Advancing Urban Rights


Book Description

How can the set of rights that underpin the notion of the "right to the city" be advanced? In seeking answers to this question over several decades, social mobilizations have been assembled and new political and legal frameworks promoted. New interpretations and political articulations of the right to the city, especially those that have emerged since the end of the 2000s, encourage us to view it through the lens of identity politics. They propose that attention should be given to the diversity of the social groups that live in urban environments, whose voice and agency must be recognized in the construction of the city in the interests of equality and social justice. ​ Addressing these issues not only involves recognizing and valuing the subjects that have historically been marginalized in the construction of urban space, both physical and symbolic. It also means bearing in mind that the city materializes and is experienced in a different way by the different groups that inhabit it through their practices, uses of it and, in short, how their daily life takes shape. Advancing Urban Rights will help both concerned citizens and policy makers identify and analyze redistribution and recognition policies, institutional change, and social production of the city in an increasingly urban world.




Global Urban Justice


Book Description

Provides theoretical and practical insights into how the new phenomenon of human rights cities contributes to global urban justice.




Advancing Urban Sustainability in China and the United States


Book Description

In November 2018, National Academy of Sciences (NAS) President Marcia McNutt visited China for the first time in her official role. As part of this visit, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Science and Technology for Sustainability (STS) program and the Chinese Academy of Sciences organized a one-day workshop relating to urban sustainability in Beijing. The goal of the visit was to begin to explore some areas where the U.S. National Academies and the Chinese Academy might develop collaboration. At the same time, the trip provided an opportunity to develop links to other parts of the science and technology community in China. To further elucidate some of these issues and build upon current partnerships, an expert committee under the STS program, in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, organized a one-day public workshop on urban sustainability in China and the United States, held on December 16, 2019. The workshop focused on the intersection of urban climate change mitigation and adaptation, urban health, and sustainable transportation, including green infrastructure and urban flooding in both countries. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.




Urban Outcasts


Book Description

Breaking with the exoticizing cast of public discourse and conventional research, Urban Outcasts takes the reader inside the black ghetto of Chicago and the deindustrializing banlieue of Paris to discover that urban marginality is not everywhere the same. Drawing on a wealth of original field, survey and historical data, Loïc Wacquant shows that the involution of America's urban core after the 1960s is due not to the emergence of an 'underclass', but to the joint withdrawal of market and state fostered by public policies of racial separation and urban abandonment. In European cities, by contrast, the spread of districts of 'exclusion' does not herald the formation of ghettos. It stems from the decomposition of working-class territories under the press of mass unemployment, the casualization of work and the ethnic mixing of populations hitherto segregated, spawning urban formations akin to 'anti-ghettos'. Comparing the US 'Black Belt' with the French 'Red Belt' demonstrates that state structures and policies play a decisive role in the articulation of class, race and place on both sides of the Atlantic. It also reveals the crystallization of a new regime of marginality fuelled by the fragmentation of wage labour, the retrenchment of the social state and the concentration of dispossessed categories in stigmatized areas bereft of a collective idiom of identity and claims-making. These defamed districts are not just the residual 'sinkholes' of a bygone economic era, but also the incubators of the precarious proletariat emerging under neoliberal capitalism. Urban Outcasts sheds new light on the explosive mix of mounting misery, stupendous affluence and festering street violence resurging in the big cities of the First World. By specifying the different causal paths and experiential forms assumed by relegation in the American and the French metropolis, this book offers indispensable tools for rethinking urban marginality and for reinvigorating the public debate over social inequality and citizenship at century's dawn.




Advancing Urban Rights


Book Description




Architecture & Human Rights


Book Description

Revealing how architects can use human rights as powerful tools for better, fairer urban planning - to create livable, sustainable cities of the future.







Saving America's Cities


Book Description

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.




Dialogues in Urban and Regional Planning 6


Book Description

The Dialogues in Urban and Regional Planning series offers a selection of some of the best scholarship in urban and regional planning from around the world. The internationally recognized authors of these award-winning papers take up a range of salient issues from the theory and practice of planning. This 6th volume incorporates essays that explore the salient issue commonly referred to as "The Right to the City." This theme speaks to a growing new movement within planning theory and practice with multiple aims and strategies but with the common objective of advancing a more just and equitable world. The right to the city functions as a manifesto advancing academic explorations of the opportunities for, and barriers to, expanding human and environmental justice. At the same time, it extends beyond academic inquiry to engage directly with the policy, legal and political dimensions of human rights. The right to the city has been invoked by global bodies such as United Nations-Habitat and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to bolster not only their agendas around fundamental human rights but advance urban policies promoting inclusion, sustainability, and resilience. Dialogues 6 offers engaging explorations into the academic expeditions by the global planning community that have helped to energize this movement. The papers assembled here through processes of peer review represent an invaluable collection to untangle the complexities of this dynamic new approach to urban and regional planning. The Dialogues in Urban and Regional Planning (DURP) series is published in association with the Global Planning Education Association Network (GPEAN) and its member national and transnational planning schools associations.




Dialogues in Urban and Regional Planning 6


Book Description

The Dialogues in Urban and Regional Planning series offers a selection of some of the best scholarship in urban and regional planning from around the world. The internationally recognized authors of these award-winning papers take up a range of salient issues from the theory and practice of planning. This 6th volume incorporates essays that explore the salient issue commonly referred to as "The Right to the City." This theme speaks to a growing new movement within planning theory and practice with multiple aims and strategies but with the common objective of advancing a more just and equitable world. The right to the city functions as a manifesto advancing academic explorations of the opportunities for, and barriers to, expanding human and environmental justice. At the same time, it extends beyond academic inquiry to engage directly with the policy, legal and political dimensions of human rights. The right to the city has been invoked by global bodies such as United Nations-Habitat and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to bolster not only their agendas around fundamental human rights but advance urban policies promoting inclusion, sustainability, and resilience. Dialogues 6 offers engaging explorations into the academic expeditions by the global planning community that have helped to energize this movement. The papers assembled here through processes of peer review represent an invaluable collection to untangle the complexities of this dynamic new approach to urban and regional planning. The Dialogues in Urban and Regional Planning (DURP) series is published in association with the Global Planning Education Association Network (GPEAN) and its member national and transnational planning schools associations.