City Futures

Global City Futures offers a queer analysis of urban and national development in Singapore, the Southeast Asian city-state commonly cast as a leading ?global city.? Much discourse on Singapore focuses on its extraordinary socioeconomic development and on the fact that many city and national governors around the world see it as a developmental model. But counternarratives complicate this success story, pointing out rising income inequalities, the lack of a social safety net, an unjust migrant labor regime, significant restrictions on civil liberties, and more. With Global City Futures Natalie Oswin contributes to such critical perspectives by centering recent debates over the place of homosexuality in the city-state. She extends out from these debates to consider the ways in which the race, class, and gender biases that are already well critiqued in the literature on Singapore (and on other cities around the world) are tied in key ways to efforts to make the city-state into not just a heterosexual space that excludes "queer" subjects but a heteronormative one that "queers" many more than LGBT people. Oswin thus argues for the importance of taking the politics of sexuality and intimacy much more seriously within both Singapore studies and the wider field of urban studies.

Cities are the future. In the past two decades, a global urban revolution has taken place, mainly in the South. The 'mega-cities' of the developing world are home to over 10 million people each and even smaller cities are experiencing unprecedented population surges. The problems surrounding this influx of people - slums, poverty, unemployment and lack of governance - have been well-documented. This book is a powerful indictment of the current consensus on how to deal with these challenges. Pieterse argues that the current 'shelter for all' and 'urban good governance' policies treat only the symptoms, not the causes of the problem. Instead, he claims, there is an urgent need to reinvigorate civil society in these cities, to encourage radical democracy, economic resilience, social resistance and environmental sustainability folded into the everyday concerns of marginalised people. Providing a dynamic picture of a cosmopolitan urban citizenship, this book is an essential guide to one of the new century's greatest challenges.

Global City Futures offers a queer analysis of urban and national development in Singapore, the Southeast Asian city-state commonly cast as a leading “global city.” Much discourse on Singapore focuses on its extraordinary socioeconomic development and on the fact that many city and national governors around the world see it as a developmental model. But counternarratives complicate this success story, pointing out rising income inequalities, the lack of a social safety net, an unjust migrant labor regime, significant restrictions on civil liberties, and more. With Global City Futures Natalie Oswin contributes to such critical perspectives by centering recent debates over the place of homosexuality in the city-state. She extends out from these debates to consider the ways in which the race, class, and gender biases that are already well critiqued in the literature on Singapore (and on other cities around the world) are tied in key ways to efforts to make the city-state into not just a heterosexual space that excludes “queer” subjects but a heteronormative one that “queers” many more than LGBT people. Oswin thus argues for the importance of taking the politics of sexuality and intimacy much more seriously within both Singapore studies and the wider field of urban studies.

This book goes beyond current ways that the impact of climate change upon the city are understood. In doing so it addresses climate in a variety of its connotations. It looks to the nomadic behaviour patterns of the past for lessons for today’s population unsettlement, and argues that as human survival will increasingly be linked directly to movement, the city can no longer be defined as a constrained space. The impacts of climate change must be understood as a combination of the actual and the expected, and have to be addressed both practically and culturally. City Futures in an Age of Changing Climate looks at how cities can adapt and respond to the unsustainable conditions they are now facing. The book considers possible post-urban futures, exposing a range of very different urban forms, and addresses the concept of fragmentation; the breaking up of any coherent economic or cultural nucleic urban spaces. Urban planners, designers, development practitioners, and anyone seeking to understand what the future is likely to look like for our cities, and how to prepare for it, will find this an essential read.

All cities face a pressing challenge – how can they provide economic prosperity and social cohesion while achieving environmental sustainability? In response, new collaborations are emerging in the form of urban living labs – sites devised to design, test and learn from social and technical innovation in real time. The aim of this volume is to examine, inform and advance the governance of sustainability transitions through urban living labs. Notably, urban living labs are proliferating rapidly across the globe as a means through which public and private actors are testing innovations in buildings, transport and energy systems. Yet despite the experimentation taking place on the ground, we lack systematic learning and international comparison across urban and national contexts about their impacts and effectiveness. We have limited knowledge on how good practice can be scaled up to achieve the transformative change required. This book brings together leading international researchers within a systematic comparative framework for evaluating the design, practices and processes of urban living labs to enable the comparative analysis of their potential and limits. It provides new insights into the governance of urban sustainability and how to improve the design and implementation of urban living labs in order to realise their potential.

Winner of the 2022 Urban Affairs Association Best Book Award. City visions represent shared, and often desirable, expectations about our urban futures. This book explores the history and evolution of city visions, placing them in the wider context of art, culture, science, foresight and urban theory. It highlights and critically reviews examples of city visions from around the world, contrasting their development and outlining the key benefits and challenges in planning such visions. The authors show how important it is to think about the future of cities in objective and strategic ways, engaging with a range of stakeholders – something more important than ever as we look to visions of a sustainable future beyond the COVID-19 crisis.

In the contemporary city, the physical infrastructure and sensorial experiences of two millennia are now interwoven within an invisible digital matrix. This matrix alters human perceptions of the city, informs our behavior, and increasingly influences the urban designs we ultimately inhabit. Digital Futures and the City of Today cuts through these issues to analyze the work of architects, designers, media specialists, and a growing number of community activists, laying out a multifaceted view of the complex integrated phenomenon of the contemporary city. Split into three relevant sections, the book interrogates the concept of the "smart" city, examines innovative digital projects from around the world, documents experimental visions for the future, and describes projects that engage local communities in the design process.

The Future of the City Centre: Global Perspectives debates future directions. It looks beyond the post-industrial, post-commercial, and post-retail city centres to examine differing visions of the future form and function of the urban core. This theme and the related sub-topics will assist the development of future city models and help to contextualise urban change. The in-depth research covers not only urban form and the re-use of the built heritage but also the provision for cultural events and different forms of entertainment that will offer vitality, together with visitors and responsible tourism. City authorities are starting to realise that structural changes are happening in city centres, as their influence is declining, and therefore new forms of governance will be needed. The book is based on an international research network hosting four symposia over 24 months. They took place in four cities in four different continents to encompass a world view of developed and developing countries. This book offers theoretical and practical perspectives from leading thinkers, academics, and practitioners, drawing on thematic issues explored across four international cities: Newcastle, UK; Newcastle, Australia; Pretoria-Tshwane, South Africa; and João Pessoa, Brazil. It draws on a wider set of global examples to reveal the shared issues and pressures being brought to bear on city centres and the diversity of responses being undertaken to ensure their long-term future. The book includes illustrations from cities around the world, and it is directed at academics, students, and professionals in architecture, planning, urban design, the built environment, geography, economics, sociology, and cultural studies.