City Halls And Civic Materialism

The town hall or city hall as a place of local governance is historically related to the founding of cities in medieval Europe. As the space of representative civic authority it aimed to set the terms of public space and engagement with the citizenry. In subsequent centuries, as the idea and built form travelled beyond Europe to become an established institution across the globe, the parameters of civic representation changed and the town hall was forced to negotiate new notions of urbanism and public space. City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space utilizes the town hall in its global historical incarnations as bases to probe these changing ideas of urban public space. The essays in this volume provide an analysis of the architecture, iconography, and spatial relations that constitute the town hall to explore its historical ability to accommodate the "public" in different political and social contexts, in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and the Americas, as the relation between citizens and civic authority had to be revisited with the universal franchise, under fascism, after the devastation of the world wars, decolonization, and most recently, with the neo-liberal restructuring of cities. As a global phenomenon, the town hall challenges the idea that nationalism, imperialism, democracy, the idea of citizenship – concepts that frame the relation between the individual and the body politic -- travel the globe in modular forms, or in predictable trajectories from the West to East, North to South. Collectively the essays argue that if the town hall has historically been connected with the articulation of bourgeois civil society, then the town hall as a global spatial type -- architectural space, urban monument, and space of governance -- holds a mirror to the promise and limits of civil society.

This is the first book to examine the development of the town hall during the twentieth century and the way in which these civic buildings have responded to the dramatic political, social and architectural changes which took place during the period. Following an overview of the history of the town hall as a building type, it examines the key themes, variations and lessons which emerged during the twentieth century. This is followed by 20 case studies from around the world which include plans, sections and full-colour illustrations. Each of the case studies examines the town hall's procurement, the selection of its architect and the building design, and critically analyses its success and contribution to the type’s development. The case studies include: Copenhagen Town Hall, Denmark, Martin Nyrop Stockholm City Hall, Sweden, Ragnar Ostberg Hilversum Town Hall, the Netherlands, Willem M. Dudok Walthamstow Town Hall, Britain, Philip Dalton Hepworth Oslo Town Hall, Norway, Arnstein Arneberg and Magnus Poulsson Casa del Fascio, Como, Italy, Guiseppe Terragni Aarhus Town Hall, Denmark, Arne Jacobsen with Eric Moller Saynatsalo Town Hall, Finland, Alvar Aalto Kurashiki City Hall, Japan, Kenzo Tange Toronto City Hall, Canada, Viljo Revell Boston City Hall, USA, Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles Dallas City Hall, USA, IM Pei Mississauga City Hall, Canada, Ed Jones and Michael Kirkland Borgoricco Town Hall, Italy, Aldo Rossi Reykjavik City Hall, Iceland, Studio Granda Valdelaguna Town Hall, Spain, Victor Lopez Cotelo and Carlos Puente Fernandez The Hague City Hall, the Netherlands, Richard Meier Iragna Town Hall, Switzerland, Raffaele Cavadini Murcia City Hall, Spain, Jose Rafael Moneo London City Hall, UK, Norman Foster

“Tells a story of a period when the quest for accurate timekeeping became an obsession in the US.” —Choice The public spaces and buildings of the United States are home to many thousands of timepieces—bells, time balls, and clock faces—that tower over urban streets, peek out from lobbies, and gleam in store windows. And in the streets and squares beneath them, men, women, and children wear wristwatches of all kinds. Americans have decorated their homes with clocks and included them in their poetry, sermons, stories, and songs. And as political instruments, social tools, and cultural symbols, these personal and public timekeepers have enjoyed a broad currency in art, life, and culture. In Marking Modern Times, Alexis McCrossen relates how the American preoccupation with time led people from across social classes to acquire watches and clocks. While noting the difficulties in regulating and synchronizing so many timepieces, McCrossen expands our understanding of the development of modern time discipline, delving into the ways we have standardized time and describing how timekeepers have served as political, social, and cultural tools in a society that doesn’t merely value time but regards access to time as a natural-born right, a privilege of being an American. “A precise, acute, and well-measured monograph.” —Journal of Social History “Important and engaging.” —Journal of American History “ An innovative contribution on a key historical shift in modern life.” —Urban History “An authoritative narrative of how and where time and timepieces were distributed in the period.” —Reviews in American History

Originally published in 2003. In Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America Helen Tangires examines the role of the public marketplace—social and architectural—as a key site in the development of civic culture in America. More than simply places for buying and selling food, Tangires explains, municipally owned and operated markets were the common ground where citizens and government struggled to define the shared values of the community. Public markets were vital to civic policy and reflected the profound belief in the moral economy—the effort on the part of the municipality to maintain the social and political health of its community by regulating the ethics of trade in the urban marketplace for food. Tangires begins with the social, architectural, and regulatory components of the public market in the early republic, when cities embraced this ancient system of urban food distribution. By midcentury, the legalization of butcher shops in New York City and the incorporation of market house companies in Pennsylvania challenged the system and hastened the deregulation of this public service. Some cities demolished their marketing facilities or loosened restrictions on the food trades in an effort to deal with the privatization movement. However, several decades of experience with dispersed retailers, suburban slaughterhouses, and food transported by railroad proved disastrous to the public welfare, prompting cities and federal agencies to reclaim this urban civic space.

From the urban affairs correspondent of the New York Times--the story of a city through twenty-seven structures that define it. As New York is poised to celebrate its four hundredth anniversary, New York Times correspondent Sam Roberts tells the story of the city through bricks, glass, wood, and mortar, revealing why and how it evolved into the nation's biggest and most influential. From the seven hundred thousand or so buildings in New York, Roberts selects twenty-seven that, in the past four centuries, have been the most emblematic of the city's economic, social, and political evolution. He describes not only the buildings and how they came to be, but also their enduring impact on the city and its people and how the consequences of the construction often reverberated around the world. A few structures, such as the Empire State Building, are architectural icons, but Roberts goes beyond the familiar with intriguing stories of the personalities and exploits behind the unrivaled skyscraper's construction. Some stretch the definition of buildings, to include the city's oldest bridge and the landmark Coney Island Boardwalk. Others offer surprises: where the United Nations General Assembly first met; a hidden hub of global internet traffic; a nondescript factory that produced billions of dollars of currency in the poorest neighborhood in the country; and the buildings that triggered the Depression and launched the New Deal. With his deep knowledge of the city and penchant for fascinating facts, Roberts brings to light the brilliant architecture, remarkable history, and bright future of the greatest city in the world.

The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture convenes a wide array of critical voices from architecture, art history, urbanism, geography, anthropology, media and performance studies, computer science, bio-engineering, environmental studies, and sociology that help us understand the meaning and significance of global architecture of the twenty-first century. New chapters by 36 contributors illustrated with over 140 black-and-white images are assembled in six parts concerning both real and virtual spaces: design, materiality, alterity, technologies, cityscapes, and practice.

Following the disaster of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, people began to discuss and visualize the ways in which the urban structure of the city could be reorganized. Rather than defining the disaster recovery process as simply a matter of rebuilding the existing city, these voices called for a more radical rethinking of the city’s physical, social and environmental systems. This idea of disaster as an opportunity for urban restructuring is a hallmark of a "design moment." Design moments are different from the incremental process of urban growth and development. Instead of gradual growth and change, design moments present the opportunity for a significant restructuring of urban form that can shape the city for decades to come. As such, a design moment presents a critical juncture in the historical growth and development of a city. In this book we explore the question: what does urban design have to do with a disaster like Hurricane Katrina? Focused on New Orleans, the authors explore different dimensions of the post-disaster design moment, including the politics of physical redevelopment, the city’s history and identity, justice and the image of the city, demolition and housing development, and the environmental aspects of the recovery process. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Urban Design.

Kim details a brief history of urban renewal in central Seoul through articulating urban planning paradigm shifts. This book illustrates four main themes in central Seoul: the restoration of the Cheonggye stream, the redevelopment of the Sewoon Plaza, the enhancement of walkability and public transport networks, and history- centred urban renewal. Urban renewal is seen as a remedy for urban sprawl and is appreciated for its capacity to make use of pre-existing infrastructure and cultural assets in high- density urban areas. However, it faces critical challenges, such as fragmented property ownership and escalated land prices in comparison with peri- urban areas. The book focuses on how planning policies have shaped the urban renewal process in central Seoul, South Korea. Spatial development policies for central Seoul have been changed from modern transport facilities, post- war reconstruction, informality, industrialisation to walkability, sustainability, and social cohesion in line with economic restructuring. In recent times, there has been a significant change in thinking towards creating public spaces for walking, preserving historical sites and heritage, and maintaining green spaces. These interconnected topics contribute to understanding the complexity of urban renewal. This book is a useful read for researchers on urban planning and policies who are keen to understand the complicated process of urban renewal and ways to revitalise economic and human activities and transform built environments.