The Caring City


Book Description

In this important contribution to urban studies, Juliet Davis makes the case for a more ethical and humane approach to city development and management. With a range of illustrative case studies, the book challenges the conventional and neoliberal thinking of urban planners and academics, and explores new ways to correct problems of inequality and exclusion. It shows how a philosophy of caring can improve both city environments and communities. This is an original and powerful theory of urban care that can promote the wellbeing of our cities’ many inhabitants.




Care and the City


Book Description

Care and the City is a cross-disciplinary collection of chapters examining urban social spaces, in which caring and uncaring practices intersect and shape people’s everyday lives. While asking how care and uncare are embedded in the urban condition, the book focuses on inequalities in caring relations and the ways they are acknowledged, reproduced, and overcome in various spaces, discourses, and practices. This book provides a pathway for urban scholars to start engaging with approaches to conceptualize care in the city through a critical-reflexive analysis of processes of urbanization. It pursues a systematic integration of empirical, methodological, theoretical, and ethical approaches to care in urban studies, while overcoming a crisis-centered reading of care and the related ambivalences in care debates, practices, and spaces. These strands are elaborated via a conceptual framework of care and situated within broader theoretical debates on cities, urbanization, and urban development with detailed case studies from Europe, the Americas, and Asia. By establishing links to various fields of knowledge, this book seeks to systematically introduce debates on care to the interconnecting fields of urban studies, planning theory, and related disciplines for the first time.




Planning for the Caring City


Book Description

As the world has become increasingly urbanised and planetary well-being ever more threatened, questions have emerged over just what the priorities should be for how we live in cities. Clearly for many the current ways of planning and managing city environments are not working, given so many of their human and non-human inhabitants struggle on a daily basis to maintain their well-being and survival. Different approaches to city development are crucial if they are to be inclusive places where all can thrive. Ensuring that cities are safe and sustainable and provide a level of care for all their residents places a significant mandate on those who manage cities and on planners in particular. This book examines all the parts of the city where care needs to be incorporated, how we plan, create nurturing environments, include all who live there, build sensitively, support meaningful livelihoods, and enable compassionate governance. With planners in mind this book examines why care is needed in the urban environment, and drawing on real world examples examines how it can be applied in an effective and empowering fashion.




Cities and Gender


Book Description

Men and women experience the city differently: in relation to housing assets, use of transport, relative mobility, spheres of employment and a host of domestic and caring responsibilities. An analysis of urban and gender studies, as co-constitutive subjects, is long overdue. Cities and Gender is a systematic treatment of urban and gender studies combined. It presents both a feminist critique of mainstream urban policy and planning and a gendered reorientation of key urban social, environmental and city-regional debates. It looks behind the ‘headlines’ on issues of transport, housing, uneven development, regeneration and social exclusion, for instance, to account for the ‘hidden’ infrastructure of everyday life. The three main sections on 'Approaching the City', 'Gender and Built Environment' and, finally, 'Representation and Regulation' explore not only the changing environments, working practices and household structures evident in European and North American cities today, but also those of the global south. International case studies alert the reader to stark contrasts in gendered life-chances (differences between north and south as well as inequalities and diversity within these regions) while at the same time highlighting interdependencies which globally thread through the lives of women and men as the result of uneven development. This book introduces the reader to previously neglected dimensions of gendered critical urban analysis. It sheds light, through competing theories and alternative explanations, on recent transformations of gender roles, state and personal politics and power relations; across intersecting spheres: of home, work, the family, urban settlements and civil society. It takes a household perspective alongside close scrutiny of social networks, gender contracts, welfare regimes and local cultural milieu. In addition to providing the student with a solid conceptual grounding across broad structures of production, consumption and social reproduction, the argument cultivates an interdisciplinary awareness of, and dialogue between, the everyday issues of urban dwellers in affluent and developing world cities. The format of the book means that included with each chapter are key definitions, ‘boxed’ concepts and case study evidence along with specifically tailored learning activities and further reading. This is both a timely and trenchant discussion that has pertinence for students, scholars and researchers.




Matters of Care


Book Description

To care can feel good, or it can feel bad. It can do good, it can oppress. But what is care? A moral obligation? A burden? A joy? Is it only human? In Matters of Care, María Puig de la Bellacasa presents a powerful challenge to conventional notions of care, exploring its significance as an ethical and political obligation for thinking in the more than human worlds of technoscience and naturecultures. Matters of Care contests the view that care is something only humans do, and argues for extending to non-humans the consideration of agencies and communities that make the living web of care by considering how care circulates in the natural world. The first of the book’s two parts, “Knowledge Politics,” defines the motivations for expanding the ethico-political meanings of care, focusing on discussions in science and technology that engage with sociotechnical assemblages and objects as lively, politically charged “things.” The second part, “Speculative Ethics in Antiecological Times,” considers everyday ecologies of sustaining and perpetuating life for their potential to transform our entrenched relations to natural worlds as “resources.” From the ethics and politics of care to experiential research on care to feminist science and technology studies, Matters of Care is a singular contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary debate that expands agency beyond the human to ask how our understandings of care must shift if we broaden the world.




Designing Urban Transformation


Book Description

While designers possess the creative capabilities of shaping cities, their often-singular obsession with form and aesthetics actually reduces their effectiveness as they are at the mercy of more powerful generators of urban form. In response to this paradox, Designing Urban Transformation addresses the incredible potential of urban practice to radically change cities for the better. The book focuses on a powerful question, "What can urbanism be?" by arguing that the most significant transformations occur by fundamentally rethinking concepts, practices, and outcomes. Drawing inspiration from the philosophical movement known as Pragmatism, the book proposes three conceptual shifts for transformative urban practice: (a) beyond material objects: city as flux, (b) beyond intentions: consequences of design, and (c) beyond practice: urbanism as creative political act. Pragmatism encourages us to consider how we can make deeper and more systemic changes and how urbanism itself can be a design strategy for such transformations. To illuminate how these conceptual shifts operate in vastly different contexts through analysis of transformative urban initiatives and projects in Belo Horizonte, Boston, Cairo, Karachi, Los Angeles, New Delhi, and Paris. The book is a rare integration of theory and practice that proposes essential ways of rethinking city-design-and-building processes, while drawing critical lessons from actual examples of such processes.




Care and Design


Book Description

Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities connects the study of design with care, and explores how concepts of care may have relevance for the ways in which urban environments are designed. It explores how practices and spaces of care are sustained specifically in urban settings, thereby throwing light on an important arena of care that current work has rarely discussed in detail.




Critical Care


Book Description

How architecture and urbanism can help to care for and repair a broken planet: essays and illustrated case studies. Today, architecture and urbanism are capital-centric, speculation-driven, and investment-dominated. Many cannot afford housing. Austerity measures have taken a disastrous toll on public infrastructures. The climate crisis has rendered the planet vulnerable, even uninhabitable. This book offers an alternative vision in architecture and urbanism that focuses on caring for a broken planet. Rooted in a radical care perspective that always starts from the given, in the midst of things, this edited collection of essays and illustrated case studies documents ideas and practices from an extraordinarily diverse group of contributors. Focusing on the three crisis areas of economy, ecology, and labor, the book describes projects including village reconstruction in China; irrigation in Spain; community land trust in Puerto Rico; revitalization of modernist public housing in France; new alliances in informal settlements in Nairobi; and the redevelopment of traditional building methods in flood areas in Pakistan. Essays consider such topics as ethical architecture, land policy, creative ecologies, diverse economies, caring communities, and the exploitation of labor. Taken together, these case studies and essays provide evidence that architecture and urbanism have the capacity to make the planet livable, again. Essays by Mauro Baracco, Sara Brolund de Carvalho, Jane Da Mosto, Angelika Fitz, Hélène Frichot, Katherine Gibson, Mauro Gil-Fournier Esquerra, Valeria Graziano, Gabu Heindl, Elke Krasny, Lisa Law, Ligia Nobre, Meike Schalk, Linda Tegg, Ana Carolina Tonetti, Kim Trogal, Joan C. Tronto, Theresa Williamson, Louise Wright Case studies aaa atelier d'architecture autogérée, Ayuntamiento BCN, Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury/Urbana, Cíclica [Space.Community.Ecology] + CAVAA arquitectes, Care+Repair Tandems Vienna (including Gabu Heindl, Zissis Kotionis + Phoebe Giannisi, rotor, Meike Schalk + Sara Brolund de Carvalho, Cristian Stefanescu, Rosario Talevi and many others), Colectivo 720, Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, EAHR Emergency Architecture & Human Rights, Fideicomiso de la Tierra del Caño Martín Peña CLT, Anna Heringer, Anupama Kundoo, KDI Kounkuey Design Initiative, Lacaton & Vassal, Yasmeen Lari, muf architecture/art, Paulo Mendes da Rocha + MMBB, RUF Rural Urban Framework, Studio Vlay Streeruwitz, De Vylder Vinck Taillieu, Xu Tiantian/DnA_Design and Architecture, ZUsammenKUNFT Berlin Copublished with Architekturzentrum Wien




The Works


Book Description

A fascinating guided tour of the ways things work in a modern city “It's a rare person who won't find something of interest in The Works, whether it's an explanation of how a street-sweeper works or the view of what's down a manhole.” —New York Post Have you ever wondered how the water in your faucet gets there? Where your garbage goes? What the pipes under city streets do? How bananas from Ecuador get to your local market? Why radiators in apartment buildings clang? Using New York City as its point of reference, The Works takes readers down manholes and behind the scenes to explain exactly how an urban infrastructure operates. Deftly weaving text and graphics, author Kate Ascher explores the systems that manage water, traffic, sewage and garbage, subways, electricity, mail, and much more. Full of fascinating facts and anecdotes, The Works gives readers a unique glimpse at what lies behind and beneath urban life in the twenty-first century.




Journey Toward the Caring Classroom


Book Description

Describes how to create an effective learning environment in which students share common interests and goals.