By the end of this century, 9 out of 10 Europeans will live in an urban area. But what kind of city will they call home? You'll find all the answers in CITY, TRANSFORMED, the new essay series from the European Investment Bank. This panoramic first essay in the series lays out a great sweeping history of European cities over the last fifty years—and showcases new directions being taken by some of our most innovative cities. Urban experts Greg Clark, Tim Moonen, and Jake Nunley based at University College London take a definitive look at how Europe's cities transformed from post-industrial decline to thriving metropolises that are as prosperous and liveable as anywhere on Earth.
The European Cities and Technology Reader is divided into three main sections presenting key readings on: Cities of the Industrial Revolution (to 1870), European Cities since 1870 and the Urban Technology Transfer.
Examines and explains the waves of urbanization across Europe from the fall of the Roman empire to the dawn of the 21st century, covering the whole of Europe, north and south, east and west, and looking at urban trends, the urban economy, social developments, cultural life, and governance.
Cities are not only home to around half of the global population but also major centers of economic activity and innovation. Yet, so far there has been no consensus of what a city really is. Substantial differences in the way cities, metropolitan, urban, and rural areas are defined across countries hinder robust international comparisons and an accurate monitoring of SDGs. The report Cities in the World: A New Perspective on Urbanisation addresses this void and provides new insights on urbanisation by applying for the first time two new definitions of human settlements to the entire globe: the Degree of Urbanisation and the Functional Urban Area.
The Political Philosophy of the European City is a courageous and wide-ranging panorama of the political life and thought of the European city. Its novel hypothesis is that modern Western political thought, since the time of Hobbes and Locke, underestimated the political significance and value of the community of urban citizens, called ‘civitas’, united by local customs, or even a formal or informal urban constitution at a certain location, which had a recognizable countenance, with natural and man-made, architectural marks, called ‘urbs’. Recalling the golden age of the European city in ancient Greece and Rome, and offering a detailed description of its turbulent life in the Renaissance Italian city-states, it makes a case for the city not only as a hotbed of modern democracy, but also as a remedy for some of the distortions of political life in the alienated contemporary, centralized, Weberian bureaucratic state. Overcoming the north-south divide, or the core and periphery partition, the book’s material is particularly rich in Central European case studies. All in all, it is an enjoyable read which offers sound arguments to revisit the offer of the small and middle-sized European town, in search of a more sustainable future for Europe.
Statistical information is an important tool for analysing changing patterns of urban development and the impact that policy decisions have on life in our cities, towns and suburbs. Urban Europe - statistics on cities, towns and suburbs provides detailed information for a number of territorial typologies that can be used to paint a picture of urban developments and urban life in the EU Member States, as well as EFTA and candidate countries. Each chapter presents statistical information in the form of maps, tables and figures, accompanied by a description of the policy context and a set of main findings. The publication is broken down into two parts : the first treats topics under the heading of city and urban developments, while the second focuses on the people in cities and the lives they lead. Overall there are 12 main chapters, covering : the urban paradox, patterns of urban and city developments, the dominance of capital cities, smart cities, green cities, tourism and culture in cities, living in cities, working in cities, housing in cities, foreign-born persons in cities, poverty and social exclusion in cities, as well as satisfaction and the quality of life in cities.
First published in 2000, this volume responds to the rise and spread of advertising throughout Europe and the world in the past one and a half centuries which is breathtaking in its scope and influence, now part of the way we think and live. Historians are only just beginning to understand this process, replacing outmoded theories of manipulation which focused on the advertiser with more sophisticated cultural explanations that centre on the way consumers filter and select messages creating new worlds of perception. The authors of this work find the origins and trace the development of this new world or perception in the modern city: London and Paris, the forerunners, and the cities and larger towns of France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, where advertising created new urban perceptions, leading to new avenues of consumption and altered lifestyles. Advertising is viewed in this work as a new way of perceiving and organising the world of the city-dweller, a visual culture, a way of attaching meaning to things and to words, or rearranging the mental map of modern life.
This book explores the multiplicity of green space developments in the modern city and the many influences shaping their evolution. Focusing on four northern European metropoles: London, Stockholm, Helsinki and St Petersburg, it examines how each has resp
Late medieval and early modern cities are often depicted as cradles of artistic creativity and hotbeds of new material culture. Cities in renaissance Italy and in seventeenth and eighteenth-century northwestern Europe are the most obvious cases in point. But, how did this come about? Why did cities rather than rural environments produce new artistic genres, new products and new techniques? How did pre-industrial cities evolve into centres of innovation and creativity? As the most urbanized regions of continental Europe in this period, Italy and the Low Countries provide a rich source of case studies, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate. They set out to examine the relationship between institutional arrangements and regulatory mechanisms such as citizenship and guild rules and innovation and creativity in late medieval and early modern cities. They analyze whether, in what context and why regulation or deregulation influenced innovation and creativity, and what the impact was of long-term changes in the political and economic sphere.
“This is a sensory history and a sensual story told from street level . . . a clear and powerful account of the transformation of street life in Europe.” —Leora Auslander, author of Taste and Power Merchants’ shouts, jostling strangers, aromas of fresh fish and flowers, plodding horses, and friendly chatter long filled the narrow, crowded streets of the European city. As they developed over many centuries, these spaces of commerce, communion, and commuting framed daily life. At its heyday in the 1800s, the European street was the place where social worlds connected and collided. Brian Ladd recounts a rich social and cultural history of the European city street, tracing its transformation from a lively scene of trade and crowds into a thoroughfare for high-speed transportation. Looking closely at four major cities—London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—Ladd uncovers both the joys and the struggles of a past world. The story takes us up to the twentieth century, when the life of the street was transformed as wealthier citizens withdrew from the crowds to seek refuge in suburbs and automobiles. As demographics and technologies changed, so did the structure of cities and the design of streets, significantly shifting our relationships to them. In today’s world of high-speed transportation and impersonal marketplaces, Ladd leads us to consider how we might draw on our history to once again build streets that encourage us to linger. By unearthing the vivid descriptions recorded by amused and outraged contemporaries, Ladd reveals the changing nature of city life, showing why streets matter and how they can contribute to public life. “[A] dazzlingly kaleidoscopic overview of city life, city living, and city dying.” —Judith Flanders, author of The Invention of Murder
