As the 20th Century progressed, urban housing became quite homogenized throughout the world. Apartment buildings in Sao Paulo are very similar to those in Seoul, Moscow, and even Chicago. It is clear that the modernist architectural vocabulary made famous by the so-called "International style" has gone much beyond corporation identity buildings and prevails in the housing sector in most of the urbanized world. According to a study supported by the United Nations Habitat (ANGEL, 2000), residential buildings - although varying in size, shape and construction materials - now take on one of four basic forms: the single family house, the row house, the walk-up apartment building and the high-rise. This book is the result of almost a decade of research on multi-family buildings, known worldwide as apartments. The main goal is to investigate the extent to which those buildings are or are not alike, or whether the similarities are more visual than experiential.

This book offers cutting-edge thinking on contemporary urban spaces.The devastation brought upon New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent levee system failure has forced urban theorists to revisit the fundamental question of urban geography and planning: What is a city? Is it a place of memory embedded in architecture, a location in regional and global networks, or an arena wherein communities form and reproduce themselves?Planners, architects, policymakers, and geographers from across the political spectrum have weighed in on how best to respond to the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina. The twelve contributors to ""What Is a City?"" are a diverse group from the disciplines of anthropology, architecture, geography, philosophy, planning, public policy studies, and sociology, as well as community organizing. They believe that these conversations about the fate of New Orleans are animated by assumptions and beliefs about the function of cities in general.They unpack post-Katrina discourse, examining what expert and public responses tell us about current attitudes not just toward New Orleans, but toward cities. As volume coeditor Phil Steinberg points out in his introduction, ""Even before the floodwaters had subsided...scholars and planners were beginning to reflect on Hurricane Katrina and its disastrous aftermath, and they were beginning to ask bigger questions with implications for cities as a whole.""The experience of catastrophe forces us to reconsider not only the material but the abstract and virtual qualities of cities. It requires us to revisit how we think about, plan for, and live in them.