Planning, History & Environment
culture, politics

City and Soul in Divided Societies

Scott A. Bollens
19 Sep 2011

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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 Soul integrates 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.

Contents

Part A: Polarized Cities
1. Introduction
2. Scholarship with an 'I'
3. Soul in the City: Epic Cultures and Urban Fault-lines

Part B: Nine Cities, Nine Sorrows
4. Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina: 'Urbicide' and Dayton
5. Johannesburg, South Africa: 'Swimming Olympic Style after Years of Drowning'
6. Belfast, Northern Ireland: A 'Peace' Not Envisioned
7. Nicosia, Cyprus: Surmounting Walls, not Politics
8. Basque Country, Spain: Moving from Etzea to Euskal Hiria
9. Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina: The City as War Spoils
10. Barcelona, Spain: An Inclusive Nationalism?
11. Jerusalem, Israel/West Bank: Narrowing the Grounds for Peace
12. Beirut, Lebanon: City in an Indeterminate State, Part 1
13. Beirut, Lebanon: City in an Indeterminate State, Part 2

Part C: Synthesis
14. Comparing Across Conflicts
15. Cities and National Peace

Planning, History & Environment
megacity, Jakarta, city and urban planning

Planning the Megacity: Jakarta in the Twentieth Century

Christopher Silver
04 Apr 2011

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Planning the Megacity examines the dramatic transformation of Jakarta over the past century. In 1900, the colonial capital of the Netherland Indies, then known as Batavia, was a compact city of approximately 150,000 inhabitants. During the next hundred years, but especially after 1950, it was transformed into the sprawling ‘megacity’ of more than 9 million in an urbanized region that boasted
nearly 18 million by 2000. How this metamorphosis took place and what it meant for the life of Jakartans are questions central to the story of the city as is the role of both local and national leaders in the control and manipulation of the processes of growth. As Christopher Silver reveals, Jakarta’s place as Indonesia’s most prestigious city and its capital city subjected it to conflicting
approaches to planning, and placed its development within the vortex of national development. He reveals how colonialism, the struggle for independence and for improving the national condition, together with aspirations for economic modernization, contributed to the distinctive character of Southeast Asia’s largest metropolitan area.
 

Contents

Introduction
1. Understanding Urganization and the Megacity in Southeast Asia
2. Fashioning the Colonial Capital City, 1900-1940
3. Plans for the Modern Metropolis, 1950s-1970s
4. Planning for Housing, Neighbourhoods and Urban Revitalization
5. Expansion, Revitalization and the Restructuring of Metropolitan Jakarta, the 1970s to the early 190s
6. Urban Village to World City: Re-planning Jakarta in the 1990s
7. Planning in the New Democratic Megacity
Planning, History & Environment
city and urban planning, urban design, architectural history

Urban Coding and Planning

28 Feb 2011

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Urban codes have a profound influence on urban form, affecting the design and placement of buildings, streets and public spaces. Historically, their use has helped create some of our best-loved urban environments, while recent advances in coding have been a growing focus of attention, particularly in Britain and North America. However, the full potential for the role of codes has yet to be realized.

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 urban planning.

By bringing together 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.

Contents

1. Introduction Stephen Marshall

2. A Chronicle of Urban Codes in Pre-Industrial London’s Streets and Squares Nick Green

3. The Controlling Urban Code of Enlightenment Scotland Charles K. McKean 4. The Ideal and the Real: Urban Codes in the Spanish-American Lettered City Jean-François Lejeune

5. Paradigms for Design: the Vastu Vidya Codes of India Vibhuti Sachdev

6. Prescribing the Ideal City: Building Codes and Planning Principles in Beijing Qinghua Guo

7. Machizukuri and Urban Codes in Historical and Contemporary Kyoto Yoshihiko Baba

8. Adelaide’s Urban Design: Pendular Swings in Concepts and Codes Barrie Shelton

9. Coding in the French Planning System: From Building Line to Morphological Zoning Karl Kropf

10. Coding as ‘Bottom-Up’ Planning: Developing a New African Urbanism Gerald Steyn

11. How Codes Shaped Development in the United States, and Why They Should Be Changed Jonathan Barnett

12. Conclusions Stephen Marshall

 

Planning, History & Environment
urban studies, Middle East studies, architecture

The Evolving Arab City

23 Feb 2011

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The Evolving Arab City is an excellent addition to the existing literature on Arab cities. It is an engaging read and invaluable for those who seek a deeper understanding of the massive urban transformations occurring in Arab cities in recent decades. As with Elsheshtawy’s previous edited collection, The Evolving Arab City is a substantial and accessible contribution to the scholarship on contemporary Arab cities and provides fascinating critical insight into a dynamic and rapidly-changing region.

Sarah Moser, Cities

This outstanding collection, written by sophisticated and engaged Arab architects/urbanists, is a stunning sequel to Planning Middle Eastern Cities (2004, 2010) Like its predecessor, it does three things: effectively demolishes the monopoly ‘orientalists’ had over the topic; integrates grounded Arab scholarship with mainstream ‘western’ critical urban theory; and, by detailing the diverse ways Arab cities are responding to globalization, challenges oversimplified debates on ‘The Global City’.

A must read!    

Janet Abu-Lughod, Professor Emerita, Northwestern University and The Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research

Yasser Elsheshtawy is Associate Professor of Architecture at the United Arab Emirates University.

 

Contents

1. Introduction: The Great Divide: Struggling and Emerging Cities of the Arab World

Yasser Elsheshtawy

2. Prologue: The New Arab Metropolis

Fuad Malkawi

 

Part I: The Struggling Arab City

3. Amman: Disguised Genealogy, Recent Urban Restructuring and Neo-liberal Threats

Rami Farouk Daher

4. From Regional Node to Backwater and Back to Uncertainty: The Refashioning of Beirut, 1943–2006

Sofia Shwayri

5. Rabat: From Capital to Global Metropolis

Jamila Bargach

Part II: The Emerging Arab City

6. Riyadh: A City of ‘Institutional’ Architecture

Mashary A. Al-Naim

7. Kuwait: Learning from a Globalized City

Yasser Mahgoub

8. Manama: The Metamorphosis of a Gulf City

Mustapha Ben Hamouche

9. Rediscovering the Island: Doha’s Urbanity from Pearls to Spectacle

Khaled Adham

10. Cities of Sand and Fog: Abu Dhabi’s Arrival on the Global Scene

Yasser Elsheshtawy

 

Planning, History & Environment
urban development, planning history, urban history

The Making of Hong Kong

Barrie Shelton, Justyna Karakiewicz and Thomas Kvan
13 Nov 2010

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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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Planning, History & Environment
Stockholm, urban development

Stockholm: The Making of a Metropolis

Thomas Hall
08 Nov 2008

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In this unique study of the Swedish capital, Thomas Hall focuses on the phases of development which shaped the Stockholm of
the twenty-first century, and whose impacts can be clearly read in today’s urban environment, often interwoven with each other.
 
Following the emergence of the medieval city in the thirteenth century, the first major extension of the city in the mid-seventeenth century sought to transform Stockholm into the ‘Paris of the North’. For two hundred years development was unremarkable until the Lindhagen plan of 1866 set out to create a healthier, more beautiful, better functioning, and much larger city. The next phases in the city’s development saw the consolidation of the city centre and the coming of the suburbs, but it was reconstruction of Stockholm city centre in the 1950s and 1960s that must surely be one of Europe’s largest and most radical urban development projects. Finally, the densification process that characterized the last decades of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first, revealed a radical change in the architectural idiom in the city – the breakthrough of postmodernism.
 
Throughout, and with the help of superb illustrations, Thomas Hall compares the various periods and plans with each other and
with developments in other European capital cities.
 

Contents

Preface
Introduction
1. Stockholm - A Planned City?
2. The Capital of a Great Power
3. The Lindhagen Plan: A Vision Realized
4. The Completion of the Inner City, 1900-1940
5. The Coming of the Outer City: From Enskede to Skarpnäck
6 ‘A Display Window for Sweden’: The Rise and Fall of the City-Centre Reconstruction
7. Concluding Reflections:
A Look Back at Aspects of Stockholm's Development
Stockholm in the New Millennium; Controversial
Metropolitan Icons: Tall Buildings in the Stockholm Cityscape by Martin Rörby
Bibliography
Planning, History & Environment
democracy, public space, Latin America

Ordinary Places, Extraordinary Events: Democracy Citizenship and Public Space in Latin America

12 Jan 2008

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This book reveals the recent urban history of nine major Latin American cities – Mexico City, São Paulo, Santiago de Chile, Lima, Bogotá, Caracas, Buenos Aires, Havana, and Santo Domingo – through studies of their public spaces and the events that have taken place there.
 
While some argue that public spaces are a prerequisite for the expression, representation and reinforcement of democracy, equally they can be said to be used in the pursuit of totalitarianism. As the case studies here reveal, for the two opposing political visions –
democracy versus totalitarianism – public streets and spaces, in both the past and present, have been sites for the enactment and contestation of various stances on democracy and citizenship. By exploring the use and meaning of public spaces in their respective cities over time, the contributors shed light on contemporary redefinitions of citizenship and democracy in the Americas and, by extrapolation, the world.
 

Contents

Prologue

Part I Cities, Democracies and Powers

Part II Place, Citizenship and Nationhood

 
Built Environment
urban disasters, resilient cities

Learning from Urban Disasters: Planning for Resilient Cities

About this issue

Issue number

Summary

Editor: Stephen Hamnett
15 Dec 2006

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The papers in this issue of Built Environment together contribute to our understanding of how planning can help reduce the vulnerability of settlements, mitigate the effects of those extreme events which will inevitably occur, and increase the ‘resilience’ of cities – their ability to recover from disaster. Resilient cities are cities built 
– and rebuilt – with an awareness of natural and technological hazards and of the risks attached to these. They are also cities which foster their social networks as integral elements of their governance and as essential aids to recovery when this becomes necessary.
 

Contents

  • Introduction – Vulnerable and Resilient Cities
    Stephen Hamnett
  • Rebuilding Communities Following Disaster: Lessons from Kobe and Los Angeles
    Robert B. Olshansky, Laurie a. Johnson and Kenneth C. Topping
  • Experiences of Rural and Urban Communities in Tamil Nadu in the Aftermath of the 2004 Tsunami
    T. Vasantha Kumaran and Elizabeth Negi
  • Housing, Urban Vulnerability and Sustainability in Rapidly-Developing Cities 
    Graham Tipple
  • Urban Planning and Policy Faces Climate Change 
    Rafael E. Pizarro, Edward Blakely and John Dee
  • Analysing and Managing Local Economic Development Risk: A Comparison of Two Australian Regions
    Brian H. Roberts
  • The Rule of Unintended Consequences: Sydney’s Water Supply Strategy
    John. M. Nichols
  • Publication Reviews

 

Built Environment
sustainability, suburbs

Towards Sustainable Suburbs

About this issue

Issue number

Summary

Editor: Nicholas Falk
10 Sep 2006

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Contents

  • Beyond City Living: Remaking the Inner Suburbs
    Rachael Unsworth, Max Nathan
  • Suburbs Reconsidered: Form, Mobility and Sustainability
    Hildebrand W Frey,  Neil S Ferguson, Samer G Bagaeen, Lee Woods
  • The Emerging Silicon Savanna: From Old Urbanism to New Suburbanism
    Stephen Marshall
  • Making Connections: The Case of Borehamwood
    Laura Vaughan
  • Reinventing Suburbia in The Netherlands
    Han Lrzing
  • Transit-Oriented Development: Lessons from California
    Brian Quinn
  • Policies for the South East: Seizing the Potential
    Mike Gwilliam
  • Smarter Growth and Sustainable Suburbs
    Nicholas Falk
  • Publication Reviews
    Peter Hall, Jeffrey W Cody
Built Environment

Reflections on the Polycentric Metropolis

About this issue

Issue number

Summary

Editors: Ludovic Halbert, Frank Convery and Alain Thiersteil
15 Jun 2006

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Contents

  • Reflections on the Polycentric Metropolis
    Ludovic Halbert, Frank J Convery, Alain Thierstein
  • Polycentrism: Boon or Barrier to Metropolitan Competitiveness? The Case of the Randstad Holland
    Bart Lambregts
  • Advantageous Fragmentation? Reimagining Metropolitan Governance and Spatial Planning in Rhine-Main
    Michael Hoyler, Tim Freytag, Christoph Mager
  • RhineRuhr: Towards Compatibility? Strategic Spatial Policies for a Specific Configuration of Polycentricity
    Wolfgang Knapp, Peter Schmitt, Rainer Danielzyk
  • Globalization and Social Dualization, under an Institutional Constraint: The Brussels-Capital Case
    Christian Vandermotten, Marcel Roelandts
  • Governance Strategies for the Zrich-Basel Metropolitan Region in Switzerland
    Simone Gabi, Alain Thierstein, Christian Kruse, Lars Glanzmann
  • Organizing Space in a Dynamic Economy: Insights for Policy from the Irish Experience
    Frank J Convery, Daniel Mcinerney, Martin Sokol, Peter Stafford
  • The Polycentric City Region That Never Was: The Paris Agglomeration, Bassin Parisien and Spatial Planning Strategies in France
    Ludovic Halbert
  • Policy Challenges of Functional Polycentricity in a Global Mega-City Region: South East England
    Kathy Pain
  • European Polycentricity and Emerging Mega-City Regions: One Size Fits All Policy?
    Ludovic Halbert, Kathy Pain, Alain Thierstein
  • Publication Reviews
    Stephen Marshall, Stephan Pauleit

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