Download or read book The Urban Text written by Mario Gandelsonas and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 1991 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By adapting Freud's notion of "floating attention" to urban systems, Mario Gandelsonas applies a process of visual drift to the plan of Chicago. He uses mechanical eye of the computer in a "delayering" process to read the plan of the city and to discover the system of urban notions that are specific to the American grid. Gandelsonas explores the spatial relationships between physical and abstract realities in the Chicago River area, the One-Mile Grid and its subdivisions. By highlighting the anomalies and idiosyncrasies of the grid the moments where its regularity falters, he establishes a narrative of Chicago's urban text. In separate essays Catherine Ingraham, Joan Copjec, and John Whiteman explore the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and urbanistic dimension of this provocative analysis.
Download or read book Urban Communication written by Timothy A. Gibson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: City leaders now confront a global competition for economic investment, and urban elites are casting about for strategies that promise to secure a share of this future of global economic growth. However, many of these strategies are largely symbolic in nature. City leaders, for example, compete for the Olympics so they can broadcast spectacular urban vistas to global television audiences. Officials pour public funds into tourist amenities to cultivate an image of vitality and renewal. But how are the local politics of urban redevelopment intertwined with the global politics of circulating vital urban images? Urban Communication brings together scholars from communication, cultural studies, and urban sociology to explore the symbolic dimensions of contemporary city-building, drawing on case studies from around the world.
Download or read book A City in Fragments written by Yair Wallach and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mid-nineteenth century, Jerusalem was rich with urban texts inscribed in marble, gold, and cloth, investing holy sites with divine meaning. Ottoman modernization and British colonial rule transformed the city; new texts became a key means to organize society and subjectivity. Stone inscriptions, pilgrims' graffiti, and sacred banners gave way to street markers, shop signs, identity papers, and visiting cards that each sought to define and categorize urban space and people. A City in Fragments tells the modern history of a city overwhelmed by its religious and symbolic significance. Yair Wallach walked the streets of Jerusalem to consider the graffiti, logos, inscriptions, official signs, and ephemera that transformed the city over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As these urban texts became a tool in the service of capitalism, nationalism, and colonialism, the affinities of Arabic and Hebrew were forgotten and these sister-languages found themselves locked in a bitter war. Looking at the writing of—and literally on—Jerusalem, Wallach offers a creative and expansive history of the city, a fresh take on modern urban texts, and a new reading of the Israel/Palestine conflict through its material culture.
Download or read book Charting Literary Urban Studies written by Jens Martin Gurr and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-11 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guided by the multifaceted relations between city and text, Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City attempts to chart the burgeoning field of literary urban studies by outlining how texts in varying degrees function as both representations of the city and as blueprints for its future development. The study addresses questions such as these: How do literary texts represent urban complexities – and how can they capture the uniqueness of a given city? How do literary texts simulate layers of urban memory – and how can they reinforce or help dissolve path dependencies in urban development? What role can literary studies play in interdisciplinary urban research? Are the blueprints or 'recipes' for urban development that most quickly travel around the globe – such as the 'creative city', the 'green city' or the 'smart city' – really always the ones that best solve a given problem? Or is the global spread of such travelling urban models not least a matter of their narrative packaging? In answering these key questions, this book also advances a literary studies contribution to the general theory of models, tracing a heuristic trajectory from the analysis of literary texts as representations of urban developments to an analysis of literary strategies in planning documents and other pragmatic, non-literary texts.
Download or read book Introduction to Urban Science written by Luis M. A. Bettencourt and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel, integrative approach to cities as complex adaptive systems, applicable to issues ranging from innovation to economic prosperity to settlement patterns. Human beings around the world increasingly live in urban environments. In Introduction to Urban Science, Luis Bettencourt takes a novel, integrative approach to understanding cities as complex adaptive systems, claiming that they require us to frame the field of urban science in a way that goes beyond existing theory in such traditional disciplines as sociology, geography, and economics. He explores the processes facilitated by and, in many cases, unleashed for the first time by urban life through the lenses of social heterogeneity, complex networks, scaling, circular causality, and information. Though the idea that cities are complex adaptive systems has become mainstream, until now those who study cities have lacked a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding cities and urbanization, for generating useful and falsifiable predictions, and for constructing a solid body of empirical evidence so that the discipline of urban science can continue to develop. Bettencourt applies his framework to such issues as innovation and development across scales, human reasoning and strategic decision-making, patterns of settlement and mobility and their influence on socioeconomic life and resource use, inequality and inequity, biodiversity, and the challenges of sustainable development in both high- and low-income nations. It is crucial, says Bettencourt, to realize that cities are not "zero-sum games" and that knowledge, human cooperation, and collective action can build a better future.
Download or read book Urban Re industrialization written by Krzysztof Nawratek and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2017-07-24 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban re-industrialisation could be seen as a method of increasing business effectiveness in the context of a politically stimulated 'green economy'; it could also be seen as a nostalgic mutation of a creative-class concept, focused on 3D printing, 'boutique manufacturing' and crafts. These two notions place urban re-industrialisation within the context of the current neoliberal economic regime and urban development based on property and land speculation. Could urban re-industrialisation be a more radical idea? Could urban re-industrialization be imagined as a progressive socio-political and economic project, aimed at creating an inclusive and democratic society based on cooperation and a symbiosis that goes way beyond the current model of a neoliberal city?In January 2012, against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis, Krzysztof Nawratek published a text in opposition to the fantasy of a 'cappuccino city, ' arguing that the post-industrial city is a fiction, and that it should be replaced by 'Industrial City 2.0.' Industrial City 2.0 is an attempt to see a post-socialist and post-industrial city from another perspective, a kind of negative of the modernist industrial city. If, for logistical reasons and because of a concern for the health of residents, modernism tried to separate different functions from each other (mainly industry from residential areas), Industrial City 2.0 is based on the ideas of coexistence, proximity, and synergy. The essays collected here envision the possibilities (as well as the possible perils) of such a scheme.TABLE OF CONTENTS //Introduction: Urban Re-industrialization as a Political Project (Krzysztof Nawratek)PART 1: Why Should We Do It? / Re-industrialisation as Progressive Urbanism: Why and How? (Michael Edwards & Myfanwy Taylor) - Mechanisms of Loss (Karol Kurnicki) - The Cultural Politics of Re-industrialisation: Some Remarks on Cultural and Urban Policy in the European Union (Jonathan Vickery)PART 2: Political Considerations and Implications / 'Shrimps not whales': Building a City of Small Parts as an Alternative Vision for Post-industrial Society (Alison Hulme) - 'Der Arbeiter': (Re) Industrialisation as Universalism? (Krzysztof Nawratek) - Whose Re-industrialisation? Greening the Pit or Taking Over the Means of Production? (Malcolm Miles) - Crowdsourced Urbanism? The Maker Revolution and the Creative City 2.0. (Doreen Jakob) - Brave New World? (Tatjana Schneider) - The Political Agency of Geography and the Shrinking City (Jeffrey T. Kruth)PART 3: How Should We Do It? / Beyond the Post-Industrial City? The Third Industrial Revolution, Digital Manufacturing and the Transformation of Homes into Miniature Factories (John R. Bryson, Jennifer Clark, & Rachel Mulhall) - Conspicuous Production: Valuing the Visibility of Industry in Urban Re-industrialisation Strategies (Karl Baker) - Industri[us] (Christina Norton) - Working with the Neighbours: Co-operative Practices Delivering Sustainable Benefits (Kate Royston) - Low-carbon (Re-)industrialisation: Lessons from China (Kevin Lo & Mark Yaolin Wang
Download or read book Urban Forms written by Ivor Samuels and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-05-04 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This popular and influential work, translated here into English for the first time, argues that modern urbanism has upset the morphology of cities, abolished their streets and isolated their buildings. In tracing the stages of this transformation, this book presents the view that the urban tissue, the intermediate scale between the architecture of buildings and the diagrammatic layouts of town planning, is the essential framework for everyday life. Only by investigating the urban tissue will it be possible to understand the complex relationships between plot and built form, between streets and buildings and between these forms and design practices. The chosen trail of the first French edition - Paris, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt - is one of continuously evolving modernity. It outlines a history, which, in one century (1860-1960), completely changed the aspect of our towns and cities and transformed our way of life. The shock has been such that we are still looking for answers, still attempting to find urban forms that can accommodate present day ways of life and at the same time maintain the qualities of the traditional town. This English edition brings the story forward to the present day and considers the impact of the New Urbanism in the United States, which, over the last decade, has sought to re-establish former relationships within the urban tissue.
Download or read book GIS for the Urban Environment written by Juliana Maantay and published by Esri Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CD-ROM contains: exercise data.
Download or read book Urban Scrawl written by Lou Chamberlin and published by Hardie Grant. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Street art is now a recognised art form that can be thought-provoking, political, humorous or shocking. Urban Scrawl documents some of the world's most interesting street-art words and typography, from formal typography to angsty scrawl, presented in a small-format hardback that's perfect for any gift or self-purchase. Lou Chamberlin has travelled from Warsaw to London, Tokyo to New York, Cape Town to Santiago, and within her home country of Australia, in search of the world's most interesting and intriguing street art. Her photographs capture these works at a moment in time, documenting and celebrating the ever-changing street art scene.
Download or read book The City written by Robert E. Park and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1925, The City is a trailblazing text in urban history, urban sociology, and urban studies. Its innovative combination of ethnographic observation and social science theory epitomized the Chicago school of sociology. Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and their collaborators were among the first to document the interplay between urban individuals and larger social structures and institutions, seeking patterns within the city’s riot of people, events, and influences. As sociologist Robert J. Sampson notes in his new foreword, though much has changed since The City was first published, we can still benefit from its charge to explain where and why individuals and social groups live as they do.
Download or read book What is Urban History written by Shane Ewen and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Urban Fabric of Crime and Fear written by Vania Ceccato and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-06-21 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does the city’s urban fabric relate to crime and fear, and how is that fabric affected by crime and fear? Does the urban environment affect one’s decision to commit an offence? Is there a victimisation-related inequality within cities? How do crime and fear interrelate to inequality and segregation in cities of developing countries? What are the challenges to planning cities which are both safe and sustainable? This book searches for answers to these questions in the nature of the city, particularly in the social interactions that take place in urban space distinctively guided by different land uses and people’s activities. In other words, the book deals with the urban fabric of crime and fear. The novelty of the book is to place safety and security issues on the urban scale by (1) showing links between urban structure, and crime and fear, (2) illustrating how different disciplines deal with urban vulnerability to (and fear of) crime (3) including concrete examples of issues and challenges found in European and North American cities, and, without being too extensive, also in cities of the Global South.
Download or read book The Urban Farmer written by Curtis Allen Stone and published by New Society Publishers. This book was released on 2015-12-14 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are twenty million acres of lawns in North America. In their current form, these unproductive expanses of grass represent a significant financial and environmental cost. However, viewed through a different lens, they can also be seen as a tremendous source of opportunity. Access to land is a major barrier for many people who want to enter the agricultural sector, and urban and suburban yards have huge potential for would-be farmers wanting to become part of this growing movement. The Urban Farmer is a comprehensive, hands-on, practical manual to help you learn the techniques and business strategies you need to make a good living growing high-yield, high-value crops right in your own backyard (or someone else's). Major benefits include: Low capital investment and overhead costs Reduced need for expensive infrastructure Easy access to markets Growing food in the city means that fresh crops may travel only a few blocks from field to table, making this innovative approach the next logical step in the local food movement. Based on a scalable, easily reproduced business model, The Urban Farmer is your complete guide to minimizing risk and maximizing profit by using intensive production in small leased or borrowed spaces. Curtis Stone is the owner/operator of Green City Acres, a commercial urban farm growing vegetables for farmers markets, restaurants, and retail outlets. During his slower months, Curtis works as a public speaker, teacher, and consultant, sharing his story to inspire a new generation of farmers.
Download or read book The Urban Towers Handbook written by Eric Firley and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-06-20 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Urban Towers Handbook Eric Firley and Julie Gimbal with Philippe Honnorat For well over a century, the modern skyscraper has provided an ingenious solution to high-density living and working - accommodating the greatest number of people in a building with a minimal footprint. In the contemporary context of drastic urban growth, its role can only gain in importance. The question is how to avoid past mistakes and how to conceive the tower as a positive component of an existing or newly created urban fabric. In a thoroughly analytical and comparative way The Urban Towers Handbook provides answers to these questions and serves as a reference book and design tool for architects, planners and developers alike. Its comprehensive graphic documentation includes not only aerials and to-scale plans and sections, but also purpose-made photography, drawings and diagrams. The core of the book is made up of over fifty case studies which have been classified according to three major typological groups and their respective sub-groups: solitaires, clusters and vertical cities. Twenty-one of these examples feature detailed documentation, including classics such as the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan and Torre Velasca in Milan, as well as contemporary milestones such as Roppongi Hills in Tokyo and the making of Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai. Among others, several districts in Hong Kong, Shanghai and São Paulo have been analysed as existing examples of vertical cities. The case studies section of the book is consolidated by a second section that outlines high-rise regulations in seven cities around the world, and highlights how planning authorities use tall buildings for the realisation of their urban goals and visions. The third and final section of the book addresses the uneasy relationship between high-rise structures and sustainability, placing the emphasis on the urban implications.
Download or read book Theorizing the Southeast Asian City as Text written by Robbie B H Goh and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2003-05-20 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theorizing the Southeast Asian City as Text examines the ways in which culture, ethnicity, languages, traditions, governance, policies and histories interplay in the creation of the urban experiences in contemporary Southeast Asian cities. It focuses on the ways in which urban spatial forms are textual experiences, subject to interpretative strategies and the influence of other discourses. In addition it also analyzes the experiences of modernization in such cities, but also in terms of the strategies of containment, refurbishment, and loss which this has occasioned. Contents:Urbanism and Post-Colonial Nationalities: Theorizing the Southeast Asian City (R B H Goh & B S A Yeoh)Reading the Southeast Asian City in the Context of Rapid Economic Growth (K S Tay & R B H Goh)“The Rise of the Merlion”: Monument and Myth in the Making of the Singapore Story (B S A Yeoh & T C Chang)Things to a Void: Utopian Discourse, Communality and Constructed Interstices in Singapore Public Housing (R B H Goh)Selective Disclosure: Romancing the Singapore River (S Huang & T C Chang)Malaysia's High-Tech Cities and the Construction of Intelligent Citizenship (T Bunnell)Museum/City/Nation: Negotiating Identities in Urban Museums in Indonesia and Singapore (K M Adams)The Urban and the Urbane: Modernization, Modernism and the Rebirth of Singaporean Cinema (A R Guneratne)Benjamin in Bombay? An Asian Extrapolation (R Patke) Readership: Undergraduates, graduate students, academics and professionals in architecture and urban planning. Keywords:Urban Studies;Southeast Asian Cities;Society and Culture;Literature;MediaReviews:“… there is much of value in the book both theoretically and empirically and it certainly deserves a readership beyond those interested in South-east Asia … this edited collection provides a good illustration of the benefits of taking the cultural turn, interpreting texts very broadly to cover anything from the built environment through museums and films as cultural artifacts to the role of the flâneur in construing rather than constructing the city.”Urban Studies
Download or read book The Urban Design Reader written by Michael Larice and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 1087 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second edition of The Urban Design Reader draws together the very best of classic and contemporary writings to illuminate and expand the theory and practice of urban design. Nearly 50 generous selections include seminal contributions from Howard, Le Corbusier, Lynch, and Jacobs to more recent writings by Waldheim, Koolhaas, and Sorkin. Following the widespread success of the first edition of The Urban Design Reader, this updated edition continues to provide the most important historical material of the urban design field, but also introduces new topics and selections that address the myriad challenges facing designers today. The six part structure of the second edition guides the reader through the history, theory and practice of urban design. The reader is initially introduced to those classic writings that provide the historical precedents for city-making into the twentieth century. Part Two introduces the voices and ideas that were instrumental in establishing the foundations of the urban design field from the late 1950s up to the mid-1990s. These authors present a critical reading of the design professions and offer an alternative urban design agenda focused on vital and lively places. The authors in Part Three provide a range of urban design rationales and strategies for reinforcing local physical identity and the creation of memorable places. These selections are largely describing the outcomes of mid-century urban design and voicing concerns over the placeless quality of contemporary urbanism. The fourth part of the Reader explores key issues in urban design and development. Ideas about sprawl, density, community health, public space and everyday life are the primary focus here. Several new selections in this part of the book also highlight important international development trends in the Middle East and China. Part Five presents environmental challenges faced by the built environment professions today, including recent material on landscape urbanism, sustainability, and urban resiliency. The final part examines professional practice and current debates in the field: where urban designers work, what they do, their roles, their fields of knowledge and their educational development. The section concludes with several position pieces and debates on the future of urban design practice. This book provides an essential resource for students and practitioners of urban design, drawing together important but widely dispersed writings. Part and section introductions are provided to assist readers in understanding the context of the material, summary messages, impacts of the writing, and how they fit into the larger picture of the urban design field.
Download or read book The Image of the City written by Kevin Lynch and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1964-06-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.
