Unsettling Cities

This text examines the global nature of cities - cities whose openness has shaped their dynamism and character. It explores cities as sites of movement, migration and settlement where different peoples, cultures and environments combine. Unsettling Cities explores the mix of proximity and difference that exists in the rich and diverse texture of city life. The contributors reveal the association between the changing fortunes of cities and the power and influence of global networks.

Short and accessible, this book interweaves a discussion of the geography of property in one global city, Vancouver, with a more general analysis of property, politics, and the city.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This text offers an international and interdisciplinary analysis of the complex interactions between infrastructure networks and urban spaces. Drawing on case studies and examples from across the globe, it offers a statement on the urban condition.

This book focuses on linguistic landscapes in present-day urban settings. In a wide-ranging collection of studies of major world cities, the authors investigate both the forces that shape linguistic landscape and the impact of the linguistic landscape on the wider social and cultural reality. Not only does the book offer a wealth of case studies and comparisons to complement existing publications on linguistic landscape, but the editors aim to investigate the nature of a field of study which is characterised by its interest in ‘ordered disorder’. The editors aspire to delve into linguistic landscape beyond its appearance as a jungle of jumbled and irregular items by focusing on the variations in linguistic landscape configurations and recognising that it is but one more field of the shaping of social reality under diverse, uncoordinated and possibly incongruent structuration principles.

Droughts, sea-level rise, crop failures - against the background of dramatic challenges in a changing climate Kira Vinke examines the effectiveness of migration as one probable form of adaptation. Her research concludes that only preventative migration can be labeled as adaptation to the threatening changes and that frequently migration falls short of maintaining or improving people's standard of living after relocation. Often, it merely ensures survival. Vinke's illuminating study which led her to Bangladesh and the Central Pacific appeals to policy makers to responsibly manage preventative outmigration if there is no option to protect exposed regions as human habitats.

Since the mid-1980s, telecommunications and information technologies (IT) have become more intensely bound up than ever before in the social, economic, political and cultural processes and transformations which are increasingly concentrated in and between key strategic urban places across the globe. By analysing telecommunications developments in Paris and London, this book offers an explicit comparative and cross-national approach to the development of urban telecommunications infrastructures and to the development of global cities through a focus on these crucial infrastructures. engagement with the most relevant and recent debates and theories in urban studies, geography and planning. By examining differing, but parallel influences of national, urban and local contexts, processes and practices bound up in telecommunications developments, the book firmly underlines the inherently territorial basis of these developments and their multi-scalar elements and implications, all of which are being reinforced by the current stringent strategic retrenching of telecommunications operations around the globe.

Journal of urban planning and design. Publishes research in the application of formal methods, methods models, and theories to spatial problems involving the built environment and the spatial structure of cities and regions. Includes the application of computers to planning and design, in particular the use of shape grammars, artificial intelligence, and morphological methods to buildings and towns, the use of multimedia and GIS in urban and regional planning, and the development of ideas concerning the virtual city.