"Cities of Ambition asks why some cities make more of their assets and resources and do better than expected. It explores the landscape of ambitious cities across Europe and assesses their special qualities looking at the pioneers and pathbreakers and how they overcome obstacles and realized their aims. It asks why cities like Barcelona, Malmo and Copenhagen or Eindhoven, Torino and Manchester are so admired as well as smaller places like Freiburg, Nantes or Umea. The central messags are: 'try to be yourself', 'identify and orchestrate your unique resources' 'be willing to look at things afresh', 'be open to ideas', 'acquire and value the new skills fit for the times, such as being a connector or orchestrator', 'connect across the world and become globally fluent', 'develop a leadership grouping', and 'do not think you can do it on your own - collaborate and partner with others'.
Cities of the Arabian Peninsula reveal contradictions of contemporary urbanization The fast-growing cities of the Persian Gulf are, whatever else they may be, indisputably sensational. The world’s tallest building is in Dubai; the 2022 World Cup in soccer will be played in fantastic Qatar facilities; Saudi Arabia is building five new cities from scratch; the Louvre, the Guggenheim and the Sorbonne, as well as many American and European universities, all have handsome outposts and campuses in the region. Such initiatives bespeak strategies to diversify economies and pursue grand ambitions across the Earth. Shining special light on Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha—where the dynamics of extreme urbanization are so strongly evident—the authors of The New Arab Urban trace what happens when money is plentiful, regulation weak, and labor conditions severe. Just how do authorities in such settings reconcile goals of oft-claimed civic betterment with hyper-segregation and radical inequality? How do they align cosmopolitan sensibilities with authoritarian rule? How do these elite custodians arrange tactical alliances to protect particular forms of social stratification and political control? What sense can be made of their massive investment for environmental breakthrough in the midst of world-class ecological mayhem? To address such questions, this book’s contributors place the new Arab urban in wider contexts of trade, technology, and design. Drawn from across disciplines and diverse home countries, they investigate how these cities import projects, plans and structures from the outside, but also how, increasingly, Gulf-originated initiatives disseminate to cities far afield. Brought together by noted scholars, sociologist Harvey Molotch and urban analyst Davide Ponzini, this timely volume adds to our understanding of the modern Arab metropolis—as well as of cities more generally. Gulf cities display development patterns that, however unanticipated in the standard paradigms of urban scholarship, now impact the world.
A lively and personal book that returns the city to political thought Cities shape the lives and outlooks of billions of people, yet they have been overshadowed in contemporary political thought by nation-states, identity groups, and concepts like justice and freedom. The Spirit of Cities revives the classical idea that a city expresses its own distinctive ethos or values. In the ancient world, Athens was synonymous with democracy and Sparta represented military discipline. In this original and engaging book, Daniel Bell and Avner de-Shalit explore how this classical idea can be applied to today's cities, and they explain why philosophy and the social sciences need to rediscover the spirit of cities. Bell and de-Shalit look at nine modern cities and the prevailing ethos that distinguishes each one. The cities are Jerusalem (religion), Montreal (language), Singapore (nation building), Hong Kong (materialism), Beijing (political power), Oxford (learning), Berlin (tolerance and intolerance), Paris (romance), and New York (ambition). Bell and de-Shalit draw upon the richly varied histories of each city, as well as novels, poems, biographies, tourist guides, architectural landmarks, and the authors' own personal reflections and insights. They show how the ethos of each city is expressed in political, cultural, and economic life, and also how pride in a city's ethos can oppose the homogenizing tendencies of globalization and curb the excesses of nationalism. The Spirit of Cities is unreservedly impressionistic. Combining strolling and storytelling with cutting-edge theory, the book encourages debate and opens up new avenues of inquiry in philosophy and the social sciences. It is a must-read for lovers of cities everywhere. In a new preface, Bell and de-Shalit further develop their idea of "civicism," the pride city dwellers feel for their city and its ethos over that of others.
Founded in 1851 as a four-cabin outpost named "New York Pretty-Soon," Seattle has long struggled with an identity crisis. From a nearly lawless port, to a sedate, conventional company town defined by Boeing Aircraft, to an accessible paradise for artists and recovering urbanites, Seattle repeatedly tried and failed to become bigger, wealthier, more like "major league" cities. In the late 1980s, Seattle's time suddenly arrived. Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, McCaw Cellular/AT&T Wireless, and dozens of local dot.com startups began to drive a booming national economy. Seattle became a city of instant millionaires and brand name shopping, skyscrapers and sports franchises-- the place everyone wanted to visit, topping lists of America's "most desirable" cities. But with such wealth came consequences: overdevelopment, paralyzing traffic, racial and class divisions, and a street population of teenagers discarded by the new culture, whose rage and disaffection fueled the rise of bands such as Nirvana. Striving to reach its ambitions, Seattle seemed to be losing the struggle for its soul. And when it hosted the 1999 World Trade Organization convention, the city's conflicted personalities clashed, as violent riots by residents and a coalition of protestors left the downtown decimated and the nation transfixed by the spectacle of globalization gone wrong. In Seattle and the Demons of Ambition, Fred Moody uses his own background as a native son, along with wide-ranging encounters with others, to trace the growing pains of the city he loves. Profiling Bill Gates and never-quite-champion football coach Chuck Knox, a pair of ambitious entrepreneurs and a homeless sculptor once profiled in the New Yorker, grunge music superstars and the preyed-upon children of the documentary "Streetwise," Moody offers a dramatic, entertaining, and insightful portrait of the city that defined economic and technological change in the America of the 1990s.
The Chinese city of Chonqing is little known in the West. Yet with its 32 million inhabitants, the city is twice as big as the Netherlands. Located on the Yangtze river in the province of Sichuan in southwestern China, it is one of Chinas most rapidly growing cities. Ferit Kuyas stayed in Chonqing on dozens of occasions for long periods and became totally fascinated by the megalomaniacal construction fervour he witnessed there, as well as its beauty. The almost ubiquitous haze naturally present in this region but intensified by large-scale pollution gave his work almost automatically an added layer of mystery. Kuyas focussed predominantly on the periphery of the city, where the enormity of it cannot be directly seen, but rather felt. The result is a stifling and exceptional book that displays all the superlatives that describe China: huge, unstoppable, terrifying, incomprehensible, fascinating, beautiful...
How can we understand the infinite variety of cities? Darran Anderson seems to exhaust all possibilities in this work of creative nonfiction. Drawing inspiration from Marco Polo and Italo Calvino, Anderson shows that we have much to learn about ourselves by looking not only at the cities we have built, but also at the cities we have imagined. Anderson draws on literature (Gustav Meyrink, Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, and James Joyce), but he also looks at architectural writings and works by the likes of Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, Medieval travel memoirs from the Middle East, mid-twentieth-century comic books, Star Trek, mythical lands such as Cockaigne, and the works of Claude Debussy. Anderson sees the visionary architecture dreamed up by architects, artists, philosophers, writers, and citizens as wedded to the egalitarian sense that cities are for everyone. He proves that we must not be locked into the structures that exclude ordinary citizens--that cities evolve and that we can have input. As he says: "If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined as well.”
This book has been written to represent the efficient applications of sustainability in urban areas. The book intends to illustrate various techniques of action on sustainability on city conception, functions and conformation. This book is divided into four parts and nine chapters: Section I is entitled "Introduction to Sustainable Cities Concept" and contains one chapter "Introductory chapter: Overview of Sustainable Cities Theory and Practices," which discusses sustainability in cities in conception and practice. Section II is entitled "Energy and Environmental Analysis of Sustainable Cities Models." This includes four chapters. It expresses the effect of the environment and energy embodiment on city configuration and function. Section III is entitled "The Role of Transport in a Sustainable City." This part includes two chapters. Section IV is entitled "The influence of Social and Economic Factors in Urban Space Conception." It includes two chapters.
Winner of the Bancroft Prize In twenty-first-century America, some cities are flourishing and others are struggling, but they all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. Cities have limited tools to address these problems, and many must rely on the private market to support the public good. It wasn’t always this way. For almost three decades after World War II, even as national policies promoted suburban sprawl, the federal government underwrote renewal efforts for cities that had suffered during the Great Depression and the war and were now bleeding residents into the suburbs. In Saving America’s Cities, the prizewinning historian Lizabeth Cohen follows the career of Edward J. Logue, whose shifting approach to the urban crisis tracked the changing balance between government-funded public programs and private interests that would culminate in the neoliberal rush to privatize efforts to solve entrenched social problems. A Yale-trained lawyer, rival of Robert Moses, and sometime critic of Jane Jacobs, Logue saw renewing cities as an extension of the liberal New Deal. He worked to revive a declining New Haven, became the architect of the “New Boston” of the 1960s, and, later, led New York State’s Urban Development Corporation, which built entire new towns, including Roosevelt Island in New York City. Logue’s era of urban renewal has a complicated legacy: Neighborhoods were demolished and residents dislocated, but there were also genuine successes and progressive goals. Saving America’s Cities is a dramatic story of heartbreak and destruction but also of human idealism and resourcefulness, opening up possibilities for our own time.
