Exploring the Production of Urban Space


Book Description

The ideas of Henri Lefebvre on the production of urban space have become increasingly useful for understanding worldwide post-industrial city transformation. This important book uses new international comparative research to engage critically with Lefebvre’s spatial theories and challenge recent thinking about the nature of urban space. Meticulous research in Vancouver, Lowell MA and Manchester, England, explains how urban public spaces, including differential space, are contested and socially produced. Spatial coalitions, counter-representations and counterprojects are seen as vital elements in such processes. The book contributes critically to the post-industrial city comparative analysis literature. It provides an accessible guide for those who care about cities, public space, city planning and urban policy. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of urban: geography, planning, policy, politics, regeneration and sociology. It will also be relevant for politicians, policy makers and urban activists.




Exploring the Production of Urban Space


Book Description

This important book engages critically with Lefebvre’s spatial theories and challenges recent thinking about the nature of urban space. Research in three iconic post-industrial cities in the UK and North America, explains how urban public spaces, including differential space are socially produced.




Urban Space: experiences and Reflections from the Global South


Book Description

The structuring of Urban Space is as topical as ever in this era of climate change, hyper-urbanisation, post-digital labour markets, and geo-political power shifts. Scholarship of the contemporary urban condition is dominated by studies and examples drawn from the global north. Yet, cities of the global south are distinctive from those of the global north. Socio-political conditions structure patterns and practices of urban reproduction and, in turn, Urban Space reflects conditions in the Global South. Th­e result is different space related outcomes. Th­is is the central topic of this collection. In this book, a unique collection of case study-based accounts posits both English and Spanish academic literature to interpret and reinterpret the appropriation, negotiation and reconfiguration of Urban Space in cities, from Colombia to Namibia. ­This collection will be of particular interest to urban scholars and others interested in contemporary urban change, especially those with an interest in the Global South. Readers will encounter new perspectives on the State’s enduring influence in urban land and territory reconfiguration and the contrasting wider rhetoric that affords and legitimises a key role for the private sector. Th­e case studies also illuminate opportunities and possibilities for grassroots organising to challenge prevailing city actor hierarchies. ­They also highlight the political-economic consequences of particular cases of bus rapid transport projects for spatial and social segregation. Across these and other topics, recurring themes of inequality, governance, and environment are investigated in contested urban terrains. Th­e result is a unique collection of viewpoints, with a common, critical narrative on the present and future challenges facing cities of the Global South.




Manhattan's Public Spaces


Book Description

Manhattan’s Public Spaces: Production, Revitalization, Commodification analyzes a series of architectural works and their contribution to New York’s public space over the past few decades. By exploring a mix of urban mechanisms, supportive frameworks, legal systems, and planning guidelines for the transformation of the city’s collective realm, the text frames Manhattan as a controversial landscape of interests and concerns to authorities, communities, and, very importantly, developers. The production, revitalization, and commodification of Manhattan’s public spaces, as a phenomenon and as a subject of study, also highlights the vicissitudes of the reconciliation of the many different agents, which are part of the process. The challenge of the book does not only lie in the analysis of good design but, more importantly, in how to understand the functional mechanisms for the current trends in the production of space for public use. A complex framework of actors, governance, and market monopolies, which invites the reader to participate in the debate of how these interventions contribute, or not, to an inclusive environment anchored in the existing built fabric. Manhattan’s Public Spaces invites reflection on the revitalization of the city’s shared space from all dimensions. Beautifully illustrated in black and white, with over 50 images, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in architecture, planning, and urban design.




Encountering Urban Places


Book Description

The aesthetics of urban life offer a curious quality, one that is both highly visible and hidden, both openly influencing and subtly imprinting. These aesthetics participate in the production of places; to the way they are built, to their resisting materiality, to their image in people's minds, to advertising and to the way people respond to the place. Exploring the encounter with the aesthetics, images and material design of urban life, this book offers analytic insights into contemporary cities. It shows how photography, maps and videos play a crucial role in bringing aesthetic dimensions into urban studies. This transdisciplinary approach draws on the full spectrum of the visual representation to tie the encounter with the realm of the visual directly and explicitly into the exploration of urban space.




Emerging Urban Spaces


Book Description

This edited collection critically discusses the relevance of, and the potential for identifying conceptual common ground between dominant urban theory projects – namely Neo-Marxian accounts on planetary urbanization and alternative ‘Southern’ post-colonial and post-structuralist projects. Its main objective is to combine different urban knowledge to support and inspire an integrative research approach and a conceptual vocabulary which allows understanding the complex characteristics of diverse emerging urban spaces. Drawing on in-depth case study material from across the world, the different chapters in this volume disentangle planetary urbanization and apply it as a research framework to the context-specific challenges faced by many `ordinary' urban settings. In addition, through their focus on both Northern- and Southern urban spaces, this edited collection creates a truly global perspective on crucial practice-relevant topics such as the co-production of urban spaces, the ‘right to diversity’ and the ‘right to the urban’ in particular local settings.




Reframing the Reclaiming of Urban Space


Book Description

In Reframing the Reclaiming of Urban Space: A Feminist Exploration into Do-It-Yourself Urbanismin Chicago, Megan E. Heim LaFrombois explores the concept of do-it-yourself (DIY) urbanism from an intersectional, feminist, analytical framework. Interventions based on DIY urbanism are small-scale and place-specific and focus on urban spaces which can be reclaimed and repurposed, often outside of formal urban planning institutions. Heim LaFrombois examines the discourses and processes surrounding the institutionalized and embedded nature of DIY urbanism. She weaves together sites and sources to reveal the ways in which DIY urbanists make sense of their participation and experiences with DIY urbanism and with the broader political, social, and economic contexts and spaces in which these activities take place. Her research findings contribute to and build on current research that illustrates the importance of gender, race, class, and sexuality to cities, local politics, urban planning initiatives, and the development of communities.




Urban Encounters


Book Description

Public art is on the urban agenda. Given recent claims about the importance of creativity to urban prosperity, opportunities for installing or performing art in the city have multiplied. As cities strive to appear culturally dynamic, the stakes of artistic production rise higher than ever. Exploring the interaction between art and the public in Canadian cities, Urban Encounters features writing by artists, architects, curators, anthropologists, geographers, and urban studies specialists. They show how people and places affect the structure and content of public artworks, what kinds of urban spaces and socialities are generated through art, and how to investigate and interpret encounters between art and its viewers in the city. Discussing a variety of art forms, including mobile cinemas, street improvisation, audiovisual investigations, and assembled objects, the contributors treat public artworks not just as aesthetic installations, but as agents that participate in the social and cultural evolution of cities. Using original, hands-on approaches, Urban Encounters reveals how art in the urban public space generates encounters that can transform both the city itself and the ways that people relate to it. Contributors include Alison Bain (York University), Robert Bean (NSCAD University), Lawrence Bird (architect, artist), Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (University of Victoria), Brenden Harvey (Dalhousie University), Wes Johnston (artist, curator), Léola Le Blanc (media artist), Brian Lilley (Dalhousie University), Barbara Lounder (NSCAD University), Mary Elizabeth Luka (York University), Sebastian Matthias (HafenCityUniversity), Christof Migone (Western University), Ellen Moffat (media artist), Kim Morgan (NSCAD University), Solomon Nagler (NSCAD University), Martha Radice (Dalhousie University), Nicole Rallis (McMaster University), Susanne Shawyer (Elon University), Shannon Turner (Aarhus University), Laurent Vernet (INRS Urbanisation Culture Société), and Nick Wees (University of Victoria).




Public Places - Urban Spaces


Book Description

Public Places - Urban Spaces is a holistic guide to the many complex and interacting dimensions of urban design. The discussion moves systematically through ideas, theories, research and the practice of urban design from an unrivalled range of sources. It aids the reader by gradually building the concepts one upon the other towards a total view of the subject. The author team explain the catalysts of change and renewal, and explore the global and local contexts and processes within which urban design operates. The book presents six key dimensions of urban design theory and practice - the social, visual, functional, temporal, morphological and perceptual - allowing it to be dipped into for specific information, or read from cover to cover. This is a clear and accessible text that provides a comprehensive discussion of this complex subject.




Urban Space and Cityscapes


Book Description

From the verticals of New York, Hong Kong and Singapore to the sprawls of London, Paris and Jakarta, this interdisciplinary volume of new writing examines constructions, representations, imaginations and theorizations of 'cityscapes' in modern and contemporary culture. With specially-commissioned essays from the fields of cultural theory, architecture, film, literature, visual art and urban geography, it offers fresh insight into the increasingly complex relationship between urban space, cultural production and everyday life. This volume draws on critical urban studies and moves beyond familiar cultural representations of the city by considering urban planning and architecture. Organized under three inter-related themes - image, text and form - essay topics range from the examination of cyberpunk skylines, pagan urbanism and the cinema of urban disaster, to the analysis of iconic city landmarks such as the twin towers, the London Eye and the Judisches Museum Berlin. Covering a diverse range of cities, including Berlin, Chicago, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Paris, and Venice, this fantastic resource for students, scholars and researchers alike, works expertly at the intersections of visual, material, and literary culture.