Cities For Life

In cities around the world, planning and health experts are beginning to understand the role of social and environmental conditions that lead to trauma. By respecting the lived experience of those who were most impacted by harms, some cities have developed innovative solutions for urban trauma. In Cities for Life, public health expert Jason Corburn shares lessons from three of these cities: Richmond, California; Medellín, Colombia; and Nairobi, Kenya. Corburn draws from his work with citizens, activists, and decision-makers in these cities over a ten-year period, as individuals and communities worked to heal from trauma--including from gun violence, housing and food insecurity, poverty, and other harms. Cities for Life is about a new way forward with urban communities that rebuilds our social institutions, practices, and policies to be more focused on healing and health.

Contemporary urbanisation has two faces: global flows of people, money and information, and that of localised social and economic disparities. Recent research has focused on the headlines of global cities as control centres of the world economy, and social and economic shock waves that have raged through cities and regions, but less attention has been paid to the secret life of cities, and the changing nature of everyday life in the wake of such changes.This book challenges current research and policy agendas recommending spatial concentration and relocation as a solution to the problems of environmental sustainability and social dislocation. Instead, this book highlights the key linkages between social and environmental problems, it argues that neither are likely to be resolved with a simple spatial fix. The book draws attention to local contexts of contemporary urbanisation emphasising consideration of policy making from the perspective of the household as a key unit of analysis in identifying links between labour and housing markets, transport and leisure.This book draws upon detailed household interviews about the daily experience of life in a global city. It illustrates the dilemmas and solutions that people routinely find in order to go on in their lives. It shows that these local fixes that are managed at the level of the household work in spite of, and sometimes against, existing policies aimed at sustainability. It concludes that policy making needs to be radically overhauled in order to address the integrated nature of people's everyday lives.

This volume addresses the complex relations between urban artifacts and urban life. The contributions show how architects, planners, and urban designers describe and give shape to the city, while novelists, humanists, and other scholars examine its operations and performances. The essential question is: How does the physical character of an urban environment influence or enable the events that take place within a specific setting? Contributors from a wide range of fields address the role and life of cities as diverse as Baku, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Detroit, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Paris, Quito, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv, Tirana, and Toronto. Portfolios of contemporary photography present the layered realities of urban life today. With contributions by Arjun Appadurai, Eve Blau, Svetlana Boym, Lindsay Bremner, Jana Cephas, Felipe Correa, Rahul Mehrotra, Mohsen Mostafavi, Antoine Picon, Gyan Prakash, Nasser Rabbat, Rafi Segal, Jorge Silvetti, AbdouMaliq Simone, and Charles Waldheim. Mohsen Mostafavi, an architect and educator, is dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design. He is the editor of Ecological Urbanism (with Gareth Doherty).

Over the last 50 years architect Jan Gehl has changed the way that we think about architecture and city planning--moving from the Modernist separation of uses to a human-scale approach inviting people to use their cities. People Cities tells the inside story of how Gehl learned to study urban spaces and implement his people-centered approach in car-dominated cities. It discusses the work, theory, life, and influence of Gehl from the perspective of those who have worked with him in cities across the globe. It will inspire anyone who wants to create vibrant, human-scale cities and understand the ideas and work of the architect who has most influenced urban design.

Imagine waking up to the gentle noises of the city, and moving through your day with complete confidence that you will get where you need to go quickly and efficiently. Soft City is about ease and comfort, where density has a human dimension, adapting to our ever-changing needs, nurturing relationships, and accommodating the pleasures of everyday life. How do we move from the current reality in most cites—separated uses and lengthy commutes in single-occupancy vehicles that drain human, environmental, and community resources—to support a soft city approach? In Soft City David Sim, partner and creative director at Gehl, shows how this is possible, presenting ideas and graphic examples from around the globe. He draws from his vast design experience to make a case for a dense and diverse built environment at a human scale, which he presents through a series of observations of older and newer places, and a range of simple built phenomena, some traditional and some totally new inventions. Sim shows that increasing density is not enough. The soft city must consider the organization and layout of the built environment for more fluid movement and comfort, a diversity of building types, and thoughtful design to ensure a sustainable urban environment and society. Soft City begins with the big ideas of happiness and quality of life, and then shows how they are tied to the way we live. The heart of the book is highly visual and shows the building blocks for neighborhoods: building types and their organization and orientation; how we can get along as we get around a city; and living with the weather. As every citizen deals with the reality of a changing climate, Soft City explores how the built environment can adapt and respond. Soft City offers inspiration, ideas, and guidance for anyone interested in city building. Sim shows how to make any city more efficient, more livable, and better connected to the environment.

"A love song for the city . . . [this] volume, attractivelypackaged and richly illustrated, is really a cookbook for downtownrevitalization." --Wall Street Journal In this pioneering book on successful urban recovery, two urbanexperts draw on their firsthand observations of downtown changeacross the country to identify a flexible, effective approach tourban rejuvenation. From transportation planning and sprawlcontainment to the threat of superstore retailers, they address ahost of key issues facing our cities today. Roberta Brandes Gratz (New York, NY), an award-winning journalistand urban critic, is author of the urban design classic The LivingCity. A former staff reporter for the New York Post, Gratz haswritten for the New York Times Magazine and other publications.Norman Mintz (New York, NY) has played a leading role in the fieldof downtown revitalization for more than twenty-five years. He isDesign Director at the 34th Street Partnership in New York City anda consultant on downtown revitalization across the country.

In the last few decades, urban quality of life has received increasing interest from policy makers who aim to make cities better places to live. In addition to the aim of improving quality of life, sustainable and equitable development is also often included in the policy agendas of decision makers. This book aims to link quality of life to related issues such as sustainability, equity, and subjective well-being. While less than one-third of the world's population lived in cities in 1950, about two thirds of humanity is expected to live in urban areas by 2030. This dramatic increase in the number of people living in urban areas serves as the backdrop for this book’s analysis of cities. This book will be useful to students and researchers in economics, architecture and urban planning, sociology and political sciences, as well as policy makers.