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Staging the New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics of Urban Reinvention Post-1989

Claire Colomb, University College London

This book explores the politics of place marketing and the process of ‘urban reinvention’ in Berlin between 1989 and 2011. In the context of the dramatic socio-economic restructuring processes, changes in urban governance and physical transformation of the city following the Fall of the Wall, the ‘new’ Berlin was not only being built physically, but staged for visitors and Berliners and marketed to the world through events and image campaigns which featured the iconic architecture of large-scale urban redevelopment sites. Public–private partnerships were set up specifically to market the ‘new Berlin’ to potential investors, tourists, Germans and the Berliners themselves. The book analyzes the images of the city and the narrative of urban change, which were produced over two decades. In the 1990s three key sites were turned into icons of the ‘new Berlin’: the new Potsdamer Platz, the new government quarter, and the redeveloped historical core of the Friedrichstadt. Eventually, the entire inner city was ‘staged’ through a series of events which turned construction sites into tourist attractions. New sites and spaces gradually became part of the 2000s place marketing imagery and narrative, as urban leaders sought to promote the ‘creative city’. By combining urban political economy and cultural approaches from the disciplines of urban politics, geography, sociology and planning, the book contributes to a better understanding of the interplay between the symbolic ‘politics of representation’ through place marketing and the politics of urban development and place making in contemporary urban governance.

Claire Colomb is Senior Lecturer in Urban Sociology and European Spatial Planning at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London (UCL). She holds a first degree in Politics and Sociology from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences-Po) and a PhD in Town Planning from UCL. Her research interests include urban governance, planning and urban policies in European cities (the UK, France, Germany and Spain); culture and urban regeneration; European spatial planning; and trans-boundary cooperation between cities and regions in Europe and the Mediterranean. She is joint author of European Spatial Planning and Territorial Cooperation (Routledge, 2010).

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City and Soul in Divided Societies

Scott A. Bollens, University of California, Irvine

In this unique book Scott A. Bollens combines personal narrative with academic analysis in telling the story of inflammatory nationalistic and ethnic conflict in nine cities – Jerusalem, Beirut, Belfast, Johannesburg, Nicosia, Sarajevo, Mostar, Bilbao, and Barcelona. Reporting on 17 years of research and over 240 interviews with political leaders, planners, architects, community representatives, and academics, he blends personal reflections, reportage from a wealth of original interviews, and the presentation of hard data in a multidimensional and interdisciplinary exploration of these urban environments of damage, trauma, healing, and repair.

City and Soul in Divided Societies reveals what it is like living and working in these cities, going inside the head of the researcher. This approach extends the reader’s understanding of these places and connects more intimately with the lived urban experience. Bollens observes that a city disabled by nationalistic strife looks like a sterile landscape of buildings, roads and prisoners, frozen in time and in place. Yet, the soul in these cities perseveres.

Written for general readers and academic specialists alike, City and Soulintegrates facts, opinions, photographs, and observations in original ways in order to illuminate the substantial challenges of living in, and governing, polarized and unsettled cities.

Scott A. Bollens is Professor of Urban Planning at the University of California, Irvine, where he holds the Warmington Chair in Peace and International Cooperation.

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Planning Asian Cities: Risks and Resilience

Edited by Stephen Hamnett and Dean Forbes

In Asian Cities: Risks and Resilience, Stephen Hamnett and Dean Forbes have brought together some of the region’s most distinguished urbanists to explore the planning history and recent development of Pacific Asia’s major cities.

They show how globalization, and the competition to achieve global city status, has had a profound effect on all these cities. Tokyo is an archetypal world city. Singapore, Hong Kong and Seoul have acquired world city characteristics. Taipei and Kuala Lumpur have been at the centre of expanding economies in which nationalism and global aspirations have been intertwined and expressed in the built environment.  Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai have played key, sometimes competing, roles in China’s rapid economic growth. Bangkok’s amenity economy is currently threatened by political instability, while Jakarta and Manila are the core city-regions of less developed countries with sluggish economies and significant unrealized potential.

But how resilient are these cities to the risks that they face? How can they manage continuing pressures for development and growth while reducing their vulnerability to a range of potential crises? How well prepared are they for climate change? How can they build social capital, so important to a city’s recovery from shocks and disasters? What forms of governance and planning are appropriate for the vast mega-regions that are emerging? And, given the tradition of top-down, centralized, state-directed planning which drove the economic growth of many of these cities in the last century, what prospects are there of them becoming more inclusive and sensitive to the diverse needs of their populations and to the importance of culture, heritage and local places in creating liveable cities?

Stephen Hamnett is Emeritus Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of South Australia, Adelaide. He is also a Commissioner of the Environment, Resources and Development Court of South Australia.

Dean Forbes is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (International and Communities) and Vice-President at Flinders University, Adelaide. He is an urbanist with a special interest in knowledge-based development in contemporary Pacific Asian cities.

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Urban Coding and Planning

Edited by Stephen Marshalland, University College London

Urban codes have a profound influence on urban form, affecting the design and placement of buildings, frontages, public spaces and street layouts. Historically, their use, in conjunction with master plans, has led to some of our best-loved urban environments, while recent advances in coding have been a centre of attention, particularly in Britain and North America. However, neither the role nor the potential of codes is wholly understood.

In Urban Coding and Planning, Stephen Marshall and his contributors investigate the nature and scope of coding; its purposes; the kinds of environments it creates; and, perhaps most importantly, its relationship to planning.

By examining historical and ongoing traditions of coding from around the world – with chapters describing examples from the United Kingdom, France, India, China, Japan, Australia, South Africa, the United States and Latin America – this book provides lessons for today’s theory and practice of place-making.

The Making of Hong Kong: From Vertical to Volumetric

Barrie Shelton, Justyna Karakiewicz, and Thomas Kvan, University of Melbourne

As the authors reveal in this unique examination of Hong Kong’s development from a tiny British colonial settlement to a world city, a few key strategies seem to have dominated its design response to its tight physical setting:

~ First has been to extend the coastline with ‘new land’ and reshape existing land – which has meant filling the sea, and removing hills or converting them into huge stepped platforms.

~ Second, was to build tall and slender: many of the views of the built-up areas from the adjacent hills are so often like bamboo shoots after rain, to borrow an Eastern phrase.

~ Third, and very much a current norm, is to pack various activities (shopping, commercial, health, community and other services) into massive volumes – in effect, town centres of multiple ‘grounds’. And then

~ Fourth, to stack dwellings in slender towers and thin slab blocks above and beside those packed mass centres.

~ Fifth, large tracts of country-park have been established across the remaining natural ground, which is usually rugged hills or coastline of cliffs, beaches and mangroves.

The result is a compact, vertical and volumetric city on mostly reclaimed and re-formed land that is never far from nature – a seemingly contradictory juxtaposition.

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Olympic Cities: City Agendas, Planning and the World’s Games, 1896–2016

Edited by John R. Gold, Oxford Brookes University and Margaret M. Gold, London Metropolitan University

The first edition of Olympic Cities, edited by John and Margaret Gold, provided the first full overview of the changing relationship between cities and the Olympic events since 1896. This substantially revised and enlarged edition builds on the success of its predecessor. Three years on, its coverage takes account of important new scholarship as well as adding reflections on the experience of staging Beijing 2008 and Vancouver 2010, the state of preparations for London 2012, and the plans for the Games scheduled for Sochi in 2014 and Rio de Janeiro 2016.

The first of the book’s three parts provides overviews of the urban legacy of the four component Olympic festivals: the Summer Games; Winter Games; Cultural Olympiads; and the Paralympics. The second part comprises systematic surveys of five key aspects of activity involved in staging the Olympics: finance; place promotion; security; urban regeneration; and tourism. The final part consists of ten chronologically arranged portraits of host cities, from 1936 to 2016, with particular emphasis on the first four Summer Olympic games of the twenty-first century. An Afterword stresses the role and strengthening of the Olympic brand.

As controversy over the growing size and expense of the Olympics continues unabated, this book’s incisive and timely assessment of the Games’ development and the complex agendas that host cities attach to the event will be essential reading not only for urban and sports historians, urban geographers, planners and all concerned with understanding the relationship between cities and culture, but for anyone with an interest in the staging of mega-events.

Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe

Edited by Deniz Göktürk, University of California, Berkeley, Levent Soysal, Kadir Has University, Istanbul and Ipek Türeli, Brown University, Providence

Istanbul – once capital of the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, and in 2010 a European Capital of Culture – is undoubtedly one of the world’s most iconic cities. With one foot in Europe, the other in Asia, for some ‘outside’ it has evoked the romance of the Orient, but for some ‘within’ the intrusion of the Occident.

But what of Istanbul in the twenty-first century?

Orienting Istanbul is the first book to capture the rise of the city to the world stage of the present day. It analyses the re-presentation of Istanbul as a city of culture, history, and diversity and in so doing highlights the processes that go to make a city a World City.

A focus on Istanbul’s venture as a European Capital of Culture enables the contributors to reveal how creative production and exhibition in the city are intertwined with neoliberal urban restructuring and the tensions of post-industrial capitalism.

Divided into five parts (Paths to Globalization; Heritage and Regeneration Debates; The Mediatized City; Art in the City; A European Capital?), with case studies ranging from urban renewal, architecture and heritage preservation to art exhibitions, cinema and literature, the book provides a unique picture of how the course to European integration and globalization is manifested in Istanbul’s streetscapes and the lives of its citizens.

Lessons in Post-War Reconstruction: Case Studies from Lebanon in the Aftermath of the 2006 War

Edited by Howayda Al-Harithy, American University of Beirut
During the 2006 war in Lebanon 1,100 civilians were killed, 4,000 wounded and 1,000,000 displaced; damage was estimated at US$3.6 billion. Destruction was not limited to homes and villages but engulfed the entire countryside, damaging the agricultural livelihoods of a predominantly subsistence rural economy.
After the ceasefire, a group of architects and planners from the American University of Beirut formed the Reconstruction Unit to help in the recovery process and in rebuilding the lives of those affected by the war.
An introductory chapter outlines the historical and political context of contemporary Lebanon and the background to the 2006 war. Then, in a series of superbly illustrated case studies, members of the Reconstruction Unit describe their work and experiences.
These cases are diverse in scale, type of intervention, methods, and approaches to the situation on the ground. All tackle both ‘politics’ and ‘process’, from local to regional to global, and from scale of destruction to social representation, identity, decision-making and funding. They discuss the role of donors, municipalities, NGOs, and the community in negotiating both process and product; the visions and approaches to reconstruction projects; community participation; heritage protection; damage assessment and compensation policies; the role of the state; and capacity building.
The Reconstruction Unit’s activities described here will provide not just valuable lessons, but an inspiration for all those involved in post-conflict reconstruction anywhere in the world.