'Peter J. Taylor has produced a sweeping, empirically grounded, defense of cities as fundamental building blocks of long-term, large scale social structures; a way of freeing social science from state-centric bias; and indeed, mankind's hope. However, the single greatest strength of this complex, seductive, argument is the insistence on treating cities relationally, as process. Here the key to understanding the significance of cities is by studying them in terms of the dynamic networks they form and in their relations to states.' - Richard E. Lee, Binghamton University, US Accepting that cities are extraordinary, this book provides an original city-centred narrative of human creativity, past, present and future. In this innovative, ambitious and wide-ranging book, Peter Taylor demonstrates that cities are the epicenters of human advancement. In exploring cities as sites through which economies flourish, by harnessing the creative potential of myriad communication networks, the author considers cities from varying temporal and spatial perspectives. Four stories of cities are told: the origins of city networks; the domination of cities by world-empires; the genesis of a singular modern creative interval in which innovation culminates in today s globalised cities; and finally, the need for cities to act as centres for human creativity to produce a more resilient global society in the current crisis century. Providing a long-term view through which to consider the role of cities in attending to incipient crises of the twenty-first century, this closely argued thesis will prove essential for students and scholars of urban studies, geography and sociology, and all those with a professional interest in, or personal fascination for, cities. Contents: Preface Part I: Setting Down and Setting Up 1. A Cities' Perspective 2. Conceptual Toolkits Part II: Narrative I: Beginning Conjectures 3. City and State Beginnings: Western Asia's Great Creative Interlude 4. Geographies of Beginning Creative Interludes Part III: Narrative II: World-systems 5. Normal History 6. Making the Modern World-system: Western Europe's Great Creative Interlude Part IV: Narrative III: Prospective Conjectures - Where Are We and Where Are We Going? 7. Working in an Urban World 8. Towards Green Networks of Cities for the Twenty-first Century References Index

City Life from Jakarta to Dakar focuses on the politics incumbent to this process ? an "anticipatory politics" ? that encompasses a wide range of practices, calculations and economies. As such, the book is not a collection of case studies on a specific theme, not a review of developmental problems, nor does it marshal the focal cities as evidence of particular urban trends. Rather, it examines how possibilities, perhaps inherent in these cities all along, are materialized through the everyday projects of residents situated in the city and the larger world in very different ways.

Presenting social innovation initiatives that emerged from organized citizenry in Southern European cities, this book explores the response to austerity policies implemented after the 2008 economic crisis. Chapters look at the common aim of these initiatives in responding to social needs and challenging social exclusion. Social Innovation and Urban Governance offers an empirically informed theoretical discussion on the scope of citizen action when members of civil society or emancipator social movements organise to contribute to local democratic governance and to enlarge the reach of social welfare. Contributions highlight how, starting from innovative actions in individual urban neighbourhoods, social actors created opportunities for participation in society and organised from below to collaborate with local institutions in 'bottom-linked' forms of governance. A timely exploration of the importance of social innovation in urban settings, this is a useful book for scholars of urban studies as well as sociology and human geography. It will also be an insightful read for urban policy-makers. Contributors include: A.B. Cano Hila, F. Diaz Orueta, S. Eizaguirre Anglada, M. Garcia Cabeza, L. Garcia Ferrando, M.L. Loures Seoane, M. Pradel I Miquel, R. Ruiz Sola

This original collection examines how architectural ideas, social models and building forms circulate round the world and become mediated and adapted to local conditions. The book shows how types such as skyscrapers, mosques or living history museums are imported, adapted and contested in different societies and how urban landscapes are reshaped by the global circulation of models drawn from elsewhere.

Written by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds -architecture, anthropology, geography, linguistics, science studies and sociology - the book draws its inspiration from a series of different approaches and offers both original theoretical reflection and carefully crafted case-studies.

Historical archaeologists often become so involved in their potsherd patterns they seldom have time or energy left to address the broader processes responsi ble for the material culture patterns they recognize. Some ofus haveurged our colleagues to use the historical record as a springboard from which to launch hypotheses with which to better understand the behavioral and cultural pro cesses responsible for the archaeological record. Toooften, this urging has re sulted in reports designed like a sandwich, having a slice of "historical back ground," followed by a totally different "archaeological record," and closed with a weevil-ridden slice of "interpretation" of questionable nutritive value for understanding the past. The reader is often left to wonder what the archae ological meat had to do with either slice of bread, since the connection be tween the documented history and the material culture is left to the reader's imagination, and the connection between the interpretation and the other disparate parts is tenuous at best. The plethora of stale archaeological sandwiches in the literature has re sulted at the methodological level from a too-narrow focus on the specific history and archaeology ofa site and the individuals involvedon it, rather than a focus on the explanation of broader processes of culture to which the actors and events at the site-specific level responded."

European cities: Modernity, race and colonialism is a multidisciplinary collection of scholarly studies which rethink European urban modernity from a race-conscious perspective, being aware of (post-)colonial entanglements. The twelve original contributions empirically focus on such various cities as Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Cottbus, Genoa, Hamburg, Madrid, Mitrovica, Naples, Paris, Sheffield, and Thessaloniki, engaging multiple combinations of global urban studies, from various historical perspectives, with postcolonial, decolonial and critical race studies. Primarily inspired by the notion of Provincializing Europe (Dipesh Chakrabarty) the collection interrogates dominant, Eurocentric theories, representations and models of European cities across the East-West divide, offering the reader alternative perspectives to understand and imagine urban life and politics. With its focus on Europe, this book ultimately contributes to decades of rigorous critical race scholarship on varied global urban regions. European cities is a vital reading for anyone interested in the complex interactions between colonial legacies and constructions of 'modernity', in view of catering to social change and urban justice. -- .

The world's urban population now exceeds the world's rural population. What does this mean for the state of our cities, given the strain this global demographic shift is placing upon current urban infrastructures? Following on from previous State of the World's Cities reports, this edition uses the framework of 'The Urban Divide' to analyze the complex social, political, economic and cultural dynamics of urban environments. In particular, the book focuses on the concept of the 'right to the city' and ways in which many urban dwellers are excluded from the advantages of city life, using the framework to explore links among poverty, inequality, slum formation and economic growth. The volume will be essential reading for all professionals and policymakers in the field, as well as a valuable resource for researchers and students in all aspects of urban development. Published with UN-Habitat.

Beirut is the cultural, commercial and economic hub of Lebanon. But to what extent has the city affected and shaped the formation and perceptions of Lebanese national identity? Ghenwa Hayek here explores how anxieties over the past, present and future of Beirut have been articulated through a sense of dislocation present in Lebanese writing since the 1960s. Drawing on theories of cultural studies, geography and history, the author uses an interdisciplinary framework to explore the role that spaces - from rural to urban - have played and continue to play in the defining, and re-defining, of national identity in the seventy years since the creation of the Lebanese nation state. This theoretical perspective coupled with a close reading of little-explored contemporary writings lead Hayek to question the predominant assumption that Lebanese novelists only became engaged in discourses about place identity and individual and social belonging with the start of the fifteen-year civil war and the destruction of Beirut's city centre. Instead, the book shows that particular geographical imaginaries have been mobilized to describe, question and debate Lebanese identity since the 1960s and that some go back even further into the late nineteenth century. This re-reading calls for a re-evaluation of some of the most predominant assumptions about Lebanon and the processes of Lebanese identity formation across the country's modern history. Examining a wide range of modern and contemporary literature, Hayek charts the rise to cultural prominence of the city of Beirut as a significant player in shaping perceptions of Lebanese culture and identity.

The concept of the 'smart city' as the confluence of urban planning and technological innovation has become a predominant feature of public policy discourse. Despite its expanding influence, however, there is little consensus on the precise meaning of a 'smart city'. One reason for this ambiguity is that the term means different things to different disciplines. For some, the concept of the 'smart city' refers to advances in sustainability and green technologies. For others, it refers to the deployment of information and communication technologies as next generation infrastructure. This volume focuses on a third strand in this discourse, specifically technology driven changes in democracy and civic engagement. In conjunction with issues related to power grids, transportation networks and urban sustainability, there is a growing need to examine the potential of 'smart cities' as 'democratic ecologies' for citizen empowerment and user-driven innovation. What is the potential of 'smart cities' to become platforms for bottom-up civic engagement in the context of next generation communication, data sharing, and application development? What are the consequences of layering public spaces with computationally mediated technologies? Foucault's notion of the panopticon, a metaphor for a surveillance society, suggests that smart technologies deployed in the design of 'smart cities' should be evaluated in terms of the ways in which they enable, or curtail, new urban literacies and emergent social practices.

From fuelwood in developing countries to the disposal of nuclear waste, energy issues have long been at the heart of the sustainability debate. Also taking in cities and transport, the Energy and Infrastructure set of volumes tackles a diverse array of questions with enduring relevance for current policy and technology. In the last two decades, environmental threats and the challenge of sustainability have moved to the very centre of political, business and, increasingly, personal agendas. The Earthscan Library Collection has been created to bring back into print the seminal texts in sustainability from the past 25 years. The Collection offers a unique opportunity to gain broad, archival coverage of all aspects of sustainability. It allows the individual as well as institutional purchaser the ability to acquire volumes by many of the most well-respected thinkers and authors across the subject.

The stereotype of Africa as a predominantly 'natural' space ignores the existence of vibrant and cosmopolitan urban environments on the continent. Far from merely embodying backwardness and lack, African cities are sites of complex and diverse cultural productions which participate in modernity and its dynamics of global flows and exchanges. This volume merges the concerns of urban, literary and cultural studies by focusing on the flows and exchanges of texts and textual elements. By analysing how texts such as popular and canonical fiction, popular music, self-help pamphlets, graffiti, films, journalistic writing, rumours and urban legends engage with the problems of citizenship, self-organisation and survival, the collection shows that despite all the problems of Africa, its cities continue to engender forward-looking creativity and hope. The texts collected here belong to several different genres themselves, and they are authored by both distinguished and younger scholars, based in and outside of Africa. The volume explores the textualities emerging from the cities of Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Above all, it calls for an end to disabling hierarchical categorisations of both texts and cities.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Previously published as a special issue of Policy Studies, this volume demonstrates the vitality of the field of urban politics and presents future challenges for urban political research in the years ahead. If it does not already, the population of cities will very soon make up more than half the global population. As the global urban population continues to expand, the challenges facing urban politics grow with it. How do we understand the relationship between politics and urban policy? What are the political challenges facing citizens and politicians in a radically unequal developing country like South Africa? How are patterns of urban governance institutionalised? How might we understand the changing relationship between hierarchies, markets and networks? And is it possible to develop a genuinely comparative urban politics in countries as different as Canada, South Africa and Bangladesh? Drawing together the work of new and established scholars from the UK, Canada, the US and South Africa in an impressive and wide ranging collection of articles, this book demonstrates the contribution of urban scholarship to answering these questions.

This book, authored by K-4 elementary educators, working at a publicly funded non-profit charter school, illustrates the power of culturally responsive teaching and learning as it becomes embedded in the New York State Education Curriculum. Educators, families, and community members contributed to this unique program with the goal of enhancing learning environments by applying the languages and cultures of their students in their classrooms. Strong, carefully attentive, school leadership encouraged culturally responsive teaching and learning with the belief that children in this urban, economically stressed area could demonstrate significant academic and social/emotional gains. Readers of this book will witness culturally responsive lessons, family interviews, and whole school events that honor languages and cultures represented in the school. Sample classrooms' culturally responsive lessons tied to the curriculum, are presented. Additionally, qualitative and quantitative student academic and affective gains are analyzed. Moreover, this book clearly demonstrates the talents, vision, and compassionate care given to children and their families by exceptional educators. A CRTL Montage was created for this book. It includes classrooms, children, teachers, family, and community members. Teachers collected CRTL experiences and presented them to Producer, Dean Meghan Miller and Director, Designer, Dean Pamela Smith. They also received support for the montage from Instructor Allen Lauricella, and Graduate Assistant Elizabeth Kenny, Syracuse University, Newhouse School.

This extensive review of urban policy explores the interaction of urban policy with changing perspectives on urban life and social welfare.
An extensive review of urban policy since the 1960s.
Examines a broad range of issues, such as race, economic regeneration and competitiveness, managing dangerous places, community and managerialism.
The theme-based structure provides a new and innovative approach to the subject.
Written in a clear, accessible style with pedagogic features to appeal to students from a range of disciplines.

An encompassing socio-historical survey of the political and sociological nature of groups, communities and societies. A transdisciplinary study of crowds, masses and groups as historical, sociological, psychological and psychosocial phenomena. A unique combination of sociology, psychoanalysis and group analysis in the study of social formations. An inquiry into the enigma of crowds and mass psychology with the history of group analytic and group relations' advances in England, especially the study of large groups in the research on group processes. A comprehensive presentation of the social unconscious theory in association with the study of large groups and the Incohesion theory as new group analytic tools for understanding contemporary crowds and masses. In today's world, flooded by social conflicts and polarizations and the mass impact of social media, this book enables the reader to map out the field of the unconscious life of crowds illuminating the darkness of twenty-first century collective movements.

Randstad Holland is the urbanized western part of the Netherlands. It contains the four largest cities of the country: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. The name Randstad (rim city) refers to the distinctive shape of the conurbation, a horseshoe of cities around an open agricultural and recreational area, known as the Green Heart. This book analyzes the restructuring of the region. The volume summarizes the research of the Urban Networks research program. The discussion is focused on four themes: housing, labor market and employment, infrastructure and transportation, and the provision of public services. The Randstad is internationally known as the playground of urban and regional planners. Their debates on present policy issues are extensively reviewed in the book. Teachers and students of urban change and planning, and policy makers and planners in The Netherlands and abroad will find much valuable information in this book.

Urban space has emerged as the central organizing construct in studies of the post-modern metropolis. Contributors to this volume write on how urban space is used and contested by different social groups, how urban space is transformed by the changing economic relationships manifested in the new world order, and how urban space is defined by those who use and study it.

Targeted federal aid to needy city areas is difficult to maintain because of political pressure to broaden geographical coverage for continued legislative support, i.e., aid becomes distributive rather than targeted. The effectiveness of a program declines because of the broadening of the program, if all else remains constant. With the last such program, the Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG), the geographic broadening did not occur, which contributed to its termination by Congress. This book details the political pressure and the effectiveness of the UDAG program. It further examines specific events, both legislative and administrative, which tended to lessen the impact of the targeted program.

Around 1900 cities in Southern and Eastern Europe were persistently labeled "backward" and "delayed." Allegedly, they had no alternative but to follow the role model of the metropolises, of London, Paris or Vienna. This edited volume fundamentally questions this assumption. It shows that cities as diverse as Barcelona, Berdyansk, Budapest, Lviv, Milan, Moscow, Prague, Warsaw and Zagreb pursued their own agendas of modernization. In order to solve their pressing problems with respect to urban planning and public health, they searched for best practices abroad. The solutions they gleaned from other cities were eclectic to fit the specific needs of a given urban space and were thus often innovative. This applied urban knowledge was generated through interurban networks and multi-directional exchanges. Yet in the period around 1900, this transnational municipalism often clashed with the forging of urban and national identities, highlighting the tensions between the universal and the local. This interurban perspective helps to overcome nationalist perspectives in historiography as well as outdated notions of "center and periphery." This volume will appeal to scholars from a large number of disciplines, including urban historians, historians of Eastern and Southern Europe, historians of science and medicine, and scholars interested in transnational connections.

Landman studies four communally-oriented settings in Washington's urban environment. Through ethnographic field work she learned that cooperation, sociability, and self management overcame the common urban challenges posed by isolation and largely impersonal, single purpose contact with others. The settings were a cooperative food store, a cooperative bakery, community gardens, and a cooperatively owned low-cost housing project. Landman shows how the participants in these economically related activities are socially bound together in a web of relations considered unusual in large American cities, and how these exceptionally connected urban lives prove very satisfactory.

What has happened to cities after the global economic recession? Sustaining Cities answers this question by explaining how failed governmental policies contributed to urban problems and offering best practices for solving them. From social scientists and urban planners to architects and literary and film critics, the authors of this unique collection suggest real responses to this crisis. Could the drastic declines in housing markets have been avoided? Yes, if we reframe our housing values. Do you want to attract corporate investment to your town? You might want to think twice about doing so. The extinction of the "Celtic Tiger" may be charted in statistics, but the response in popular Irish mystery novels is much more compelling. China, while not immune to market vicissitudes, still booms, but at a considerable cost to its urban identities. Whether constructing a sustainable social framework for Mexican mega-cities or a neighborhood in London, these nine essays consider some strikingly similar strategies. And perhaps, as the contributors suggest, it's time to look beyond the usual boundaries of urban, suburban, and exurban to forge new links among these communities that will benefit all citizens. Accessible to anyone with an interest in how cities cope today, Sustaining Cities presents a cautionary tale with a hopeful ending. |What has happened to cities after the global economic recession? Sustaining Cities answers this question by explaining how failed governmental policies contributed to urban problems and offering best practices for solving them. From social scientists and urban planners to architects and literary and film critics, the authors of this unique collection suggest real responses to this crisis. Could the drastic declines in housing markets have been avoided? Yes, if we reframe our housing values. Do you want to attract corporate investment to your town? You might want to think twice about doing so. The extinction of the "Celtic Tiger" may be charted in statistics, but the response in popular Irish mystery novels is much more compelling. China, while not immune to market vicissitudes, still booms, but at a considerable cost to its urban identities. Whether constructing a sustainable social framework for Mexican mega-cities or a neighborhood in London, these nine essays consider some strikingly similar strategies. And perhaps, as the contributors suggest, it's time to look beyond the usual boundaries of urban, suburban, and exurban to forge new links among these communities that will benefit all citizens. Accessible to anyone with an interest in how cities cope today, Sustaining Cities presents a cautionary tale with a hopeful ending.

Edited by thought leaders in the fields of urban informatics and urban interaction design, this book brings together case studies and examples from around the world to discuss the role that urban interfaces, citizen action, and city making play in the quest to create and maintain not only secure and resilient, but productive, sustainable and viable urban environments. The book debates the impact of these trends on theory, policy and practice. The individual chapters are based on blind peer reviewed contributions by leading researchers working at the intersection of the social / cultural, technical / digital, and physical / spatial domains of urbanism scholarship. The book will appeal not only to researchers and students, but also to a vast number of practitioners in the private and public sector interested in accessible content that clearly and rigorously analyses the potential offered by urban interfaces, mobile technology, and location-based services in the context of engaging people with open, smart and participatory urban environments.

With the rise of wealth inequalities, our cities are changing dramatically. This collection critically engages with and advances existing debates on the super-rich and their roles in these transformations. An interdisciplinary range of contributions from international experts including sociologists, geographers, historians, discourse analysts, and urban studies specialists reveal crucial aspects of the real estate investment practices of the super-rich, their social spaces in the city as well as the distinct influence of the super-rich on the transformation of four key cities: London, Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong. By drawing together diverse disciplines, perspectives, and experiences across different geographical contexts, this book offers a fresh, comparative, and nuanced take on the super-rich and the 1% city, as well as a solid, empirically and theoretically grounded basis to think about future research questions and policy implications.

Exploring the relationships between qualitative research and social change, this book asks how social change is informed and influenced by research. Examples discussed are from research practice and experiences in the fields of sociology, social work, professional practice, education, criminal justice and anthropology.