Dialectical Urbanism
Dialectical Urbanism

Author: Andy Merrifield

Publisher:

Published: 2002-02

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13:

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Life in the city can be both liberating and oppressive. The contemporary city is an arena in which new and unexpected personal identities and collective agencies are forged and at the same time the major focus of market forces intent on making all life a commodity. This book explores both sides of the urban experience, developing a perspective from which the contradictory nature of the politics of the city comes more clearly into view. Dialectical Urbanism discusses a range of urban issues, conflicts and struggles through detailed case studies set in Liverpool, Baltimore, New York, and Los Angeles. Issues which affect the quality of everyday life in the citygentrification and development, affordable rents, the accountability of local government, the domination of the urban landscape by new corporate giants, policingare located in the context of larger political and economic forces. At the same time, the narrative constantly returns to those moments in which city dwellers discover and develop their capacity to challenge larger forces and decide their own conditions of life, becoming active citizens rather than the passive consumers. Merrifield draws on a wide range of sourcesfrom interviews with activists and tenants fighting eviction to government and corporate reportsand uncovers surprising connections, for example, between the rise of junk bonds in the 1980s and urban improvement schemes in a working-class neighborhood in Baltimore. This lively and many-sided narrative is constantly informed by broader analyses and reflections on the city and engages with these analyses in turn. It fuses scholarship and political engagement into a powerful defense of the possibilities of life in the metropolis today.

Urban Planning’s Philosophical Entanglements
Urban Planning’s Philosophical Entanglements

Author: Richard S Bolan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-04-21

Total Pages: 473

ISBN-13: 131530919X

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Urban Planning’s Philosophical Entanglements explores the long-held idea that urban planning is the link in moving from knowledge to action. Observing that the knowledge domain of the planning profession is constantly expanding, the approach is a deep philosophical analysis of what is the quality and character of understanding that urban planners need for expert engagement in urban planning episodes. This book philosophically analyses the problems in understanding the nature of action — both individual and social action. Included in the analysis are the philosophical concerns regarding space/place and the institution of private property. The final chapter extensively explores the linkage between knowledge and action. This emerges as the process of design in seeking better urban communities — design processes that go beyond buildings, tools, or fashions but are focused on bettering human urban relationships. Urban Planning’s Philosophical Entanglements provides rich analysis and understanding of the theory and history of planning and what it means for planning practitioners on the ground.

Global Urbanism
Global Urbanism

Author: Michele Lancione

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2021-06-21

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 0429521774

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Global Urbanism is an experimental examination of how urban scholars and activists make sense of, and act upon, the foundational relationship between the ‘global’ and the ‘urban’. What does it mean to say that we live in a global-urban moment, and what are its implications? Refusing all-encompassing answers, the book grounds this question, exploring the plurality of understandings, definitions, and ways of researching global urbanism through the lenses of varied contributors from different parts of the world. The contributors explore what global urbanism means to them, in their context, from the ground and the struggles upon which they are working and living. The book argues for an incremental, fragile and in-the-making emancipatory urban thinking. The contributions provide the resources to help make sense of what global urbanism is in its varieties, what’s at stake in it, how to research it, and what needs to change for more progressive urban futures. It provides a heterodox set of approaches and theorisations to probe and provoke rather than aiming to draw a line under a complex, changing and profoundly contested set of global-urban processes. Global Urbanism is primarily intended for scholars and graduate students in geography, sociology, planning, anthropology and the field of urban studies, for whom it will provide an invaluable and up-to-date guide to current thinking across the range of disciplines and practices which converge in the study of urbanism. Chapter 36 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429259593

Theorising Urban Development From the Global South
Theorising Urban Development From the Global South

Author: Anjali Karol Mohan

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-10-25

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 3030824756

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This edited volume brings together debates from the Global South and Global East to explore alternatives to conventional planning in Southern cities. Embracing the evolving post-colonial theory, the volume offers ‘fragments’ of the urban that provide clues to the larger, often-repeated ontological question that continues to hold: Why and what does theory from the South mean? The chapters derive from and speak to the simultaneously homogenous and heterogeneous South. They focus on presenting the alternative realities of Southern cities as critical analytical lenses that can build up to the theorisation of the Southern urban with a potential to (re)understand the contemporary urban world. The contributions explore locally rooted knowledge systems, premised on social and cultural practices, as possible conduits to evolving planning methods. In doing so, the volume breaks apart the linear modernity that urban theory from the North relies on. Chapters [Chapter-1] and [Chapter-11] are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Sustainable Urbanism and Direct Action
Sustainable Urbanism and Direct Action

Author: Benjamin Heim Shepard

Publisher: Radical Subjects in International Politics

Published: 2023-01-31

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781783483167

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Urban activism can manifest in many guises, from community gardening to mass naked bike rides. But how might we theorize the evidence of the collisions between social forces that take place in our streets and public commons? Cities are formed through these collective collisions in time. This book draws on the author's own vast experience as an activist to make links between a theory of practice with rich discussion of the histories of conflicts over public space. Each chapter examines activist responses to a range of issues that have confronted New Yorkers, from the struggle for green space and non-polluting transportation, for housing and the fight for sexual civil liberties. The cases are shaped through interplay between multiple data sources, including the author's own voice as an observing participant, as well as interviews with other participant activists, historic accounts and theoretical discussion. Taken together, these highlight a story of urban public space movements and the ways they shape cities and are shaped by history.

Metromarxism
Metromarxism

Author: Andrew Merrifield

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-04-15

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1135024855

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"Metromarxism" discusses Marxism's relationship with the city from the 1850s to the present by way of biographical chapters on figures from the Marxist tradition, including Marx, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, and David Harvey. Each chapter combines interesting biographical anecdotes with an accessible analysis of each individual's contribution to an always-transforming Marxist theory of the city. He suggests that the interplay between the city as center of economic and social life and its potential for progressive change generated a major corpus of work. That work has been key in advancing progressive political and social transformations.

Critical Urban Theory, Common Property, and “the Political”
Critical Urban Theory, Common Property, and “the Political”

Author: Dan Webb

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-05-18

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1351736469

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Dan Webb explores an undervalued topic in the formal discipline of Political Theory (and political science, more broadly): the urban as a level of political analysis and political struggles in urban space. Because the city and urban space is so prominent in other critical disciplines, most notably, geography and sociology, a driving question of the book is: what kind of distinct contribution can political theory make to the already existing critical urban literature? The answer is to be found in what Webb calls the "properly political" approach to understanding political conflict as developed in the work of thinkers like Chantal Mouffe, Jodi Dean, and Slavoj Žižek. This "properly political" analysis is contrasted with and a curative to the predominant "ethical" or "post-political" understanding of the urban found in so much of the geographical and sociological critical urban theory literature. In order to illustrate this primary theoretical argument of the book, Webb suggests that "common property" is the most useful category for conceiving the city as a site of the "properly political." When the city and urban space are framed within this theoretical framework, critical urbanists are provided a powerful tool for understanding urban political struggles, in particular, anti-gentrification movements in the inner city.

Made in Australia
Made in Australia

Author: Richard Weller

Publisher: Apollo Books

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9781742584928

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How do you creatively plan for a population of 62 million by 2100, Australia's current major city planning frameworks only account for an extra 5.5 million people. Whether we want a 'Big Australia' or not, Australia's 21st century is likely to see rapid and continual growth - and if we want liveable, high functioning cities and regional centres we need to think outside the box. Richard Weller and Julian Bolleter (Australian Urban Design Research Centre) offer optimistic and creative solutions for the future with one imperative: what we build this century will make or break our country.

Dialectics for the New Century
Dialectics for the New Century

Author: B. Ollman

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2008-02-27

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0230583814

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This anthology contains some of the more important Marxist thinkers now working on dialectics. As a whole the book is an unusual 'Introduction to Dialectics', a systematic restatement of what it is and how to use it, a survey of most of the main debates in the field, and a good picture of the current state of the art of dialectics.

The Politics of the Encounter
The Politics of the Encounter

Author: Andy Merrifield

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2013-04-15

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 0820345814

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The Politics of the Encounter is a spirited interrogation of the city as a site of both theoretical inquiry and global social struggle. The city, writes Andy Merrifield, remains "important, virtually and materially, for progressive politics." And yet, he notes, more than forty years have passed since Henri Lefebvre advanced the powerful ideas that still undergird much of our thinking about urbanization and urban society. Merrifield rethinks the city in light of the vast changes to our planet since 1970, when Lefebvre's seminal Urban Revolution was first published. At the same time, he expands on Lefebvre's notion of "the right to the city," which was first conceived in the wake of the 1968 student uprising in Paris. We need to think less of cities as "entities with borders and clear demarcations between what's inside and what's outside" and emphasize instead the effects of "planetary urbanization," a concept of Lefebvre's that Merrifield makes relevant for the ways we now experience the urban. The city—from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street—seems to be the critical zone in which a new social protest is unfolding, yet dissenters' aspirations are transcending the scale of the city physically and philosophically. Consequently, we must shift our perspective from "the right to the city" to "the politics of the encounter," says Merrifield. We must ask how revolutionary crowds form, where they draw their energies from, what kind of spaces they occur in—and what kind of new spaces they produce.