regions and Flows written by Peter V. Hall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities, Regions and Flows presents a theoretical framework for understanding the changing relationship between places and physical movement, and thoughtfully prepared case studies from five continents on how cities relate to value chains, and how they ensure accessibility and urban liveability in an increasingly contested policy environment. Moreover, the book discusses how urban policies attempt to solve related conflicts in terms of infrastructure provision, land use, local labour markets and environmental sustainability. The two subsystems that are of major interest here - urban regions on the one hand, and logistics management and physical distribution on the other - develop in quite distinct, and often contradictory, ways. Whereas urban regions face disintegration due to the expansion of the built environment and the spatio-temporal fragmentation of life-worlds and regional systems, the logistics system itself demands integration in order to keep flows moving and to reduce costs. Physical flows, networks and chains thus have a fundamental impact on urban restructuring.
Download or read book Darwin Comes to Town written by Menno Schilthuizen and published by Picador. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Carrion crows in the Japanese city of Sendai have learned to use passing traffic to crack nuts. *Lizards in Puerto Rico are evolving feet that better grip surfaces like concrete. *Europe’s urban blackbirds sing at a higher pitch than their rural cousins, to be heardover the din of traffic. How is this happening? Menno Schilthuizen is one of a growing number of “urban ecologists” studying how our manmade environments are accelerating and changing the evolution of the animals and plants around us. In Darwin Comes to Town, he takes us around the world for an up-close look at just how stunningly flexible and swift-moving natural selection can be. With human populations growing, we’re having an increasing impact on global ecosystems, and nowhere do these impacts overlap as much as they do in cities. The urban environment is about as extreme as it gets, and the wild animals and plants that live side-by-side with us need to adapt to a whole suite of challenging conditions: they must manage in the city’s hotter climate (the “urban heat island”); they need to be able to live either in the semidesert of the tall, rocky, and cavernous structures we call buildings or in the pocket-like oases of city parks (which pose their own dangers, including smog and free-rangingdogs and cats); traffic causes continuous noise, a mist of fine dust particles, and barriers to movement for any animal that cannot fly or burrow; food sources are mainly human-derived. And yet, as Schilthuizen shows, the wildlife sharing these spaces with us is not just surviving, but evolving ways of thriving. Darwin Comes toTown draws on eye-popping examples of adaptation to share a stunning vision of urban evolution in which humans and wildlife co-exist in a unique harmony. It reveals that evolution can happen far more rapidly than Darwin dreamed, while providing a glimmer of hope that our race toward over population might not take the rest of nature down with us.
Download or read book Being Human in Digital Cities written by Myria Georgiou and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2023-11-28 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is life in digital cities changing what it means to be human? In this perceptive book, Myria Georgiou sets out to investigate the new configuration of social order that is taking shape in today’s cities. Although routed through extractive datafication, compulsive connectivity, and regulatory AI technologies, this digital order nonetheless displaces technocentrism and instead promotes new visions of humanism, all in the name of freedom, diversity, and sustainability. But the digital order emerges in the midst of neoliberal instability and crises, resulting in a plurality of contrasting responses to securing digitally mediated human progress. While corporate, media, and state actors mobilize such positive sociotechnical imaginaries to promise digitally mediated human progress, urban citizens and social movements propose alternative pathways to autonomy and dignity through and sometimes against digital technologies. Investigating the dynamic workings of technology and power from a transnational and comparative perspective, this book reveals the contradictory claims and struggles for the future of digital cities and their humanity. In doing so, it will enrich understandings of digital urbanism, critical data studies, and critical humanist studies.
Download or read book Human Environmental Interactions in Cities written by Nadja Kabisch and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-12 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses international research communities concerned with conceptual, scientific, and design approaches to urban land developments and biodiversity. The main focus is on the understanding of human-environment interactions analysed by multi-disciplinary approaches. The articles in this important collection include new concepts and challenges for sustainable green space development emerging from the pressure caused by urbanisation. The concept of biophilic urbanism and the framework of urban ecosystem services are introduced and referred to by applications in different case studies in Europe. Case studies also refer to the current challenges for biodiversity in different urban spaces. These spaces include the urban garden and school environments. Important human-species interactions are identified by analysing the allergenic potential of urban trees in a US city. Anthropogenic influences on the survival or local extinction of species are examined in a Mediterranean urban area. In all articles, the importance of urban planning on green infrastructure development, biodiversity conservation and management within the urban ecosystem is highlighted, and planning recommendations are given.
