Living The City

In this nuanced and groundbreaking history, Donna Murch argues that the Black Panther Party (BPP) started with a study group. Drawing on oral history and untapped archival sources, she explains how a relatively small city with a recent history of African

This richly illustrated book presents the exhibits and curatorial visions of the 2015 Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (UABB), organized around the theme, Re-Living the City. It highlights the contributions of dozens of international architects, designers and artists, and offers 12 probing, original essays. The projects and essays of UABB 2015, Re-Living the City, criticize the status quo of architecture and urbanism, but they also resist the false dream of designing a perfect city from scratch. Instead, they portray the city as the incremental product of its inhabitants and designers, who provisionally make and remake its fabric through various means at their disposal. Urbanization in the world’s fastest growing regions today has a dual character: officially-sanctioned, large-scale development shadowed by unregulated or ‘informal’ spaces built by disenfranchised migrants. UABB 2015 operates between these poles, seeking alternative paradigms to generate a more sustain- able, equitable, and imaginative urbanity.The principal exhibitions of UABB 2015 include: (1) ‘Radical Urbanism’, curated by Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner (Urban-Think Tank), based on the proposition that the city today is more radical than the architects and planners operating within it; (2) ‘Collage City 3D’, curated by Aaron Betsky, in which artists and architects are asked to create adjacent three-dimensional installations to explore the idea of habitable collage as a mode of urban design; and (3) ‘PRD 2.0’, curated by Doreen Heng Liu, focusing on the need for a more balanced approach to urbanism and architecture in the Pearl River Delta region in southeast China. Liu also offers an account of the renovation of the Shenzhen exhibition venue, the former Dacheng Flour Factory complex. In addition, the book presents the ‘Social City’ online platform and exhibition curated by Renny Ramakers, the ‘Maker Maker’ showcase of contemporary craft, and a series of national, regional, and thematic pavilions. Curatorial essays are complemented by guest essays from international critics, researchers, and practitioners.

On the personal narratives that exist alongside architecture Cities are full of stories--running in parallel, contradictory, overlapping and inseparably linked. Such stories are told in Living the City, referencing various projects from architecture, art and urban planning. The book aims to show processes and possibilities for action in cities based on more than 50 projects from all over Europe. The publication first looks at urbanites before expanding into emotionally and poetically charged stories that consider basic activities such as loving, living, moving, working, learning, playing, dreaming, and participating in the city. The book is published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name at the former airport in Tempelhof, Berlin. Contributors include: Assemble, ateliermob, Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine, Civic Architects, Crimson Historians and Urbanists, Eutropian, Larissa Fassler, Jeppe Hein, Thomas Hirschhorn, Lacaton & Vassal, No Shade, Olalekan Jeyifous, Ahmet Ögüt, Planbude, raumlaborberlin, Rotor DC, The Black Archives, White Arkitekter and Zones Urbaines Sensibles.

Living for the City is a social history of the Central African Copperbelt, considered as a single region encompassing the neighbouring mining regions of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Haut Katanga and Zambian Copperbelt mine towns have been understood as the vanguard of urban 'modernity' in Africa. Observers found in these towns new African communities that were experiencing what they wrongly understood as a transition from rural 'traditional' society - stable, superstitious and agricultural - to an urban existence characterised by industrial work discipline, the money economy and conspicuous consumption, Christianity, and nuclear families headed by male breadwinners supported by domesticated housewives. Miles Larmer challenges this representation of Copperbelt society, presenting an original analysis which integrates the region's social history with the production of knowledge about it, shaped by both changing political and intellectual contexts and by Copperbelt communities themselves. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

A master architect of the twentieth century unfolds his revolutionary idea for a city of the future, a ... solution to the ills of urbanization whereby man can attain dignity in his home, his work, his community. [The book] not only presents [the author's] ... plans for his model community, Broadacre City, but also provides a[n] ... overview of the architect's opinions on crucial contemporary problems such as overcentralization, dehumanized values, and the waning sovereignty of the individual. This volume includes the great model of Broadacre City itself ... -Back cover.

One of our great urbanists and one of our great public health experts join forces to reckon with how cities are changing in the face of existential threats the pandemic has only accelerated Cities can make us sick. They always have—diseases spread more easily when more people are close to one another. And disease is hardly the only ill that accompanies urban density. Cities have been demonized as breeding grounds for vice and crime from Sodom and Gomorrah on. But cities have flourished nonetheless because they are humanity’s greatest invention, indispensable engines for creativity, innovation, wealth, and connection, the loom on which the fabric of civilization is woven. But cities now stand at a crossroads. During the global COVID crisis, cities grew silent as people worked from home—if they could work at all. The normal forms of socializing ground to a halt. How permanent are these changes? Advances in digital technology mean that many people can opt out of city life as never before. Will they? Are we on the brink of a post-urban world? City life will survive but individual cities face terrible risks, argue Edward Glaeser and David Cutler, and a wave of urban failure would be absolutely disastrous. In terms of intimacy and inspiration, nothing can replace what cities offer. Great cities have always demanded great management, and our current crisis has exposed fearful gaps in our capacity for good governance. It is possible to drive a city into the ground, pandemic or not. Glaeser and Cutler examine the evolution that is already happening, and describe the possible futures that lie before us: What will distinguish the cities that will flourish from the ones that won’t? In America, they argue, deep inequities in health care and education are a particular blight on the future of our cities; solving them will be the difference between our collective good health and a downward spiral to a much darker place.

City Living is about urban spaces, urban dwellers, and how these spaces and people make, shape, and change one another. More people live in cities than ever before: more than 50% of the earth's people are urban dwellers. As downtown cores gentrify and globalize, they are becoming more diverse than ever, along lines of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, sexuality, and age. Meanwhile, we are in the early stages of what seems sure to be a period of intense civil unrest. During such periods, cities generally become the primary sites where tensions and resistance are concentrated, negotiated, and performed. For all of these reasons, understanding cities and contemporary city living is pressing and exciting from almost any disciplinary and political perspective. Quill R Kukla offers the first systematic philosophical investigation of the nature of city life and city dwellers. The book draws on empirical and ethnographic work in geography, anthropology, urban planning, and several other disciplines in order to explore the impact that cities have on their dwellers and that dwellers have on their cities. It begins with a philosophical exploration of spatially embodied agency and of the specific forms of agency and spatiality that are distinctive of urban life. It explores how gentrification is enacted and experienced at the level of embodied agency, arguing that gentrifying spaces are contested territories that shape and are shaped by their dwellers. The book then moves to an exploration of repurposed cities, which are cities materially designed to support one sociopolitical order, but in which that order collapsed, leaving new dwellers to use the space in new ways. Through detailed original ethnography of the repurposed cities of Berlin and Johannesburg, Kukla makes the case that in repurposed cities, we can see vividly how material spaces shape and constrain the agency and experience of dwellers, while dwellers creatively shape the spaces they inhabit in accordance with their needs. The book concludes with a reconsideration of the right to the city, asking what would be involved in creating a city that enabled the agency and flourishing of all its diverse inhabitants.

Politicians and academics alike have made globalization the key reference point for interpreting the 1990s. For many, globalization threatens both community and the nation-state. It appears to represent forces beyond human control. Living the Global City documents globalization's impact on everyday lives by drawing on research rather than rhetoric and arrives at a very different perspective. Living the Global City offers an analysis of globalization and global/local processes by focussing on specific issues and themes which include community, culture, milieu, socioscapes and sociospheres, microglobalization, poverty, ethnic identity and carnival. By advancing the debates which surround these issues through a redefinition of the terms in which they have been developed and engagement with the everyday lives of people in a global city, this book reveals how such key concepts as community, culture, class, poverty and identity can be reconceptualized in the context of global/local processes.