Download or read book Demolition Means Progress written by Andrew R. Highsmith and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-12-30 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flint, Michigan, is widely seen as Detroit s Detroit: the perfect embodiment of a ruined industrial economy and a shattered American dream. In this deeply researched book, Andrew Highsmith gives us the first full-scale history of Flint, showing that the Vehicle City has always seen demolition as a tool of progress. During the 1930s, officials hoped to renew the city by remaking its public schools into racially segregated community centers. After the war, federal officials and developers sought to strengthen the region by building subdivisions in Flint s segregated suburbs, while GM executives and municipal officials demolished urban factories and rebuilt them outside the city. City leaders later launched a plan to replace black neighborhoods with a freeway and new factories. Each of these campaigns, Highsmith argues, yielded an ever more impoverished city and a more racially divided metropolis. By intertwining histories of racial segregation, mass suburbanization, and industrial decline, Highsmith gives us a deeply unsettling look at urban-industrial America."

Download or read book Rebuilding the American City written by David Gamble and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban redevelopment in American cities is neither easy nor quick. It takes a delicate alignment of goals, power, leadership and sustained advocacy on the part of many. Rebuilding the American City highlights 15 urban design and planning projects in the U.S. that have been catalysts for their downtowns—yet were implemented during the tumultuous start of the 21st century. The book presents five paradigms for redevelopment and a range of perspectives on the complexities, successes and challenges inherent to rebuilding American cities today. Rebuilding the American City is essential reading for practitioners and students in urban design, planning, and public policy looking for diverse models of urban transformation to create resilient urban cores.

Download or read book Bulldozer written by Francesca Russello Ammon and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the decades following World War II stand out as an era of rapid growth and construction in the United States, those years were equally significant for large-scale destruction. In order to clear space for new suburban tract housing, an ambitious system of interstate highways, and extensive urban renewal development, wrecking companies demolished buildings while earthmoving contractors leveled land at an unprecedented pace and scale. In this pioneering history, Francesca Russello Ammon explores how postwar America came to equate this destruction with progress. The bulldozer functioned as both the means and the metaphor for this work. As the machine transformed from a wartime weapon into an instrument of postwar planning, it helped realize a landscape-altering “culture of clearance.” In the hands of the military, planners, politicians, engineers, construction workers, and even children’s book authors, the bulldozer became an American icon. Yet social and environmental injustices emerged as clearance projects continued unabated. This awareness spurred environmental, preservationist, and citizen participation efforts that have helped to slow, though not entirely stop, the momentum of the postwar bulldozer.

Download or read book Regeneration of the Built Environment from a Circular Economy Perspective written by Stefano Della Torre and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-12-30 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book explores the strategic importance and advantages of adopting multidisciplinary and multiscalar approaches of inquiry and intervention with respect to the built environment, based on principles of sustainability and circular economy strategies. A series of key challenges are considered in depth from a multidisciplinary perspective, spanning engineering, architecture, and regional and urban economics. These challenges include strategies to relaunch socioeconomic development through regenerative processes, the regeneration of urban spaces from the perspective of resilience, the development and deployment of innovative products and processes in the construction sector in order to comply more fully with the principles of sustainability and circularity, and the development of multiscale approaches to enhance the performance of both the existing building stock and new buildings. The book offers a rich selection of conceptual, empirical, methodological, technical, and case study/project-based research. It will be of value for all who have an interest in regeneration of the built environment from a circular economy perspective.

Download or read book American City Planning Since 1890 written by Mel Scott and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1971-01-01 with total page 776 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Saving America s Cities written by Lizabeth Cohen and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Bancroft Prize In twenty-first-century America, some cities are flourishing and others are struggling, but they all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. Cities have limited tools to address these problems, and many must rely on the private market to support the public good. It wasn’t always this way. For almost three decades after World War II, even as national policies promoted suburban sprawl, the federal government underwrote renewal efforts for cities that had suffered during the Great Depression and the war and were now bleeding residents into the suburbs. In Saving America’s Cities, the prizewinning historian Lizabeth Cohen follows the career of Edward J. Logue, whose shifting approach to the urban crisis tracked the changing balance between government-funded public programs and private interests that would culminate in the neoliberal rush to privatize efforts to solve entrenched social problems. A Yale-trained lawyer, rival of Robert Moses, and sometime critic of Jane Jacobs, Logue saw renewing cities as an extension of the liberal New Deal. He worked to revive a declining New Haven, became the architect of the “New Boston” of the 1960s, and, later, led New York State’s Urban Development Corporation, which built entire new towns, including Roosevelt Island in New York City. Logue’s era of urban renewal has a complicated legacy: Neighborhoods were demolished and residents dislocated, but there were also genuine successes and progressive goals. Saving America’s Cities is a dramatic story of heartbreak and destruction but also of human idealism and resourcefulness, opening up possibilities for our own time.

Download or read book Design After Decline written by Brent D. Ryan and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-05-22 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost fifty years ago, America's industrial cities—Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Baltimore, and others—began shedding people and jobs. Today they are littered with tens of thousands of abandoned houses, shuttered factories, and vacant lots. With population and housing losses continuing in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis, the future of neighborhoods in these places is precarious. How we will rebuild shrinking cities and what urban design vision will guide their future remain contentious and unknown. In Design After Decline, Brent D. Ryan reveals the fraught and intermittently successful efforts of architects, planners, and city officials to rebuild shrinking cities following mid-century urban renewal. With modern architecture in disrepute, federal funds scarce, and architects and planners disengaged, politicians and developers were left to pick up the pieces. In twin narratives, Ryan describes how America's two largest shrinking cities, Detroit and Philadelphia, faced the challenge of design after decline in dramatically different ways. While Detroit allowed developers to carve up the cityscape into suburban enclaves, Philadelphia brought back 1960s-style land condemnation for benevolent social purposes. Both Detroit and Philadelphia "succeeded" in rebuilding but at the cost of innovative urban design and planning. Ryan proposes that the unprecedented crisis facing these cities today requires a revival of the visionary thinking found in the best modernist urban design, tempered with the lessons gained from post-1960s community planning. Depicting the ideal shrinking city as a shifting patchwork of open and settled areas, Ryan concludes that accepting the inevitable decline and abandonment of some neighborhoods, while rebuilding others as new neighborhoods with innovative design and planning, can reignite modernism's spirit of optimism and shape a brighter future for shrinking cities and their residents.

Download or read book Purging the Poorest written by Lawrence J. Vale and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The building and management of public housing is often seen as a signal failure of American public policy, but this is a vastly oversimplified view. In Purging the Poorest, Lawrence J. Vale offers a new narrative of the seventy-five-year struggle to house the “deserving poor.” In the 1930s, two iconic American cities, Atlanta and Chicago, demolished their slums and established some of this country’s first public housing. Six decades later, these same cities also led the way in clearing public housing itself. Vale’s groundbreaking history of these “twice-cleared” communities provides unprecedented detail about the development, decline, and redevelopment of two of America’s most famous housing projects: Chicago’s Cabrini-Green and Atlanta’s Techwood /Clark Howell Homes. Vale offers the novel concept of design politics to show how issues of architecture and urbanism are intimately bound up in thinking about policy. Drawing from extensive archival research and in-depth interviews, Vale recalibrates the larger cultural role of public housing, revalues the contributions of public housing residents, and reconsiders the role of design and designers.

Download or read book American City Planning written by Mel Scott and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 904 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Supporting Shrinkage written by Michael P. Johnson and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-08-01 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Supporting Shrinkage describes a new approach to citizen-engaged, community-focused planning methods and technologies for cities and regions facing decline, disinvestment, shrinkage, and social and physical distress. The volume evaluates the benefits and costs of a wide range of analytic approaches for designing policy and planning interventions for shrinking cities and distressed communities. These include collaborative planning, social media, civic technology, game design, analytics, decision modeling and decision support, and spatial analysis. The authors present case studies of three US cities addressing shrinkage and decline, with a focus on issues of social justice, democratization of knowledge, and local empowerment. Proposed as a solution is an approach that puts community engagement and empowerment at the center, combined with data and technology innovations. The authors argue that decisions informed by qualitative and quantitative data and analytic methods, implemented through accessible and affordable technologies, and based on notions of social impact and social justice, can enable residents to play a leading role in the positive transformation of shrinking cities and distressed communities.

Download or read book Order without Design written by Alain Bertaud and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-08-06 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that operational urban planning can be improved by the application of the tools of urban economics to the design of regulations and infrastructure. Urban planning is a craft learned through practice. Planners make rapid decisions that have an immediate impact on the ground—the width of streets, the minimum size of land parcels, the heights of buildings. The language they use to describe their objectives is qualitative—“sustainable,” “livable,” “resilient”—often with no link to measurable outcomes. Urban economics, on the other hand, is a quantitative science, based on theories, models, and empirical evidence largely developed in academic settings. In this book, the eminent urban planner Alain Bertaud argues that applying the theories of urban economics to the practice of urban planning would greatly improve both the productivity of cities and the welfare of urban citizens. Bertaud explains that markets provide the indispensable mechanism for cities’ development. He cites the experience of cities without markets for land or labor in pre-reform China and Russia; this “urban planners’ dream” created inefficiencies and waste. Drawing on five decades of urban planning experience in forty cities around the world, Bertaud links cities’ productivity to the size of their labor markets; argues that the design of infrastructure and markets can complement each other; examines the spatial distribution of land prices and densities; stresses the importance of mobility and affordability; and critiques the land use regulations in a number of cities that aim at redesigning existing cities instead of just trying to alleviate clear negative externalities. Bertaud concludes by describing the new role that joint teams of urban planners and economists could play to improve the way cities are managed.

Download or read book Capital City written by Samuel Stein and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This superbly succinct and incisive book” on urban planning and real estate argues gentrification isn’t driven by latte-sipping hipsters—but is engineered by the capitalist state (Michael Sorkin, author of All Over the Map) Our cities are changing. Around the world, more and more money is being invested in buildings and land. Real estate is now a $217 trillion dollar industry, worth thirty-six times the value of all the gold ever mined. It forms sixty percent of global assets, and one of the most powerful people in the world—the former president of the United States—made his name as a landlord and developer. Samuel Stein shows that this explosive transformation of urban life and politics has been driven not only by the tastes of wealthy newcomers, but by the state-driven process of urban planning. Planning agencies provide a unique window into the ways the state uses and is used by capital, and the means by which urban renovations are translated into rising real estate values and rising rents. Capital City explains the role of planners in the real estate state, as well as the remarkable power of planning to reclaim urban life.

Download or read book The Creative Destruction of New York City written by Alessandro Busà and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-07 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bill de Blasio's campaign rhetoric focused on a tale of two cities: rich and poor New York. He promised to value the needs of poor and working-class New Yorkers, making city government work better for everyone-not just those who thrived during Bloomberg's tenure as mayor. But well into de Blasio's administration, many critics think that little has changed in the lives of struggling New Yorkers, and that the gentrification of New York City is expanding at a record pace across the five boroughs. Despite the mayor's goal of creating more affordable housing, Brooklyn and Manhattan sit atop the list of the most unaffordable housing markets in the country. It seems that the old adage is becoming truer: New York is a place for only the very rich and the very poor. In The Creative Destruction of New York City, urban scholar Alessandro Busà travels to neighborhoods across the city, from Harlem to Coney Island, from Hell's Kitchen to East New York, to tell the story of fifteen years of drastic rezoning and rebranding, updating the tale of two New Yorks. There is a gilded city of sky-high glass towers where Wall Street managers and foreign billionaires live-or merely store their cash. And there is another New York: a place where even the professional middle class is one rent hike away from displacement. Despite de Blasio's rhetoric, the trajectory since Bloomberg has been remarkably consistent. New York's urban development is changing to meet the consumption demands of the very rich, and real estate moguls' power has never been greater. Major players in real estate, banking, and finance have worked to ensure that, regardless of changes in leadership, their interests are safeguarded at City Hall. The Creative Destruction of New York City is an important chronicle of both the success of the city's elite and of efforts to counter the city's march toward a glossy and exclusionary urban landscape. It is essential reading for everyone who cares about affordable housing access and, indeed, the soul of New York City.

Download or read book Strong Towns written by Charles L. Marohn, Jr. and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new way forward for sustainable quality of life in cities of all sizes Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he co-founded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem. Inside, you’ll learn why inducing growth and development has been the conventional response to urban financial struggles—and why it just doesn’t work. New development and high-risk investing don’t generate enough wealth to support itself, and cities continue to struggle. Read this book to find out how cities large and small can focus on bottom-up investments to minimize risk and maximize their ability to strengthen the community financially and improve citizens’ quality of life. Develop in-depth knowledge of the underlying logic behind the “traditional” search for never-ending urban growth Learn practical solutions for ameliorating financial struggles through low-risk investment and a grassroots focus Gain insights and tools that can stop the vicious cycle of budget shortfalls and unexpected downturns Become a part of the Strong Towns revolution by shifting the focus away from top-down growth toward rebuilding American prosperity Strong Towns acknowledges that there is a problem with the American approach to growth and shows community leaders a new way forward. The Strong Towns response is a revolution in how we assemble the places we live.

Download or read book The U S City in Transition written by Barbara Hahn and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-07-21 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The U.S. city is undergoing constant change. In the East and Midwest, most cities were founded as trading posts on waterways. They boomed during the industrial era and reached their population peak in the mid-20th century, before suburbanization and deindustrialization caused them to decline in importance. Traces of decay were everywhere, and the prognosis for the future was conceivably poor. As Barbara Hahn shows in her book, this trend now seems to have been broken: Things are looking up again for the US city. Some of the former industrial cities have succeeded in structural change. In the south and west of the country, cities have developed into new growth centers. However, not all cities are benefiting from this positive development, and many continue to shrink at an alarming rate. As the author points out, similar processes such as neoliberalisation, deregulation, privatisation and gentrification can be observed in all cities, regardless of their location and level of development. Due to the large number of didactically prepared graphics, the book is suitable as a study read for students and scholars. The characteristics of the U.S. city, which are elaborated on the basis of current examples, as well as the illustrative photos also illustrate the change of the U.S. city to the interested reader.

Download or read book The Divided City written by Alan Mallach and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Divided City, urban practitioner and scholar Alan Mallach presents a detailed picture of what has happened over the past 15 to 20 years in industrial cities like Pittsburgh and Baltimore, as they have undergone unprecedented, unexpected revival. He spotlights these changes while placing them in their larger economic, social and political context. Most importantly, he explores the pervasive significance of race in American cities, and looks closely at the successes and failures of city governments, nonprofit entities, and citizens as they have tried to address the challenges of change. The Divided City concludes with strategies to foster greater equality and opportunity, firmly grounding them in the cities' economic and political realities.

Download or read book The Neoliberal City written by Jason Hackworth and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The shift in the ideological winds toward a "free-market" economy has brought profound effects in urban areas. The Neoliberal City presents an overview of the effect of these changes on today's cities. The term "neoliberalism" was originally used in reference to a set of practices that first-world institutions like the IMF and World Bank impose on third-world countries and cities. The support of unimpeded trade and individual freedoms and the discouragement of state regulation and social spending are the putative centerpieces of this vision. More and more, though, people have come to recognize that first-world cities are undergoing the same processes. In The Neoliberal City, Jason Hackworth argues that neoliberal policies are in fact having a profound effect on the nature and direction of urbanization in the United States and other wealthy countries, and that much can be learned from studying its effect. He explores the impact that neoliberalism has had on three aspects of urbanization in the United States: governance, urban form, and social movements. The American inner city is seen as a crucial battle zone for the wider neoliberal transition primarily because it embodies neoliberalism's antithesis, Keynesian egalitarian liberalism. Focusing on issues such as gentrification in New York City; public-housing policy in New York, Chicago, and Seattle; downtown redevelopment in Phoenix; and urban-landscape change in New Brunswick, N.J., Hackworth shows us how material and symbolic changes to institutions, neighborhoods, and entire urban regions can be traced in part to the rise of neoliberalism.