The City as a Project

The City as a Project
Author: Pier Vittorio Aureli
Publisher:
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2013
Genre: Cities and towns
ISBN: 9783944074061

The city is often depicted as a sort of self-organizing chaos. This collection of essays, edited by Pier Vittorio Aureli, makes the case for the opposite hypothesis: The city is always the result of political intention, often in the form of specific architectural projects. Cities are shaped not only by material forces, but also by cultural and didactic visions. This thesis is substantiated by eight thoroughly researched essays scrutinizing a fascinating line-up of urban conditions across more than two thousands years of history: from the political theology of the Islamic city to the political economy of Renaissance architecture; from the rise of public architecture in 17th-century France to the laissez-faire development of the contemporary Greek city; from the exemplary teachings of Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand to the collaborative work of Hannes Meyer; and from the plan of the Mesoamerican metropolis to that of the Fordist factory floor. In challenging the split between theory and practice, The City as a Project reveals the powerful ways in which the city arises from the constant interaction between ideas and spatial conditions.

City Project and Public Space

City Project and Public Space
Author: Silvia Serreli
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2013-06-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 940076037X

The book aims at nurturing theoretic reflection on the city and the territory and working out and applying methods and techniques for improving our physical and social landscapes. The main issue is developed around the projectual dimension, with the objective of visualising both the city and the territory from a particular viewpoint, which singles out the territorial dimension as the city’s space of communication and negotiation. Issues that characterise the dynamics of city development will be faced, such as the new, fresh relations between urban societies and physical space, the right to the city, urban equity, the project for the physical city as a means to reveal civitas, signs of new social cohesiveness, the sense of contemporary public space and the sustainability of urban development. Authors have been invited to explore topics that feature a pluralism of disciplinary contributions studying formal and informal practices on the project for the city and seeking conceptual and operative categories capable of understanding and facing the problems inherent in the profound transformations of contemporary urban landscapes.

Great Leap Forward

Great Leap Forward
Author: Chuihua Judy Chung
Publisher: Taschen America Llc
Total Pages: 709
Release: 2001
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9783822860489

Harvard Design School's Project on the City is a graduate thesis program that examines the effects of modernization on the urban condition. Each year the Project on the City studies a specific region or phenomena, & develops a conceptual framework & vocabulary for urban environments that can not be described within the traditional categories of architecture, landscape, or urbanism. In order to understand new forms of urbanization, thesis advisor Rem Koolhaas & students from the fields of architecture, landscape, & urbanism, document & analyze areas of study through a combination of field research, statistical analysis, historical developments, & anecdotal situations. The result of each project is an intensive, specialized study of the effects of modernization on the contemporary city. During the 1996-1997 period, Harvard's graduate students studied China's Pearl River Delta (PRD), a cluster of five cities with a population of twelve million destined to reach thirty-six million by the year 2020. The establishment in the PRD of Special Economic Zones--"laboratories for the contained unleashing of capitalism"--hastened an unprecedented experiment in urbanization on an astonishingly large scale. Great Leap Forward contains essays which explore, in a theoretical & statistical context, the results of this rapid modernization that has produced an entirely new urban substance.

Collage City

Collage City
Author: Colin Rowe
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 198
Release: 1984-03-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780262680424

This book is a critical reappraisal of contemporary theories of urban planning and design and of the role of the architect-planner in an urban context. The authors, rejecting the grand utopian visions of "total planning" and "total design," propose instead a "collage city" which can accommodate a whole range of utopias in miniature.

Project Cinema City

Project Cinema City
Author: Madhusree Dutta
Publisher:
Total Pages: 557
Release: 2013
Genre: Motion picture industry
ISBN: 9789382381228

Project Cinema City is an anthology of text and image essays, documentation transcripts, maps, graphics, annotated artworks, and films on various configurations of the cinema and the city of Bombay/Mumbai. This volume has evolved out of and is the culmination, in a sense, of Project Cinema City: Research Art and Documentary Practices - an expansive project initiated by Majlis, a center for multidisciplinary art initiatives in Mumbai, and developed over five years, from 2008 to 2012. The contributors to the book include filmmakers, visual artists, designers, architects, photographers, historians and other social scientists. Project Cinema City is primarily a set of inquiries into the labor, imagination, desire, access, spaces, locations, iconization, materiality, languages, moving peoples, viewing conventions, and hidden processes that inform the cinemas the city makes, and also the cities its cinema produces. The inquiries are based on the hypothesis that cinema in the terrain of cinema city is as much everyday practice as it is a part of a speculative desirescape. Hence this volume presents cinema as a manufacturing enterprise that alters through shifts in materials, technologies, labor inflow, distribution territories, demographic patterns and development policies, and the city as a phenomenon that continuously evolves through the interface between lived reality and the reality perceived in cinema. The main aim of this volume is to convey the richness of documentation made through the parent project - a richness that, hopefully, will also convey to the reader the scale and diversity, and the crisis and creativity of the relationship between cinema and city in Bombay. In its free mixing of images, graphics, field notes, information and commentary, the book, quite like the parent project, maintains a work-in-progress status. The book is divided into three sections. The first, Mapping Imaginations: Terrains, Locations, deals with the spatiality, materiality and habitability of the cinema city. The second section, Performing Labour: Bodies, Network, is about the act of producing and the labor that produces - skill, work, character, aspiration, dissent, transgression, duplication, ancillaries - and the myriad ways in which they populate the cinema city. With the death of manufacturing industries in Bombay, the service and entertainment sectors have become the mainstay of aspiration-induced migration to the city. The third section, titled Viewing Limits: Narratives, Technologies, deals with the multiple niches and varied strategies through which cinema is arranged and rearranged in the everyday life of the city and its citizens.

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
Author: William Hollingsworth Whyte
Publisher: Ingram
Total Pages: 125
Release: 2001
Genre: Open spaces
ISBN: 9780970632418

The Social Life Of Small Urban Spaces.

Sociópolis, Project for a City of the Future

Sociópolis, Project for a City of the Future
Author: Vicente Guallart
Publisher:
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2004
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

Sociopolis is a project for the building of a city neighbourhood of public housing in the 21st century. Under the direction of Vicente Guallart, thirteen international architects (Toyo Ito, MVRDV, FOA, François Roche, etc.) propose schemes for the construction of a neighborhood in the city of Valencia, schemes in which a new relationship is posited with the farming and natural environment, thus creating the conditions for a new shared habitat.

Rehabilitating the Old City of Beijing

Rehabilitating the Old City of Beijing
Author: Liangyong Wu
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2011-11-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0774842032

Seventy years of revolution and turmoil have had a severe impact on the miraculous ancient urban form of Beijing, but economic growth since the early 1990s has threatened to deal the coup de grace. In Rehabilitating the Old City of Beijing, Wu Liangyong presents an impassioned plea to turn the tide of demolition and offers a new direction for the planning and development of China's capital. His project for the renewal of the Ju'er Hutong (Chrysanthemum Lane) neighbourhood in the heart of Beijing's Old City takes pride of place in this book. A thoughtful analysis of those aspects of the ancient capital's features, which the project aims to respect and conserve, is followed by a detailed account of the design and development process of the project itself.

The Happiness Project

The Happiness Project
Author: Gretchen Rubin
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2012-06-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1443418196

What if you could change your life--without changing your life? Gretchen had a good marriage, two healthy daughters, and work she loved--but one day, stuck on a city bus, she realized that time was flashing by, and she wasn’t thinking enough about the things that really mattered. “I should have a happiness project,” she decided. She spent the next year test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier. Each month, she pursued a different set of resolutions: go to sleep earlier, quit nagging, forget about results, or take time to be silly. Bit by bit, she began to appreciate and amplify the happiness that already existed in her life. Written with humour and insight, Gretchen’s story will inspire you to start your own happiness project. Now in a beautiful, expanded edition, Gretchen offers a wealth of new material including happiness paradoxes and practical tips on many daily matters: being a more light-hearted parent, sticking to a fitness routine, getting your sweetheart to do chores without nagging, coping when you forget someone’s name and more.