City Making

American metropolitan areas today are divided into neighborhoods of privilege and poverty, often along lines of ethnicity and race. City residents traveling through these neighborhoods move from feeling at home to feeling like tourists to feeling so out of place they fear for their security. As Gerald Frug shows, this divided and inhospitable urban landscape is not simply the result of individual choices about where to live or start a business. It is the product of government policies--and, in particular, the policies embedded in legal rules. A Harvard law professor and leading expert on urban affairs, Frug presents the first-ever analysis of how legal rules shape modern cities and outlines a set of alternatives to bring down the walls that now keep city dwellers apart. Frug begins by describing how American law treats cities as subdivisions of states and shows how this arrangement has encouraged the separation of metropolitan residents into different, sometimes hostile groups. He explains in clear, accessible language the divisive impact of rules about zoning, redevelopment, land use, and the organization of such city services as education and policing. He pays special attention to the underlying role of anxiety about strangers, the widespread desire for good schools, and the pervasive fear of crime. Ultimately, Frug calls for replacing the current legal definition of cities with an alternative based on what he calls "community building"--an alternative that gives cities within the same metropolitan region incentives to forge closer links with each other. An incisive study of the legal roots of today's urban problems, City Making is also an optimistic and compelling blueprint for enabling American cities once again to embrace their historic role of helping people reach an accommodation with those who live in the same geographic area, no matter how dissimilar they are.

City-making is an art, not a formula. The skills required to re-enchant the city are far wider than the conventional ones like architecture, engineering and land-use planning. There is no simplistic, ten-point plan, but strong principles can help send good city-making on its way. The vision for 21st century cities must be to be the most imaginative cities for the world rather than in the world. This one change of word - from 'in' to 'for' - gives city-making an ethical foundation and value base. It helps cities become places of solidarity where the relations between the individual, the group, outsiders to the city and the planet are in better alignment. Following the widespread success of The Creative City, this new book, aided by international case studies, explains how to reassess urban potential so that cities can strengthen their identity and adapt to the changing global terms of trade and mass migration. It explores the deeper fault-lines, paradoxes and strategic dilemmas that make creating the 'good city' so difficult.

This book is about the soul of the city, embodied in its spaces and people. It traces dynamics in inner city neighbourhoods of South Africa’s post-apartheid capital, Pretoria. Viewing the city through its most vulnerable people and places, it recognizes that urban space is never neutral and shaped by competing value frameworks. The first part of the book invites planners, city-makers, and ordinary urban citizens, to consider a new self-understanding, reclaiming their agency in the city-making process. Through the metaphor of "becoming like children", planning practice is deconstructed and re-imagined. A praxis-based methodology is presented, cultivating four distinct moments of entering, reading, imagining and co-constructing the city. After deconstructing urban spaces and discourses, the second part of the book explores a concrete spirituality and ethic of urban space. It argues for a shift from planning as technocracy, to planning as immersed, participatory artistry: opening up to the "genius" of space, responsive to urban cries, and joining to construct new, soul-full spaces. Local communities and interconnected movements become embodiments of urban alternatives – through resistance and reconstruction; building on local assets; animating local reclamations; and weaving nets of hope that will span the entire city. Providing a concrete methodology for city-making that is rooted in a community-based urban praxis, this book will be of interest to urban planning researchers, professional planners and designers and also grass-root community developers or activists.

This critical work explores those key choices that made Vancouver one of the world's most livable cities, an international urban poster child-and challenges policy makers and the public to reinvigorate the debate for the next generation of successful, sustainable city building Time and again, the Vancouver region is recognized internationally as one of the world's best places to live. Chroniclers of the city's success over the past half-century have noted its achievement - unique among the world's cities -- of growing past 2 million in population without losing any of the features that make it a great place to live. In fact, many would say that it is an even better place than 50 years ago, with more protected green space, better environmental quality, more choice in housing and transportation, a more diverse and stronger multicultural society, and urban design that frames a spectacular natural setting. Even with its current problems of housing affordability, drugs and crime, and congestion, Greater Vancouver is a world leader in addressing urban sustainability issues. Interestingly, it has achieved that status by breaking rules and pioneering new directions in North American urbanism. This compelling book details the nine most important decisions made in the Greater Vancouver region since the 1940s. Authors Mike Harcourt and Ken Cameron, themselves key players in several of these developments, take readers to the heart of each story, focussing on the people involved to reveal the political machinations, the ideological struggles and the personal commitment that lay behind each one. The Fraser River flood of 1948 demonstrated the need for regional planning for the entire Fraser Valley. Shirley Chan and Darlene Marzari led the fight against bulldozer urban renewal in Strathcona. Dave Barrett was called a communist when the Agricultural Land Reserve was introduced, but the real battle was inside his cabinet. Gordon Campbell cut his political teeth building consensus around an inspiring vision of the future that set the regional agenda for a decade. By tracing today's successes back to their roots, Harcourt and Cameron illustrate their central theme that cities-both those that work well and those that don't-are the result of the daily choices we make as leaders, activists and citizens. According to urban critic Trevor Boddy, Vancouver is in a position to "write the new rulebook of city-making for the twenty-first century." But Harcourt and Cameron argue that Greater Vancouver itself is at a crossroads. They end their book with a survey of the decisions Greater Vancouver must make concerning transportation, growth, air quality, regional governance, relations with First Nations, and climate change if it is to remain an international model for urban sustainability. Our future will depend largely on our ability to successfully plan and manage the development of our urban regions. If we can do this in a visionary, collaborative way, Harcourt and Cameron argue, Vancouver can continue to be a model for how to get things right.

Traces the history of the Ohio city from its days as a frontier settlement, through the coming of industrialization, to 1950.

Cities in both North and South America are confronting tremendous challenges in urban growth and management as they enter the new century. Curitiba in Brazil and Portland in Oregon, US are cities that have achieved recognition for exemplary urban planning programmes over the past three decades. As such, they provide particularly useful illustrations of the intense development pressures that many urban areas currently face. This book explores the dynamics of their urban governance, arguing that, in general, there has been a unique synergy derived from the combination of visionary leadership, innovative urban plans and effective citizen involvement. The book argues that, while urban design and architecture are key to the success in making cities livable and in augmenting the global reputations, such sensitive, innovative urban planning and design projects first need to be governed effectively and grounded within the specifics of their local cultures and existing built environments.

Through a combination of historical and contemporary analysis this book shows how settler colonialism, as a mode of racial capitalism, has made and remade Winnipeg and the Canadian Prairie West over the past one hundred and fifty years. It traces the emergence of a 'dominant bloc', or alliance, in Winnipeg that has imagined and installed successive regional development visions to guarantee its own wealth and power. The book gives particular attention to the ways that an ascendant post-industrial urban redevelopment vision for Winnipeg's city-centre has renewed longstanding colonial 'legacies' of dispossession and racism over the past forty years. In doing so, it moves beyond the common tendency to break apart histories of settler-colonial conquest from studies of urban history or contemporary urban processes.

This book explores the relationships between home, work and migration among Vietnamese people in East London, demonstrating the diversity of home-making practices and forms of belonging in relation to the dwelling, workplace and wider city. Engaging with wider scholarship on transnationalism, urban mobilities and the geopolitical dimensions of home among migrants and diasporic communities, the author draws on ethnographic work to examine the experiences of people who migrated from Vietnam to London at different times and in diverse circumstances, including individuals who arrived as refugees in the 1970s, as well as those who have migrated for work or education in recent years. Migration, Work and Home-Making in the City thus sheds new light on the social, material and spiritual practices through which people create senses of home that connect them with their country of origin, and reveals how home-making is constrained by immigration policies, insecure housing and precarious work, thus highlighting the barriers to belonging in the city.