The European Metropolis

Building on the long-standing image of Paris as the "Capital of the Nineteenth Century" and the "Capital of Modernity," this book examines the city's place in the imagination of Irish women writers in the long nineteenth century. By reasserting the centrality of Paris, this book draws connections between Irish and European writers, expanding the map of Irish Studies and forging new points of contact between Irish literature and canonical figures like Goethe, Balzac, and Zola through the shared interest in the socio-economic development of modernity.

This work, written by local experts in the city, deals with the transformation of Barcelona. It will be of interest to architects, planners and urban designers, as well as those interested in the social and economic impacts of regeneration.

Originally published in 1991, this book focusses on the philosophies, histories and processes which have made the West European city system rich in internal variety yet distinct from that of the rest of western industrialised urban society. It synthesizes international experiences in particular aspects of urban policy making, with reference to Germany, France and Benelux. The book covers urban planning in its broadest sense – from economic, socio-spacial, recreational, housing and transport perspectives.

A new 21st century urban phenomenon is emerging: the networked polycentric mega-city region. Developed around one or more cities of global status, it is characterized by a cluster of cities and towns, physically separate but intensively networked in a complex spatial division of labour. This book describes and analyses eight such regions in North West Europe. For the first time, this work shows how businesses interrelate and communicate in geographical space - within each region, between them, and with the wider world. It goes on to demonstrate the profound consequences for spatial planning and regional development in Europe - and, by implication, other similar urban regions of the world. The Polycentric Metropolis introduces the concept of a mega-city region, analyses its characteristics, examines the issues surrounding regional identities, and discusses policy ramifications and outcomes for infrastructure, transport systems and regulation. Packed with high quality maps, case study data and written in a clear style by highly experienced authors, this will be an insightful and significant analysis suitable for professionals in urban planning and policy, environmental consultancies, business and investment communities, technical libraries, and students in urban studies, geography, economics and town/spatial planning.

"Mosques in the Metropolisis a dual-site ethnographic study of two of Europe's largest mosques, one a conservative Islamist community in London and the other a progressive Muslim community in Berlin. The contrasting sites allow sociologist Elisabeth Becker to provide a complex picture of Islam in Europe at a particularly fraught time. She spent over thirty months studying the mosques through immersion and interviews and provides an analysis that goes deep into European Muslim communities. Individual Muslim voices come through loud and clear-for example, the young mother of three in London trying to reconcile her conservative religious views with her desire to leave her husband-as do the historical and structural forces at play. Ultimately Becker insists that caste is a crucial lens through which to view Islam in Europe, and through this lens she critiques what she perceives as failing European pluralism. To amplify her point, Becker brings Jewish history and twentieth-century Jewish thought into the conversation directly, drawing on the ways in which Bauman and Arendt utilized the concept of caste to describe Jewish life and marginality. What is at stake here is nothing less than the fundamental values of freedom, equality, and individual rights--ostensibly the bedrock of European identity"--

The Political Philosophy of the European City is a courageous and wide-ranging panorama of the political life and thought of the European city. Its novel hypothesis is that modern Western political thought, since the time of Hobbes and Locke, underestimated the political significance and value of the community of urban citizens, called ‘civitas’, united by local customs, or even a formal or informal urban constitution at a certain location, which had a recognizable countenance, with natural and man-made, architectural marks, called ‘urbs’. Recalling the golden age of the European city in ancient Greece and Rome, and offering a detailed description of its turbulent life in the Renaissance Italian city-states, it makes a case for the city not only as a hotbed of modern democracy, but also as a remedy for some of the distortions of political life in the alienated contemporary, centralized, Weberian bureaucratic state. Overcoming the north-south divide, or the core and periphery partition, the book’s material is particularly rich in Central European case studies. All in all, it is an enjoyable read which offers sound arguments to revisit the offer of the small and middle-sized European town, in search of a more sustainable future for Europe.

By the end of this century, 9 out of 10 Europeans will live in an urban area. But what kind of city will they call home? You'll find all the answers in CITY, TRANSFORMED, the new essay series from the European Investment Bank. This panoramic first essay in the series lays out a great sweeping history of European cities over the last fifty years—and showcases new directions being taken by some of our most innovative cities. Urban experts Greg Clark, Tim Moonen, and Jake Nunley based at University College London take a definitive look at how Europe's cities transformed from post-industrial decline to thriving metropolises that are as prosperous and liveable as anywhere on Earth.

Europe City: Lessons from the European Prize for Urban Public Space presents a multifaceted and diverseplatform of ideas about European public space and its social, cultural and economic significance. Based onseven themes--or lessons to be learned--, this discussion is approached from different disciplines, resulting ina wide-ranging reflection on public space as the intrinsic element that binds the European urban experiencetogether. These themes are Memory, Mobility, Mixture, Margins, Waterfronts, Marketplaces and Democracy, illustrated by a selection of about fifty projects of diverse scales and programs. The book also features ahistoric overview of European public space as well as impressions from international professionals. With aforeword by Kenneth Frampton and an epilogue by Zygmunt Bauman.The European Prize for Urban Public Space is an initiative of the Centre de Cultura Contemporània deBarcelona (CCCB) and is co-organized with AzW Vienna; AF, London; DAM Frankfurt; Cité de l'architectureet du patrimoine, Paris; MAO Ljubljana, and MFA Helsinki.