In the contemporary moment, smart cities have become the dominant paradigm for urban planning and administration, which involves weaving the urban fabric with digital technologies. Recently, however, the promises of smart cities have been gradually supplanted by recognition of their inherent inequalities, and scholars are increasingly working to envision alternative smart cities. Informed by these pressing challenges, Digital (In)Justice in the Smart City foregrounds discussions of how we should think of and work towards urban digital justice in the smart city. It provides a deep exploration of the sources of injustice that percolate throughout a range of sociotechnical assemblages, and it questions whether working towards more just, sustainable, liveable, and egalitarian cities requires that we look beyond the limitations of "smartness" altogether. The book grapples with how geographies impact smart city visions and roll-outs, on the one hand, and how (unjust) geographies are produced in smart pursuits, on the other. Ultimately, Digital (In)Justice in the Smart City envisions alternative cities - smart or merely digital - and outlines the sorts of roles that the commons, utopia, and the law might take on in our conceptions and realizations of better cities.

In Food City, a companion piece to Smartcities and Eco-Warriors, innovative architect and urban designer CJ Lim explores the issue of urban transformation and how the creation, storage and distribution of food has been and can again become a construct for the practice of everyday life. Food City investigates the reinstatement of food at the core of national and local governance -- how it can be a driver to restructure employment, education, transport, tax, health, culture, communities, and the justice system, re-evaluating how the city functions as a spatial and political entity. Global in scope, Food City first addresses the frameworks of over 25 international cities through the medium of food and how the city is governed. It then provides a case study through drawings, models, and text, exploring how a secondary infrastructure could function as a living environmental and food system operating as a sustainable stratum over the city of London. This case study raises serious questions about the priorities of our governing bodies, using architectural relationships to reframe the spaces of food consumption and production, analyzed through historical precedent, function and form. This study of the integration of food, architecture, and the development of future cities will both inspire and stimulate professionals and students in the fields of urban design and architecture.

Place-Keeping presents the latest research and practice on place-keeping - that is, the long-term management of public and private open spaces - from around Europe and the rest of the world. There has long been a focus in urban landscape planning and urban design on the creation of high-quality public spaces, or place-making. This is supported by a growing body of research which shows how high-quality public spaces are economically and socially beneficial for local communities and contribute positively to residents' quality of life and wellbeing. However, while large amounts of capital are spent on the creation of open spaces, little thought is given to, and insufficient resources made available for, the long-term maintenance and management of public spaces, or place-keeping. Without place-keeping, public spaces can fall into a downward spiral of disrepair where anti-social behaviour can emerge and residents may feel unsafe and choose to use other spaces. The economic and social costs of restoring such spaces can therefore be considerable where place-keeping does not occur. Place-Keeping also provides an accessible presentation of the outputs of a major European Union-funded project MP4: Making Places Profitable, Public and Private Open Spaces which further extends the knowledge and debate on long-term management of public and private spaces. It will be an invaluable resource for students, academics and practitioners seeking critical but practical guidance on the long-term management of public and private spaces in a range of contexts.

This is the first book ever to examine the architecture and urbanism of the Persian Gulf as a complete entity, dealing equally with conditions on the eastern Iranian shoreline as in Arabic countries on the western side. By inviting a range of architects and scholars to write about historical and contemporary influences on 14 cities along both Gulf coastlines, the book traces the changes in architecture and human settlement in relation to environmental factors and particularity of place. It provides an innovative contribution to the study of architecture and globalisation through a detailed investigation of this particular region, investigating how buildings and cities are being shaped as a result. A set of thematic essays at the end offer important insights into issues of globalisation, urbanism and environmental design, drawing from the experience of the Persian Gulf. The outcome is a unique record of the Gulf in the early-21st century at a point when global capitalism is making major inroads and yet questions of architectural design, climate change, ecological sustainability, cultural identity and so-called 'Facebook Democracy' are likewise shaking up the Middle Eastern region. The book thus offers a fresh reading of the architecture and urbanism of a fascinating and often contradictory region, while also showing how globalisation can be analysed in a more engaged and integrated manner.

Which new institutions do we need in order to trigger local- and global sustainable urban development? Are cities the right starting points for implementing sustainability policies? If so, what are the implications for city management? This book reflects the situation of cities in the context of global change and increasing demands for sustainable development. The book introduces core findings, new methods, and international experience related to sustainability innovations and the social transformation of cities, synthesizing insights from megacity research, sustainability science, and urban planning. Written by a team of more than fifty leading researchers and practitioners from all five continents, it traces general urban transformations and introduces new approaches such as: smart growth strategies; cross-sectoral, transdisciplinary urban transition management; rubanisation; and city syntegration. The book reveals the potential of new, networked agencies of sustainability transformation, and discusses the role of science institutions in the diffusion and implementation of institutional and social innovations. This comprehensive book is of immense value to students, researchers, and professionals working on issues of sustainable development, in environmental programs in human geography, planning and the built environment, sociology and policy studies, institutional economics, and environmental politics.

The town hall or city hall as a place of local governance is historically related to the founding of cities in medieval Europe. As the space of representative civic authority it aimed to set the terms of public space and engagement with the citizenry. In subsequent centuries, as the idea and built form travelled beyond Europe to become an established institution across the globe, the parameters of civic representation changed and the town hall was forced to negotiate new notions of urbanism and public space. City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space utilizes the town hall in its global historical incarnations as bases to probe these changing ideas of urban public space. The essays in this volume provide an analysis of the architecture, iconography, and spatial relations that constitute the town hall to explore its historical ability to accommodate the "public" in different political and social contexts, in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and the Americas, as the relation between citizens and civic authority had to be revisited with the universal franchise, under fascism, after the devastation of the world wars, decolonization, and most recently, with the neo-liberal restructuring of cities. As a global phenomenon, the town hall challenges the idea that nationalism, imperialism, democracy, the idea of citizenship - concepts that frame the relation between the individual and the body politic -- travel the globe in modular forms, or in predictable trajectories from the West to East, North to South. Collectively the essays argue that if the town hall has historically been connected with the articulation of bourgeois civil society, then the town hall as a global spatial type -- architectural space, urban monument, and space of governance -- holds a mirror to the promise and limits of civil society.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of the role of property investment and development in the urban regeneration process. It relates the physical, economic, financial and environmental aspects of urban change and development to the realities of particular cities by case studies drawn from Britain and Europe.

Residents and visitors in today's Seattle would barely recognize the landscape that its founding settlers first encountered. As the city grew, its leaders and inhabitants dramatically altered its topography to accommodate their changing visions. In Too High and Too Steep, David B. Williams uses his deep knowledge of Seattle, scientific background, and extensive research and interviews to illuminate the physical challenges and sometimes startling hubris of these large-scale transformations, from the filling in of the Duwamish tideflats to the massive regrading project that pared down Denny Hill. In the course of telling this fascinating story, Williams helps readers find visible traces of the city's former landscape and better understand Seattle as a place that has been radically reshaped. Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=af51FU8hHLI Too High and Too Steep was made possible in part by a grant from 4Culture's Heritage Program.

Temporal Urban Design: Temporality, Rhythm and Place examines an alternative design approach, focusing on the temporal aesthetics of urban places and the importance of the sense of time and rhythm in the urban environment. The book departs from concerns on the acceleration of cities, its impact on the urban quality of life and the liveability of urban spaces, and questions on what influences the sense of time, and how it expresses itself in the urban environment. From here, it poses the questions: what time is this place and how do we design for it? It offers a new aesthetic perspective akin to music, brings forward the methodological framework of urban place-rhythmanalysis, and explores principles and modes of practice towards better temporal design quality in our cities. The book demonstrates that notions of time have long been intrinsic to planning and urban design research agendas and, whilst learning from philosophy, urban critical theory, and both the natural and social sciences debate on time, it argues for a shift in perspective towards the design of everyday urban time and place timescapes. Overall, the book explores the value of the everyday sense of time and rhythmicity in the urban environment, and discusses how urban designers can understand, analyse and ultimately play a role in the creation of temporally unique, both sensorial and affective, places in the city. The book will be of interest to urban planners, designers, landscape architects and architects, as well as urban geographers, and all those researching within these disciplines. It will also interest students of planning, urban design, architecture, urban studies, and of urban planning and design theory.

This book explicates the relationships between design thinking, critical making, and socially responsive technical communication. It leverages the recent technology-powered DIY culture called "the Maker Movement" to identify how citizen innovation can inform cutting-edge social innovation that advocates for equitable change and progress on today's "wicked" problems. After offering a succinct account of the origin and recent history of design thinking, along with its connections to the design paradigm in writing studies, the book analyzes maker culture and its influences on innovation and education through an ethnographic study of three academic makerspaces. It offers opportunities to cultivate a sense of critical changemaking in technical communication students and practitioners, showcasing examples of socially responsive innovation and expert interviews that urge a disciplinary attention to social justice advocacy and an embrace of the design-thinking principle of radical collaboration. The value of design thinking methodologies for teaching and practicing socially responsible technical communication are demonstrated as the author argues for a future in the field that sees its constituents as leaders in radical innovation to solve wicked social problems. This book is essential reading for instructors, students, and practitioners of technical communication, and can be used as a supplemental text for graduate and undergraduate courses in usability and user-centered design and research.

This book is an investigation of the cultural phenomenon of branding and its transformational effects on the contemporary spatial - and urban - reality. It develops a novel understanding of the rationale behind the construction of large-scale architectural complexes that relate to corporate brands, and of its tremendous cultural effects. The author suggests that what we see today is the creation of "global mass ornaments", of a thorough ornamentalization of the entire globe. The origins of this are discussed with regard to examples of corporate brand-building from Europe and China (Autostadt Wolfsburg, BMW Welt Munich and Anting New Town). Additional cases are several simulated spaces in Berlin and the space-branding activities of companies like Apple or Prada. Theoretically, the author develops an innovative poststructuralist framework, combining ideas from Gilles Deleuze with the space philosophy of Peter Sloterdijk. He analyzes how the corporate redefinition of space makes the city enter into a mode of virtual urbanity. This idea leads to a notion of a "global urban" and, ultimately, the "global mass ornament". This concept of a global mass ornament is developed here with reference to Sloterdijk's concept of a world of "spheres". The latter is used to understand the new mode of spatiality of mediatized spaces. The book makes the point that our world is involved in a process of mass ornamentalization that has only just begun. The concept of the global mass ornament is the first to come to grips with a culture in which branding is effectively changing the physiognomy of the earth. The global mass ornament is a banner for a cultural transformation that employs architecture, sign theory and mechanisms borrowed from traditional advertising and from social media, as well as social processes - and that we have yet to properly understand. This book is a significant step forward in this respect.

This book develops tools and techniques that will help urban residents gain access to urban computing. Metaphorically speaking, it is taking computing to the street by giving the general public - rather than just researchers and professionals - the power to leverage available city infrastructure and create solutions tailored to their individual needs. It brings together five articles that are based on presentations given at the Street Computing Workshop held on 24 November 2009 in Melbourne in conjunction with the Australian Computer-Human Interaction conference (OZCHI 2009). This volume focuses on applying urban informatics, urban and community sensing and open application programming interfaces (APIs) to the public space through the delivery of online services, on demand and in real time. It then offers a case study of how the city of Singapore has harnessed the potential of an online infrastructure so that residents and visitors can access services electronically. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology.

Knighted in 1998 'for services to the Town and Country Planning Association', and in 2003 named by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II as a 'Pioneer in the Life of the Nation', Peter Hall is internationally renowned for the breadth and depth of his studies and writings on urban and regional planning. For the last 50 years, he has captured and helped to create the 'planning imagination'. Here the editors have brought together in five themes a series of critical reflections on Peter's vast and diverse contributions. Those reflections are provided by colleagues familiar with his work. The five parts are devoted to Peter Hall's breadth of academic work, covering the history of cities and planning, London, spatial planning, connectivity and mobility, and urban globalization. Finally, as a sixth part, the editors have asked Peter Hall himself to reflect on his career and the sources of his imagination. The story this book tells is not one of a singular, totally consistent theoretical and philosophical view elaborated over several decades. Rather it covers a set of views that necessarily admits signs of Peter's inconsistency and imperfection over the years - the insights and imperfections that inevitably accompany the exercise of a nonetheless remarkably fertile, restless and inspiring planning imagination.

First published in 1987, this title was one of the first to explore the emerging popular movement of Community Architecture, championed by Prince Charles, which gained momentum throughout Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. The conceptual framework rests fundamentally on the principle that the built environment is most effective when those who live in a particular area are actively engaged with its creation and daily administration. A work that has influenced policy makers and planning legislation, "Community Architecture" remains one of the key reference works for student architects and planners.

In this book, Lori Brown examines the relationship between space, defined physically, legally and legislatively, and how these factors directly impact the spaces of abortion. It analyzes how various political entities shape the physical landscapes of inclusion and exclusion to reproductive healthcare access, and questions what architecture's responsibilities are in respect to this spatial conflict. Employing writing, drawing and mapping methodologies, this interdisciplinary project explores restrictions and legislatures which directly influence abortion policy in the US, Mexico and Canada. It questions how these legal rulings produce spatial complexities and why architecture isn't more culturally and spatially engaged with these spaces. In Mexico, where abortion is fully legal only in Mexico City during the first trimester, women must travel vast distances and undergo extreme conditions in order to access the procedure. Conservative state governments continue to make abortion a severely punishable crime. In Canada, there are nowhere near the cultural and religious stigmas to abortion as in the US and Mexico. Completely legal and without restrictions, Canada offers an important contrast to the ongoing abortion issues within the US and Mexico. Researching the spatial implications of such a politicized space, this book expands beyond a study of abortion clinic and includes other spaces such as women's shelters and hospitals that require multiple levels of secured spaces in order to discuss the spatial ramifications of access and security within spaces that are highly personal, private, and sometimes secret or even hidden. In questioning what architecture's responsibility is in these spatial conflicts, the book looks at how what architecture 'does' can be used to reconsider the spaces and security around such contested places, and ultimately suggests what design's potential impact might be. In doing so, it shows how architecture's role might be redefined within social and spatial practices.

Historically, we see the city as the cramped, crumbling core of development and culture, and the suburb as the vast outlying wasteland - convenient, but vacant. Contemporary urban design proves this wrong. In New SubUrbanisms, Judith De Jong explains the on-going "flattening" of the American Metropolis, as suburbs are becoming more like their central cities - and cities more like their suburbs through significant changes in spatial and formal practice as well as demographic and cultural changes. These revisionist practices are exemplified in the emergence of hybrid sub/urban conditions such as parking practices, the residential densification of suburbia, hyper-programmed public spaces and inner city big-box retail, among others. Each of these hybridized conditions reflects to varying degrees the reciprocating influences of the urban and the suburban. Each also offers opportunities for innovation in new formal and spatial practices that re-configure conventional understandings of urban and suburban, and in new ways of forming the evolving American metropolis. Based on this new understanding, De Jong argues for the development of new ways of building the city. Aimed at students and practitioners of urban design and planning New SubUrbanisms attempts to re-frame the contemporary metropolis in a way that will generate more instrumental engagement - and ultimately, better design.

Today's most pressing challenges require behaviour change at many levels, from the city to the individual. This book focuses on the collective influences that can be seen to shape change. Exploring the underlying dimensions of behaviour change in terms of consumption, media, social innovation and urban systems, the essays in this book are from many disciplines, including architecture, urban design, industrial design and engineering, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, waste management and public policy. Aimed especially at designers and architects, Motivating Change explores the diversity of current approaches to change, and the multiple ways in which behaviour can be understood as an enactment of values and beliefs, standards and habitual practices in daily life, and more broadly in the urban environment.

Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia, is a former colony of the British Empire which today prides itself in being a multicultural society par excellence. However, the Islamisation of the urban landscape, which is at the core of Malaysia's decolonisation projects, has marginalised the Chinese urban spaces which were once at the heart of Kuala Lumpur. Engaging with complex colonial and postcolonial aspects of the city, from the British colonial era in the 1880s to the modernisation period in the 1990s, this book demonstrates how Kuala Lumpur's urban landscape is overwritten by a racial agenda through the promotion of Malaysian Architecture, including the world-famous mega-projects of the Petronas Twin Towers and the new administrative capital of Putrajaya. Drawing on a wide range of Chinese community archives, interviews and resources, the book illustrates how Kuala Lumpur's Chinese spaces have been subjugated. This includes original case studies showing how the Chinese re-appropriated the Kuala Lumpur old city centre of Chinatown and Chinese cemeteries as a way of contesting state's hegemonic national identity and ideology. This book is arguably the first academic book to examine the relationship of Malaysia's large Chinese minority with the politics of architecture and urbanism in Kuala Lumpur. It is also one of the few academic books to situate the Chinese diaspora spaces at the centre of the construction of city and nation. By including the spatial contestation of those from the margins and their resistance against the state ideology, this book proposes a recuperative urban and architectural history, seeking to revalidate the marginalised spaces of minority community and re-script them into the narrative of the postcolonial nation-state.

Today's most pressing challenges require behaviour change at many levels, from the city to the individual. This book focuses on the collective influences that can be seen to shape change. Exploring the underlying dimensions of behaviour change in terms of consumption, media, social innovation and urban systems, the essays in this book are from many disciplines, including architecture, urban design, industrial design and engineering, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, waste management and public policy. Aimed especially at designers and architects, Motivating Change explores the diversity of current approaches to change, and the multiple ways in which behaviour can be understood as an enactment of values and beliefs, standards and habitual practices in daily life, and more broadly in the urban environment.

Transcultural Cities uses a framework of transcultural placemaking, cross-disciplinary inquiry and transnational focus to examine a collection of case studies around the world, presented by a multidisciplinary group of scholars and activists in architecture, urban planning, urban studies, art, environmental psychology, geography, political science, and social work. The book addresses the intercultural exchanges as well as the cultural trans-formation that takes place in urban spaces. In doing so, it views cultures not in isolation from each other in today's diverse urban environments, but as mutually influenced, constituted and transformed. In cities and regions around the globe, migrations of people have continued to shape the makeup and making of neighborhoods, districts, and communities. For instance, in North America, new immigrants have revitalized many of the decaying urban landscapes, creating renewed cultural ambiance and economic networks that transcend borders. In Richmond, BC Canada, an Asian night market has become a major cultural event that draws visitors throughout the region and across the US and Canadian border. Across the Pacific, foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong transform the deserted office district in Central on weekends into a carnivalesque site. While contributing to the multicultural vibes in cities, migration and movements have also resulted in tensions, competition, and clashes of cultures between different ethnic communities, old-timers, newcomers, employees and employers, individuals and institutions. In Transcultural Cities Jeffrey Hou and a cross-disciplinary team of authors argue for a more critical and open approach that sees today's cities, urban places, and placemaking as vehicles for cross-cultural understanding.

Britain's planning system began as 'town and country planning' to repair the ravages of unplanned industrialism and promote ideal environments for the future. Steering a course between left and right, public control and for-profit development, it survived successive booms and busts, broadening to include new concerns like ecology, conservation and community participation. By the 1986, when this book was first published, the system's survival beyond the year 2000 was in doubt. It did endure, but it is now under serious threat from the right, which sees it as obstructing enterprise and the restoration of 'growth'. It has been stripped of some of its core aims and mechanisms, while as yet there is no agenda distinguishing growth that will be sustainable from growth which self-evidently is not. The Government of Space was written as a concise guide for the non-specialist to the origins and evolution of British planning, its intellectual pedigree, achievements and cruxes. It is an invaluable background to the state of planning and the cases for and against it today.

Received the Environmental Design Research Association's 2014 Place Book Award

Shortlisted for the UDG Francis Tibbalds Book Award 2014

Good cities are places of social encounter. Creating public spaces that encourage social behavior in our cities and neighborhoods is an important goal of city design. One of the cardinal roles of the street, as public space, is to provide a setting for sociability.

How do we make sociable streets? This book shows us how these ordinary public spaces can be planned and designed to become settings that support an array of social behaviors. Through carefully crafted research, "The Street" systematically examines people's actions and perceptions, develops a comprehensive typology of social behaviors on the neighborhood commercial street and provides a thorough inquiry into the social dimensions of streets.

Vikas Mehta shows that sociability is not a result of the physical environment alone, but is achieved by the relationships between the physical environment, the land uses, their management, and the places to which people assign special meanings.

Scholars and students of urban design, planning, architecture, geography and sociology will find the book a stimulating resource. The material is also directly applicable to practice and should be widely read by professional urban designers, planners, architects, and others involved in the design, planning, and implementation of commercial streets.

By the late nineteenth century, the city had become the dominant social environment of Britain, with the majority of the population living in large cities, often with over 100, 000 inhabitants. The central concern of this book, first published in 1976, is to assess how successful the late Victorians were in creating a stimulating social environment whilst these developing cities were being transformed into modern industrial and commercial centres. Using Bristol as a case study, Helen Meller analyses the new relationships brought about by mass urbanisation, between city and citizen, environment and society. The book considers a variety of important features of the Victorian city, in particular the development of the main cultural institutions, the provision of leisure facilities by voluntary societies and the expansion of activities such as music, sport and commercial entertainment. Comparative examples are drawn from other cities, which illustrate the common social and cultural values of an urbanised nation. This is a very interesting title, of great relevance to students and academics of town planning, Victorian society, and the history and development of the modern city.

Which new institutions do we need in order to trigger local- and global sustainable urban development? Are cities the right starting points for implementing sustainability policies? If so, what are the implications for city management? This book reflects the situation of cities in the context of global change and increasing demands for sustainable development. The book introduces core findings, new methods, and international experience related to sustainability innovations and the social transformation of cities, synthesizing insights from megacity research, sustainability science, and urban planning. Written by a team of more than fifty leading researchers and practitioners from all five continents, it traces general urban transformations and introduces new approaches such as: smart growth strategies; cross-sectoral, transdisciplinary urban transition management; rubanisation; and city syntegration. The book reveals the potential of new, networked agencies of sustainability transformation, and discusses the role of science institutions in the diffusion and implementation of institutional and social innovations. This comprehensive book is of immense value to students, researchers, and professionals working on issues of sustainable development, in environmental programs in human geography, planning and the built environment, sociology and policy studies, institutional economics, and environmental politics.

Following the disaster of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, people began to discuss and visualize the ways in which the urban structure of the city could be reorganized. Rather than defining the disaster recovery process as simply a matter of rebuilding the existing city, these voices called for a more radical rethinking of the city's physical, social and environmental systems. This idea of disaster as an opportunity for urban restructuring is a hallmark of a "design moment." Design moments are different from the incremental process of urban growth and development. Instead of gradual growth and change, design moments present the opportunity for a significant restructuring of urban form that can shape the city for decades to come. As such, a design moment presents a critical juncture in the historical growth and development of a city. In this book we explore the question: what does urban design have to do with a disaster like Hurricane Katrina? Focused on New Orleans, the authors explore different dimensions of the post-disaster design moment, including the politics of physical redevelopment, the city's history and identity, justice and the image of the city, demolition and housing development, and the environmental aspects of the recovery process. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Urban Design.