Download or read book Urban Theory written by Alan Harding and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is Urban Theory? How can it be used to understand our urban experiences? Experiences typically defined by enormous inequalities, not just between cities but within cities, in an increasingly interconnected and globalised world. This book explains: Relations between urban theory and modernity in key ideas of the Chicago School, spatial analysis, humanistic urban geography, and ‘radical′ approaches like Marxism Cities and the transition to informational economies, globalization, urban growth machine and urban regime theory, the city as an "actor" Spatial expressions of inequality and key ideas like segregation, ghettoization, suburbanization, gentrification Socio-cultural spatial expressions of difference and key concepts like gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and "culturalist" perspectives on identity, lifestyle, subculture How cities should be understood as intersections of horizontal and vertical – of coinciding resources, positions, locations, influencing how we make and understand urban experiences. Critical, interdisciplinary and pedagogically informed - with opening summaries, boxes, questions for discussion and guided further reading - Urban Theory: A Critical Introduction to Power, Cities and Urbanism in the 21st Century provides the tools for any student of the city to understand, even to change, our own urban experiences.
Download or read book Making Urban Theory written by Mary Lawhon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-01-20 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book facilitates more careful engagement with the production, politics and geography of knowledge as scholars create space for the inclusion of southern cities in urban theory. Making Urban Theory addresses debates of the past fifty years regarding whether and why scholars should conceptualize southern cities as different and argues for the continued importance of unlearning existing theory. With examples from the urban question to environmental justice, urban infrastructure to basic income, this volume highlights the limitations of existing explanations as well as how thinking from the south entails more than collecting data in new places. Throughout the book, instances of juxtapositions, unease, unlearning and learning anew emphasize how theory-making from southern cases can open avenues to more creative possibilities. The book pulls theories apart, examining distinct components to better understand the universality and provinciality of empirical phenomena, causality and norms, including questions of what a city is and ought to be. This book delivers a clearer articulation of ongoing debates and future possibilities for southern urban scholarship, and it will thus be relevant for both scholars and students of Urban Studies, Urban Theory, Urban Geography, Research Methods in Geography, Postcolonial/Southern Cities and Global Cities at graduate and post-graduate levels.
Download or read book Urban Theory written by Mark Jayne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban Theory: New Critical Perspectives provides an introduction to innovative critical contributions to the field of urban studies. Chapters offer easily accessible and digestible reviews, and as a reference text Urban Theory is a comprehensive and integrated primer which covers topics necessary for a full understanding of recent theoretical engagements with cities. The introduction outlines the development of urban theory over the past two hundred years and discusses significant theoretical, methodological and empirical challenges facing the field of urban studies in the context of an increasing globally inter-connected world. The chapters explore twenty-four topics, which are new additions to the urban theoretical debate, highlighting their relationship to long established concerns that continue to have intellectual purchase, and which also engage with rich new and emerging avenues for debate. Each chapter considers the genealogy of the topic at hand and also includes case studies which explain key terms or provide empirical examples to guide the reader to a better understanding of how theory adds to our understanding of the complexities of urban life. This book offers a critical and assessable introduction to original and groundbreaking urban theory and will be essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students in human geography, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, economics, planning, political science and urban studies.
Download or read book Readings in Urban Theory written by Susan S. Fainstein and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-03-07 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updated with a majority of new readings, the Third Edition of Readings in Urban Theory expands its focus to present the most recent developments in urban and regional theories and policies in a globalized world. Around 75% of the readings included are new for the third edition Unifies readings by an orientation toward political economy and normative themes of social justice Expands the focus on international planning, including globalization and theories of development Addresses the full range of core urban theory so as to remain the primary text in courses
Download or read book A Feminist Urban Theory for Our Time written by Linda Peake and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-07-30 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does a feminist urban theory look like for the twenty first century? This book puts knowledges of feminist urban scholars, feminist scholars of social reproduction, and other urban theorists into conversation to propose an approach to the urban that recognises social reproduction both as foundational to urban transformations and as a methodological entry-point for urban studies. Offers an approach feminist urban theory that remains intentionally cautious of universal uses of social reproduction theory, instead focusing analytical attention on historical contingency and social difference Eleven chapters that collectively address distinct elements of the contemporary crisis in social reproduction and the urban through the lenses of infrastructure and subjectivity formation as well as through feminist efforts to decolonize urban knowledge production Deepens understandings of how people shape and reshape the spatial forms of their everyday lives, furthering understandings of the 'infinite variety' of the urban Essential reading for academics, researchers and scholars within urban studies, human geography, gender and sexuality studies, and sociology
Download or read book Social Theory and the Urban Question written by Peter Saunders and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Urban Theory Beyond the West written by Tim Edensor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-12 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the late eighteenth century, academic engagement with political, economic, social, cultural and spatial changes in our cities has been dominated by theoretical frameworks crafted with reference to just a small number of cities. This book offers an important antidote to the continuing focus of urban studies on cities in ‘the Global North’. Urban Theory Beyond the West contains twenty chapters from leading scholars, raising important theoretical issues about cities throughout the world. Past and current conceptual developments are reviewed and organized into four parts: ‘De-centring the City’ offers critical perspectives on re-imagining urban theoretical debates through consideration of the diversity and heterogeneity of city life; ‘Order/Disorder’ focuses on the political, physical and everyday ways in which cities are regulated and used in ways that confound this ordering; ‘Mobilities’ explores the movements of people, ideas and policy in cities and between them and ‘Imaginaries’ investigates how urbanity is differently perceived and experienced. There are three kinds of chapters published in this volume: theories generated about urbanity ‘beyond the West’; critiques, reworking or refining of ‘Western’ urban theory based upon conceptual reflection about cities from around the world and hybrid approaches that develop both of these perspectives. Urban Theory Beyond the West offers a critical and accessible review of theoretical developments, providing an original and groundbreaking contribution to urban theory. It is essential reading for students and practitioners interested in urban studies, development studies and geography.
Download or read book Urban Planning Theory Since 1945 written by Nigel Taylor and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1998-12-12 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taylor describes the development of urban planning ideas since the end of the Second World War, outlining the main theories from the traditional view of planning as an exercise in physical design to recent views of planning as 'communicative action'.
Download or read book Global Cities and Urban Theory written by Donald McNeill and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global Cities and Urban Theory provides an innovative set of approaches to understanding some of the world's major cities, working with concepts such as smart cities, volumetric urbanism, and critical accounting to illustrate the everyday agents and practices that place cities in the world. Donald McNeill draws on detailed discussions of major cities such as London, San Francisco, Paris and Singapore to provide a deep understanding of how urban theory can be grounded in the cultural economies of urban development. The book: Reviews the insights of key thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Mike Davis, and Jane M. Jacobs in relation to specific cities. Highlights methodological and epistemological notes on each theme. Provides case studies of nine key global cities, examined in the context of specific material and spatial practices. Essential reading for upper level students and researchers across urban studies, urban geography, urban sociology and urban policy.
Download or read book Cities for People Not for Profit written by Neil Brenner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-06-25 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The worldwide financial crisis has sent shock-waves of accelerated economic restructuring, regulatory reorganization and sociopolitical conflict through cities around the world. It has also given new impetus to the struggles of urban social movements emphasizing the injustice, destructiveness and unsustainability of capitalist forms of urbanization. This book contributes analyses intended to be useful for efforts to roll back contemporary profit-based forms of urbanization, and to promote alternative, radically democratic and sustainable forms of urbanism. The contributors provide cutting-edge analyses of contemporary urban restructuring, including the issues of neoliberalization, gentrification, colonization, "creative" cities, architecture and political power, sub-prime mortgage foreclosures and the ongoing struggles of "right to the city" movements. At the same time, the book explores the diverse interpretive frameworks – critical and otherwise – that are currently being used in academic discourse, in political struggles, and in everyday life to decipher contemporary urban transformations and contestations. The slogan, "cities for people, not for profit," sets into stark relief what the contributors view as a central political question involved in efforts, at once theoretical and practical, to address the global urban crises of our time. Drawing upon European and North American scholarship in sociology, politics, geography, urban planning and urban design, the book provides useful insights and perspectives for citizens, activists and intellectuals interested in exploring alternatives to contemporary forms of capitalist urbanization.
Download or read book New Urban Spaces written by Neil Brenner and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. In New Urban Spaces, Neil Brenner argues that understanding these mutations of urban life requires not only concrete research, but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit-the city or the metropolis-and explores the multiscalar constitution and periodic rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric. Drawing on critical geopolitical economy and spatialized approaches to state theory, Brenner offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban space and their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as radically revisable: key urban concepts must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate.
Download or read book The City written by Allen J. Scott and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Los Angeles has grown from a scattered collection of towns and villages to one of the largest megacities in the world. The editors of THE CITY have assembled a variety of essays examining the built environment and human dynamics of this extraordinary modern city, emphasizing the dramatic changes that have occurred since 1960. 58 illustrations.
Download or read book Urban Theory written by John Rennie Short and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08-24 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging and state-of-the-art new edition reviews the classic contributions to understanding modern and post-modern cities, and is comprehensively updated to take account of the issues and concepts at stake in 21st century urban theory.
Download or read book Urban Theory and the Urban Experience written by Simon Parker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-11-06 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time Urban Theory and the Urban Experience brings together classic and contemporary approaches to urban research in order to reveal the intellectual origins of urban studies, and the often unacknowledged debt that empirical and theoretical perspectives on the city owe to one another. Both students and urban scholars will appreciate the critical way in which classical and contemporary debates on the nature of the city are presented. Extensive use is made throughout of documentary, literary and cultural sources to bring the different theoretical perspectives to life. Discussion points introduce and explain key concepts and intellectual histories in a jargon free manner. End of chapter further readings have also been annotated to encourage additional study.
Download or read book Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory written by Mickey Lauria and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1997 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban regime theory has gained a dominant position in the literature on local politics in the United States and its use in comparative cross-national research despite its cited shortcomings. In Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory, editor Mickey Lauria presents a challenging argument for the need to reconceptualize urban regime's middle-level abstraction by interpreting it through the lens of the higher-level abstraction of regulationist theory. The noted contributors to this volume propose stronger conceptual linkages between local agents and institutions, regime transformation, and the restructuring of urban space. The blend of empirical and case-study chapters provide an excellent mix of theory and practice that makes Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory well suited to a broad spectrum of upper-level undergraduate courses covering urban studies, political science, sociology, and geography as well as a rich resource for academics and researchers in these fields.
Download or read book A New Theory of Urban Design written by Christopher Alexander and published by Center for Environmental Struc. This book was released on 1987 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The venerable cities of the past, such as Venice or Amsterdam, convey a feeling of wholeness, an organic unity that surfaces in every detail, large and small, in restaurants, shops, public gardens, even in balconies and ornaments. But this sense of wholeness is lacking in modern urban design, with architects absorbed in problems of individual structures, and city planners preoccupied with local ordinances, it is almost impossible to achieve. In this groundbreaking volume, architect and planner Christopher Alexander presents a new theory of urban design which attempts to recapture the process by which cities develop organically. To discover the kinds of laws needed to create a growing whole in a city, Alexander proposes here a preliminary set of seven rules which embody the process at a practical level and which are consistent with the day-to-day demands of urban development. He then puts these rules to the test, setting out with a number of his graduate students to simulate the urban redesign of a high-density part of San Francisco, initiating a project that encompassed some ninety different design problems, including warehouses, hotels, fishing piers, a music hall, and a public square. This extensive experiment is documented project by project, with detailed discussion of how each project satisfied the seven rules, accompanied by floorplans, elevations, street grids, axonometric diagrams and photographs of the scaled-down model which clearly illustrate the discussion. A New Theory of Urban Design provides an entirely new theoretical framework for the discussion of urban problems, one that goes far to remedy the defects which cities have today.
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.
