Best of
Urban-Studies

2013

High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing


Audrey Petty - 2013
    These stories of community, displacement, and poverty in the wake of gentrification give voice to those who have long been ignored, but whose hopes and struggles exist firmly at the heart of our national identity.

Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain


John Grindrod - 2013
    FLYOVERS. STREETS IN THE SKY. ONCE, THIS WAS THE FUTURE. Was Britain's postwar rebuilding the height of midcentury chic or the concrete embodiment of Crap Towns? John Grindrod decided to find out how blitzed, slum-ridden and crumbling 'austerity Britain' became, in a few short years, a space-age world of concrete, steel and glass. On his journey he visits the sleepy Norfolk birthplace of Brutalism, the once-Blitzed city centre of Plymouth, the futuristic New Town of Cumbernauld, Sheffield's innovative streets in the sky, the foundations of the BT tower, and the brave 1950s experiments in the Gorbals. Along the way he meets New Town pioneers, tower block builders, Barbican architects, old retainers of Coventry Cathedral, proud prefab dwellers and sixties town planners: people who lived through a time of phenomenal change and excitement. What he finds is a story of dazzling space-age optimism, ingenuity and helipads -- so many helipads -- tempered by protests, deadly collapses and scandals that shook the government. Concretopia is an accessible, warm and revealing social history of an aspect of Britain often ignored, insulted and misunderstood. It will change the way you look at Arndale Centres, tower blocks and concrete forever.

How to Study Public Life


Jan Gehl - 2013
    Jan Gehl has been examining this question since the 1960s, when few urban designers or planners were thinking about designing cities for people. But given the unpredictable, complex and ephemeral nature of life in cities, how can we best design public infrastructure—vital to cities for getting from place to place, or staying in place—for human use? Studying city life and understanding the factors that encourage or discourage use is the key to designing inviting public space. In How to Study Public Life Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre draw from their combined experience of over 50 years to provide a history of public-life study as well as methods and tools necessary to recapture city life as an important planning dimension. This type of systematic study began in earnest in the 1960s, when several researchers and journalists on different continents criticized urban planning for having forgotten life in the city. City life studies provide knowledge about human behavior in the built environment in an attempt to put it on an equal footing with knowledge about urban elements such as buildings and transport systems. Studies can be used as input in the decision-making process,  as part of overall planning, or in designing individual projects such as streets, squares or parks. The original goal is still the goal today: to recapture city life as an important planning dimension. Anyone interested in improving city life will find inspiration, tools, and examples in this invaluable guide.

A History of Future Cities


Daniel Brook - 2013
    Pouring into developing-world “instant cities” like Dubai and Shenzhen, these urban newcomers confront a modern world cobbled together from fragments of a West they have never seen. Do these fantastical boomtowns, where blueprints spring to life overnight on virgin land, represent the dawning of a brave new world? Or is their vaunted newness a mirage?In a captivating blend of history and reportage, Daniel Brook travels to a series of major metropolitan hubs that were once themselves instant cities— St. Petersburg, Shanghai, and Mumbai—to watch their “dress rehearsals for the twenty-first century.” Understanding today’s emerging global order, he argues, requires comprehending the West’s profound and conflicted influence on developing-world cities over the centuries.In 1703, Tsar Peter the Great personally oversaw the construction of a new Russian capital, a “window on the West” carefully modeled on Amsterdam, that he believed would wrench Russia into the modern world. In the nineteenth century, Shanghai became the fastest-growing city on earth as it mushroomed into an English-speaking, Western-looking metropolis that just happened to be in the Far East. Meanwhile, Bombay, the cosmopolitan hub of the British Raj, morphed into a tropical London at the hands of its pith-helmeted imperialists.Juxtaposing the stories of the architects and authoritarians, the artists and revolutionaries who seized the reins to transform each of these precociously modern places into avatars of the global future, Brook demonstrates that the drive for modernization was initially conflated with wholesale Westernization. He shows, too, the ambiguous legacy of that emulation—the birth (and rebirth) of Chinese capitalism in Shanghai, the origins of Bollywood in Bombay’s American-style movie palaces, the combustible mix of revolutionary culture and politics that rocked the Russian capital—and how it may be transcended today.A fascinating, vivid look from the past out toward the horizon, A History of Future Cities is both a crucial reminder of globalization’s long march and an inspiring look into the possibilities of our Asian Century.

Getting to Know Arcgis for Desktop


Michael Law - 2013
    Readers are shown how to use ArcGIS for Desktop software tools to display and present maps and data, and then query and analyze the data. The third edition has been reorganized and includes new topics such as exploring online resources and raster data and contains new exercises, data, and learning tools. Known for its broad scope, clarity, and reliability, Getting to Know ArcGIS for Desktop is equally well-suited for classroom use, independent study, and as a reference. A data DVD for working through the exercises is included with the book, and access to a 180-day trial of ArcGIS 10.1 for Desktop is provided.

Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities


Lawrence J. Vale - 2013
    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.

New Deal Ruins


Edward G. Goetz - 2013
    As chronicled in New Deal Ruins, however, housing policy since the 1990s has turned to the demolition of public housing in favor of subsidized units in mixed-income communities and the use of tenant-based vouchers rather than direct housing subsidies. While these policies, articulated in the HOPE VI program begun in 1992, aimed to improve the social and economic conditions of urban residents, the results have been quite different. As Edward G. Goetz shows, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced and there has been a loss of more than 250,000 permanently affordable residential units. Goetz offers a critical analysis of the nationwide effort to dismantle public housing by focusing on the impact of policy changes in three cities: Atlanta, Chicago, and New Orleans.Goetz shows how this transformation is related to pressures of gentrification and the enduring influence of race in American cities. African Americans have been disproportionately affected by this policy shift; it is the cities in which public housing is most closely identified with minorities that have been the most aggressive in removing units. Goetz convincingly refutes myths about the supposed failure of public housing. He offers an evidence-based argument for renewed investment in public housing to accompany housing choice initiatives as a model for innovative and equitable housing policy.

Paradise Planned: The Garden Suburb and the Modern City


Robert A.M. Stern - 2013
    These bucolic settings offered an ideal lifestyle typically outside the city but accessible by streetcar, train, and automobile.   Today, the principles of the garden city movement are once again in play, as retrofitting the suburbs has become a central issue in planning. Strategies are emerging that reflect the goals of garden suburbs in creating metropolitan communities that embrace both the intensity of the city and the tranquility of nature.   Paradise Planned is the comprehensive, encyclopedic record of this movement, a vital contribution to architectural and planning history and an essential recourse for guiding the repair of the American townscape.

Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality


Patrick Sharkey - 2013
    Four decades later, the degree of racial inequality has barely changed. To understand what went wrong, Patrick Sharkey argues that we have to understand what has happened to African American communities over the last several decades. In Stuck in Place, Sharkey describes how political decisions and social policies have led to severe disinvestment from black neighborhoods, persistent segregation, declining economic opportunities, and a growing link between African American communities and the criminal justice system.As a result, neighborhood inequality that existed in the 1970s has been passed down to the current generation of African Americans. Some of the most persistent forms of racial inequality, such as gaps in income and test scores, can only be explained by considering the neighborhoods in which black and white families have lived over multiple generations. This multigenerational nature of neighborhood inequality also means that a new kind of urban policy is necessary for our nation’s cities. Sharkey argues for urban policies that have the potential to create transformative and sustained changes in urban communities and the families that live within them, and he outlines a durable urban policy agenda to move in that direction.

A Chance to Win: Boyhood, Baseball, and the Struggle for Redemption in the Inner City


Jonathan Schuppe - 2013
    A former high-school pitching ace with a 93 mph fastball, Mason decided to form a Little League team to help boys avoid the street life that had claimed his youth and mobility. Predictably, the players struggle—they endure poverty, unstable family lives with few positive male role models, failing schools, and dangerous neighborhoods—but through the fists and tears, lopsided losses and rare victories, this bunch of misfits becomes a team, and in doing so gives the community something to root for. With in-depth reporting, fascinating characters, and vivid prose, Jonathan Schuppe’s book is both a penetrating, true-to-life portrait of what’s at stake for kids growing up poor in America’s inner cities and a portrait of Newark itself, a struggling city that has recently known great hope as well as failure.http://us.macmillan.com/achancetowin/...

Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence


Christina B. Hanhardt - 2013
    During the same time, policymakers and private developers have declared the containment of urban violence to be a top priority. In this important book, Christina B. Hanhardt examines how LGBT calls for "safe space" have been shaped by broader public safety initiatives that have sought solutions in policing and privatization and have had devastating effects along race and class lines.Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic research in New York City and San Francisco, Hanhardt traces the entwined histories of LGBT activism, urban development, and U.S. policy in relation to poverty and crime over the past fifty years. She highlights the formation of a mainstream LGBT movement, as well as the very different trajectories followed by radical LGBT and queer grassroots organizations. Placing LGBT activism in the context of shifting liberal and neoliberal policies, Safe Space is a groundbreaking exploration of the contradictory legacies of the LGBT struggle for safety in the city.

The City at Eye Level: Lessons for Street Plinths


Meredith Glaser - 2013
    Storefronts, first floor apartments, and sidewalks are the most immediate and common experience of a city. These “plinths” are the ground floors that negotiate between inside and outside, the public and private spheres. The City at Eye Level qualitatively evaluates plinths by exploring specific examples from all over the world. Over twenty-five experts investigate the design, land use, and road and foot traffic in rigorously researched essays, case studies, and interviews. These pieces are supplemented by over two hundred beautiful color images and engage not only with issues in design, but also the concerns of urban communities. The editors have put together a comprehensive guide for anyone concerned with improving or building plinths, including planners, building owners, property and shop managers, designers, and architects.

Baghdad: The City in Verse


Reuven Snir - 2013
    In this unusual anthology, Reuven Snir offers original translations of more than 170 Arabic poems--most of them appearing for the first time in English--which represent a cross-section of genres and styles from the time of Baghdad's founding in the eighth century to the present day. The diversity of the fabled city is reflected in the Bedouin, Muslim, Christian, Kurdish, and Jewish poets featured here, including writers of great renown and others whose work has survived but whose names are lost to history.Through the prism of these poems, readers glimpse many different Baghdads: the city built on ancient Sumerian ruins, the epicenter of Arab culture and Islam's Golden Age under the enlightened rule of Harun al-Rashid, the bombed-out capital of Saddam Hussein's fallen regime, the American occupation, and life in a new but unstable Iraq. With poets as our guides, we visit bazaars, gardens, wine parties, love scenes (worldly and mystical), brothels, prisons, and palaces. Startling contrasts emerge as the day-to-day cacophony of urban life is juxtaposed with eternal cycles of the Tigris, and hellish winds, mosquitoes, rain, floods, snow, and earthquakes are accompanied by somber reflections on invasions and other catastrophes.Documenting the city's 1,250-year history, "Baghdad: The City in Verse "shows why poetry has been aptly called the public register of the Arabs.

The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894


Sam Mitrani - 2013
    Chicago was roiling with political and economic conflict, much of it rooted in class tensions, and the city's lawmakers and business elite fostered the growth of a professional municipal police force to protect capitalism, its assets, and their own positions in society. Together with city policymakers, the business elite united behind an ideology of order that would simultaneously justify the police force's existence and dictate its functions. Tracing the Chicago police department's growth through events such as the 1855 Lager Beer riot, the Civil War, the May Day strikes, the 1877 railroad workers strike and riot, and the Haymarket violence in 1886, Mitrani demonstrates that this ideology of order both succeeded and failed in its aims. Recasting late nineteenth-century Chicago in terms of the struggle over order, this insightful history uncovers the modern police department's role in reconciling democracy with industrial capitalism.

The Hub's Metropolis: Greater Boston's Development from Railroad Suburbs to Smart Growth


James C. O'Connell - 2013
    From its proto-suburban village centers of 1800 to its far-flung, automobile-centric exurbs of today, Boston has been a national pacesetter for suburbanization. In The Hub's Metropolis, James O'Connell charts the evolution of Boston's suburban development.The city of Boston is compact and consolidated--famously, "the Hub." Greater Boston, however, stretches over 1,736 square miles and ranks as the world's sixth largest metropolitan area. Boston suburbs began to develop after 1820, when wealthy city dwellers built country estates that were just a short carriage ride away from their homes in the city. Then, as transportation became more efficient and affordable, the map of the suburbs expanded. The Metropolitan Park Commission's park-and-parkway system, developed in the 1890s, created a template for suburbanization that represents the country's first example of regional planning.O'Connell identifies nine layers of Boston's suburban development, each of which has left its imprint on the landscape: traditional villages; country retreats; railroad suburbs; streetcar suburbs (the first electric streetcar boulevard, Beacon Street in Brookline, was designed by Frederic Law Olmsted); parkway suburbs, which emphasized public greenspace but also encouraged commuting by automobile; mill towns, with housing for workers; upscale and middle-class suburbs accessible by outer-belt highways like Route 128; exurban, McMansion-dotted sprawl; and smart growth. Still a pacesetter, Greater Boston has pioneered antisprawl initiatives that encourage compact, mixed-use development in existing neighborhoods near railroad and transit stations.O'Connell reminds us that these nine layers of suburban infrastructure are still woven into the fabric of the metropolis. Each chapter suggests sites to visit, from Waltham country estates to Cambridge triple-deckers.

Good Cities, Better Lives: How Europe Discovered the Lost Art of Urbanism


Peter Geoffrey Hall - 2013
    Social inequalities and regional disparities show little sign of going away. Efforts to generate growth, and spread it to the poorer areas of cities, have failed dismally. Much new urban development and redevelopment is not up to standard. Yet there are cities in mainland Europe, which have set new standards of high-quality sustainable urban development. This book looks at these best-practice examples - in Germany, the Netherlands, France and Scandinavia, - and suggests ways in which the UK and other countries could do the same.The book is in three parts. Part 1 analyses the main issues for urban planning and development - in economic development and job generation, sustainable development, housing policy, transport and development mechanisms - and probes how practice in the UK has fallen short.Part Two embarks on a tour of best-practice cities in Europe, starting in Germany with the country's boosting of its cities' economies, moving to the spectacularly successful new housing developments in the Netherlands, from there to France's integrated city transport, then to Scandinavia's pursuit of sustainability for its cities, and finally back to Germany, to Freiburg - the city that 'did it all'.Part Three sums up the lessons of Part Two and sets out the key steps needed to launch a new wave of urban development and regeneration on a radically different basis.

Reconsidering the Bicycle: An Anthropological Perspective on a New (Old) Thing


Luis A. Vivanco - 2013
    Bicycles in the city are, some would say, the wave of the future for car-choked, financially-strapped, obese, and sustainability-sensitive urban areas.This book explores how and why people are reconsidering the bicycle, no longer thinking of it simply as a toy or exercise machine, but as a potential solution to a number of contemporary problems. It focuses in particular on what reconsidering the bicycle might mean for everyday practices and politics of urban mobility, a concept that refers to the intertwined physical, technological, social, and experiential dimensions of human movement.This book is for Introductory Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Sociology, Environmental Anthropology, and all undergraduate courses on the environment and on sustainability throughout the social sciences.

In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine


Jeffrey Veidlinger - 2013
    Still, thousands of Jews in these small towns survived the war and returned afterward to rebuild their communities. The recollections of some 400 returnees in Ukraine provide the basis for Jeffrey Veidlinger’s reappraisal of the traditional narrative of 20th-century Jewish history. These elderly Yiddish speakers relate their memories of Jewish life in the prewar shtetl, their stories of survival during the Holocaust, and their experiences living as Jews under Communism. Despite Stalinist repressions, the Holocaust, and official antisemitism, their individual remembrances of family life, religious observance, education, and work testify to the survival of Jewish life in the shadow of the shtetl to this day.

Manhattan at Mid-Century: An Oral History


Myrna Katz Frommer - 2013
    This is the story of a time when great ocean liners were docked in the Hudson River ports, Checker cabs hurtled across a two-way Fifth Avenue, and the Third Avenue el cast long shadows onto the street below. There are recollections of Friday night boxing matches at the old Madison Square Garden, of peddling tunes in the heart of Tin Pan Alley at the Brill Building, of a Harlem that had a nightclub on every corner, and a SoHo that was saved from a wrecker's ball by a "bunch of mothers." Eleven daily newspapers covered the city beat back then, Automats and five-and-dimes were in each neighborhood, and the New York Philharmonic performed free summer concerts at Lewisohn Stadium on the City College campus. Zabar's was a small dairy store; Balducci's was an open-air fruit and vegetable stand. New York was becoming the center of haute cuisine and haute couture; the New York School of abstract expressionists had taken the lead from Paris in avant-garde art. This transformative time when New York City became the capital of the world is captured here in myriad memories that create an often humorous, sometimes poignant, occasionally bitter--but always loving--testament to the magical mystique of Manhattan. Includes interviews with Jimmy Breslin, Bill Gallo, Monte Irvin, Robert Merrill, Herman Badillo, Elaine Kaufman, Jerry Della Femina, Pauline Trig�re, Sirio Maccioni, Jane Jacobs, Saul Zabar, Margaret Whiting, and many more.

On the Wrong Side of the Track?: East London and the Post Olympics


Phil Cohen - 2013
    Part one sets the scene, exploring the changing social and physical landscape of East London from the inside - including voices from East London communities and the Olympic Park workers - and from the outside - in the imagination of artists, social commentators and reformers who made the area into an object of public fascination and concern. The second half of the book examines the strategies that were used to present an 'Olympian' vision of London to the world; it focuses on the rhetoric and reality of regeneration and the cultural politics of staging the event, pinpointing the differences that East London and the Olympics have made, and will continue to make, to one another. The book includes a photo essay on the Olympic site, original photographs by Jason Orton, Ian F. Rogers, Loraine Leeson and Peter Dunne, and John Claridge; artworks by Aldo Katayanagi, Jake Humphrey, and Jock McFadyen; and maps by William Dant and John Wallet. The cover is a specially commissioned photomontage by Peter Kennard and Tarek Salhany. The book also includes a reading guide and is supported by an online gallery of images and other Olympic materials for further study. Phil Cohen grew up with Steve Ovett and Jean-Paul Sartre as his teenage heroes and has been trying to get them into the same book ever since. He is author of Knuckle Sandwich: Growing up in the working class city (with Dave Robins); Rethinking the Youth Question; London's Turning: The making of Thames Gateway (with Mike Rustin); and Borderscapes: memory, narrative and Un/Common Culture (to be published in 2013). His poetry has been published by Critical Quarterly, Agenda, and Soundings. A memoir Reading Room Only: memoirs of a radical bibliophile is forthcoming. He is Emeritus Professor in Cultural Studies at the University of East London.

After the New Order: Space, Politics, and Jakarta


Abidin Kusno - 2013
    This new work explores the formation of populist urban programs in post-Suharto Jakarta and the cultural and political contradictions that have arisen as a result of the continuing influence of the Suharto-era's neoliberal ideology of development. Analyzing a spectrum of urban agendas from waterfront city to green environment and housing for the poor, Kusno deepens our understanding of the spatial mediation of power, the interaction between elite and populist urban imaginings, and how past ideologies are integral to the present even as they are newly reconfigured.The book brings together eight chapters that examine the anxiety over the destiny of Jakarta in its efforts to resolve the crisis of the city. In the first group of chapters Kusno considers the fate and fortune of two building types, namely the city hall and the shop house, over a longue duree as a metonymy for the culture, politics, and society of the city and the nation. Other chapters focus on the intellectual legacies of the Sukarno and Suharto eras and the influence of their spatial paradigms. The final three chapters look at social and ecological consciousness in the post-Suharto era. One reflects on citizens' responses to the waterfront city project, another on the efforts to "green" the city as it is overrun by capitalism and reaching its ecological limits. The third discusses a recent low-income housing program by exploring the two central issues of land and financing; it illuminates the interaction between the politics of urban space and that of global financial capitalism. The epilogue, consisting of an interview with the author, discusses Kusno's writings on contemporary Jakarta, his approach to history, and how his work is shaped by concerns over the injustices, violence, and environmental degradation that continue to accompany the city's democratic transition.After the New Order will be essential reading for anyone--including Asianists, urban historians, social scientists, architects, and planners--concerned with the interplay of space, power, and identity.

Statues and Cities: Honorific Portraits and Civic Identity in the Hellenistic World


John Ma - 2013
    350 BC- c. AD 1), which is marked by a political culture of civic devotion, common decision making, and publicness.As honorific statues were considered public art, the volume also investigates the workings of images, representations, memory, and the monumental public form of permanent inscription, to see what stories the Hellenistic city-states can reveal about themselves.

Geographies of Privilege


France Winddance Twine - 2013
    Twine and Gardener have put together a collection that analyzes how the centrality of spaces (domestic, institutional, leisure, educational) are central to the production, maintenance and transformation of inequalities. The collected readings show how power--in the form of economic, social, symbolic, and cultural capital--is employed and experienced.The volume's contributors take the reader to diverse sites, including brothels, blues clubs, dance clubs, elite schools, detention centers, advocacy organizations, and public sidewalks in Canada, Italy, Spain, United Arab Emirates, Mozambique, South Africa, and the United States. Geographies of Privilege is the perfect teaching tool for courses on social problems, race, class and gender in Geography, Sociology and Anthropology.

Architecture in Formation: On the Nature of Information in Digital Architecture


Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa - 2013
    Sixteen essays from practitioners, historians, and theorists look at the many ways information technology is being used to conceive and assess architecture to present to you a well-rounded discussion of the field. Twenty-nine projects illustrate real-world examples of the digital made concrete, so that you can see how you might do it too.Featuring essays by: Georges Teyssot, Mario Carpo, Martin Bressani, Patrik Schumacher, Bernard Cache, Mark Linder, David Theodore, Evan Douglis, Rocker-Lange Architects, Antoine Picon, Michael Wen-Sen Su, Chris Perry, Alexis Meier, Achim Menges, Martin BressaniInterviews with: George Legendre, Alessandra Ponte, Karl Chu, Ciro Najle, and Greg LynnProjects by: Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Mark Burry, Yehuda Kalay, Omar Khan, Jason Kelly Johnson, Alejandro Zaera Polo and Maider Llaguno Munitxa, Anna Dyson, Bess Krietemeyer, Peter Stark, Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology (CASE), Philippe Rahm, Lydia Kallipoliti and Alexandros Tsamis, Neeraj Bhatia, InfraNet Lab, Jenny Sabin, LabStudio, Luc Courschene, Preston Scott Cohen, Eisenman Architects, Eiroa Architects, Michael Hansmeyer, Chandler Ahrens (Open Source Architecture), Andrew Saunders, Nader Tehrani, Satoru Sugihara, ATLV and Thom Mayne, Morphosis, Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto, Roland Snooks, Philip Beesley, Matias del Campo and Sandra Manninger (SPAN), Michael Young, Young & Ayata, Monad Studio, Francois Roche, Ruy Klein, Chandler Ahrens and John Carpenter.