Imagining Urban Complexity

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Imagining Urban Complexity

Author : Frans-Willem Korsten,Anthony T. Albright
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2024-07-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781040095591

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Imagining Urban Complexity by Frans-Willem Korsten,Anthony T. Albright Pdf

Imagining Urban Complexity introduces passionate and critical perspectives on the link between the humanities and urban studies. It emphasizes tropes, media, and genres as cultural techniques that shape complexity in urban environments by distributing affordances, modes of sensing, and modes of sense-making. Focusing on urban political and cultural dynamics in 24 global cities, the book shows that urban environments are thematized in literature and art, but are also entities that are shaped, perceived, interpreted, and experienced through sense-making techniques that have long been central concerns of the humanities. These techniques, the book argues, activate a dialectic between urban imaginations and cancellations. Tropes, media, and genres are aesthetically and politically powerful: they propel imaginations and open up multiplicities of urban possibilities, they naturalize actualized orders, and they cancel alternatives. The book moves between close readings of city spaces and more systemic and infrastructural approaches to urban environments, providing tools and strategies that can be adapted and extended to understand urban complexity in different cultural and political contexts. The book speaks to global audiences from a continental philosophical tradition. It is relevant to undergraduates, postgraduates, and academic researchers in the fields of critical urban studies, urban design, comparative literature, cultural studies, cultural analysis, ecocriticism, political theory, and ethics.

Imagining Urban Complexity

Author : FRANS-WILLEM. T. ALBRIGHT KORSTEN (ANTHONY.),Anthony T Albright
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2024-07-12
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1032735279

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Imagining Urban Complexity by FRANS-WILLEM. T. ALBRIGHT KORSTEN (ANTHONY.),Anthony T Albright Pdf

Imagining Urban Complexity introduces passionate and critical perspectives on the link between humanities and urban studies. It emphasizes tropes, media, and genres as cultural techniques that shape complexity in urban environments by distributing affordances, modes of sensing, and modes of sense-making. Focusing on urban political and cultural dynamics in 24 global cities, the book shows that urban environments are thematized in literature and art, but are also entities that are shaped, perceived, interpreted, and experienced through sense-making techniques that have long been central to the humanities. These techniques activate a dialectic between urban imaginations and cancellations because tropes, media, and genres are aesthetically and politically powerful: they propel imaginations and open up multiplicities of urban possibilities, they naturalize actualized orders and cancel alternatives. This book moves between close readings of city spaces and more systemic and infrastructural approaches to urban environments, providing tools and strategies that can be adapted and extended to understand urban complexity in different cultural and historical contexts. The book speaks to global audiences from a continental philosophical tradition. It is aimed for scholars and researchers in the field of the Humanities, Social Sciences, Urban Studies, urban complexity, aesthetics, and politics. It is relevant to graduate or postgraduate students in critical urban studies, urban design, comparative literature, art history, cultural studies, cultural analysis, ecocriticism, citizenship, political theory, and ethics.

Planning within Complex Urban Systems

Author : Shih-Kung Lai
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2020-12-18
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781000206227

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Planning within Complex Urban Systems by Shih-Kung Lai Pdf

Imagine living in a city where people could move freely and buildings could be replaced at minimal cost. Reality cannot be further from such. Despite this imperfect world in which we live, urban planning has become integral and critical especially in the face of rapid urbanization in many developing and developed countries. This book introduces the axiomatic/experimental approach to urban planning and addresses the criticism of the lack of a theoretical foundation in urban planning. With the rise of the complexity movement, the book is timely in its depiction of cities as complex systems and explains why planning from within is useful in the face of urban complexity. It also includes policy implications for the Chinese cities in the context of axiomatic/experimental planning theory.

The Urban Planning Imagination

Author : Nicholas A. Phelps
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 202 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2021-04-13
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781509526284

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The Urban Planning Imagination by Nicholas A. Phelps Pdf

Urban planning is not just about applying a suite of systematic principles or plotting out pragmatic designs to satisfy the briefs of private developers or public bodies. Planning is also an activity of imagination, with a stock of wisdom and an array of useful methods for making decisions and getting things done. This critical introduction uncovers and celebrates this imagination and its creative potential. Nicholas A. Phelps explores the key themes and driving questions in the circulation of planning ideas and methods over time and across spaces, identifying the contrasts and commonalities between urban planning systems and cultures. He argues that the tools for inclusive urban planning are today, more than ever, not solely restricted to the hands of planning bodies, but are distributed across citizens, a variety of organizations (what Phelps calls ‘clubs’) and states. As a result, the book sets the ground for the new arrangements between these groups and actors which will be central to the future of urban planning. By unsettling standard accounts, this book compels us towards more critical and creative thinking to ensure that the imagination, wisdom and methods of urban planning are mobilized towards achieving the aspiration of shaping better places.

"Invisible Cities" and the Urban Imagination

Author : Benjamin Linder
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 355 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2022-11-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783031130489

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"Invisible Cities" and the Urban Imagination by Benjamin Linder Pdf

In 1972, Italo Calvino published Invisible Cities, a literary book that masterfully combines philosophy and poetry, rigid structure and free play, theoretical insight and glittering prose. The text is an extended meditation on urban life, and it continues to resonate not only among literary scholars, but among social scientists, architects, and urban planners as well. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Invisible Cities, this collection of essays serves as both an appreciation and a critical engagement. Drawing from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives and geographical contexts, this volume grapples with the theoretical, pedagogical, and political legacies of Calvino’s work. Each chapter approaches Invisible Cities not only as a novel but as a work of evocative ethnography, place-writing, and urban theory. Fifty years on, what can Calvino’s dreamlike text offer to scholars and practitioners interested in actually existing urban life?

The Urban Church Imagined

Author : Jessica M. Barron,Rhys H. Williams
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2017-11-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781479844760

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The Urban Church Imagined by Jessica M. Barron,Rhys H. Williams Pdf

Explores the role of race and consumer culture in attracting urban congregants to an evangelical church The Urban Church Imagined illuminates the dynamics surrounding white urban evangelical congregations’ approaches to organizational vitality and diversifying membership. Many evangelical churches are moving to urban, downtown areas to build their congregations and attract younger, millennial members. The urban environment fosters two expectations. First, a deep familiarity and reverence for popular consumer culture, and second, the presence of racial diversity. Church leaders use these ideas when they imagine what a “city church” should look like, but they must balance that with what it actually takes to make this happen. In part, racial diversity is seen as key to urban churches presenting themselves as “in touch” and “authentic.” Yet, in an effort to seduce religious consumers, church leaders often and inadvertently end up reproducing racial and economic inequality, an unexpected contradiction to their goal of inclusivity. Drawing on several years of research, Jessica M. Barron and Rhys H. Williams explore the cultural contours of one such church in downtown Chicago. They show that church leaders and congregants’ understandings of the connections between race, consumer culture, and the city is a motivating factor for many members who value interracial interactions as a part of their worship experience. But these explorations often unintentionally exclude members along racial and classed lines. Indeed, religious organizations’ efforts to engage urban environments and foster integrated congregations produce complex and dynamic relationships between their racially diverse memberships and the cultivation of a safe haven in which white, middle-class leaders can feel as though they are being a positive force in the fight for religious vitality and racial diversity. The book adds to the growing constellation of studies on urban religious organizations, as well as emerging scholarship on intersectionality and congregational characteristics in American religious life. In so doing, it offers important insights into racially diverse congregations in urban areas, a growing trend among evangelical churches. This work is an important case study on the challenges faced by modern churches and urban institutions in general.

Urban Disasters and the Roman Imagination

Author : Virginia M. Closs,Elizabeth Keitel
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2020-09-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783110674736

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Urban Disasters and the Roman Imagination by Virginia M. Closs,Elizabeth Keitel Pdf

This book affords new perspectives on urban disasters in the ancient Roman context, attending not just to the material and historical realities of such events, but also to the imaginary and literary possibilities offered by urban disaster as a figure of thought. Existential threats to the ancient city took many forms, including military invasions, natural disasters, public health crises, and gradual systemic collapses brought on by political or economic factors. In Roman cities, the memory of such events left lasting imprints on the city in psychological as well as in material terms. Individual chapters explore historical disasters and their commemoration, but others also consider of the effect of anticipated and imagined catastrophes. They analyze the destruction of cities both as a threat to be forestalled, and as a potentially regenerative agent of change, and the ways in which destroyed cities are revisited — and in a sense, rebuilt— in literary and social memory. The contributors to this volume seek to explore the Roman conception of disaster in terms that are not exclusively literary or historical. Instead, they explore the connections between and among various elements in the assemblage of experiences, texts, and traditions touching upon the theme of urban disasters in the Roman world.

Imagining Urban Futures

Author : Carl Abbott
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2016-09-13
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780819576729

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Imagining Urban Futures by Carl Abbott Pdf

What science fiction can teach us about urban planning Carl Abbott, who has taught urban studies and urban planning in five decades, brings together urban studies and literary studies to examine how fictional cities in work by authors as different as E. M. Forster, Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, and China Miéville might help us to envision an urban future that is viable and resilient. Imagining Urban Futures is a remarkable treatise on what is best and strongest in urban theory and practice today, as refracted and intensely imagined in science fiction. As the human population grows, we can envision an increasingly urban society. Shifting weather patterns, rising sea levels, reduced access to resources, and a host of other issues will radically impact urban environments, while technology holds out the dream of cities beyond Earth. Abbott delivers a compelling critical discussion of science fiction cities found in literary works, television programs, and films of many eras from Metropolis to Blade Runner and Soylent Green to The Hunger Games, among many others.

Fuzzy Planning

Author : Mr Geoff Porter,Professor Gert de Roo
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2012-11-28
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781409487395

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Fuzzy Planning by Mr Geoff Porter,Professor Gert de Roo Pdf

Many of the key notions associated with spatial planning are essentially ‘fuzzy’ in their nature. For example, while almost everyone accepts ‘sustainability’ as an important goal of planning, the actions of the actors involved can render the achieved ‘sustainability’ minimal, or even counterproductive. Putting forward an innovative way of looking at planning problems and policies, this volume suggests actor-consulting is important in addressing the fuzzy nature of planning. A tool to address differences in understanding, actor-consulting is based on an analysis of actor motives, perceptions and contributions. By inviting all actors to express their desired, actual and potential contributions to achieving an agreed outcome to a local policy issue, decision-makers have a means to develop their goals in line with the roles, motivation, perception and behaviour of the various actors involved. Including contributions from Patsy Healy, Johan Woltjer, Don Miller and Karel Martens, the book presents a variety of case studies which demonstrate the use of the actor-consulting model in addressing planning issues.

The Venice Variations

Author : Sophia Psarra
Publisher : UCL Press
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2018-04-30
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9781787352391

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The Venice Variations by Sophia Psarra Pdf

From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability – how we imagine better urban environments – remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time. Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city – Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital – Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic ‘algorithm’, that is, a structure with a small number of rules capable of producing a large number of variations. The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the ‘model city’ that endured a thousand years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other ‘Venices’ for the future.

Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy

Author : Mary E. Mills
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2012-10-26
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780567592149

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Urban Imagination in Biblical Prophecy by Mary E. Mills Pdf

This volume brings together aspects of contemporary study of cultural geography and selected passages from prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament. The aim is to identify how the image of the city helps to construct meaning inside the biblical material. In order to carry out this task relevant textual narratives are analysed and then read from the viewpoint of space, place and urban studies. This latter category includes the works of Lefebvre, Bachelard, Soja, Massey, Amin and Thrift and Pile, among others. A major finding is that urban imagination is a tool by which the texts manage the experience of political and social events in a time of radical change.

The Tribal Imagination

Author : Robin Fox
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 428 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2011-03-08
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780674263567

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The Tribal Imagination by Robin Fox Pdf

We began as savages, and savagery has served us well—it got us where we are. But how do our tribal impulses, still in place and in play, fit in the highly complex, civilized world we inhabit today? This question, raised by thinkers from Freud to Lévi-Strauss, is fully explored in this book by the acclaimed anthropologist Robin Fox. It takes up what he sees as the main—and urgent—task of evolutionary science: not so much to explain what we do, as to explain what we do at our peril. Ranging from incest and arranged marriage to poetry and myth to human rights and pop icons, Fox sets out to show how a variety of human behaviors reveal traces of their tribal roots, and how this evolutionary past limits our capacity for action. Among the questions he raises: How real is our notion of time? Is there a human “right” to vengeance? Are we democratic by nature? Are cultural studies and fascism cousins under the skin? Is evolutionary history coming to an end—or just getting more interesting? In his famously informative and entertaining fashion, drawing links from Volkswagens to Bartók to Woody Guthrie, from Swinburne to Seinfeld, Fox traces our ongoing struggle to maintain open societies in the face of profoundly tribal human needs—needs which, paradoxically, hold the key to our survival.

Imaging the City

Author : Jr. Warner
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 542 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2021-12-17
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781000661866

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Imaging the City by Jr. Warner Pdf

Planners face a controversial task because their professional role requires them to be spokespersons for the public interest. In a welter of conflicting pictures and voices, how might the public interest be discovered? Once identified, how might it be expressed so that competing publics attend to it? There are no easy answers, but the experience of planners today suggests ways of working and innovations of promise.The focus on planning practice prompted the editors to analyze images that are now at work in our cities. For Vale and Warner, all city design and constructions offer material that people should include in images of their environment. The built and building city are part of the experience of all city dwellers; it is theirs to incorporate, interpret, or ignore. Essays included in this text trace the interplay between physical objects of planners and architects and the social experience and outlooks of image makers and their audiences.Imaging the City explores urban image making from civic boosterism of medieval cities to iconic imagery of Times Square. Vale and Warner bring together urban historians, geographers, city planners, architects, and cultural commentators to analyze the creation of urban imagery from the signature skyscrapers of Kuala Lumpur to the re-creation of the South Bronx and the use of city images in film, literature, television, and on the Internet. Urban dwellers, urban planners, architects, municipal officials, sociologists, urban historians - all will perceive their worlds with a heightened sense of awareness after reading this book.

The Image of the City

Author : Kevin Lynch
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 1964-06-15
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 0262620014

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The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch Pdf

The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.

Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies

Author : Patsy Healey
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 343 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2006-12-15
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9781134180080

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Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies by Patsy Healey Pdf

Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies develops important new relational and institutionalist approaches to policy analysis and planning, of relevance to all those with an interest in cities and urban areas. Well-illustrated chapters weave together conceptual development, experience and implications for future practice and address the challenge of urban and metropolitan planning and development. Useful for students, social scientists and policy makers, Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies offers concepts and detailed cases of interest to those involved in policy development and management, as well as providing a foundation of ideas and experiences, an account of the place-focused practices of governance and an approach to the analysis of governance dynamics. For those in the planning field itself, this book re-interprets the role of planning frameworks in linking spatial patterns to social dynamics with twenty-first century relevance.