The Extended Metropolis

Asian urbanization is entering a new phase that differs significantly from the patterns of city growth experienced in other developing countries and in the developed world. According to a recent hypothesis, zones of intensive economic interaction between rural and urban activities are emerging. The zones appear to be a new form of socioeconomic organization that is neither rural nor urban, but preserves essential ingredients of each.

This book provides an overview of the Horizontal Metropolis concept, and of the theoretical, methodological and political implications for the interdisciplinary field in which it operates. The book investigates the contemporary emergence of a new type of extended urbanity across regions, territories and continents, up to the global scale. Further, it explores the diffusion of contemporary urban conditions in an interdisciplinary and original manner by analyzing essential case studies. Offering extensive content on the Horizontal Metropolis concept, the book presents a range of approaches intended to transcend various inherited spatial ontologies: urban/rural, town/country, city/non-city, and society/nature. The book is intended for all readers interested in the emergence and development of new approaches in cultural theory, urban and design education, landscape urbanism and geography.

Beyond Metropolis builds on studies conducted during the 1990s under the Centre for Human Settlements at the University of British Columbia.

Bringing together leading scholars of literature, history, library studies, and communications, Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis rejects the idea that print culture necessarily spreads outwards from capitals and cosmopolitan cities and focuses attention to how the residents of smaller cities, provincial districts, rural settings, and colonial outposts have produced, disseminated, and read print materials. Too often print media has been represented as an engine of metropolitan modernity. Rather than being the passive recipients of print culture generated in city centres, the inhabitants of provinces and colonies have acted independently, as jobbing printers in provincial Britain, black newspaper proprietors in the West Indies, and library patrons in “Middletown,” Indiana, to mention a few examples. This important new book gives us a sophisticated account of how printed materials circulated, a more precise sense of their impact, and a fuller of understanding of how local contexts shaped reading experiences.

This book provides a multi-scale reading of the spatial “elements” in which the extensive urbanity in Yangtze River Delta is constructed, and from there an imagination of a new paradigm of urbanization. The urbanization in Yangtze River Delta today is in need of a new interpretation and paradigm. The delta is a territory with city cores but it also has vast dispersed urbanization where the agricultural and non-agricultural activities and spaces are mixed and interlinked, a desakota (McGee, 1991). This book attempts to answer a basic question: what is the desakota in the Yangtze River Delta made of? The research Horizontal Metropolis led by Prof. Paola Viganò at EPFL, Switzerland focuses on the form of the contemporary city – the fragmentary spatial condition and dispersed urbanity all over the world. The study on Yangtze River delta is part of its research frame.

This book draws together classic and contemporary texts on the “Horizontal Metropolis” concept. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it explores various theoretical, methodological and political implications of the Horizontal Metropolis hypothesis. Assembling a series of textual and cartographic interventions, this book explores those that supersede inherited spatial ontologies (urban/rural, town/country, city/non-city, society/nature). It investigates the emergence of a new type of extended urbanity across regions, territories and continents up to the global scale through the reconstruction of a fundamental but neglected tradition. This book responds to the radical nature of the changes underway today, calling for a rethinking of the Western Metropolis idea and form along with the emergence of new urban paradigms. The Horizontal Metropolis concept represents an ambitious attempt to offer new instruction to take on this challenge at the global scale. The book is intended for a wide audience interested in the emergence and development of new approaches in urbanism, architecture, cultural theory, urban and design education, landscape urbanism and geography.

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A distinctive feature of urbanization in the last 50 years is the expansion of urban populations and built development well beyond what was earlier conceived as the city limit, resulting in metropolitan areas. This is challenging the relevance of traditional municipal boundaries, and by extension, traditional governing structures and institutions. "Steering the Metropolis: Metropolitan Governance for Sustainable Urban Development,” encompasses the reflections of thought and practice leaders on the underlying premises for governing metropolitan space, sectoral adaptations of those premises, and dynamic applications in a wide variety of contexts. Those reflections are structured into three sections. Section 1 discusses the conceptual underpinnings of metropolitan governance, analyzing why political, technical, and administrative arrangements at this level of government are needed. Section 2 deepens the discussion by addressing specific sectoral themes of mobility, land use planning, environmental management, and economic production, as well as crosscutting topics of metropolitan governance finance, and monitoring and evaluation. Section 3 tests the concepts and their sectoral adaptations against the practice, with cases from Africa, America, Asia, and Europe.