The Material City

Redirecting examinations of the culture of the city away from its customs, art, and amenities to focus on the mental life of modern society, Alan Blum explores the methods cities and their subjects use to find meaning in the context of urban life, in particular the city’s relationships to social change and what has traditionally been identified as justice. The Material City pictures the city as a landscape of diverse clashes over beliefs, a site that exhibits interpretive collisions over globalization, gentrification, innovation, preservation, market value, popular culture, crowds, consumption, urban governance, and different strategies for healing the democratic city’s ever-present conflicts over these concerns. Each chapter uses a problem of urban life to observe and analyze assumptions and values that are typically taken for granted and unspoken, using elements of the philosophy of Plato as well as the work of modern thinkers such as Georg Simmel, Gertrude Stein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Lacan. The Material City translates contested views of everyday life and its management into a deeper reflection on urbanity as a system of desire. The historical and the contemporary metropolis alike are shown to be sites where the enigma of mortality – and its relation to pleasure, comedy, and fate – plays out.

This book explores new themes and ideas that relate directly to the millions of Australians who live and work in our nation's capital cities. For, it is here in the increasingly densified suburbs and business districts that we are experiencing first hand what Australia's growing population means. Multi-res, low, medium and high-rise buildings are becoming the norm in areas that once housed the populace in single-storey dwellings. Until recently, office towers rarely exceeded 20-storeys, although this is changing. However, by international standards our planning laws either prevent or discourage truly monumental buildings on a scale seen in many other countries. In a single decade there has been an emphatic shift towards a bolder, more confronting reality that our cities must adapt and (literally) rise to the occasion. For with nowhere else to spread, Sydney, for example, must increase density through infill or multi-storey buildings. The growing pains are obvious as government, local council and urban planners struggle to deal with the inadequacies of public transport infrastructure, community disquiet and possibly a reluctance to grasp the true significance of rapidly increasing populations. The Material city: density and design in contemporary Australian architecture seeks to explore these issues through 50 selected case studies and 20 essays and feature articles. These represent the ideas of many of Australia's leading architects whose work is informed by limitations of space, yet whose designs seek to meet the need for public and private space, infrastructure, the workplace and home.

The aesthetics of urban life offer a curious quality, one that is both highly visible and hidden, both openly influencing and subtly imprinting. These aesthetics participate in the production of places; to the way they are built, to their resisting materiality, to their image in people's minds, to advertising and to the way people respond to the place. Exploring the encounter with the aesthetics, images and material design of urban life, this book offers analytic insights into contemporary cities. It shows how photography, maps and videos play a crucial role in bringing aesthetic dimensions into urban studies. This transdisciplinary approach draws on the full spectrum of the visual representation to tie the encounter with the realm of the visual directly and explicitly into the exploration of urban space.

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.

What happens when computational design and fabrication technologies ramp up to the urban scale? Though these innovative production processes are currently now largely limited to small-scale design projects, what will happen when they are applied to the vast scale of the 21st-century world city? Could new technologies enable an important shift away from mass production to increasingly bespoke and custom-designed systems? The introduction of standardisation and mass production processes in the 20th century saw the industrial city take on a repetitious and homogeneous quality through the duplication of component parts. Today non-standard, bespoke systems hold out the promise of realising a distinctive urbanism; characterized by the differentiation of serial production and the variation of simple parts that should lead to a more complex and compelling whole. Given the current pace and rate of urbanisation in Asia, the mass customization of the city is set to have imminent and far-reaching practical consequences for the rest of the developing and developed world.

Cities are staging more events than ever. Within this macro-trend, there is another less acknowledged trend: more events are being staged in public spaces. Some events have always been staged in parks, streets and squares, but in recent years events have been taken out of traditional venues and staged in prominent urban spaces. This is favoured by organisers seeking more memorable and more spectacular events, but also by authorities who want to animate urban space and make it more visible. This book explains these trends and outlines the implications for public spaces. Events play a positive role in our cities, but turning public spaces into venues is often controversial. Events can denigrate as well as animate city space; they are part of the commercialisation, privatisation and securitisation of public space noted by commentators in recent years. The book focuses on examples from London in particular, but it also covers a range of other cities from the developed world. Events at different scales are addressed and, there is dedicated coverage of sports events and cultural events. This topical and timely volume provides valuable material for higher level students, researchers and academics from events studies, urban studies and development studies.

We live in a self-proclaimed Urban Age, where we celebrate the city as the source of economic prosperity, a nurturer of social and cultural diversity, and a place primed for democracy. We proclaim the city as the fertile ground from which progress will arise. Without cities, we tell ourselves, human civilization would falter and decay. In Cities in the Urban Age, Robert A. Beauregard argues that this line of thinking is not only hyperbolic—it is too celebratory by half. For Beauregard, the city is a cauldron for four haunting contradictions. First, cities are equally defined by both their wealth and their poverty. Second, cities are simultaneously environmentally destructive and yet promise sustainability. Third, cities encourage rule by political machines and oligarchies, even as they are essentially democratic and at least nominally open to all. And fourth, city life promotes tolerance among disparate groups, even as the friction among them often erupts into violence. Beauregard offers no simple solutions or proposed remedies for these contradictions; indeed, he doesn’t necessarily hold that they need to be resolved, since they are generative of city life. Without these four tensions, cities wouldn’t be cities. Rather, Beauregard argues that only by recognizing these ambiguities and contradictions can we even begin to understand our moral obligations, as well as the clearest paths toward equality, justice, and peace in urban settings.

In the late nineteenth century, the urban department store arose as a built artifact and as a social institution in the United States. While the physical building type is the foundation of this comprehensive architectural study, Louisa Iarocci reaches beyond the analysis of the bricks and mortar to reconsider how the ?spaces of selling? were culturally-produced spaces, as well as the product of interrelated economic, social, technological and aesthetic forces. The agenda of the book is three-fold; to address the lack of a comprehensive architectural study of the nineteenth century department store in the United States; to expand the analysis of the commercial city as a built and represented entity; and to continue recent scholarly efforts that seek to understand commercial space as a historically specific and a conceptually perceived construct. The Urban Department Store in America, 1850-1930 acts as a corrective to a current imbalance in the historiography of this retailing institution that tends to privilege its role as an autonomous ?modern? building type. Instead, Iarocci documents the development of the department store as an urban institution that grew out of the built space of the city and the lived spaces of its occupants.