Ordinary Cities

Ordinary Cities
Author: Jennifer Robinson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2013-07-04
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1134406940

With the urbanization of the world's population proceeding apace and the equally rapid urbanization of poverty, urban theory has an urgent challenge to meet if it is to remain relevant to the majority of cities and their populations, many of which are outside the West. This groundbreaking book establishes a new framework for urban development. It makes the argument that all cities are best understood as ‘ordinary’, and crosses the longstanding divide in urban scholarship and urban policy between Western and other cities (especially those labelled ‘Third World’). It considers the two framing axes of urban modernity and development, and argues that if cities are to be imagined in equitable and creative ways, urban theory must overcome these axes with their Western bias and that resources must become at least as cosmopolitan as cities themselves. Tracking paths across previously separate literatures and debates, this innovative book - a postcolonial critique of urban studies - traces the outlines of a cosmopolitan approach to cities, drawing on evidence from Rio, Johannesburg, Lusaka and Kuala Lumpur. Key urban scholars and debates, from Simmel, Benjamin and the Chicago School to Global and World Cities theories are explored, together with anthropological and developmentalist accounts of poorer cities. Offering an alternative approach, Ordinary Cities skilfully brings together theories of urban development for students and researchers of urban studies, geography and development.

Ordinary Cities, Extraordinary Geographies

Ordinary Cities, Extraordinary Geographies
Author: Bryson, John R.
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2021-08-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1789908027

This insightful book explores smaller towns and cities, places in which the majority of people live, highlighting that these more ordinary places have extraordinary geographies. It focuses on the development of an alternative approach to urban studies and theory that foregrounds smaller cities and towns rather than much larger cities and conurbations.

Cities of the Global South Reader

Cities of the Global South Reader
Author: Faranak Miraftab
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2014-10-10
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317636791

The Cities of the Global South Reader adopts a fresh and critical approach to the fi eld of urbanization in the developing world. The Reader incorporates both early and emerging debates about the diverse trajectories of urbanization processes in the context of the restructured global alignments in the last three decades. Emphasizing the historical legacies of colonialism, the Reader recognizes the entanglement of conditions and concepts often understood in binary relations: first/third worlds, wealth/poverty, development/underdevelopment, and inclusion/exclusion. By asking: “whose city? whose development?” the Reader rigorously highlights the fractures along lines of class, race, gender, and other socially and spatially constructed hierarchies in global South cities. The Reader’s thematic structure, where editorial introductions accompany selected texts, examines the issues and concerns that urban dwellers, planners, and policy makers face in the contemporary world. These include the urban economy, housing, basic services, infrastructure, the role of non-state civil society-based actors, planned interventions and contestations, the role of diaspora capital, the looming problem of adapting to climate change, and the increasing spectre of violence in a post 9/11 transnational world. The Cities of the Global South Reader pulls together a diverse set of readings from scholars across the world, some of which have been written specially for the volume, to provide an essential resource for a broad interdisciplinary readership at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in urban geography, urban sociology, and urban planning as well as disciplines related to international and development studies. Editorial commentaries that introduce the central issues for each theme summarize the state of the field and outline an associated bibliography. They will be of particular value for lecturers, students, and researchers, making the Cities of the Global South Reader a key text for those interested in understanding contemporary urbanization processes.

The City Reader

The City Reader
Author: Richard T. LeGates
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1207
Release: 2020-05-14
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0429537328

The seventh edition of the highly successful The City Reader juxtaposes the very best classic and contemporary writings on the city. Sixty-three selections are included: forty-five from the sixth edition and eighteen new selections, including three newly written exclusively for The City Reader. The anthology features a Prologue essay on "How to Study Cities", eight part introductions as well as individual introductions to each of the selected articles. The new edition has been extensively updated and expanded to reflect the latest thinking in each of the disciplinary and topical areas included, such as sustainable urban development, globalization, the impact of technology on cities, resilient cities, and urban theory. The seventh edition places greater emphasis on cities in the developing world, the global city system, and the future of cities in the digital transformation age. While retaining classic writings from authors such as Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, and Louis Wirth, this edition also includes the best contemporary writings of, among others, Peter Hall, Manuel Castells, and Saskia Sassen. New material has been added on compact cities, urban history, placemaking, climate change, the world city network, smart cities, the new social exclusion, ordinary cities, gentrification, gender perspectives, regime theory, comparative urbanization, and the impact of technology on cities. Bibliographic material has been completely updated and strengthened so that the seventh edition can serve as a reference volume orienting faculty and students to the most important writings of all the key topics in urban studies and planning. The City Reader provides the comprehensive mapping of the terrain of Urban Studies, old and new. It is essential reading for anyone interested in studying cities and city life.

World Cities And Climate Change

World Cities And Climate Change
Author: Hodson, Mike
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education (UK)
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2010-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0335237304

Relationships between cities and socio-technical energy, water, waste and transport networks are changing. Global Urbanism argues that this is not something that is happening naturally but is the product of social, economic, political and spatial processes and that these changes have profound implications for the mutual organisation of urbanism and resource flows and consequently for the shape of contemporary and future cities.

Locating Right to the City in the Global South

Locating Right to the City in the Global South
Author: Tony Roshan Samara
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2013-01-04
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1136201858

Despite the fact that virtually all urban growth is occurring, and will continue to occur, in the cities of the Global South, the conceptual tools used to study cities are distilled disproportionately from research on the highly developed cities of the Global North. With urban inequality widely recognized as central to many of the most pressing challenges facing the world, there is a need for a deeper understanding of cities of the South on their own terms. Locating Right to the City in the Global South marks an innovative and far reaching effort to document and make sense of urban transformations across a range of cities, as well as the conflicts and struggles for social justice these are generating. The volume contains empirically rich, theoretically informed case studies focused on the social, spatial, and political dimensions of urban inequality in the Global South. Drawing from scholars with extensive fieldwork experience, this volume covers sixteen cities in fourteen countries across a belt stretching from Latin America, to Africa and the Middle East, and into Asia. Central to what binds these cities are deeply rooted, complex, and dynamic processes of social and spatial division that are being actively reproduced. These cities are not so much fracturing as they are being divided by governance practices informed by local histories and political contestation, and refracted through or infused by market based approaches to urban development. Through a close examination of these practices and resistance to them, this volume provides perspectives on neoliberalism and right to the city that advance our understanding of urbanism in the Global South. In mapping the relationships between space, politics and populations, the volume draws attention to variations shaped by local circumstances, while simultaneously elaborating a distinctive transnational Southern urbanism. It provides indepth research on a range of practical and policy oriented issues, from housing and slum redevelopment to building democratic cities that include participation by lower income and other marginal groups. It will be of interest to students and practitioners alike studying Urban Studies, Globalization, and Development.

Cities and Cultures

Cities and Cultures
Author: Malcolm Miles
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2007-04-26
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1134257716

Cities and Cultures is a critical account of the relations between contemporary cities and the cultures they produce and which in turn shape them. The book questions received ideas of what constitutes a city's culture through case studies in which different kinds of culture - the arts, cultural institutions and heritage, distinctive ways of life - are seen to be differently used in or affected by the development of particular cities. The book does not mask the complexity of this, but explains it in ways accessible for undergraduates. The book begins with introductory chapters on the concepts of a city and a culture (the latter in the anthropological sense as well as denoting the arts), citing cases from modern literature. The book then moves from a critical account of cultural production in a metropolitan setting to the idea that a city, too, is produced through the characteristic ways of life of its inhabitants. The cultural industries are scrutinised for their relation to such cultures as well as to city marketing, and attention is given to the European Cities of Culture initiative, and to the hybridity of contemporary urban cultures in a period of globalisation and migration. In its penultimate chapter the book looks at incidental cultural forms and cultural means to identify formation; and in its final chapter, examines the permeability of urban cultures and cultural forms. Sources are introduced, positions clarified and contrasted, and notes given for selective further reading. Playing on the two meanings of culture, Miles takes an unique approach by relating arguments around these meanings to specific cases of urban development today. The book includes both critical comment on a range of literatures - being a truly inter-disciplinary study - and the outcome of the author's field research into urban cultures.

Cities and the Cultural Economy

Cities and the Cultural Economy
Author: Thomas A. Hutton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2015-08-27
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1136251413

The cultural economy forms a leading trajectory of urban development, and has emerged as a key facet of globalizing cities. Cultural industries include new media, digital arts, music and film, and the design industries and professions, as well as allied consumption and spectacle in the city. The cultural economy now represents the third-largest sector in many metropolitan cities of the West including London, Berlin, New York, San Francisco, and Melbourne, and is increasingly influential in the development of East Asian cities (Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore), as well as the mega-cities of the Global South (e.g. Mumbai, Capetown, and São Paulo). Cities and the Cultural Economy provides a critical integration of the burgeoning research and policy literatures in one of the most prominent sub-fields of contemporary urban studies. Policies for cultural economy are increasingly evident within planning, development and place-marketing programs, requiring large resource commitments, but producing – on the evidence – highly uneven results. Accordingly the volume includes a critical review of how the new cultural economy is reshaping urban labour, housing and property markets, contributing to gentrification and to ‘precarious employment’ formation, as well as to broadly favorable outcomes, such as community regeneration and urban vitality. The volume acknowledges the important growth dynamics and sustainability of key creative industries. Written primarily as a text for upper-level undergraduate and Masters students in urban, economic and social geography; sociology; cultural studies; and planning, this provocative and compelling text will also be of interest to those studying urban land economics, architecture, landscape architecture and the built environment.

Contested Holy Cities

Contested Holy Cities
Author: Michael Dumper
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2019-05-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429673841

Examining contestation and conflict management within holy cities, this book provides both an overview and a range of options available to those concerned with this increasingly urgent phenomenon. In cities in India, the Balkans and the Mediterranean, we can see examples where religion plays a dominant role in urban development and thus provides a platform for conflict. Powerful religious hierarchies, the generation of often unregulated revenues from donations and endowments, the presence of holy sites and the enactment of ritualistic activities in public spaces combine to create forms of conflicts which are, arguably, more intense and more intractable than other forms of conflicts in cities. The book develops a working definition of the urban dimension of religious conflicts so that the kinds of conflicts exhibited can be contextualised and studied in a more targeted manner. It draws together a series of case studies focusing on specific cities, the kinds of religious conflicts occurring in them and the international structures and mechanisms that have emerged to address such conflicts. Combining expertise from both academics and practitioners in the policy and military world, this interdisciplinary collection will be of particular relevance to scholars and students researching politics and religion, regional studies, geography and urban studies. It should also prove useful to policymakers in the military and other international organisations.