Imaginative Structure Of The City

Table of contents

Richard Florida outlines how certain cities succeed in attracting members of the 'creative class' - the key economic growth asset - and argues that, in order to prosper, cities must harness this creative potential.

The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.

In 1972, Italo Calvino published Invisible Cities, a literary book that masterfully combines philosophy and poetry, rigid structure and free play, theoretical insight and glittering prose. The text is an extended meditation on urban life, and it continues to resonate not only among literary scholars, but among social scientists, architects, and urban planners as well. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Invisible Cities, this collection of essays serves as both an appreciation and a critical engagement. Drawing from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives and geographical contexts, this volume grapples with the theoretical, pedagogical, and political legacies of Calvino’s work. Each chapter approaches Invisible Cities not only as a novel but as a work of evocative ethnography, place-writing, and urban theory. Fifty years on, what can Calvino’s dreamlike text offer to scholars and practitioners interested in actually existing urban life?

Comparing the major Pacific Rim cities of Sydney, Hong Kong and Shanghai, this book examines world city branding. Using an interdisciplinary approach, it draws in cultural studies and psychology approaches to offer fresh and useful insights to place branding and marketing in general.

With the publication of The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida in 2002, the 'creative city' became the new hot topic among urban policymakers, planners and economists. Florida has developed one of three path-breaking theories about the relationship between creative individuals and urban environments. The economist Åke E. Andersson and the psychologist Dean Simonton are the other members of this 'creative troika'. In the Handbook of Creative Cities, Florida, Andersson and Simonton appear in the same volume for the first time. The expert contributors in this timely Handbook extend their insights with a varied set of theoretical and empirical tools. The diversity of the contributions reflect the multidisciplinary nature of creative city theorizing, which encompasses urban economics, economic geography, social psychology, urban sociology, and urban planning. The stated policy implications are equally diverse, ranging from libertarian to social democratic visions of our shared creative and urban future. Being truly international in its scope, this major Handbook will be particularly useful for policy makers that are involved in urban development, academics in urban economics, economic geography, urban sociology, social psychology, and urban planning, as well as graduate and advanced undergraduate students across the social sciences and in business.

The book focuses on the processes of urban restructuring, power relations and the political economy of touristic authenticity. Through an in-depth analysis of Marrakesh, Morroco, the book proposes a comprehensive analytic framework. It highlights the issues of (post)coloniality, ideology, heritage-commodification, subjectivity and counter-conduct in the shadow of global capitalism. It explores how power relations and political ecomomy have shaped the city of Marrakesh over the past few decades, formulating new subjectivities. It reveals how urban policy’s sole purpose is to boost tourism in the city, bringing into question the long-term resilience and success of tourism as an economic activity and a policy choice. This book considers how the well-being of city residents is submitted to such policies, conforming to certain forms of appropriation – of land, culture and memory. The example of Morocco helps us understand a phenomenon affecting many other cities internationally. This book will be valuable to academics and practitioners across disciplines, including geography, political science, urban planning and architecture.

This collection offers a global perspective on the changing character of cities and the increasing importance that consumer culture plays in defining their symbolic economies. Increasingly, forms of spectacle have come to shape how cities are imagined and to influence their character and the practices through which we know them - from advertising and the selling of real estate, to youth cultural consumption practices and forms of entrepreneurship, to the regeneration of urban areas under the guise of the heritage industry and the development of a WiFi landscape. Using examples of cities such as New York, Sydney, Atlantic City, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Douala, Liverpool, San Juan, Berlin and Harbin this book illustrates how image and practice have become entangled in the performance of the symbolic economy. It also argues that it is not just how the urban present is being shaped in this way that is significant to the development of cities but also that a prominent feature of their development has been the spectacular imagining of the past as heritage and through regeneration. Yet the ghosts that this conjures up in practice offer us a possible form of political unsettlement and alternative ways of viewing cities that is only just beginning to be explored. Through this important collection by some of the leading analysts of consumption, cities and space Consuming the Entrepreneurial City offers a cutting edge analysis of the ways in which cities are developing and the implications this has for their future. It is essential reading for students of Urban Studies, Geography, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Heritage Studies and Anthropology.