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Urban China in the New Era
by Zhiming Cheng Mark Wang Junhua ChenThis book aims to provide a scholarly account of recent understandings and reflections on some of the prevalent and emerging issues in urban and regional China, such as urbanization, inequality, hukou (household registration) reforms, labor relations, not-in-my-backyard protests and environmental governance. Presenting rich data analysis and case studies, these book chapters together utilize multidisciplinary approaches and contribute to the empirical and theoretical literature in development studies.
Urban China in Transition (IJURR Studies in Urban and Social Change Book Series #60)
by John R. LoganUsing an innovative approach, this book interprets the unprecedented transformation of contemporary China’s major cities. It deals with a diversity of trends and analyzes their sources. Offers a multi-dimensional analysis of urban life in China Highlights a diversity of trends in the areas of migration, criminal victimization, gated communities, and the status of women, suburbanization, and neighbourhood associations Each chapter includes input from both an expert on urban life in China and an 'outside' expert from the fields of sociology, geography, economics, planning, political science, history, demography, architecture, or anthropology An alternative theoretical perspective comparing the Chinese experience with other urban settings in the United States, Poland, Russia, Vietnam, East and South East Asia, and South America
Urban Chinese Daughters: Navigating New Roles, Status and Filial Obligation in a Transitioning Culture (St Antony's Series)
by Patricia O’NeillThe lives of urban Chinese daughters have changed. Education and employment have propelled them from dependency to self-sufficiency, resulting in new attitudes and lifestyles. However, traditional filial obligation has remained. This book asks why it continues and how it is currently discharged, focusing on the emotion work daughters do to sustain the parent relationship, deal with conflict and maintain their self-esteem.Based on interviews with women living in Hong Kong, Singapore and mainland China, the book further explores whether the structural or relational motivations underpinning support and care may be less important than the standards daughters impose on themselves; why care may be discontinued or not undertaken in the first place; why care provided to parents may be different from in-laws, and the importance of domestic helpers to the modern caregiving paradigm.To undertake this exploration, a typology of support and care was created, allowing for the first time to distinguish between what daughters do for healthy parents and in-laws versus parents who require temporary or full time care, specifically addressing how providing support and care affects the daughters’ well-being.
Urban Christianity And Global Order: Theological Resources For An Urban Future
by Andrew DaveyThis is the first book to bring together current urban theory and theology in a form that may be used as a text book for Urban Theology courses, as well as being accessible to the general reader. It explores how globalization is affecting communities worldwide, and seeks for a new pattern of local and global Christian mission.
Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America: The Shared Intimacy of Everyday Life
by Viviane MahieuxAn unstructured genre that blends high aesthetic standards with nonfiction commentary, the journalistic crónica, or chronicle, has played a vital role in Latin American urban life since the nineteenth century. <P><P>Drawing on extensive archival research, Viviane Mahieux delivers new testimony on how chroniclers engaged with modernity in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo during the 1920s and 1930s, a time when avant-garde movements transformed writers' and readers' conceptions of literature. Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America: The Shared Intimacy of Everyday Life examines the work of extraordinary raconteurs Salvador Novo, Cube Bonifant, Roberto Arlt, Alfonsina Storni, and Mário de Andrade, restoring the original newspaper contexts in which their articles first emerged.
The Urban Church Imagined: Religion, Race, and Authenticity in the City
by Jessica M. Barron Rhys H. WilliamsExplores the role of race and consumer culture in attracting urban congregants to an evangelical church The Urban Church Imagined illuminates the dynamics surrounding white urban evangelical congregations’ approaches to organizational vitality and diversifying membership. Many evangelical churches are moving to urban, downtown areas to build their congregations and attract younger, millennial members. The urban environment fosters two expectations. First, a deep familiarity and reverence for popular consumer culture, and second, the presence of racial diversity. Church leaders use these ideas when they imagine what a “city church” should look like, but they must balance that with what it actually takes to make this happen. In part, racial diversity is seen as key to urban churches presenting themselves as “in touch” and “authentic.” Yet, in an effort to seduce religious consumers, church leaders often and inadvertently end up reproducing racial and economic inequality, an unexpected contradiction to their goal of inclusivity. Drawing on several years of research, Jessica M. Barron and Rhys H. Williams explore the cultural contours of one such church in downtown Chicago. They show that church leaders and congregants’ understandings of the connections between race, consumer culture, and the city is a motivating factor for many members who value interracial interactions as a part of their worship experience. But these explorations often unintentionally exclude members along racial and classed lines. Indeed, religious organizations’ efforts to engage urban environments and foster integrated congregations produce complex and dynamic relationships between their racially diverse memberships and the cultivation of a safe haven in which white, middle-class leaders can feel as though they are being a positive force in the fight for religious vitality and racial diversity. The book adds to the growing constellation of studies on urban religious organizations, as well as emerging scholarship on intersectionality and congregational characteristics in American religious life. In so doing, it offers important insights into racially diverse congregations in urban areas, a growing trend among evangelical churches. This work is an important case study on the challenges faced by modern churches and urban institutions in general.
Urban Climate and Urban Design (Urban Sustainability)
by Baojie He Yupeng Wang Ali CheshmehzangiDue to climate change and urbanization, urban climate change is increasingly prominent with significantly environmental, economic, social, and health consequences. Addressing climate-related risks, threats and disasters in cities to a significant extent means creating resilient, healthy, safe and inclusive built environments. Such an assumption is much truer since cities are the main human settlements of human beings. Typically, urban design is an implementable and tangible pathway to practically deal with the city-climate interactions, while there should be a large transformation from unsustainable urban design patterns towards sustainable ones. Urban Climate and Urban Design is a comprehensive collection of theoretical perspectives and global case study examples focused on three core areas of (i) urban climate monitoring, assessing and forecasting, (ii) mitigation and adaptation strategies, (iii) advanced and emerging design models and tools, and (iv) action plans and policy formulation. This edited volume provides theoretical and methodological references for urban climate research and generates practical implications for mitigation and adaptation capacity improvement. This book will be of interest to a range of researchers from earth and planetary sciences and environmental sciences to engineering, architecture, and urban planning. Beyond them, this book will enlighten policy makers, practitioners, and developers how to properly regulate urban climate through design interventions. We believe this book is promising to narrow the gap in the transition towards climate-resilient cities, and enhance the understanding of new ideas, methods, strategies, and policies.
Urban Coasts in Socio-ecological Transition: A Methodological Framework to Support Planning and Management of the City-Sea Interface (Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering)
by Ivan PistoneThis book delves into the concept of city-sea interface as a space of strong physical, ecological, social and functional connection between the edge of the city and the edge of the water, recalling the idea of an urban amphibious, in relation to its flexibility to community, environmental and management issue that prevent the sustainable development of urban coasts. In particular, the volume relates the spatial planning of littoral spaces with the demands of contemporary urban coastal society, since such complex places constitute crucial hubs for the fruition of coastal ecosystem services. The work explores these topics in the Euro-Mediterranean context, with regard to densely urbanised land-water areas through a methodological framework. A legal analysis describes the main coastal governance and Maritime Spatial Planning guidelines and how they are incorporated in national littoral management systems; the geo-spatial approach defines a spatial data model for the socio-environmental features of the interface; finally, the psycho-social approach aims at studying the social representations in relation to accessibility, uses and planning adaptation. This framework is proposed as a benchmarking tool: specifically, it has been applied to Marseille and Naples, two similar Mediterranean cities with complex city-sea interfaces. Moreover, it may also support the implementation of coastal-maritime planning at a local scale.
Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives (Routledge Advances in Comics Studies)
by Dominic DaviesUrban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives makes an important and timely contribution both to comics studies and urban studies, offering a decolonisation and reconfiguration of both of these already interdisciplinary fields. With chapter-length discussions of comics from cities such as Cairo, Cape Town, New Orleans, Delhi and Beirut, this book shows how artistic collectives and urban social movements working across the global South are producing some of the most exciting and formally innovative graphic narratives of the contemporary moment.Throughout, the author reads an expansive range of graphic narratives through the vocabulary of urban studies to argue that these formal innovations should be thought of as a kind of infrastructure. This ‘infrastructural form’ allows urban comics to reveal that the built environments of our cities are not static, banal, or depoliticised, but rather highly charged material spaces that allow some forms of social life to exist while also prohibiting others. Built from a formal infrastructure of grids, gutters and panels, and capable of volumetric, multi-scalar perspectives, this book shows how urban comics are able to represent, repair and even rebuild contemporary global cities toward more socially just and sustainable ends.Operating at the intersection of comics studies and urban studies, and offering large global surveys alongside close textual and visual analyses, this book explores and opens up the fascinating relationship between comics and graphic narratives, on the one hand, and cities and urban spaces, on the other.
Urban Commons: Rethinking the City (Space, Materiality And The Normative Ser.)
by Christian Borch Martin KornbergerThis book rethinks the city by examining its various forms of collectivity – their atmospheres, modes of exclusion and self-organization, as well as how they are governed – on the basis of a critical discussion of the notion of urban commons. The idea of the commons has received surprisingly little attention in urban theory, although the city may well be conceived as a shared resource. Urban Commons: Rethinking the City offers an attempt to reconsider what a city might be by studying how the notion of the commons opens up new understandings of urban collectivities, addressing a range of questions about urban diversity, urban governance, urban belonging, urban sexuality, urban subcultures, and urban poverty; but also by discussing in more methodological terms how one might study the urban commons. In these respects, the rethinking of the city undertaken in this book has a critical dimension, as the notion of the commons delivers new insights about how collective urban life is formed and governed.
The Urban Commons: How Data and Technology Can Rebuild Our Communities
by Daniel T. O'BrienThrough voicemail, apps, websites, and Twitter, Boston’s sophisticated 311 system allows citizens to report potholes, broken streetlights, graffiti, and vandalism that affect everyone’s quality of life. Drawing on Boston’s rich data, Daniel T. O’Brien offers a model of what smart technology can do for cities seeking both growth and sustainability.
The Urban Condition (Questioning Cities)
by Brendan GleesonThis book will speak to the new human epoch, the Urban Age. A majority of humanity now lives for the first time in cities. The city, the highest invention of the modern age, is now the human heartland. And yet the same process that brought us the city and its wonders, modernisation, has also thrown up challenges and threats, especially climate change, resource depletion, social division and economic insecurity. This book considers how these threats are encountered and countered in the urban age, focusing on the issue of human knowledge and self-awareness, just as Hannah Arendt’s influential The Human Condition did half a century ago. The Human Condition is now The Urban Condition. And it is this condition that will define human prospects in an age of default and risk. Gleeson expertly explores the concept through three main themes. The first is an exploration of what defines the current human condition, especially the expanding cities that are at the heart of an over-consumptive world economic order. The second exposes and reviews the reawakening of forms of knowledge (‘naturalism’) that are likely to worsen not improve our comprehension of the crisis. The new ‘science of urbanism’ in popular new literature exemplifies this dangerous trend. The third and last part of the book considers prospects for a new urban, and therefore human, dispensation, ‘The Good City’. We must first journey in our urban vessels through troubled times. But can we now start to plot the way to new shores, to a safer, more resilient city that provides for human flourishing? The Urban Condition attempts this ideal, conceiving a new urbanism based on the old idea of self-limitation. The Urban Condition is an original, timely book that reconsiders and redeploys Arendt’s famous notion of The Human Condition in an age of cities and risk. It brings together several important strands of human consideration, urbanisation, climate threat, resource depletion, economic default and critical knowledge and weaves them into a new analysis of the times. It also looks to a future that is nearly with us—of changed climate, resource scarcity and economic stress. The book journeys into these troubled times, proposing the idea of Lifeboat Cities as a way of thinking about the human journey to come
Urban Constellations: Spaces of Cultural Regeneration in Post-Industrial Britain
by Zoë ThompsonThis book investigates the iconic architectural cultural spaces of the contemporary cityscape as engines of regeneration. Promising much to their fading locales, these spaces locate culture in the space where production once ruled in order to revitalise post-industrial urban provinces. With close attention to four sites across the UK, Urban Constellations engages with the work of Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard, to read these spaces and in so doing, offer a critical intervention into the theory and experience of contemporary cityscapes. Developing the notion of surface ethnography as a methodological approach to examining the form of cultural experience produced by urban cultural spaces, the author sheds light on the manner in which they transform cultural spectatorship, express wider political and ecological concerns and offer differing views to the ’native’ and the ’tourist’ in the construction of local history. The book also examines the decline of the idea that iconic projects can drive regeneration, in the failures and delays that can beset such undertakings. Offering a rich examination of the legacy of urban change in its most recent formulation - that of cultural regeneration - this book reveals the fragile potential of the spaces produced by contemporary ’dream houses’ and as such, will be of interest to scholars of cultural studies, sociology and social theory, urban studies, cultural geography and architecture.
Urban Cosmopolitics: Agencements, assemblies, atmospheres (Questioning Cities)
by Anders Blok Ignacio FariasInvoking the notion of ‘cosmopolitics’ from Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, this volume shows how and why cities constitute privileged sites for studying the search for and composition of common worlds of cohabitation. A cosmopolitical approach to the city focuses on the multiple assemblages of human and nonhuman actors that constitute urban common worlds, and on the conflicts and compromises that arise among different ways of assembling the city. It brings into view how urban worlds are always in the process of being subtly transformed, destabilized, decentred, questioned, criticized, or even destroyed. As such, it opens up novel questions as to the gradual and contested composition of urban life, thereby forcing us to pay more explicit attention to the politics of urban assemblages. Focusing on changing sanitation infrastructures and practices, emerging forms of urban activism, processes of economic restructuring, transformations of the built environment, changing politics of expert-based urban planning, as well as novel practices for navigating the urban everyday, the contributions gathered in this volume explore different conceptual and empirical configurations of urban cosmopolitics: agencements, assemblies, atmospheres. Taken together, the volume thus aims at introducing and specifying a novel research program for rethinking urban studies and politics, in ways that remain sensitive to the multiple agencies, materialities, concerns and publics that constitute any urban situation.
Urban Crime and Social Disorganization in China
by Haiyan XiongThe book selects Guangzhou, which has the highest crime rate in China, as a research site to study patterns of crime and social disorganization. It combines methods of content analyses with ethnographic fieldwork. The research first selected 1422 crime cases reported by the influential Southern Metropolis Daily in 2013 to identify the general crime-distribution pattern. The findings suggest that both spatial and demographic-density distribution of criminal cases in Guangzhou show a gradient circle pattern from city center to suburb. Focusing on three selected typical communities, the thesis finds important patterns of crime and social disorganization that are very different from Western research. These findings are organized according to major correlates of social disorganization, including unemployment, marriage and family, residential stability, ethnic heterogeneity, social equality, social capital, social control, social isolation and social exclusion, community cohesion, trust and fear, traditions, morals and beliefs, language. These findings extend and elaborate Social Disorganization Theory in urban China. This book can be used as a textbook for college and Ph. D. students majoring in law and sociology, as well as a reference book for professionals in related fields. Although academic, this book is written in such a way that it will also appeal to a general audience.
Urban Crime Control in Cinema: Fallen Guardians and the Ideology of Repression (Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture)
by Vladimir RizovThis book uses popular films to understand the convergence of crime control and the ideology of repression in contemporary capitalism. It focuses on the cinematic figure of the fallen guardian, a protagonist who, in the course of a narrative, falls from grace and becomes an enemy of the established social order. The fallen guardian is a figure that allows for the analysis of a particular crime control measure through the perspective of both an enforcer and a target. The very notion of ‘justice’ is challenged, and questions are posed in relation to the role that films assume in the reproduction of policing as it is. In doing so, the book combines a historical far-reaching perspective with popular culture analysis. At the core remains the value of the cinematic figure of the fallen guardian for contemporary understandings of urban space and urban crime control and how films are clear examples of the ways in which the ideology of repression is reproduced.This book questions the justifications that are often given for social control in cities and understands cinema as a medium for offering critique of such processes and justifications. Explored are the crime control measures of private policing in relation to RoboCop (1987), preventative policing and Minority Report (2002), mass incarceration in The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and extra-judicial killing in Blade Runner 2049 (2017). The book speaks to those interested in crime control in critical criminology, cultural criminology, urban studies, and beyond.
Urban Crime Prevention: Multi-disciplinary Approaches (The Urban Book Series)
by Miguel SaraivaThis book provides an original cross-thematic and wide scope review of crime prevention processes in urban areas that are explicitly based on the cooperation between different scientific and professional fields. Focusing primarily on environmental and community-based crime prevention, this book compiles a peer-reviewed collection of papers and prospective essays that explore how, and to what extent, multi-disciplinarity can be used as a cornerstone for achieving safer cities.Relying on the input from specialists, researchers, decision-makers, and practitioners from around the world, it covers the various stages from theory to implementation, by discussing theoretical stances, interpreting policy and planning guidelines, uncovering unique educational experiences, and narrating insights and lessons learned from innovative research and practice. Hence, it provides vivid discussions and invaluable insights into processes of partnership building, planning, and management, oriented towards establishing successful mechanism for preventing crime and reducing feelings of insecurity in urban areas.
Urban Culture: Exploring Cities and Cultures
by Alan C TurleyThis innovative text uses the lens of culture to examine the various theoretical perspectives and paradigms of urban analysis. It explores the city's impact on how we make and consume all types of culture—art, music, literature, architecture, film, and more—not only illustrating the effects the urban environment has on the production of culture, but, at times, how culture has influenced the city. Theoretically diverse, Urban Culture employs the major theoretical perspectives in sociology and the major paradigms in Urban Sociology and Urban Studies: Urban Ecology, Marxism, New Urbanism, Socio-Psychological Perspective, Structuralists/Econometrics, and Urban Elites/ Entrepreneurs. Urban Terrorism is also addressed to provide a timely examination of the cultural impact and sociological effects of terrorism in an urban setting.
Urban Culture in Tehran
by Seyed Hossein Iradj Moeini Mehran Arefian Bahador Kashani Golnar AbbasiThis book studies the production of urban culture in Tehran after 1979. It analyzes urban resistance and urban processes in underground cultural spaces: bookshops, cafes and art galleries. The intended audience is architects and urban planners interested in socio-political aspects of bottom-up space formation, but also those in humanities and particularly cultural studies. The idea of the book reflects architectural criticism and bottom-up processes of space formation. It analyzes alternative, non-official ways of forming cultural spaces in Tehran and the way they resist formally endorsed culture. Caf#65533;s, bookshops and galleries, each take various and different sets of strategies to constitute their territory and their communities within the city. From temporarily occupying street corners (booksellers) to constitution of an underground network of unfixed meeting points, to using the modern paradigms of ownership and the idea of private property, primarily as a political tool for management, to claim a safe alternative sphere of art, and finally to semiotic spatial codifications of spaces to make them as a safe gathering places taking food as a means. All these three cultural spaces deal with various conditions to form specific forms of resistance practices, throughout processes that leave their spatial traces on the city.
Urban Deprivation and the Inner City (Routledge Library Editions: Urban Studies #13)
by Colin JonesOriginally published in 1979. Phenomena such as high levels of unemployment, decaying and vandalised council estates, poor educational achievements by schoolchildren and the population decline in inner cities are just some of the problems challenged by this important work. The contributors from such diverse fields as economics, geography, public administration, social policy and sociology investigate the specific areas where the problematic conditions of unemployment and housing tend to predominate. This title will be of particular interest to students of the social sciences.
Urban Design and Representation
by Barbara E.A. Piga Rossella SalernoThis book explores how environmental urban design can benefit from established and emerging representation and simulation techniques that meet the need for a multisensory approach. Bringing together contributions by researchers and practicing professionals that approach the topics discussed from both theoretical and practical perspectives and draw on case-study applications, it addresses important themes including digital modeling, physical modeling, mapping, and simulation. The chapters are linked by their relevance to simple but crucial questions: How can representational solutions enhance an urban design approach in which people's well-being is considered the primary goal? How can one best represent and design the ambiance of places? What kinds of technologies and tools are available to support multisensory urban design? How can current and future environments be optimally represented and simulated, taking into account the way in which we experience places? Shedding new light on these key questions, the book offers both a reference guide for those engaged in applied research, and a toolkit for professionals and students.
Urban Design Futures
by Malcolm Moor Jon RowlandThe last decade has seen the rise of urban design which has taken a central position in the new agendas for urban regeneration and renaissance. Urban design has moved from marginality to mainstream. The principles espoused by urban designers over the past thirty years are now accepted as key to a better urban environment and as we move towards greater sustainability, different ideas are emerging that are challenging some of the accepted urban design norms; urban design is at a watershed. Urban Design Futures presents essays from an international cast of authors to review progress and explore emerging ideas: should urban design reflect the future rather than recreate the past? What are the new driving forces that will shape urban living and hence urban design in the future? This book explores new concepts and points the way towards a series of urban design paradigms for the twenty-first century.
Urban Design Made by Humans: A Handbook of Design Ideas
by Anirban Adhya Philip D. PlowrightThe design of urban environments is complex and involves diverse needs, organisations, professions, authorities, and communities. It requires relationships to be constructed and sustained between infrastructure, resources, and populations across multiple scales. This can be quite daunting. However, at the core of urban design is a simple idea—our urban spaces are designed to allow people and communities to thrive. For that reason, a good starting point for urban designers is to focus on the way people think when engaging our built environment. This thinking is embodied, developed through the interactions between our mind, body, and the environment around us. These embodied concepts are central to how we see the world, how we move and gather, and how we interact with others. They are also the same ideas we use to design our environments and cities. Urban Design Made by Humans is a reference book that presents 56 concepts, notions, ideas, and agreements fundamental to the design and interpretation of our human settlements. The ideas here parallel those found in Making Architecture Through Being Human but extends them into urban environments. Urban Design Made by Humans distinctly highlights priorities in urban design in how we produce meaningful environments catering to wider groups of people. Each idea is isolated for clarity with short and concise definitions, examples, and illustrations. They are organised in five sections of increasing complexity. Taken as a whole, the entries frame the priorities and values of urban design while also being instances of a larger system of human thinking.
Urban Development and Planning: An Introduction
by Bikram PattanaikThis book details the most contemporary concerns related to urban development, governance, and planning, as well as the challenges to urban administration. It analyses the policies and programmes adopted by both high-income and lower-middle-income countries to achieve sustainable urbanization and their application and treatment to help students get a holistic, practical perspective of the issues at hand.This volume elucidates urban development theories and approaches, coupled with urban planning, local government finance, urban management, and urban governance. It also discusses urban issues and challenges such as education, health, waste management, land use planning, housing, and transport. Critical concerns related to urban water bodies, open spaces, urban heritage and smart cities, and urban future are similarly addressed.This book will be useful to students, researchers, and teachers of urban planning and architecture, urban sociology, economics, geography, environmental science, and public administration. It shall also be useful to NGOs, parastatal bodies, and trainers of urban planning and development. Planners, policymakers, functionaries, and elected representatives of urban local bodies may also use this book as a capacity-building instrument.
Urban Development Challenges, Risks and Resilience in Asian Mega Cities
by R. B. SinghIn this book, an interdisciplinary research group of faculty members, researchers, professionals, and planners contributed to an understanding of the dynamics and dimensions of emerging challenges and risks in megacities in the rapidly changing urban environments in Asia and examined emerging resilience themes from the point of view of sustainability and public policy. The world's urban population in 2009 was approximately 3. 4 billion and Asia's urban population was about 1. 72 billion. Between 2010 and 2020, 411 million people will be added to Asian cities (60 % of the growth in the world's urban population). By 2020, of the world's urban population of 4. 2 billion, approximately 2. 2 billion will be in Asia. China and India will contribute 31. 3 % of the total world urban population by 2025. Developing Asia's projected global share of CO2 emissions for energy consumption will increase from 30 % in 2006 to 43 % by 2030. City regions serve as magnets for people, enterprise, and culture, but with urbanisation , the worst form of visible poverty becomes prominent. The Asian region, with a slum population of an estimated 505. 5 million people, remains host to over half of the world's slum population . The book provides information on a comprehensive range of environmental threats faced by the inhabitants of megacities. It also offers a wide and multidisciplinary group of case studies from rapidly growing megacities (with populations of more than 5 million) from developed and developing countries of Asia.