Urban Revolutions

Manifesto on the urban commons from the acclaimed theorist.

Focused on struggles and debates in France, Martinique and Canada, Urban Revolutions shows how research on the (neo-)colonial dimensions of capitalist urbanization deepens the relationship between Marxist and anti-colonial traditions, including those represented by Henri Lefebvre and Frantz Fanon.

Urban Revolutions is a different kind of cycling book. Author Emilie Bahr draws on her experience as an everyday cyclist and a transportation planner in New Orleans to demystify urban bicycling in this visually-compelling and fun-to-read field guide. What does it mean for a city to be bike-friendly? What makes bicycling a women's issue? What does it take to feel safe on a bike? How do you bike to work in the summer and still look professional? What is the most fun you can possibly have on two wheels without being athletic? Bahr answers all these questions and more in her friendly and thoughtful essays and detailed practical tips on everything from biking in hot weather to biking with kids to biking with natural hair.Read an interview with Emilie on our blog!Urban Revolutions from Micheal Boedigheimer on Vimeo.

Originally published in 1970, The Urban Revolution marked Henri Lefebvre’s first sustained critique of urban society, a work in which he pioneered the use of semiotic, structuralist, and poststructuralist methodologies in analyzing the development of the urban environment. Although it is widely considered a foundational book in contemporary thinking about the city, The Urban Revolution has never been translated into English—until now. This first English edition, deftly translated by Robert Bononno, makes available to a broad audience Lefebvre’s sophisticated insights into the urban dimensions of modern life.Lefebvre begins with the premise that the total urbanization of society is an inevitable process that demands of its critics new interpretive and perceptual approaches that recognize the urban as a complex field of inquiry. Dismissive of cold, modernist visions of the city, particularly those embodied by rationalist architects and urban planners like Le Corbusier, Lefebvre instead articulates the lived experiences of individual inhabitants of the city. In contrast to the ideology of urbanism and its reliance on commodification and bureaucratization—the capitalist logic of market and state—Lefebvre conceives of an urban utopia characterized by self-determination, individual creativity, and authentic social relationships.A brilliantly conceived and theoretically rigorous investigation into the realities and possibilities of urban space, The Urban Revolution remains an essential analysis of and guide to the nature of the city.Henri Lefebvre (d. 1991) was one of the most significant European thinkers of the twentieth century. His many books include The Production of Space (1991), Everyday Life in the Modern World (1994), Introduction to Modernity (1995), and Writings on Cities (1995).Robert Bononno is a full-time translator who lives in New York. His recent translations include The Singular Objects of Architecture by Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel (Minnesota, 2002) and Cyberculture by Pierre Lévy (Minnesota, 2001).

In Welcome to the Urban Revolution, internationally recognized urbanist Jeb Brugmann turns traditional thinking about globalization on its head to show that the city isn't a backdrop to global change; it is a central driver of change—political, economic, social, and environmental. This powerful reappraisal of the global role of cities brilliantly synthesizes urban studies, economics, and sociology to show how cities create but can also help solve some of the 21st century's major challenges, including poverty, inequality, and environmental sustainability. With more than half the world now living in cities, internationally recognized urbanologist Brugmann argues that we need to take note of that fact and its social, economic, and ecological implications to develop an "urban strategy." This goes way beyond globalization. The urbanization of nations demands are examination of how resources are used for good or ill. Drawing on two decades of field research, Brugmann profiles several cities for best lessons on the peculiarly urban advantages of density, scale, association, and extension. Among the cities he examines: Bangalore, India, a "world-changing" city with high-tech industry and fiber-optic infrastructure; the Dharavi sector of Mumbai, a dense city built on a marsh by poor migrants, that despite its vibrancy is threatened with "slum clearance" by developers; Detroit, faltering into an urban prairie state after generations of racialized neglect; and Chicago, an example of a strategic city making use of its resources, including community groups, with smart planning for the future. Brugmann argues that the spread of threats from SARS to subprime mortgages could have been contained with better understanding of the urban conditions that created the problems. If we want a sustainable future, cities—and nations—need to use the natural advantages of urban areas with an eye toward how citizens (corporate and individual) actually use and misuse those advantages. Totally fascinating. — Vanessa Bush, Booklist

List of illustrations -- List of tables -- Preface -- Introduction: revolution and the city -- A spatial theory of revolution -- The growth and urbanization of revolution -- The urban civic revolutionary moment -- The repression-disruption trade-off and the shifting odds of success -- Revolutionary contingency and the city -- Public space and urban revolution -- The individual and collective action in urban civic revolution -- The pacification of revolution -- The evolving impact of revolution -- The city and the future of revolution -- Appendix 1. construction of cross-national data on revolutionary episodes -- Appendix 2. revolutionary episodes, 1900-2014 -- Appendix 3. data sources used in statistical analyses -- Appendix 4. choices of statistical models.

Front Cover -- About Island Press -- Subscribe -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Will the Transportation Revolutions Improve Our Lives-- or Make Them Worse? -- 2. Electric Vehicles: Approaching the Tipping Point -- 3. Shared Mobility: The Potential of Ridehailing and Pooling -- 4. Vehicle Automation: Our Best Shot at a Transportation Do-Over? -- 5. Upgrading Transit for the Twenty-First Century -- 6. Bridging the Gap between Mobility Haves and Have-Nots -- 7. Remaking the Auto Industry -- 8. The Dark Horse: Will China Win the Electric, Automated, Shared Mobility Race? -- Epilogue -- Notes -- About the Contributors -- Index -- IP Board of Directors

When Henri Lefebvre published The Urban Revolution in 1970, he sketched a research itinerary on the emerging tendency towards planetary urbanization. Today, when this tendency has become reality, Lefebvre’s ideas on everyday life, production of space, rhythmanalysis and the right to the city are indispensable for the understanding of urbanization processes at every scale of social practice. This volume is the first to develop Lefebvre’s concepts in social research and architecture by focusing on urban conjunctures in Barcelona, Belgrade, Berlin, Budapest, Copenhagen, Dhaka, Hong Kong, London, New Orleans, Nowa Huta, Paris, Toronto, São Paulo, Sarajevo, as well as in Mexico and Switzerland. With contributions by historians and theorists of architecture and urbanism, geographers, sociologists, political and cultural scientists, Urban Revolution Now reveals the multiplicity of processes of urbanization and the variety of their patterns and actors around the globe.