Meet the editors

Peter Nijkamp is a Professor in Regional and Urban Economics and in Economic Geography at the Free University, Amsterdam. His main research interests cover plan evaluation, multicriteria analysis, regional and urban planning, transport systems analysis, mathematical modelling, technological innovation, and resource management. He is a former President of the European Regional Science Association and of the Regional Science Association International. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. Since 2002, he has been serving as the President of the governing board of the Netherlands Research Council (NWO). In addition, he is the former President of the European Heads of Research Councils (EUROHORCs).

Karima Kourtit is a Researcher at the Free University, Amsterdam. Her main research interests cover entrepreneurship, innovation, geographic location and spatial clustering of industries. In recent years, she has focused in particular on new qualitative and quantitative methods for business and policy analysis, as well as on spatial-behavioural analysis of economic agents. She plays an active role in several (inter)national scientific networks and is leader on various international research projects related to sustainable diversity and the complex space-economy of sustainable urban development.

Luigi Fusco Girard is Professor of Economics and Environmental Evaluation in the Department of Architecture, University of Naples ‘Federico II’. He is President of the International Scientific Committee for Economics of Conservation, International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), Vice President of CESET (Italian Centre of Evaluation and Territory Economics). His research interests include sustainable cities development and the methods and assessment tools for sustainability. He has published on several national and international journals and books.

Professor Sir Peter Hall: Role Model

In a guest-editorial introduction to the ‘Built Environment’ special issue in celebration of Peter Hall, Michael Hebbert reflects on the range and variety of his accomplishment. Diversity was a striking feature of the obituaries published after his death in 2014 and it shows through even more strongly in the present collection of papers from former students and collaborators. They reflect on his legacy in a very personal way. Here was a man who modelled many roles and touched many lives: easy to love, hard to emulate, impossible to forget.

… we were having a very enjoyable lunch at the Garrick, when he [Terry Heiser, Permanent Secretary to the Department of the Environment] suddenly sprang a Heiser-type question: ‘Who are your role models?’ It more or less completely floored me and the other guest, who has produced some notable movies in his time. I don’t think either of us adequately rewarded Terry for that lunch. I've been thinking about the question ever since, and this is by way of recompense.

Thus Peter Hall introduced the memorable inaugural lecture marking his professorial appointment to University College London in 1992. The lecture took shape as an intellectual autobiography spanning the entire trajectory from boyhood in West Kensington through wartime years in Blackpool, undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Cambridge, journalism, teaching and policy engagements in swinging sixties London, his first youthful professorship at the University of Reading, the move to the University of California at Berkeley in 1980 and his return to England to take up the UCL chair at the age of sixty. Peter updated his narrative two decades later in an ‘Apologia Pro Vita Sua’ written as a personal contribution to our eightieth birthday festschrift The Planning Imagination. After his death it was reprinted in the August 2014 issue of Town and Country Planning.

So who were his role models ? It’s a long roll-call but there are consistent patterns. As a writer he prized clarity and moral honesty, values learned from George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Frank Leavis, his Cambridge tutor Gus Caesar, and Paul Barker (editor of New Society) among others. As a geographer he admired social scientists who engaged with the evidence on the big scale: Alfred Marshall, Charles Booth, Beatrice Webb, Joseph Schumpeter. In his planning pantheon were decision-makers such as Frank Pick, Patrick Abercrombie, Michael Heseltine, Wulf Daseking, who similarly saw the big picture and – as he put it when thanking the Royal Town Planning Institute for their Gold Medal in 2003 – could walk the walk as well as talking the talk. He liked academics unafraid to engage with real-world challenges who could multi-task, dictating their correspondence and writing their books on the hoof – Maynard Keynes, Dudley Stamp, Richard Llewellyn-Davies. He enjoyed collaborations with salty characters with iconoclastic streaks – John Vaizey, Reyner Banham, Michael Young, Manuel Castells, Colin Ward. He sniffed out pseudo-intellectualism and had no time for cultural affectations: it explains a certain estrangement from his parent discipline of geography, a sore topic for the 1992 inaugural, though less with the passage of years.

There’s a sense of organic unity in Peter Hall’s own telling of his career. The strands lead connectedly from childhood experiments in drawing Harry Beck’s London Underground map with coloured crayons, through Blackpool Grammar School and St Catharine’s Cambridge, to those first superb books of his early career, the historical Industries of London and the prophetic London 2000. Having succinctly captured the complexities of London’s metropolitan geography he went on to do it for seven other capitals in the book World Cities. His analyses of outer metropolitan land use and travel patterns developed into the monumental Containment of Urban England, which in turn included a narrative of planning history that came to fruit in his texts Urban & Regional Planning and Cities of Tomorrow. That original intensive study of agglomeration and innovation in London’s industrial structure re-emerged in his seminal American studies of sunbelt and gunbelt industry, silicon landscapes and technopolises, and lastly and most ambitiously in the thousand-page Cities in Civilization, which is as much a work of comparative economic geography as it is a homage to Lewis Mumford. His final cluster of projects on railway networks and sustainable, polycentric settlement patterns connected right back to Frank Pick, Harry Beck and those coloured crayons. So in his life as well as in his work Peter did meet the precept of his undergraduate tutor Augustus Caesar: begin at the beginning and follow inexorably through logical argument to your final conclusions.

After Peter’s death the obituaries had a different logic. There were some common elements – tribute to his encyclopaedic intelligence, personal charm, exceptional productivity – but beyond that, each emphasized a difference. Some highlighted his advocacy of free enterprise, others his championship of planning. He was remembered as the heir to Ebenezer Howard and the reviver of the decentralist garden cities movement, but also ‘the most urbane of urbanists’ (in the words of the Financial Times) and leading light of the big-city network Global Urban Development. His legacies were detected at the wide scale of regional structure or in the detail of transport networks. Historians hailed his genius in making sense of the past, technophiles his flair for futurology. He was remembered for big data-crunching projects and for pioneering the UK application of numerical modelling of land-use and transport systems, but also for commonsensical weekly journalism and the sort of readable scholarship embodied in this very journal, which he edited for 36 years. From one perspective he was the essential globalist, travelling astonishing numbers of miles each year and always comparing what he saw; but he was also deeply rooted and an effective local champion in his home territories of London, Blackpool and Manchester.

This commemorative issue of Built Environment continues the multiplication of narratives around Peter Hall’s work and influence. Written by students and colleagues, its theme is a truly surprising diversity: it seems we all knew the same individual yet each knew a different man. The fourteen contributors cover the entire span of his career from the moment he joined LSE in 1965 through to the intense research activity of his last summer months in 2014. It’s extraordinary to be reminded of the scope of his life-work, the variety of roles he modelled for successive generations of students and colleagues, and the ramifications of his legacy. If the ‘Apologia Pro Vita Sua’ reveals Peter’s own moral compass, this collection shows the many different points to which it led him – and us.

The issue’s starting point is 1965 when Peter Hall arrived at the London School of Economics and John Goddard became one of his first PhD students, working on the London office boom and the efforts of government to regulate it. The topic combined methodological innovation in the latest techniques of quantitative geography with intense policy relevance, and the paper shows the brilliance with which Peter fostered both sets of connections. My own experience began four years later, in 1969. Newly graduated with a history degree (specialism: Later Roman Empire) I had visited Reyner Banham at UCL in search of advice on how to become a journalist specializing in urban issues. He sensibly directed me to the University of Reading where the newly installed Professor of Geography was a superb exponent of the craft – not that I acquired it, though I learned so much else, ending up 40 years later as a Bartlett colleague. My Reading fellow-students are represented in this issue by Peter Williams and Ray Wyatt, both of whom joined in 1972. The former’s investigation of gentrification in Islington launched a distinguished academic and professional career as one of the UK’s top housing experts, the latter was drawn from Australia by Reading’s reputation as a hot spot for urban modelling, and his paper offers a quizzical account of the ups and downs of the field internationally, and Peter’s lasting role as translator of computer output into policy input.

Next came California. Amy Glasmeier first met Peter Hall in London in the spring of 1978 when she was still a Berkeley undergraduate. Two years later she watched, and here most vividly describes, his induction to the University of California and the origins of the collaboration with Ann Markusen that launched what was, even by his standards of productivity, an outstandingly creative decade of work on the changing economic geography of the US. His collaborations involved a brilliant constellation of students and researchers whose work is explored here in joint-authored contributions from Sabina Deitrich with Scott Campbell, and Erica Schoenberger with Marc Weiss. Our Berkeley profiles are completed by Yuko Aoyama. She met Peter in 1990 when working for OECD Urban Affairs in Paris, and went to join his final Californian PhD cohort. Her paper’s unexpected excursions into the social histories of blues and flamenco remind us how wide he could range.
Nick Green opens the final sequence as one of the first PhD students of the Bartlett years, working on a cultural-spatial analysis of artists’ studios in the East End of London. As with many other contributors, the doctoral project led into an extended research collaboration, contributing to the POLYNET project on European Spatial Structure from posts within the two non-profit organizations that became Peter’s principal policy vehicles after the turn of the century, Michael Young’s Institute of Community Studies and the Town and Country Planning Association. Basak Demires joined the team as a doctoral student funded by the wondrous windfall from the Swiss Balzan Foundation, which named Peter as one of its 2005 prize-winners for his contributions to the history of the modern European city. Her task was to analyse the role of telecommunications in Europe’s polycentric urban system, and her paper tells this story within a wider tribute to his contributions to location theory, in particular via translation, interpretation and application of Von Thünen’s classic Isolated State.

Chia-Lin Chen commenced her PhD under Peter’s supervision in 2008, working on the regional economic impacts of High Speed Rail (HSR). By a stroke of genius he encouraged her to study British Rail’s introduction of Intercity 125 diesel sets in 1976 as a prototype HSR experiment, allowing longitudinal analysis and all but connecting the work of his final PhD student to John Goddard’s investigations of London office decentralisation and relocation forty years earlier. The thesis led to early publications, had immediate policy impact in the debate over the extension of the HSR network north of London, and once again led straight into post-doctoral research collaboration. Chia-Lin Chen’s paper offers a vivid and poignant account of the projects on which she, Peter and their team worked flat out until the moment of his death.

The last word of this special issue belongs to someone who knew Peter better than any of us – Ann Rudkin, Publisher of Built Environment, publisher and editor of many of his books. She joined the journal when it was relaunched under Peter’s direction in 1978, and has run it ever since. The journal’s impressive run of back issues has perfectly realized his vision of a quarterly ‘mag’ in readable pocket format, each issue addressing a salient topic, well laid out and illustrated with photographs and (ideally) a cartoon from Louis Hellman. Ann’s paper offers glimpses into Peter at work in editorial meetings, over lunch, in email correspondence, writing in manuscript margins. It leaves us with a picture of a role model who modelled many roles, but whose versatility was always shaped by a clear sense of purpose: easy to love, hard to emulate, impossible to forget.

Meet the editor

Michael Hebbert is Professor of Town Planning at the Bartlett School, University College London, Professor Emeritus of the University of Manchester, and Editor-in-Chief of the Routledge journal Planning Perspectives.

Professor Sir Peter Hall: Role Model

About this issue

Issue number

Summary

This issue of Built Environment, written by students and colleagues, celebrates the life and work of Peter Hall.

Guest editor: Michael Hebbert

17 Mar 2015

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This issue of Built Environment, written by students and colleagues, celebrates the life and work of Peter Hall. The fourteen contributors cover the entire span of his career from the moment he joined LSE in 1965 through to the intense research activity of his last summer months in 2014. It’s extraordinary to be reminded of the scope of his life-work, the variety of roles he modelled for successive generations of students and colleagues, and the ramifications of his legacy. The papers may be accessed here.

Contents

• Professor Sir Peter Hall: Role Model 
  Michael Hebbert
• Building Bridges between Economic Geography and Regional Planning: Office Location in London and the South East in the 1960s 
  John Goddard
• Housing, Planning and Peter Hall: Unfinished Business 
  Peter Williams
• Sir Peter Hall: A Humane, Urban Polymath 
  Ray Wyatt
• Elastic Peter 
  Amy Glasmeier
• Peter Hall Tours the Gunbelt (and Other Side Trips to the Legacies of Ebenezar Howard) 
  Sabina Deitrick and Scott Campbell
• Peter Hall and the Western Urban and Regional Collective at the University of California, Berkeley 
  Marc A. Weiss and Erica Schoenberger
• Sir Peter Hall: From Kondratieff Waves to the Soul of the Delta 
  Yuko Aoyama
• A Relationship of Ideas 
  Nick Green
• Von Thünen Revisited 
  Basak Demires Ozkul
• Peter Hall: Inspirer of Railways and Regions 
  Chia-Lin Chen
• Peter Hall: The Man Who Flew to Australia and Back [Almost] the Following Day 
  Ann Rudkin

Footnote: The cover Built Environment, Volume 41, number 1 shows Edward Hopper’s Approaching a City, 1946
Oil on canvas, 27 1/8 x 36 in.; 68.8975 x 91.44 cm
Acquired 1947, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Modernization, Urbanization and Development in Latin America, 1900s–2000s

Arturo Almandoz

21 Oct 2014

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In this book Arturo Almandoz places the major episodes of Latin America’s twentieth and early twenty-first century urban history within the changing relationship between industrialization and urbanization, modernization and development. This relationship began in the early twentieth century, when industrialization and urbanization became significant in the region, and ends at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when new tensions between liberal globalization and populist nationalism challenge development in the subcontinent, much of which is still poverty stricken.

Latin America’s twentieth-century modernization and development are closely related to nineteenth-century ideals of progress and civilization, and for this reason Almandoz opens with a brief review of that legacy for the different countries that are the focus of his book – Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela – but with references to others.

He then explores the regional distortions, which resulted from the interaction between industrialization and urbanization, and how the imbalance between urbanization and the productive system helps to explain why ‘take-off’ was not followed by the ‘drive to maturity’ in Latin American countries. He suggests that the close yet troublesome relationship with the United States, the recurrence of dictatorships and autocratic regimes, and Marxist influences in many domains, are all factors that explain Latin America’s stagnation and underdevelopment up to the so-called ‘lost decade’ of 1980s.

He shows how Latin America’s fate changed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, when neoliberal programmes, political compromise and constitutional reform dismantled the traditional model of the corporate state and centralized planning. He reveals how economic growth and social improvements have been attained by politically left-wing yet economically open-market countries while others have resumed populism and state intervention. All these trends make up the complex scenario for the new century – especially when considered against the background of vibrant metropolises that are the main actors in the book.

Contents

• Prologue
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
  Industrialization and Urbanization, Modernization and Development
  On Urban Cultural History and Latin America’s Overviews
  Approach and Structure of the Book
• 2 Nineteenth-Century Antecedents
  Postcolonial Changes
  Civilization and Barbarism
  European Godfathers
  Conservatives and Liberals, Oligarchies and Bourgeoisies
  From Postcolonial to Bourgeois Cities
• 3 From Arielismo to World War I
  Overshadowed by the Colossus
  Arielismo, Modernism and Belle Époque
  From Dictatorial Pax to Democracy
  The Centenary’s Urban Agenda
• 4 Good Neighbourhood, Masificación and Urbanism
  From Caliban to Prospero
  Towards Welfare States, Corporatism and Citizenship
  Mass Metropolises
  Between Vanguards and Social Sciences
  Urban Reforms and the Emergence of Urbanismo
• 5 Developmentalism, Modernism and Planning
  Industrialization, Urbanization and Development
  Fifty Years in Five
  Asynchronies in Urbanization and Modernization
  From Academicism to Functional Modernism
  Between Urbanismo and Planning, City and Region
• 6 Between Cold War and Third World
  Revolution and Alliance in the Backyard
  AFP, Coup and Communism
  Guerrillas, Anti-Imperialism and Revolution
  From Vecindades to Shantytowns
  Central Planning and Regional Development
• 7 Dismantling a Model
  From the Oil Crisis to the Lost Decade
  Between New Right and Neoliberalism
  National Packages and Prescriptions
  The Completion of Urbanization: From Demography to Globalization
• 8 New Century and Old Demons
  Post-Liberalism and Neo-Populism
  Incomplete Reforms
  Poverty Alleviation and Fragmented Metropolises
  Trends of the 2000s
• Appendices
  Initials and Acronyms
  Dramatis Personae
  Table 1 Urban and rural population of Latin American countries, 1955–2010 in thousands
  Table 2 Urbanization, growth and level of transition, 1950–2010
  Table 3 Human Development Index (HDI), 2011

Urban Violence

Cities have always been sites of struggle, contestation and violence. Indeed contemporary urban planning has in many instances been used as a tool to contain, minimize and combat such disorderly activities. Recent political events, which have taken place in urban squares and plazas, have drawn on the symbolic strength of these urban centres. While mostly peaceful, such sites have sometimes become places where violent confrontations take place. Yet this would be only one form of violence. Other cities, due to deep societal divisions, have a polarized and bifurcated urban space. Lines – real or imagined – are drawn to demarcate, create boundaries, and separate conflicting groups.

Urban violence as a construct clearly has political overtones. But the term can also accommodate other meanings seeking to draw attention to social injustices and inequality, for example. In such instances graffiti is used both to indict societal practices and to lay claim to existing spaces. It may refer to wilful destruction of heritage sites, displacement of residents, and securitization of urban spaces. Trouble spots are occupied by police forces asserting their presence; the ubiquity of security cameras acts as a constant reminder of the continuous presence of an all-seeing authority. Such acts reverberate in urban settings, impacting people’s lives, and may contribute to increased alienation.

In this issue of Built Environment papers were invited that reflected on this theme. Empirical research that draws on observations of existing sites was particularly welcome. Theoretical contributions, which would elaborate and expand on the definition of urban violence were also encouraged. The overall aim was to suggest the myriad ways in which the term can be conceptualized and the impact this has on urban space. Eight papers were selected either for their theoretical depth, empirical rigor or the unique way in which they have conceptualized the term in response to the call for papers (sometimes they addressed all three). The papers were written by a diverse group, hailing from a variety of backgrounds including anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, architects, psychiatrists and public health professionals. All share similar concerns about urban violence but their focus understandably differed. The differences were primarily in how violence was defined and the extent to which it was enabled/facilitated by the built environment. Architects, for example, had a clear focus on the built environment and the morphology of cities whereas psychiatrists focused on place attachment. Yet most importantly this diversity illustrates the extent to which the issue of urban violence draws concerns that transcend disciplinary boundaries, pointing to the importance of collaboration, and sharing insights to provide meaningful solutions to one of the most critical concerns of contemporary urbanism.

The majority of papers have focused to some degree or another on planning and architecture as a tool of violence and shied away from the more conventional approach of violence through the agency of city residents (crime, graffiti). Yet there are differences. Overall papers can be classified into three distinct groups. The notion of ‘urbicide’, i.e. the urban as an arena of warfare is dealt with by two papers (Leïla Vignal and Mirjana Ristic). Three papers tackle the issue of urban planning and violence directly (Khaled Al Awadi, Yves Pedrazzini et al., and Diane Davis). My own paper combines both urban planning as a tool of violence, the agency of crowds and how the urban facilitates and enables violence. The issue concludes with an empirical study that looks at the role of architecture in combating urban violence (Lourdes Rodriguez et al.). The first paper is largely theoretical, challenging our understanding of the term and provides a personal narrative (Moises Lino e Silva).

The papers are distinguished by a broad geographical range which includes South America (Lino e Silva, Davis), the Middle East (Awadi, Elsheshtawy, Vignal), Africa (Pedrazzini et al.), Europe (Ristic) and North America (Rodriguez et al.) demonstrating the universality of urban violence and how it manifests itself in different contexts. The paper by Moises Lino e Silva starts the issue focusing on South America. He uses the Brazilian favella of Rocinha as a site for exploring the concept of violence, arguing that how the construct is employed by scholars contradicts residents’ understanding. Violence in this conceptualization is performed through language. To illustrate this point he narrates a violent episode involving the invasion of the Special Police Force in Rio bringing closer the concept of violence as it impacts the everyday.

Urban warfare is explored in two papers. Leïla Vignal describes the Syrian civil war. She looks at how cities are sites of urban violence and engages in a meticulous documentation of acts perpetuated by the Syrian regime – particularly its wholesale destruction of neighbourhoods. Her analysis of aerial maps showing the impact of bombing is particularly revealing. She also shows how planning regulations are used as an excuse to raze areas held by opposition forces. Violence, Leïla argues, is not a consequence of war but a strategy. Mirjana Ristic looks at another form of urban warfare, not in the sense of wholesale destruction but as a way to instil fear and terror. Her focus is on Sarajevo during the devastating Bosnian War; specifically, the sniping of civilians in public space and how that has impacted everyday life and practices. She draws attention to the intersection of spatial violence, urban networks and spatial mobility. Infrastructure is used in this case as a tool of terror. Moreover she shows how the city’s specific geography and topography enabled specific acts of violence (sniping) transforming the entire city into a Foucaultian panopticon. Specific tactics by city residents coping with this onslaught are discussed and form a fascinating component of her narrative.

The next set of papers explore the relation between urban planning, particularly urban renewal, on city form and how that could be conceptualized as a form of violence. Khaled Al-Awadi tackles the city of Dubai, known for its spectacular cityscape and its tabula rasa, i.e. non-contextual approach to urban development. The case study is the neighbourhood of Satwa built in the 1970s and now undergoing urban renewal. He demonstrates how this process can result in uprooting residents’ lives because of displacement. His depiction is anchored by a strong visual analysis as well as interviews with Satwa’s inhabitants, giving voice to their plight. Arguably such a vision of urban renewal relies on a neo-liberal approach to urban planning, a common theme uniting all three papers in this thread.

Diane Davis looks at the origins of such thinking and how the informal is construed and conceptualized as a temporary stop on the way to modernity. Her analysis is anchored in Latin America providing a historical overview of modernist planning, which she argues established conditions that made violence more likely. Indeed, as Diane notes, existing power structures prevented implementation of progressive, i.e. inclusive planning, ideas through the location of housing projects for the poor at the periphery of cities. She draws on a plethora of examples to illustrate this point. Davis concludes by arguing that such an approach eventually caused fragmentation, exclusion, and is closely tied to neo-liberal urbanization policies.

Yves Pedrazzini, Stéphanie Vincent Geslin and Alexandra Thorer elaborate on this issue further by introducing the term ‘violence of urbanization’. Of particular interest is the locale of their case study, urban Africa. Similar to the preceding two papers they move away from violent acts perpetuated by city residents. Instead the emphasis is on how planning policies enable violence and can be considered as a violent act against the city. Their focus is on Addis Ababa and their cases involve the role of infrastructure and transportation projects: a study of street intersection, demolition of neighbourhoods and erasure of memory through destruction. Modernity here is used as an excuse to attack the ‘traditional’ city, force resettlement and impose incompatible lifestyles. Spatial violence, the authors argue, is thus an outcome of capitalism (or neo-liberal urbanization policies).

My paper conceptualizes urban violence through both the agency of crowds and urban planning. The city enables and facilitates a certain form of violence (demonstrations, arson), which is then used as a pretext to reconfigure the urban planning paradigm to usher in a new political and social system: a form of urban rupture. My case centres on the city of Cairo, taking a historical approach by looking at the violent events of 1952 whereby the city’s downtown area was devastated by a fire. I discuss the specific urban character of the area, how it contributed to this act and the new planning approach following the fire, which aimed at ushering in a new society that has been supposedly liberated from the shackles of the past.

Lastly, Lourdes Rodriguez, Arlene Peguero, Arelis De La O, Howard Joseph, Robert E. Fullilove, and Mindy Thompson Fullilove, take a slightly different approach in examining urban violence. Theirs is based on place attachment and the extent to which community organizations and changes in the physical structure of the built environment can create an atmosphere that lessens the occurrence of violent events (graffiti, drug use, accumulation of trash). Through a carefully constructed study that involves a comparison of two blocks in a New York City neighbourhood, carried out over an extended period, they observed the impact of the construction of the headquarters for a youth organization. Yet they poignantly highlight an inadvertent effect of such positive change: gentrification. Given the improvement in the overall environment long-time residents were at risk of being displaced due to increasing rent.

Urban violence can come in myriad forms and can be understood in different ways, as all these papers have illustrated. Our very understanding of the term depends on how it is employed and formulated among scholars; how regimes use the city as a strategic site for destruction and the spreading of terror; how urban planning as a discipline is complicit in furthering violent acts that displace, relocate and erase memory and history; how history contributes to the founding myths of oppressive regimes. Yet there can be a ray of hope. Individuals and organizations have the capacity to mitigate the negative effect of urbanism, but without an effective change in policy such efforts are short-lived and may indeed contribute to further extending the cycle of violence directed at cities.

Meet the editor

Yasser Elsheshtawy is Associate Professor of Architecture at United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, where in addition to teaching he also runs the Urban Research Lab. His scholarship focuses on urbanization in developing societies, informal urbanism, urban history and environment-behavior studies, with a particular focus on Middle Eastern cities. He authored a series of books and publications including “Dubai: Behind an urban spectacle.” His blog dubaization.com has been hailed by The Guardian as one of the best city blogs in the world.

Urban Violence

About this issue

Issue number

440 pages

Summary

This issue, edited by Yasser Elsheshtawy, explores the theme of Urban Violence and the different forms it can take, whether it be physical acts of struggle or contestation and other disorderly activities, or the constrictions that the design of urban spaces can intentionally enforce or even unintentionally create.

Guest Editor: Yasser Elsheshtawy

21 Oct 2014

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This issue explores the myriad of forms that ‘urban violence’ can take, from social injustices to wilful destruction of heritage sites, from displacement of people from their homes to urban warfare. The contributors here are from very varied backgrounds – anthropology, sociology, geography, architecture, psychiatry and public health – and their papers encompass a broad geographical range; a diversity that illustrates the extent to which urban violence transcends disciplinary and geographical boundaries.

Contents

• Urban Violence
  Yasser Elsheshtawy
• The Violence of Structural Violence: Ethical Commitments and an Exceptional Day in a Brazilian Favela
  Moises Lino E Silva
• Destruction in Progress: Revolution, Repression and War in Syria (2011 Onwards)
  Leïla Vignal
• ‘Sniper Alley’: The Politics of Urban Violence in the Besieged Sarajevo
  Mirjana Ristic
• Urban Redevelopment Trauma: The Story of a Dubai Neighbourhood
  Khaled Alawadi
• Modernist Planning and the Foundations of Urban Violence in Latin America
  Diane E. Davis
• Violence of Urbanization, Poor Neighbourhoods and Large-Scale Projects: Lessons from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
  Yves Pedrazzini, Stéphanie Vincent-Geslin and Alexandra Thorer
• Urban Transformations: The Great Cairo Fire and the Founding of a Modern Capital, 1952–1970
  Yasser Elsheshtawy
• Acts of Neighbouring: Socially-Engaged Urban Investment and Youth Violence Prevention
  Lourdes J. Rodgrïguez, Arlene Peguero, Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Arelis De La O, Howard Joseph and Robert E. Fullilove
• Publication Review

The Making of Hong Kong

Barrie Shelton, Justyna Karakiewicz and Thomas Kvan

19 Aug 2014

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With its island origins, skyscraper skyline and world city status, Hong Kong is often likened to New York. However the comparison soon falters with the realization that Hong Kong’s skyscrapers are only the more visible aspect of a far more complex urban condition. A steep and contorted terrain has ensured that built-up areas are compact, rich in spatial experience, rarely far from hills and water; and connected by an array of public transport that is second to none.

The three authors of The Making of Hong Kong see value in these conditions – a metropolis with a small urban footprint, 90 per cent use of public transport for vehicular journeys, and proximity to nature. Though the compact city is a model that is frequently advocated by urban thinkers, it is one rarely encountered. Here, the evolution of Hong Kong’s intense urbanism is traced from the region’s pre-colonial walled settlements and colonial shop-houses to the contemporary vertical and volumetric metropolis of towers, podia-and-towers, decks, bridges, escalators and other components of multi-level city living. On a site bedevilled by an acute shortage of flat land, Hong Kong is portrayed as the ‘accidental pioneer of a new kind of urbanism’ that commands the thoughtful attention of a wider world.

Barrie Shelton is Associate Professor of Urban Design in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne

Justyna Karakiewicz is Associate Professor of Urban Design in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne

Thomas Kvan is Professor and Dean in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne

Contents

• 1. A State of IntenCity
• 2. Precedents
• 3. Long, Low and Intense: From Possession Point to World War II
• 4. Massing and Rising: The Post-War Decades
• 5. Vertical and Volumetric: Post 1980
• 6. Podium and Tower
• 7. Emerging Volumetric: Components
• 8. Conclusion: Vertical and Volumetric
• Addendum: Advancing the Volumetric on Old District and New Territory Sites

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The Urban Wisdom of Jane Jacobs

19 Aug 2014

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Here for the first time is a thoroughly interdisciplinary and international examination of Jane Jacobs’s legacy. Divided into four parts: I. Jacobs, Urban Philosopher; II. Jacobs, Urban Economist; III. Jacobs, Urban Sociologist; and IV. Jacobs, Urban Designer, the book evaluates the impact of Jacobs’s writings and activism on the city, the professions dedicated to city-building and, more generally, on human thought. Together, the editors and contributors highlight the notion that Jacobs’s influence goes beyond planning to philosophy, economics, sociology and design. They set out to answer such questions as: What explains Jacobs’s lasting appeal and is it justified? Where was she right and where was she wrong? What were the most important themes she addressed? And, although Jacobs was best known for her work on cities, is it correct to say that she was a much broader thinker, a philosopher, and that the key to her lasting legacy is precisely her exceptional breadth of thought? 

Contents

• 1 Jane Jacobs, Urban Visionary Sonia Hirt
• Part I: Jane Jacobs, Urban Philosopher
  2 The Right and the Good in Jane Jacobs’s Urbanism Paul Kidder
  3 The ‘Sidewalk Ballet’ in the Work of Henri Lefebvre and Benjamin Fraser Manuel Delgado Ruiz 
  4 Jane Jacobs, Modernity and Knowledge Sonia Hirt 
  5 Jane Jacobs and Citizen Participation James Stockard
• Part II: Jane Jacobs, Urban Economist
  6 Economic Development from a Jacobsian Perspective Sanford Ikeda
  7 What Would Jane Jacobs See in the Global City? Place and Social Practices Saskia Sassen
• Part III: Jane Jacobs, Urban Sociologist
  8 Infrastructure, Social Injustice, and the City: Parsing the Wisdom of Jane Jacobs Marie-Alice L’Heureux
  9 Jane Jacobs, Jim Crow and the Madness of Borders Mindy Thompson Fullilove
• Part IV: Jane Jacobs, Urban Designer
  10 Jane Jacobs and the Diversity Ideal Emily Talen
  11 Diversity and Mixed Use: Lessons from Medieval China Jing Xie 
  12 Jane Jacobs’s Relevance in Beirut Ibrahim Maarouf and Hassan Abdel-Salam 
  13 Jane Jacobs and Diversity of Use of Public Open Spaces in Thailand Kan Nathiwutthikun
  14 Revisiting Jane Jacobs’s ‘Eyes on the Street’ for the Twenty-First Century: Evidence from Environmental Criminology Paul Cozens and David Hillier 
  15 Jane Jacobs and the Theory of Placemaking in Debates of Sustainable UrbanismAnirban Adhya 
  16 Making the Familiar Strange: Understanding Design Practice as Cultural Practice B.D. Wortham-Galvin
  17 Jane Jacobs and Designing Cities as Organized Complexity Jonathan Barnett