Understanding Cities

Understanding Cities is richly textured, complex and challenging. It creates the vital link between urban design theory and praxis and opens the required methodological gateway to a new and unified field of urban design. Using spatial political economy as his most important reference point, Alexander Cuthbert both interrogates and challenges mainstream urban design and provides an alternative and viable comprehensive framework for a new synthesis. He rejects the idea of yet another theory in urban design, and chooses instead to construct the necessary intellectual and conceptual scaffolding for what he terms 'The New Urban Design'. Building both on Michel de Certeau's concept of heterology - 'thinking about thinking' - and on the framework of his previous books Designing Cities and The Form of Cities, Cuthbert uses his prior adopted framework - history, philosophy, politics, culture, gender, environment, aesthetics, typologies and pragmatics - to create three integrated texts. Overall, the trilogy allows a new field of urban design to emerge. Pre-existing and new knowledge are integrated across all three volumes, of which Understanding Cities is the culminating text.

This book explores mobilities as a key to understanding the practices that both frame and generate contemporary everyday life in the urban context. At the same time, it investigates the challenges arising from the interpretation of mobility as a socio-spatial phenomenon both in the social sciences and in urban studies. Leading sociologists, economists, urban planners and architects address the ways in which spatial mobilities contribute to producing diversified uses of the city and describe forms and rhythms of different life practices, including unexpected uses and conflicts. The individual sections of the book focus on the role of mobility in transforming contemporary cities; the consequences of interpreting mobility as a socio-spatial phenomenon for urban projects and policies; the conflicts and inequalities generated by the co-presence of different populations due to mobility and by the interests gathered around major mobility projects; and the use of new data and mapping of mobilities to enhance comprehension of cities. The theoretical discussion is complemented by references to practical experiences, helping readers gain a broader understanding of mobilities in relation to the capacity to analyze, plan and design contemporary cities.

Shrinking Cities: Understanding Shrinkage and Decline in the United States offers a contemporary look at patterns of shrinkage and decline in the United States. The book juxtaposes the complex and numerous processes that contribute to these patterns with broader policy frameworks that have been under consideration to address shrinkage in U.S. cities. A range of methods are employed to answer theoretically-grounded questions about patterns of shrinkage and decline, the relationships between the two, and the empirical associations among shrinkage, decline, and several socio-economic variables. In doing so, the book examines new spaces of shrinkage in the United States. The book also explores pro-growth and decline-centered governance, which has important implications for questions of sustainability and resilience in U.S. cities. Finally, the book draws attention to U.S.-wide demographic shifts and argues for further research on socio-economic pathways of various groups of population, contextualized within population trends at various geographic scales. This timely contribution contends that an understanding of what the city has become, as it faces shrinkage, is essential toward a critical analysis of development both within and beyond city boundaries. The book will appeal to urban and regional studies scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, as well as practitioners and policymakers.

Mario Carpo provides a subtle and insightful discussion of the intellectual structures that guide architectural composition and the ways that these structures were transformed by the historic shifts from script to print and from hand-made drawings to mechanically reproduced images. He goes on to suggest that the current shift from print to digital representations will have similarly profound consequences. This is a crucial text for anyone interested in the interrelationships of media and design processes. As urban planning moves from a centralized, top-down approach to a decentralized, bottom-up perspective, our conception of urban systems is changing. In Cities and Complexity, Michael Batty offers a comprehensive view of urban dynamics in the context of complexity theory, presenting models that demonstrate how complexity theory can embrace a myriad of processes and elements that combine into organic wholes. He argues that bottom-up processes—in which the outcomes are always uncertain—can combine with new forms of geometry associated with fractal patterns and chaotic dynamics to provide theories that are applicable to highly complex systems such as cities. Batty begins with models based on cellular automata (CA), simulating urban dynamics through the local actions of automata. He then introduces agent-based models (ABM), in which agents are mobile and move between locations. These models relate to many scales, from the scale of the street to patterns and structure at the scale of the urban region. Finally, Batty develops applications of all these models to specific urban situations, discussing concepts of criticality, threshold, surprise, novelty, and phase transition in the context of spatial developments. Every theory and model presented in the book is developed through examples that range from the simplified and hypothetical to the actual. Deploying extensive visual, mathematical, and textual material, Cities and Complexity will be read both by urban researchers and by complexity theorists with an interest in new kinds of computational models. Sample chapters and examples from the book, and other related material, can be found at http://www.complexcity.info

Understanding Cities is richly textured, complex and challenging. It creates the vital link between urban design theory and praxis and opens the required methodological gateway to a new and unified field of urban design. Using spatial political economy as his most important reference point, Alexander Cuthbert both interrogates and challenges mainstream urban design and provides an alternative and viable comprehensive framework for a new synthesis. He rejects the idea of yet another theory in urban design, and chooses instead to construct the necessary intellectual and conceptual scaffolding for what he terms 'The New Urban Design'. Building both on Michel de Certeau's concept of heterology – 'thinking about thinking' – and on the framework of his previous books Designing Cities and The Form of Cities, Cuthbert uses his prior adopted framework – history, philosophy, politics, culture, gender, environment, aesthetics, typologies and pragmatics – to create three integrated texts. Overall, the trilogy allows a new field of urban design to emerge. Pre-existing and new knowledge are integrated across all three volumes, of which Understanding Cities is the culminating text.

This book investigates the role of smart cities in the broader context of urban innovation and e-government, identifies what a smart city is in practice and highlights their importance to the welfare of society. The book offers specific, measurable, and action-oriented public sector planning and management principles and ideas for smart governance in the era of global urbanization and innovation to help with the challenges in maintaining the democratic system of checks and balances as well as the division of powers in a highly interconnected world. The book will be of interest researchers, practitioners, students, and public sector IT professionals that work within innovation management, public administration, urban technologies and urban innovation, and public local administration studies.

Seemingly messy and chaotic, the landscapes and urban life of cities in Asia possess an order and hierarchy that often challenges understanding and appreciation. With contributions by a cross-disciplinary group of authors, Messy Urbanism: Understanding the “Other” Cities of Asia examines a range of cases in Asia to explore the social and institutional politics of urban informality and the contexts in which this “messiness” emerges or is constructed. The book brings a distinct perspective to the broader patterns of informal urban orders and processes as well as their interplay with formalized systems and mechanisms. It also raises questions about the production of cities, cityscapes, and citizenship. Messy Urbanism will appeal to professionals, students, and scholars in the fields of urban studies, architecture, landscape architecture, planning and policy, as well as Asian studies. “The rubric of ‘messy urbanism’ is a productive antidote to the binaries that have limited a productive discussion about urbanism in Asia. This book is a significant contribution in understanding the inherent nature of the built environments in aspiring democracies—an emergent urbanism that seamlessly embraces the incremental, temporal, and ephemeral as given conditions in the formation of Asian cities.” —Rahul Mehrotra, Architect / Professor of Urban Design and Planning, Harvard University “This book is of a high quality, with multiple examples from Hong Kong and China. The authors have covered the topic admirably and I expect the book to attract a wide readership.” —Vinit Mukhija, Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Urban Planning, UCLA

A novel, integrative approach to cities as complex adaptive systems, applicable to issues ranging from innovation to economic prosperity to settlement patterns. Human beings around the world increasingly live in urban environments. In Introduction to Urban Science, Luis Bettencourt takes a novel, integrative approach to understanding cities as complex adaptive systems, claiming that they require us to frame the field of urban science in a way that goes beyond existing theory in such traditional disciplines as sociology, geography, and economics. He explores the processes facilitated by and, in many cases, unleashed for the first time by urban life through the lenses of social heterogeneity, complex networks, scaling, circular causality, and information. Though the idea that cities are complex adaptive systems has become mainstream, until now those who study cities have lacked a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding cities and urbanization, for generating useful and falsifiable predictions, and for constructing a solid body of empirical evidence so that the discipline of urban science can continue to develop. Bettencourt applies his framework to such issues as innovation and development across scales, human reasoning and strategic decision-making, patterns of settlement and mobility and their influence on socioeconomic life and resource use, inequality and inequity, biodiversity, and the challenges of sustainable development in both high- and low-income nations. It is crucial, says Bettencourt, to realize that cities are not "zero-sum games" and that knowledge, human cooperation, and collective action can build a better future.