Instant Cities

Instant Cities

Author: Gunther Paul Barth

Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press

Published: 1975

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0195018990

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A reprint of the Oxford U. Press edition of 1975 with a new introduction (20 p.). Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


Instant City

Instant City

Author: Steve Inskeep

Publisher: Penguin Books

Published: 2012-09-25

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0143122169

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Morning Edition" cohost Inskeep presents a riveting account of a single harrowing day in December 2009 that sheds light on the constant tensions in Karachi, Pakistan--when a bomb blast ripped through a religious procession.


Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition

Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition

Author: Ellen Dunham-Jones

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2011-03-23

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1118027671

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Updated with a new Introduction by the authors and a foreword by Richard Florida, this book is a comprehensive guide book for urban designers, planners, architects, developers, environmentalists, and community leaders that illustrates how existing suburban developments can be redesigned into more urban and more sustainable places. While there has been considerable attention by practitioners and academics to development in urban cores and new neighborhoods on the periphery of cities, there has been little attention to the redesign and redevelopment of existing suburbs. The authors, both architects and noted experts on the subject, show how development in existing suburbs can absorb new growth and evolve in relation to changed demographic, technological, and economic conditions. Retrofitting Suburbia was named winner in the Architecture & Urban Planning category of the 2009 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (The PROSE Awards) awarded by The Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of American Publishers


The Shenzhen Experiment

The Shenzhen Experiment

Author: Juan Du

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-01-07

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0674975286

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An award-winning Hong Kong–based architect with decades of experience designing buildings and planning cities in the People’s Republic of China takes us to the Pearl River delta and into the heart of China’s iconic Special Economic Zone, Shenzhen. Shenzhen is ground zero for the economic transformation China has seen in recent decades. In 1979, driven by China’s widespread poverty, Deng Xiaoping supported a bold proposal to experiment with economic policies in a rural borderland next to Hong Kong. The site was designated as the City of Shenzhen and soon after became China’s first Special Economic Zone (SEZ). Four decades later, Shenzhen is a megacity of twenty million, an internationally recognized digital technology hub, and the world’s most successful economic zone. Some see it as a modern miracle city that seemingly came from nowhere, attributing its success solely to centralized planning and Shenzhen’s proximity to Hong Kong. The Chinese government has built hundreds of new towns using the Shenzhen model, yet none has come close to replicating the city’s level of economic success. But is it true that Shenzhen has no meaningful history? That the city was planned on a tabula rasa? That the region’s rural past has had no significant impact on the urban present? Juan Du unravels the myth of Shenzhen and shows us how this world-famous “instant city” has a surprising history—filled with oyster fishermen, villages that remain encased within city blocks, a secret informal housing system—and how it has been catapulted to success as much by the ingenuity of its original farmers as by Beijing’s policy makers. The Shenzhen Experiment is an important story for all rapidly urbanizing and industrializing nations around the world seeking to replicate China’s economic success in the twenty-first century.


Instant City

Instant City

Author: Steve Inskeep

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2011-10-13

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1101547936

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From the host of NPR's Morning Edition, a deeply reported portrait of Karachi, Pakistan, a city that illuminates the perils and possibilities of rapidly growing metropolises all around the world. In recent decades, the world has seen an unprecedented shift of people from the countryside into cities. As Steve Inskeep so aptly puts it, we are now living in the age of the "instant city," when new megacities can emerge practically overnight, creating a host of unique pressures surrounding land use, energy, housing, and the environment. In his first book, the co-host of Morning Edition explores how this epic migration has transformed one of the world's most intriguing instant cities: Karachi, Pakistan. Karachi has exploded from a colonial port town of 350,000 in 1941 to a sprawling metropolis of at least 13 million today. As the booming commercial center of Pakistan, Karachi is perhaps the largest city whose stability is a vital security concern of the United States, and yet it is a place that Americans have frequently misunderstood. As Inskeep underscores, one of the great ironies of Karachi's history is that the decision to divide Pakistan and India along religious lines in 1947 only unleashed deeper divisions within the city-over religious sect, ethnic group, and political party. In Instant City, Inskeep investigates the 2009 bombing of a Shia religious procession that killed dozens of people and led to further acts of terrorism, including widespread arson at a popular market. As he discovers, the bombing is in many ways a microcosm of the numerous conflicts that divide Karachi, because people wondered if the perpetrators were motivated by religious fervor, political revenge, or simply a desire to make way for new real estate in the heart of the city. Despite the violence that frequently consumes Karachi, Inskeep finds remarkable signs of the city's tolerance, vitality, and thriving civil society-from a world-renowned ambulance service to a socially innovative project that helps residents of the vast squatter neighborhoods find their own solutions to sanitation, health care, and education. Drawing on interviews with a broad cross section of Karachi residents, from ER doctors to architects to shopkeepers, Inskeep has created a vibrant and nuanced portrait of the forces competing to shape the future of one of the world's fastest growing cities.


Instant Cities

Instant Cities

Author: Amer Moustafa

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 578

ISBN-13: 9789957860219

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"'Instant cities : emergent trends in architecture and urbanism in the Arab world' invited colleagues from across disciplines to develop analyses that identify, explicate and theorize emergent trends in architecture and urbanism in the Arab region in general and the Gulf states in particular."--P. vii.


Instant Cities

Instant Cities

Author: Herbert Wright

Publisher: Black Dog Architecture

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781906155346

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Assesses the stratospheric rise of the city throughout history, surveying the exploding megacities in China, India, South America and elsewhere to the continuous remodeloing of Western cityscapes and the socialist experiments of the twentieth century.


The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics

The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics

Author: Kevin Ward

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-04-17

Total Pages: 845

ISBN-13: 1317495012

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics provides a comprehensive statement and reference point for urban politics. The scope of this handbook’s coverage and contributions engages with and reflects upon the most important, innovative and recent critical developments to the interdisciplinary field of urban politics, drawing upon a range of examples from within and across the Global North and Global South. This handbook is organized into nine interrelated sections, with an introductory chapter setting out the rationale, aims and structure of the Handbook, and short introductory commentaries at the beginning of each part. It questions the eliding of ‘urban politics’ into the ‘politics of the city’, reconsidering the usefulness of the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ urban politics, considering issues of ‘class’, ‘gender’, ‘race’ and the ways in which they intersect, appear and reappear in matters of urban politics, how best to theorize the roles of capital, the state and other actors, such as social movements, in the production of the city and, finally, issues of doing urban political research. The various chapters explore the issues of urban politics of economic development, environment and nature in the city, governance and planning, the politics of labour as well as living spaces. The concluding sections of the Handbook examine the politics over alternative visions of cities of the future and provide concluding discussions and reflections, particularly on the futures for urban politics in an increasingly ‘global’ and multidisciplinary context. With over forty-five contributions from leading international scholars in the field, this handbook provides critical reviews and appraisals of current conceptual and theoretical approaches and future developments in urban politics. It is a key reference to all researchers and policy-makers with an interest in urban politics.


Many Urbanisms

Many Urbanisms

Author: Martin J. Murray

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2022-02-15

Total Pages: 693

ISBN-13: 0231555350

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Winner, 2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Now, for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s population lives in cities. But urbanization is accelerating in some places and slowing down in others. The sprawling megacities of Asia and Africa, as well as many other smaller and medium-sized cities throughout the “Global South,” are expected to continue growing. At the same time, older industrial cities in wealthier countries are experiencing protracted socioeconomic decline. Nonetheless, mainstream urban studies continues to treat a handful of superstar cities in Europe and North America as the exemplars of world urbanism, even though current global growth and development represent a dramatic break with past patterns. Martin J. Murray offers a groundbreaking guide to the multiplicity, heterogeneity, and complexity of contemporary global urbanism. He identifies and traces four distinct pathways that characterize cities today: tourist-entertainment cities with world-class aspirations; struggling postindustrial cities; megacities experiencing hypergrowth; and “instant cities,” or master-planned cities built from scratch. Murray shows how these different types of cities respond to different pressures and logics rather than progressing through the stages of a predetermined linear path. He highlights new spatial patterns of urbanization that have undermined conventional understandings of the city, exploring the emergence of polycentric, fragmented, haphazard, and unbounded metropolises. Such cities, he argues, should not be seen as deviations from a norm but rather as alternatives within a constellation of urban possibility. Innovative and wide-ranging, Many Urbanisms offers ways to understand the disparate forms of global cities today on their own terms.


A History of Future Cities

A History of Future Cities

Author: Daniel Brook

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2013-02-12

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0393078124

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A pioneering exploration of four cities where East meets West and past becomes future: St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai.