Download or read book Cities in the Urban Age written by Robert A. Beauregard and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-03-19 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a self-proclaimed Urban Age, where we celebrate the city as the source of economic prosperity, a nurturer of social and cultural diversity, and a place primed for democracy. We proclaim the city as the fertile ground from which progress will arise. Without cities, we tell ourselves, human civilization would falter and decay. In Cities in the Urban Age, Robert A. Beauregard argues that this line of thinking is not only hyperbolic—it is too celebratory by half. For Beauregard, the city is a cauldron for four haunting contradictions. First, cities are equally defined by both their wealth and their poverty. Second, cities are simultaneously environmentally destructive and yet promise sustainability. Third, cities encourage rule by political machines and oligarchies, even as they are essentially democratic and at least nominally open to all. And fourth, city life promotes tolerance among disparate groups, even as the friction among them often erupts into violence. Beauregard offers no simple solutions or proposed remedies for these contradictions; indeed, he doesn’t necessarily hold that they need to be resolved, since they are generative of city life. Without these four tensions, cities wouldn’t be cities. Rather, Beauregard argues that only by recognizing these ambiguities and contradictions can we even begin to understand our moral obligations, as well as the clearest paths toward equality, justice, and peace in urban settings.
Download or read book City written by P.D. Smith and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-06-19 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time in the history of the planet, more than half the population - 3.3 billion people - are now living in cities. Two hundred years ago only 3 per cent of the world's population were urbanites, a figure that had remained fairly stable (give or take the occasional plague) for about 1000 years. By 2030, 60 per cent of us will be urban dwellers. City is the ultimate handbook for the archetypal city and contains main sections on 'History', 'Customs and Language', 'Districts', 'Transport', 'Money', 'Work', 'Tourist Sites', 'Shops and markets', 'Nightlife', etc., and mini-essays on anything and everything from Babel, Tenochtitlán and Ellis Island to Beijing, Mumbai and New York, and from boulevards, suburbs, shanty towns and favelas, to skylines, urban legends and the sacred. Drawing on a wide range of examples from cities across the world and throughout history, it explores the reasons why people first built cities and why urban populations are growing larger every year. City is illustrated throughout with a range of photographs, maps and other illustrations.
Download or read book Four Lost Cities A Secret History of the Urban Age written by Annalee Newitz and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and Science Friday A quest to explore some of the most spectacular ancient cities in human history—and figure out why people abandoned them. In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today. Newitz travels to all four sites and investigates the cutting-edge research in archaeology, revealing the mix of environmental changes and political turmoil that doomed these ancient settlements. Tracing the early development of urban planning, Newitz also introduces us to the often anonymous workers—slaves, women, immigrants, and manual laborers—who built these cities and created monuments that lasted millennia. Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate.
Download or read book Shaping Cities in an Urban Age written by Ricky Burdett and published by Phaidon Press. This book was released on 2018-09-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An authoritative - and fascinating - investigation into the spatial and social dynamics of cities at a global scale Shaping Cities in an Urban Age is the third addition to Phaidon's hugely successful Urban Age series, published in collaboration with the London School of Economics (LSE) and the Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft (AHG). Generously illustrated with photographs, visual data, and statistics, and featuring a series of essays written by leading people in their fields, Shaping Cities in an Urban Age addresses our most urgent contemporary and future urban issues by examining a set of key forces that have combined to create the city as we know it today. From the publisher of The Endless City and Living in the Endless City.
Download or read book Urban Rage written by Mustafa Dikeç and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timely and incisive examination of contemporary urban unrest that explains why riots will continue until citizens are equally treated and politically included In the past few decades, urban riots have erupted in democracies across the world. While high profile politicians often react by condemning protestors' actions and passing crackdown measures, urban studies professor Mustafa Dikeç shows how these revolts are in fact rooted in exclusions and genuine grievances which our democracies are failing to address. In this eye-opening study, he argues that global revolts may be sparked by a particular police or government action but nonetheless are expressions of much longer and deep seated rage accumulated through hardship and injustices that have become routine. Increasingly recognized as an expert on urban unrest, Dikeç examines urban revolts in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Greece, and Turkey and, in a sweeping and engaging account, makes it clear that change is only possible if we address the failures of democratic systems and rethink the established practices of policing and political decision-making.
Download or read book The Endless City written by London School of Economics and Political Science and published by Phaidon. This book was released on 2010-12-06 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Endless Citypresents a unique survey of the contemporary city at the beginning of the 21stcentury. It includes a wealth of material that has emerged from a sequence of six conferences held by influential figures in the field of urban development and its related disciplines, and examines the requisite tools for creating a thriving modern city. The book has been edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic in collaboration with one of the most important educational institutions in this field, the London School of Economics, which assures that the information and data provided is reliable, accurate and informed. Taking 6 key cities as its focal point: New York, Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Berlin, The Endless City discusses in depth not only the infrastructure and architectural expansion necessary for continuous urban growth, but also the social and economic factors that are critical to urban development in the 21stcentury. Clearly organised into separate sections for each city, the book will have a strong visual impact and make detailed scholarly research straightforward and manageable. Images of each city will complement the discussions and enrich the discussion presented in the text. With contributions by experts in urban development, this book will appeal to architects, city planners, economists, students, politicians and anyone with an interest in the future of our cities.
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 The City written by Robert Ezra Park and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Urban Politics written by Bernard H. Ross and published by M.E. Sharpe. This book was released on 2011-08-10 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This popular text mixes the best classic theory and research on urban politics with the most recent developments in urban and metropolitan affairs. Its very balanced and realistic approach helps students to understand the nature of urban politics and the difficulty of finding effective solutions in a suburban and global age. The eighth edition provides a comprehensive review and analysis of urban policy under the Obama administration and brand new coverage of sustainable urban development. A new chapter on globalization and its impact on cities brings the history of urban development up to date, and a focus on the politics of local economic development underscores how questions of economic development have come to dominate the local arena. The book traces the changing style of community participation, including the emergence of CDCs, BIDs, and other new-style service organizations. It analyzes the impacts of the New Regionalism, the New Urbanism, and much more at an approachable level. The eighth edition is significantly shorter and more affordable than previous editions, and the entire text has been thoroughly rewritten to engage students. Boxed case studies of prominent recent and current urban development efforts provide material for class discussion, and concluding material demonstrates the tradeoff between more ideal and more pragmatic urban politics. Source material provides Internet addresses for further research.
Download or read book The City Is the Factory written by Miriam Greenberg and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban public spaces, from the streets and squares of Buenos Aires to Zuccotti Park in New York City, have become the emblematic sites of contentious politics in the twenty-first century. As the contributors to The City Is the Factory argue, this resurgent politics of the square is itself part of a broader shift in the primary locations and targets of popular protest from the workplace to the city. This shift is due to an array of intersecting developments: the concentration of people, profit, and social inequality in growing urban areas; the attacks on and precarity faced by unions and workers' movements; and the sense of possibility and actual leverage afforded by local politics and the tactical use of urban space. Thus, "the city"—from the town square to the banlieu—is becoming like the factory of old: a site of production and profit-making as well as new forms of solidarity, resistance, and social reimagining.We see examples of the city as factory in new place-based political alliances, as workers and the unemployed find common cause with "right to the city" struggles. Demands for jobs with justice are linked with demands for the urban commons—from affordable housing to a healthy environment, from immigrant rights to "urban citizenship" and the right to streets free from both violence and racially biased policing. The case studies and essays in The City Is the Factory provide descriptions and analysis of the form, substance, limits, and possibilities of these timely struggles. Contributors Melissa Checker, Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; Daniel Aldana Cohen, University of Pennsylvania; Els de Graauw, Baruch College, City University of New York; Kathleen Dunn, Loyola University Chicago Shannon Gleeson, Cornell University; Miriam Greenberg, University of California, Santa Cruz; Alejandro Grimson, Universidad de San Martín (Argentina); Andrew Herod, University of Georgia; Penny Lewis, Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, City University of New York; Stephanie Luce, Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, City University of New York; Lize Mogel, artist and coeditor of An Atlas of Radical Cartography; Gretchen Purser, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University
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 Extreme Cities written by Ashley Dawson and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cutting exploration of how cities drive climate change while being on the frontlines of the coming climate crisis How will climate change affect our lives? Where will its impacts be most deeply felt? Are we doing enough to protect ourselves from the coming chaos? In Extreme Cities, Ashley Dawson argues that cities are ground zero for climate change, contributing the lion’s share of carbon to the atmosphere, while also lying on the frontlines of rising sea levels. Today, the majority of the world’s megacities are located in coastal zones, yet few of them are adequately prepared for the floods that will increasingly menace their shores. Instead, most continue to develop luxury waterfront condos for the elite and industrial facilities for corporations. These not only intensify carbon emissions, but also place coastal residents at greater risk when water levels rise. In Extreme Cities, Dawson offers an alarming portrait of the future of our cities, describing the efforts of Staten Island, New York, and Shishmareff, Alaska residents to relocate; Holland’s models for defending against the seas; and the development of New York City before and after Hurricane Sandy. Our best hope lies not with fortified sea walls, he argues. Rather, it lies with urban movements already fighting to remake our cities in a more just and equitable way. As much a harrowing study as a call to arms Extreme Cities is a necessary read for anyone concerned with the threat of global warming, and of the cities of the world.
Download or read book The Urban Condition written by Brendan Gleeson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-23 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book will speak to the new human epoch, the Urban Age. A majority of humanity now lives for the first time in cities. The city, the highest invention of the modern age, is now the human heartland. And yet the same process that brought us the city and its wonders, modernisation, has also thrown up challenges and threats, especially climate change, resource depletion, social division and economic insecurity. This book considers how these threats are encountered and countered in the urban age, focusing on the issue of human knowledge and self-awareness, just as Hannah Arendt’s influential The Human Condition did half a century ago. The Human Condition is now The Urban Condition. And it is this condition that will define human prospects in an age of default and risk. Gleeson expertly explores the concept through three main themes. The first is an exploration of what defines the current human condition, especially the expanding cities that are at the heart of an over-consumptive world economic order. The second exposes and reviews the reawakening of forms of knowledge (‘naturalism’) that are likely to worsen not improve our comprehension of the crisis. The new ‘science of urbanism’ in popular new literature exemplifies this dangerous trend. The third and last part of the book considers prospects for a new urban, and therefore human, dispensation, ‘The Good City’. We must first journey in our urban vessels through troubled times. But can we now start to plot the way to new shores, to a safer, more resilient city that provides for human flourishing? The Urban Condition attempts this ideal, conceiving a new urbanism based on the old idea of self-limitation. The Urban Condition is an original, timely book that reconsiders and redeploys Arendt’s famous notion of The Human Condition in an age of cities and risk. It brings together several important strands of human consideration, urbanisation, climate threat, resource depletion, economic default and critical knowledge and weaves them into a new analysis of the times. It also looks to a future that is nearly with us—of changed climate, resource scarcity and economic stress. The book journeys into these troubled times, proposing the idea of Lifeboat Cities as a way of thinking about the human journey to come
Download or read book City Unsilenced written by Jeffrey Hou and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do the recent urban resistance tactics around the world have in common? What are the roles of public space in these movements? What are the implications of urban resistance for the remaking of public space in the "age of shrinking democracy"? To what extent do these resistances move from anti- to alter-politics? City Unsilenced brings together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars and scholar-activists to examine the spaces, conditions, and processes in which neoliberal practices have profoundly impacted the everyday social, economic, and political life of citizens and communities around the globe. They explore the commonalities and specificities of urban resistance movements that respond to those impacts. They focus on how such movements make use of and transform the meanings and capacity of public space. They investigate their ramifications in the continued practices of renewing democracies. A broad collection of cases is presented and analyzed, including Movimento Passe Livre (Brazil), Google Bus Blockades San Francisco (USA), the Platform for Mortgage Affected People (PAH) (Spain), the Piqueteros Movement (Argentina), Umbrella Movement (Hong Kong), post-Occupy Gezi Park (Turkey), Sunflower Movement (Taiwan), Occupy Oakland (USA), Syntagma Square (Greece), Researchers for Fair Policing (New York), Urban Movement Congress (Poland), urban activism (Berlin), 1DMX (Mexico), Miyashita Park Tokyo (Japan), 15M Movement (Spain), and Train of Hope and protests against Academic Ball in Vienna (Austria). By better understanding the processes and implications of the recent urban resistances, City Unsilenced contributes to the ongoing debates concerning the role and significance of public space in the practice of lived democracy.
Download or read book Survival of the City written by Edward Glaeser and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of our great urbanists and one of our great public health experts join forces to reckon with how cities are changing in the face of existential threats the pandemic has only accelerated Cities can make us sick. They always have—diseases spread more easily when more people are close to one another. And disease is hardly the only ill that accompanies urban density. Cities have been demonized as breeding grounds for vice and crime from Sodom and Gomorrah on. But cities have flourished nonetheless because they are humanity’s greatest invention, indispensable engines for creativity, innovation, wealth, and connection, the loom on which the fabric of civilization is woven. But cities now stand at a crossroads. During the global COVID crisis, cities grew silent as people worked from home—if they could work at all. The normal forms of socializing ground to a halt. How permanent are these changes? Advances in digital technology mean that many people can opt out of city life as never before. Will they? Are we on the brink of a post-urban world? City life will survive but individual cities face terrible risks, argue Edward Glaeser and David Cutler, and a wave of urban failure would be absolutely disastrous. In terms of intimacy and inspiration, nothing can replace what cities offer. Great cities have always demanded great management, and our current crisis has exposed fearful gaps in our capacity for good governance. It is possible to drive a city into the ground, pandemic or not. Glaeser and Cutler examine the evolution that is already happening, and describe the possible futures that lie before us: What will distinguish the cities that will flourish from the ones that won’t? In America, they argue, deep inequities in health care and education are a particular blight on the future of our cities; solving them will be the difference between our collective good health and a downward spiral to a much darker place.
Download or read book City Power written by Richard C. Schragger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reigning theories of urban power suggest that in a world dominated by footloose transnational capital, cities have little capacity to effect social change. In City Power, Richard Schragger challenges this conventional wisdom, arguing that cities can and should pursue aims other than making themselves attractive to global capital. Using the municipal living wage movement as an example, Schragger explains why cities are well-positioned to address issues like income equality and how our institutions can be designed to allow them to do so.
Download or read book Urban Planning in the Digital Age written by Nicolas Douay and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technological changes have often produced important social changes that translate into spatial and planning practice. Whereas the intelligent city is one of the unavoidable and even dominant concepts, digital uses can influence urban planning in four different directions. These scenarios are represented by a compass composed of a horizontal axis opposing institutional and non-institutional actors, and a second axis with open and closed opposition.
