Urban Transformations

How do cities transform over time? And why do some cities change for the better while others deteriorate? In articulating new ways of viewing urban areas and how they develop over time, Peter Bosselmann offers a stimulating guidebook for students and professionals engaged in urban design, planning, and architecture. By looking through Bosselmann’s eyes (aided by his analysis of numerous color photos and illustrations) readers will learn to “see” cities anew. Bosselmann organizes the book around seven “activities”: comparing, observing, transforming, measuring, defining, modeling, and interpreting. He introduces readers to his way of seeing by comparing satellite-produced “maps” of the world’s twenty largest cities. With Bosselmann’s guidance, we begin to understand the key elements of urban design. Using Copenhagen, Denmark, as an example, he teaches us to observe without prejudice or bias. He demonstrates how cities transform by introducing the idea of “urban morphology” through an examination of more than a century of transformations in downtown Oakland, California. We learn how to measure quality-of-life parameters that are often considered immeasurable, including “vitality,” “livability,” and “belonging.” Utilizing the street grids of San Francisco as examples, Bosselmann explains how to define urban spaces. Modeling, he reveals, is not so much about creating models as it is about bringing others into public, democratic discussions. Finally, we find out how to interpret essential aspects of “life and place” by evaluating aerial images of the San Francisco Bay Area taken in 1962 and those taken forty-three years later. Bosselmann has a unique understanding of cities and how they “work.” His hope is that, with the fresh vision he offers, readers will be empowered to offer inventive new solutions to familiar urban problems.

Economic restructuring and demographic change have in recent years placed much strain on urban areas with the effects falling disproportionately on neighbourhoods that were previously underpinned by industry and manufacturing. This has presented policy makers and city planners with a binary choice: to resist change and stagnate or to change and attempt to keep up with the pace of global demand. This edited book tells the story of how urban transformation impacts on people’s lives and everyday interactions – to question where and to whom benefit accrues from these changes. Urban Transformations offers insight into both risk and reward as local communities and public authorities creatively address the challenge of building vital and sustainable urban environments. The authors in this edited collection argue that understanding the specifics of community, space and place is crucial to delivering insights into how, where, when, why and for whom urban areas might successfully transform. The chapters investigate urban change using a range of approaches, and case studies from the four corners of the Earth – from the United States to Iran; from the United Kingdom to Canada. The varying scales at which governance or regeneration initiatives operate, the nature and composition of urban communities, and the local or global interests of different private sector actors all raise questions for urban policy and practice. It is important to not only consider the drivers of regeneration, but its beneficiaries need to be identified. This edited volume addresses and elaborates on critical issues facing urban transformation and renewal as a basis for future discussion on strategies for ‘successful’ urban transformation.

The book addresses urban transformations towards sustainability in light of challenges of global urbanization processes and the consequences of global environmental change. The aim is to show that urban transformations only succeed if both innovative scientific solutions and practice-oriented governance approaches are developed. This assumption is addressed by providing theoretical insights and empirical evidence pointing particularly at 3 concepts or qualities which are determined here as being central for achieving urban sustainability: resource efficiency, quality of life and resilience. Urban case studies from several international research projects illustrate our conceptual approach of urban transformations towards sustainable development. Thus, the book reaches far beyond a mere additive description of single case studies. It incorporates the results of condensed synthesis, resulting from comparisons and evaluations. It provides, based on cross-cutting reflection of single cases and different scales and methods of analysis, general and transferable findings. They do not only consider the scientific sphere but deliberately go beyond it discussing transferability of knowledge into practice, governance options and the feasibility of policy strategies in order to pave the way for sustainable urban transformations to happen today and in the future.

While designers possess the creative capabilities of shaping cities, their often-singular obsession with form and aesthetics actually reduces their effectiveness as they are at the mercy of more powerful generators of urban form. In response to this paradox, Designing Urban Transformation addresses the incredible potential of urban practice to radically change cities for the better. The book focuses on a powerful question, "What can urbanism be?" by arguing that the most significant transformations occur by fundamentally rethinking concepts, practices, and outcomes. Drawing inspiration from the philosophical movement known as Pragmatism, the book proposes three conceptual shifts for transformative urban practice: (a) beyond material objects: city as flux, (b) beyond intentions: consequences of design, and (c) beyond practice: urbanism as creative political act. Pragmatism encourages us to consider how we can make deeper and more systemic changes and how urbanism itself can be a design strategy for such transformations. To illuminate how these conceptual shifts operate in vastly different contexts through analysis of transformative urban initiatives and projects in Belo Horizonte, Boston, Cairo, Karachi, Los Angeles, New Delhi, and Paris. The book is a rare integration of theory and practice that proposes essential ways of rethinking city-design-and-building processes, while drawing critical lessons from actual examples of such processes.

Present case studies of cities which have integrated, walkable transit districts. It argues that if well done, transit oriented developments can save money, create healthy neighbourhoods and help communities compete in the global marketplace.

Cities affect every person's life, yet across the traditional divides of class, age, gender and political affiliation, armies of people are united in their dislike of the transformations that cities have undergone in recent times. The physical form of the urban environment is not a designer add-on to 'real' social issues; it is a central aspect of the social world. Yet in many people's experience, the cumulative impacts of recent urban development have created widely un-loved urban places. To work towards better-loved urban environments, we need to understand how current problems have arisen and identify practical action to address them. Urban Transformations examines the crucial issues relating to how cities are formed, how people use these urban environments and how cities can be transformed into better places. Exploring the links between the concrete physicality of the built environment and the complex social, economic, political and cultural processes through which the physical urban form is produced and consumed, Ian Bentley proposes a framework of ideas to provoke and develop current debate and new forms of practice.

Urban Transformations is a theoretical and empirical account of the changing nature of urbanization in Germany. Where city planners and municipal administrations had emphasized free markets, the rule of law, and trade in 1871, by the 1930s they favoured a quite different integrative, corporate, and productivist vision. Urban Transformations explores the broad-based social transformation connected to these changes and the contemporaneous shifts in the cultural and social history of global capitalism. Dynamic features of modern capitalist life, such as rapid industrialization, working-class radicalism, dramatic population growth, poor quality housing, and regional administrative incoherence significantly influenced the Greater Berlin region. Examining materials on city planning, municipal administration, architecture, political economy, and jurisprudence, Urban Transformations recasts the history of German and European urbanization, as well as that of modernist architecture and city planning.

Economic restructuring and demographic change have in recent years placed much strain on urban areas with the effects falling disproportionately on neighbourhoods that were previously underpinned by industry and manufacturing. This has presented policy makers and city planners with a binary choice: to resist change and stagnate or to change and attempt to keep up with the pace of global demand. This edited book tells the story of how urban transformation impacts on people’s lives and everyday interactions – to question where and to whom benefit accrues from these changes. Urban Transformations offers insight into both risk and reward as local communities and public authorities creatively address the challenge of building vital and sustainable urban environments. The authors in this edited collection argue that understanding the specifics of community, space and place is crucial to delivering insights into how, where, when, why and for whom urban areas might successfully transform. The chapters investigate urban change using a range of approaches, and case studies from the four corners of the Earth – from the United States to Iran; from the United Kingdom to Canada. The varying scales at which governance or regeneration initiatives operate, the nature and composition of urban communities, and the local or global interests of different private sector actors all raise questions for urban policy and practice. It is important to not only consider the drivers of regeneration, but its beneficiaries need to be identified. This edited volume addresses and elaborates on critical issues facing urban transformation and renewal as a basis for future discussion on strategies for ‘successful’ urban transformation.