The Rise and Fall of London’s Ringways, 1943-1973

The Rise and Fall of London’s Ringways, 1943-1973

Author: Michael Dnes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-10-22

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1000734730

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Urban motorways are among the greatest – and least forgiven – legacies of post-war planning in Britain. Ringways explores the genesis, development and collapse of London’s controversial plans for nearly 500 miles of highways, to understand why such ambitious and unlamented programmes gained widespread support and triggered urban uproar. Combining a review of the wider intellectual climate with extensive archival research, Ringways asks how far the rise of the urban motorway can be attributed to urban contingency as opposed to far-seeing planners; how ideas of the environment changed as proposals were debated; and whether their fall was the work of popular revolt or expert regret.


Waterloo Sunrise

Waterloo Sunrise

Author: John Davis

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2022-03-15

Total Pages: 600

ISBN-13: 0691220581

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A kaleidoscopic history of how the 1960s and 1970s changed London forever Waterloo Sunrise is a panoramic and multifaceted account of modern London during the transformative years of the sixties and seventies, when a city still bearing the scars of war emerged as a vibrant yet divided metropolis. John Davis paints lively and colorful portraits of life in the British capital, covering topics as varied as the rise and fall of boutique fashion, Soho and the sex trade, eating out in London, cabbies and tourists, gentrification, conservation, suburbia and the welfare state. With vivid and immersive scene-setting, Davis traces how ‘swinging London’ captured the world’s attention in the mid-sixties, discarding postwar austerity as it built a global reputation for youthful confidence and innovative music and fashion. He charts the slow erosion of mid-sixties optimism, showing how a newly prosperous city grappled with problems of deindustrialisation, inner-city blight and racial friction. Davis reveals how London underwent a complex evolution that reflected an underlying tension between majority affluence and minority deprivation. He argues that the London that had taken shape by the time of Margaret Thatcher’s election as prime minister in 1979 already displayed many of the features that would come to be associated with ‘Thatcher’s Britain’ of the eighties. Monumental in scope, Waterloo Sunrise draws on a wealth of archival evidence to provide an evocative, engrossing account of Britain’s ever-evolving capital city.


Migrants and the Making of the Urban-Maritime World

Migrants and the Making of the Urban-Maritime World

Author: Christina Reimann

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-09-03

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1000173534

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This volume explores the mutually transformative relations between migrants and port cities. Throughout the ages of sail and steam, port cities served as nodes of long-distance transmissions and exchanges. Commercial goods, people, animals, seeds, bacteria and viruses; technological and scientific knowledge and fashions all arrived in, and moved through, these microcosms of the global. Migrants made vital contributions to the construction of the urban-maritime world in terms of the built environment, the particular sociocultural milieu, and contemporary representations of these spaces. Port cities, in turn, conditioned the lives of these mobile people, be they seafarers, traders, passers-through, or people in search of a new home. By focusing on migrants—their actions and how they were acted upon—the authors seek to capture the contradictions and complexities that characterized port cities: mobility and immobility, acceptance and rejection, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, diversity and homogeneity, segregation and interaction. The book offers a wide geographical perspective, covering port cities on three continents. Its chapters deal with agency in a widened sense, considering the activities of individuals and collectives as well as the decisive impact of sailing and steamboats, trains, the built environment, goods or microbes in shaping urban-maritime spaces.


Urban Emotions and the Making of the City

Urban Emotions and the Making of the City

Author: Katie Barclay

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-04-06

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1000371972

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This book brings together a vibrant interdisciplinary mix of scholars – from anthropology, architecture, art history, film studies, fine art, history, literature, linguistics and urban studies – to explore the role of emotions in the making and remaking of the city. By asking how urban boundaries are produced through and with emotion; how emotional communities form and define themselves through urban space; and how the emotional imaginings of urban spaces impact on histories, identities and communities, the volume advances our understanding of 'urban emotions' into discussions of materiality, power and embodiment across time and space.


Interurban Knowledge Exchange in Southern and Eastern Europe, 1870–1950

Interurban Knowledge Exchange in Southern and Eastern Europe, 1870–1950

Author: Eszter Gantner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-10-22

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 100020765X

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Around 1900 cities in Southern and Eastern Europe were persistently labeled "backward" and "delayed." Allegedly, they had no alternative but to follow the role model of the metropolises, of London, Paris or Vienna. This edited volume fundamentally questions this assumption. It shows that cities as diverse as Barcelona, Berdyansk, Budapest, Lviv, Milan, Moscow, Prague, Warsaw and Zagreb pursued their own agendas of modernization. In order to solve their pressing problems with respect to urban planning and public health, they searched for best practices abroad. The solutions they gleaned from other cities were eclectic to fit the specific needs of a given urban space and were thus often innovative. This applied urban knowledge was generated through interurban networks and multi-directional exchanges. Yet in the period around 1900, this transnational municipalism often clashed with the forging of urban and national identities, highlighting the tensions between the universal and the local. This interurban perspective helps to overcome nationalist perspectives in historiography as well as outdated notions of "center and periphery." This volume will appeal to scholars from a large number of disciplines, including urban historians, historians of Eastern and Southern Europe, historians of science and medicine, and scholars interested in transnational connections.


New Approaches to Governance and Rule in Urban Europe Since 1500

New Approaches to Governance and Rule in Urban Europe Since 1500

Author: Simon Gunn

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-03-31

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1000062775

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Urban power and politics are topics of abiding interest for students of the city. This exciting collection of essays explores how Europe’s cities have been governed across the last 500 years. Taken as a whole, it provides a unique historical overview of urban politics in early modern and modern Europe. At the same time, it guides the reader through the variety of ways in which power and governance are currently understood by historians and new directions in the subject. The essays are wide-ranging, covering Europe from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, Russia to Ireland, between 1500 and the twentieth century. Each chapter employs a specific case-study to illuminate a way of examining how power worked in regard to topics such as women, popular culture or urban elites. A variety of approaches are deployed, including the study of ritual and performance, morality and conduct, governmentality and the state, infrastructure and the individual. Reflecting the state of the art in European urban history, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the study of urban politics and government. It represents a fresh take on a rich subject and will stimulate a new generation of historical studies of power and the city.


Nordic Welfare Cities

Nordic Welfare Cities

Author: Magnus Linnarsson

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-04-25

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1040040985

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This book examines Nordic cities from 1850 and their transformation from traditional, oligarchic towns to modern, inclusive welfare cities. In the contemporary world, the role of cities as hotbeds for progressive change has become increasingly topical. Historical studies on how Nordic cities addressed social and environmental questions a hundred years ago and how they eventually created new and inclusive policies for the future is a useful contribution to the current debate. The concept of the welfare city is addressed and elaborated upon to analyse the attempts by urban authorities to solve the problems following industrialization and urbanization. From the late nineteenth century, municipal public services promoted the integration of new groups in the urban community including workers, immigrants, women and children. The contributions in this book analyse various examples of welfare and public services that include infrastructure and transport systems, health care, housing conditions, outdoor life and entertainment. The chapters highlight the arguments and considerations promoting welfare policies, while also addressing differences between the Nordic countries. The evolution of the Nordic welfare city was a process of several overlapping phases or dimensions. This volume will be of value to students and scholars alike interested in urban history, social and cultural history and European history.


Values in Cities

Values in Cities

Author: James Lesh

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-09-23

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1000606724

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Examining urban heritage in twentieth-century Australia, James Lesh reveals how evolving ideas of value and significance shaped cities and places. Over decades, a growing number of sites and areas were found to be valuable by communities and professionals. Places perceived to have value were often conserved. Places perceived to lack value became subject to modernisation, redevelopment, and renewal. From the 1970s, alongside strengthened activism and legislation, with the innovative Burra Charter (1979), the values-based model emerged for managing the aesthetic, historic, scientific, and social significance of historic environments. Values thus transitioned from an implicit to an overt component of urban, architectural, and planning conservation. The field of conservation became a noted profession and discipline. Conservation also had a broader role in celebrating the Australian nation and in reconciling settler colonialism for the twentieth century. Integrating urban history and heritage studies, this book provides the first longitudinal study of the twentieth-century Australian heritage movement. It advocates for innovative and reflexive modes of heritage practice responsive to urban, social, and environmental imperatives. As the values-based model continues to shape conservation worldwide, this book is an essential reference for researchers, students, and practitioners concerned with the past and future of cities and heritage. The Foreword and Chapter 1/Introduction of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.


Strategic Planning in London

Strategic Planning in London

Author: Douglas A. Hart

Publisher: Elsevier

Published: 2013-10-22

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 148315548X

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Strategic Planning in London: The Rise and Fall of the Primary Road Network examines the relationship between order and change in the urban planning process. Focusing on the planning of Greater London during 1943 to 1973, the book describes how strategic road planning and urban order has changed over this period. The text analyzes why the large-scale planning of high-speed major roads in Greater London has failed. Chapter 1 examines traditional master planning and disjointed incrementalism and outlines a conceptual model based on an iterative approach to urban planning. Chapter 2 considers the way in which traffic congestion in Greater London was defined in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Chapter 3 and 4 describes Abercombrie-Buchanan approach to highway and urban and planning. Chapter 5 points out the ways in which the concept of traffic congestion was broadened in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Finally, Chapter 6 focuses on the control mechanisms used in the planning period from 1943 to 1973. This book will be of interest to engineers who are seeking a comprehensive analysis of strategic planning.