This book delves into the ethical dimension of urban life: how should one live in the city? What constitutes a ‘good’ life under urban condition? Whose gets to live a ‘good’ life, and whose ideas of morality, propriety and ‘good’ prevail? What is the connection between the ‘good’ and the ‘just’ in urban life? Rather than philosophizing the ‘good’ and proper life in cities, the book considers what happens when urban conflicts and urban futures are carried out as conflicts over the good and proper life in cities. It offers an understanding of how ethical discourses, ideals and values are harmonized with material interests of different groups, taking up cases studies about environmental protection, co-housing schemes, political protest, heritage preservation, participatory planning, collaborative art production, and other topics from different eras and parts of the globe. This book offers multidisciplinary insights, ethnographic research and conceptual tools and resources to explore and better understand such conflicts. It questions the ways in which urban ethics draw on tacit moral economies of urban life and the ways in which such moral economies become explicit, political and programmatic. Chapters 1 and 11 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
"In times where global matters such as the climate, currencies and places of residence become increasingly volatile, the urban public space we live in is an area where power, identity and belonging are negotiated. Cities have always been melting pots of history, society, art and politics, which is why the way a city is shaped tells us a lot about the people who live in it. With contributors from a variety of fields, Ethics of the Urban discusses these urban spaces of the political. "How do we move about the city?", "How does memory of the past inspire the future of cities?" and "What makes a city a home?" are only some of the many questions that Ethics of the Urban addresses. The publication gathers experts from history, sociology, art, political theory, planning, law and design to emphasize the complexity of the meaning that urban space has today. Urban spaces are on one hand political spaces, since buildings, streets and people moving around all mirror political decisions in one way or another. On the other hand, the urban space is also a designed space, conceptualized, planned and sometimes gentrified. Complimented by stunning photography, Ethics of the Urban is a vibrant intellectual journey straight into the bone marrow of every contemporary city around the globe." -- from publisher's website.
"The city," according to urban design scholar Gideon Golany, is"the largest and most complicated project ever produced byhumankind." In Ethics and Urban Design, he challenges designprofessionals to reexamine their basic assumptions about the urbanenvironment and offers design strategies based on enduring humanvalues. In search of answers to the paradoxical problems of the moderncity, Golany takes the reader through the sweep of humansettlements from the dawn of civilization to the present. Hisauthoritative examination of the genesis of the city is illuminatedby instructive examples of early urban centers. Mesopotamia, theIndus River Valley, the Egyptian cities of the Nile, and thecapital cities of ancient China--all are examined in the light ofwhat made them work as major centers of human activity. What Golany finds in the success stories of the past are cohesivesociocultural values that shaped the design of homes,neighborhoods, and cities. These ethical values helped to maintainan equilibrium within the society that permeated its natural,social, and human-made environments. In the present era,conversely, he finds a major disconnection between human values andthe ethics of technology, which has resulted in confusion,imbalance, and dehumanization. To help designers gain a perspective on possible solutions, Golanyexplains leading comprehensive design strategies, including thevalley theory, the urban border zone concept, and the regionalconcept of Patrick Geddes. In the case study of contemporaryHolland, he details what a small, densely populated country hasbeen able to achieve through design planning rooted inenvironmental ethics. "Future Frontiers for Urban Design," the culminating section ofthis groundbreaking book, opens with Golany's vision of the futurecity. He examines the issues of thermal performance and climate asthey relate to urban design and offers the concept of"geospace"--the earth-enveloped habitat. Buttressing hispresentation with detailed information on the mechanics ofgeospace, Golany describes case studies of the successful use ofearth-enveloped habitats in China and Tunisia. He makes a powerfulargument for the geospace city as a renewal of ancient traditionsthat can restore the vital equilibrium between nature and humansettlements that we seem to have lost. Ethics and Urban Design is a distinguished scholar's analysis andprescription for the city; it offers an abundance of stimulatingideas for the architects, designers, and planners who have assumedresponsibility for its future. Ethics & Urban Design draws on historical examples andcontemporary case studies from around the world to illustrate urbandesign strategies that can help restore equilibrium to the natural,social, and built environments of the city. In this stimulatingbook, urban design scholar Gideon Golany offers architects,designers, and planners both an in-depth analysis of thefundamental issues of urban design and practical options for thedesign of the future city. * Examines the genesis and development of the city from theearliest presettlements to the rise of urban society * Presents urban design strategies based on historical examples ofearly urban centers, including Mesopotamia, the Indus River Valley,Egypt, and China * Offers case studies of environmental success stories from Europe,Asia, and Africa * Details geospace design options--the use of underground space fordiversified land use, housing, and transportation * Fully illustrated, with over 80 photographs, drawings, anddiagrams
A reflection on the past and present of city life, and a bold proposal for its future “Constantly stimulating ideas from a veteran of urban thinking.”—Jonathan Meades, The Guardian In this sweeping work, the preeminent sociologist Richard Sennett traces the anguished relation between how cities are built and how people live in them, from ancient Athens to twenty-first-century Shanghai. He shows how Paris, Barcelona, and New York City assumed their modern forms; rethinks the reputations of Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, and others; and takes us on a tour of emblematic contemporary locations, from the backstreets of Medellín, Colombia, to Google headquarters in Manhattan. Through it all, Sennett laments that the “closed city”—segregated, regimented, and controlled—has spread from the Global North to the exploding urban centers of the Global South. He argues instead for a flexible and dynamic “open city,” one that provides a better quality of life, that can adapt to climate change and challenge economic stagnation and racial separation. With arguments that speak directly to our moment—a time when more humans live in urban spaces than ever before—Sennett forms a bold and original vision for the future of cities.
The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism explores the possible and potential relevance of Giorgio Agamben’s political thoughts and writings for the theory and the practice of architecture and urban design. It sketches out the potentiality of Agamben’s politics, which can affect change in current architectural and design discourses. The book investigates the possibility of an inoperative architecture, as an ethical shift for a different practice, just a little bit different, but able to deactivate the sociospatial dispositive and mobilize a new theory and a new project for the urban now to come. This particular reading from Agamben’s oeuvre suggests a destituent mode of both thinking and practicing of architecture and urbanism that could possibly redeem them from their social emptiness, cultural irrelevance, economic reductionism and proto-avant-garde extravagance, contributing to a renewed critical ‘encounter’ with architecture’s aesthetic-political function.
Across the Western world, full membership of society is established through entitlements to space, formalized in the institutions of property and citizenship. Those without such entitlements thus become less than fully human, as they struggle to find a place where they can symbolically and physically exist. The Ethics of Space is an unprecedented account from an anthropologist who accidentally found herself homeless, studying what happens when homeless people organize to occupy abandoned properties. Set against the backdrop of economic crisis, austerity, and a disintegrating British state, Steph Grohmann describes a flourishing squatter community in the city of Bristol, and its eventual outlawing by this state. Contrary to a mainstream discourse that seeks to divide squatters into the 'deserving' homeless and 'undeserving' activists, Grohmann shows that squatters may in fact be homeless people who, choose to challenge property and the State.
This is a revised edition of Walker's well-known book in feminist ethics first published in 1997. Walker's book proposes a view of morality and an approach to ethical theory which uses the critical insights of feminism and race theory to rethink the epistemological and moral position of the ethical theorist, and how moral theory is inescapably shaped by culture and history. The main gist of her book is that morality is embodied in "practices of responsibility" that express our identities, values, and connections to others in socially patterned ways. Thus ethical theory needs to be empirically informed and politically critical to avoid reiterating forms of socially entrenched bias. Responsible ethical theory should reveal and question the moral significance of social differences. The book engages with, and challenges, the work of contemporary analytic philosophers in ethics. Moral Understandings has been influential in reaching a global audience in ethics and feminist philosophy, as well as in tangential fields like nursing ethics; research ethics; disability ethics; environmental ethics, and social and political theory. This revised edition contains a new preface, a substantive postscript to Chapter 1 about "the subject of moral philosophy"; the addition of a new chapter on the importance of emotion in practices of responsibility; and the addition of an afterword, which responds to critics of the book.
Transforming Urban Transport confronts head-on the dilemma faced by a world wedded to mobility: the danger of continuing along the fossil-fuelled path and the real paucity of viable technological alternatives which can be deployed in time. To respond to the dilemma, the ideal of urban transport must be changed from auto-based mobility to systems of sustainable transport in which public transport, and non-motorised transport work together to reduce climate change pressures, enhance urban quality and preserve life and health. The book challenges the commonly held view that a combination of urbanity and higher residential density expressed in compact cities (expected to have greater public transport use) will resolve urban transport/environment problems, instead showing that transport systems can be changed to meet the environmental imperatives without the massive spatial change implied. But the problem of change of urban transport is profoundly institutional and cultural. Changes in urban mobility and transport require local institutional policy action. To support such action, the book explores new methods of governance of transport in dispersed and concentrated cities, new techniques for assessing transport need, ways of improving childhood mobility, guidelines for political mobilization, and norms of knowledge sharing. Drawing together leading scholars from different disciplines in Australia, Japan and China, this book provides a unique fusion of Asian and Australasian perspectives and engages with the coming needs of transport planning practitioners in both high density and dispersed cities.
This book reflects on theoretical developments in the political theory of care and new applications of care ethics in different contexts. The chapters provide original and fresh perspectives on the seminal notions and topics of a politically formulated ethics of care. It covers concepts such as democratic citizenship, social and political participation, moral and political deliberation, solidarity and situated attentive knowledge. It engages with current debates on marketizing and privatizing care, and deals with issues of state care provision and democratic caring institutions. It speaks to the current political and societal challenges, including the crisis of Western democracy related to the rise of populism and identity politics worldwide. The book brings together perspectives of care theorists from three different continents and ten different countries and gives voice to their unique local insights from various socio-political and cultural contexts. Chapter 11 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
This collection seeks to expand the limits of current debates about urban commoning practices that imply a radical will to establish collaborative and solidarity networks based on anti-capitalist principles of economics, ecology and ethics. The chapters in this volume draw on case studies in a diversity of urban contexts, ranging from Detroit, USA to Kyrenia, Cyprus – on urban gardening and land stewardship, collaborative housing experiments, alternative food networks, claims to urban leisure space, migrants’ appropriation of urban space and workers’ cooperatives/collectives. The analysis pursued by the eleven chapters opens new fields of research in front of us: the entanglements of racial capitalism with enclosures and of black geographies with the commons, the critical history of settler colonialism and indigenous commons, law as a force of enclosure and as a strategy of commoning, housing commons from the urban scale perspective, solidarity economies as labour commons, territoriality in the urban commons, the non-territoriality of mobile commons, the new materialist and post-humanist critique of the commons debate and feminist ethics of care.
