Urban Histories in Practice
Urban Histories in Practice

Author: Jeffrey Kruth

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2022-09-08

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1527587959

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This volume brings together ideas about the material and social transformation of cities by asking, “what is the relationship between history, memory, and the contemporary city?” The urgency of this question grows in the contexts of rapid urbanization in the Global South and urban decline in the deindustrializing areas of the Global North. Within these spaces, multiple disciplines shape our capacity to know the contemporary city. The work presented here invites the reader to undertake critical and creative approaches regarding how these disciplines might shape this process, ultimately making it more equitable and just. Using various methods, the contributors engage in critical readings of specific built and discursive legacies in numerous global contexts. Differing forms of a social agenda permeate each piece, but none is utopian or totalizing. Rather, the emphasis is on various forms of close reading. The authors begin with the city as found and address each context in specific and precise terms. The contributions here bring together histories in critical and creative ways, while also catalyzing future possibilities. In this way, these writings frame urban history and morphology discourse not only as arenas for theoretical posturing, but also as calls for action.

Urban Humanities
Urban Humanities

Author: Dana Cuff

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2020-04-07

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0262356996

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Original, action-oriented humanist practices for interpreting and intervening in the city: a new methodology at the intersection of the humanities, design, and urban studies. Urban humanities is an emerging field at the intersection of the humanities, urban planning, and design. It offers a new approach not only for understanding cities in a global context but for intervening in them, interpreting their histories, engaging with them in the present, and speculating about their futures. This book introduces both the theory and practice of urban humanities, tracing the evolution of the concept, presenting methods and practices with a wide range of research applications, describing changes in teaching and curricula, and offering case studies of urban humanities practices in the field. Urban humanities views the city through a lens of spatial justice, and its inquiries are centered on the microsettings of everyday life. The book's case studies report on real-world projects in mega-cities in the Pacific Rim—Tokyo, Shanghai, Mexico City, and Los Angeles—with several projects described in detail, including playful spaces for children in car-oriented Mexico City, a commons in a Tokyo neighborhood, and a rolling story-telling box to promote “literary justice” in Los Angeles.

Urban Histories of Science
Urban Histories of Science

Author: Oliver Hochadel

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-09-20

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 135185643X

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This book tells ten urban histories of science from nine cities—Athens, Barcelona, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Dublin (2 articles), Glasgow, Helsinki, Lisbon, and Naples—situated on the geographical margins of Europe and beyond. Ranging from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, the contents of this volume debate why and how we should study the scientific culture of cities, often considered "peripheral" in terms of their production of knowledge. How were scientific practices, debates and innovations intertwined with the highly dynamic urban space around 1900? The authors analyze zoological gardens, research stations, observatories, and international exhibitions, along with hospitals, newspapers, backstreets, and private homes while also stressing the importance of concrete urban spaces for the production and appropriation of knowledge. They uncover the diversity of actors and urban publics ranging from engineers, scientists, architects, and physicians to journalists, tuberculosis patients, and fishermen. Looking at these nine cities around 1900 is like glancing at a prism that produces different and even conflicting notions of modernity. In their totality, the ten case studies help to overcome an outdated centre-periphery model. This volume is, thus, able to address far more intriguing historiographical questions. How do science, technology, and medicine shape the debates about modernity and national identity in the urban space? To what degree do cities and the heterogeneous elements they contain have agency? These urban histories show that science and the city are consistently and continuously co-constructing each other.

Real Estate and Global Urban History
Real Estate and Global Urban History

Author: Alexia Yates

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-08-26

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 1108851762

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Capitalist private property in land and buildings – real estate – is the ground of modern cities, materially, politically, and economically. It is foundational to their development and core to much theoretical work on the urban environment. It is also a central, pressing matter of political contestation in contemporary cities. Yet it remains largely without a history. This Element examines the modern city as a propertied space, defining real estate as a technology of (dis)possession and using it to move across scales of analysis, from the local spatiality of particular built spaces to the networks of legal, political, and economic imperatives that constitute property and operate at national and international levels. This combination of territorial embeddedness with more wide-ranging institutional relationships charts a route to an urban history that allows the city to speak as a global agent and artefact without dispensing with the role of states and local circumstance.

Urban Transportation Planning in the United States
Urban Transportation Planning in the United States

Author: Edward Weiner

Publisher: Praeger Publishers

Published: 1987-01-01

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13: 9780275925444

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A definitive, brief institutional overview of urban transportation planning in the US from 1920 to the present. The book is a highly readable, nontechnical summary of a rich and diverse decision-making arena that mirrors faithfully the changing dynamic of urban life and politics in America in the late 20th century. The author, a highly authoritative career policy analyst with the US Department of Transportation, gives us capsule descriptions of each landmark event in urban transportation planning, emphasizing post-1960 happenings. . . . There is no comparable book. The quality of the bibliography, references, index, printing, and binding are excellent. . . . The book will appeal to students of urban transportation, urban policy, and recent urban and American history. Choice The development of U.S. urban transportation policy over the past 50 years illustrates the changing relationships between Federal, state, and local governments. This comprehensive text examines the evolution of urban transportation planning from early developments in highway planning in the 1930s to the shift to decentralization of authority in the 1980s. Focusing on major national events, the book discusses the influence of legislation, regulations, conferences, Federal programs, and advances in planning procedures and technology. It offers an in-depth look at the most significant event in transportation planning--the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1962.

Urban Practices
Urban Practices

Author: Annette Haug

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9782503584614

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Cities in the ancient world, much like in the modern era, were not simply a locus for population and a hub for social, cultural, and economic activity, but were themselves the products of urban practices. This volume draws together two often disparate fields - urban space and human practice - to explore the actors and actions that underpinned ancient cities and to offer unique insights into the lives of those who dwelt there. Placing particular emphasis on social practice theory, the contributions gathered together in this book seek to analyse the development of the city, especially public urban spaces, from the archaic period up to Roman Imperial times. A key focus is on infrastructure, public spaces used for politics (particularly the Forum Romanum), and the role of sanctuaries and the way in which they were shaped by cult activity. Through this unique approach, this volume is able, for the first time, to bring the inhabitants of ancient cities to the fore, and in doing so, to offer key insights into the development of spatial routines, the interaction of these routines with the material setting of a city, and the way in which cities themselves played an important role in shaping the people and practices within them.

The Power of Place
The Power of Place

Author: Dolores Hayden

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1997-02-24

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780262581523

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Based on her extensive experience in the urban communities of Los Angeles, historian and architect Dolores Hayden proposes new perspectives on gender, race, and ethnicity to broaden the practice of public history and public art, enlarge urban preservation, and reorient the writing of urban history to spatial struggles. In the first part of The Power of Place, Hayden outlines the elements of a social history of urban space to connect people's lives and livelihoods to the urban landscape as it changes over time. She then explores how communities and professionals can tap the power of historic urban landscapes to nurture public memory. The second part documents a decade of research and practice by The Power of Place, a nonprofit organization Hayden founded in downtown Los Angeles. Through public meetings, walking tours, artists's books, and permanent public sculpture, as well as architectural preservation, teams of historians, designers, planners, and artists worked together to understand, preserve, and commemorate urban landscape history as African American, Latina, and Asian American families have experienced it. One project celebrates the urban homestead of Biddy Mason, an African American ex-slave and midwife active betwen 1856 and 1891. Another reinterprets the Embassy Theater where Rose Pesotta, Luisa Moreno, and Josefina Fierro de Bright organized Latina dressmakers and cannery workers in the 1930s and 1940s. A third chapter tells the story of a historic district where Japanese American family businesses flourished from the 1890s to the 1940s. Each project deals with bitter memories—slavery, repatriation, internment—but shows how citizens survived and persevered to build an urban life for themselves, their families, and their communities. Drawing on many similar efforts around the United States, from New York to Charleston, Seattle to Cincinnati, Hayden finds a broad new movement across urban preservation, public history, and public art to accept American diversity at the heart of the vernacular urban landscape. She provides dozens of models for creative urban history projects in cities and towns across the country.

Practicing Utopia
Practicing Utopia

Author: Rosemary Wakeman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-04

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 022634603X

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Rosemary Wakeman provides a sweeping history of "new towns"--those created by fiat rather than out of geographic or economic logic and often intended to break with the tendencies of past development. Heralded throughout the twentieth century as solutions to congestion, environmental threats, architectural malaise, and cultural anomie, today they are often seen as sad, pernicious, or merely suburban. Wakeman shows that hundreds of such towns sprang from templates and designs not only in North America and across Europe but around the world, revealing how different cultures dreamed of (re)organizing themselves. Wakeman also illuminates the missteps and unanticipated results of the initial optimistic choices and impulses.

Urban Public Health
Urban Public Health

Author: Gina S. Lovasi

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-09-10

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0190885319

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Today, we know cities as shared spaces with the potential to both threaten and promote human health: while urban areas are known to amplify the transmission of epidemics like Ebola, urban residency is also associated with longer, healthier lives. Modern cities encompass a wide ecology of infrastructures, institutions and services that impact health, from access to improved sanitation and early childhood education to the design of buildings and transportation systems. So how has this centuries-long transformation in human settlement affected the mindset surrounding public health research and practice? Urban Public Health is an interdisciplinary collaboration from experts across the globe that approaches the issue of urban health research from a uniquely public health orientation. The carefully crafted and thoughtful chapters in this volume grapple with the complexity of the urban setting as a physical and social space while also providing an abundance of global and local examples of current urban health practices. Urban Public Health is divided into four pragmatic sections which cover core conceptual models of public health and their inequities, methods of urban health research assessment, methods of urban health research analysis and explanation, and ultimately, opportunities for urban health research to inform action through partnership and collaboration, including those which elevate community voices and capacities. An accessible guide for both students and researchers alike, Urban Public Health shines a light on how to understand, measure and change the urban setting so that cities grow, people thrive, and no one is left behind.

Animal Cities
Animal Cities

Author: Professor Peter J Atkins

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2012-10-28

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13: 140948338X

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Animal Cities builds upon a recent surge of interest about animals in the urban context. Considering animals in urban settings is now a firmly established area of study and this book presents a number of valuable case studies that illustrate some of the perspectives that may be adopted. Having an ‘urban history’ flavour, the book follows a fourfold agenda. First, the opening chapters look at working and productive animals that lived and died in nineteenth-century cities such as London, Edinburgh and Paris. The argument here is that their presence yields insights into evolving understandings of the category ‘urban’ and what made a good city. Second, there is a consideration of nineteenth-century animal spectacles, which influenced contemporary interpretations of the urban experience. Third, the theme of contested animal spaces in the city is explored further with regard to backyard chickens in suburban Australia. Finally, there is discussion of the problem of the public companion animal and its role in changing attitudes to public space, illustrated with a chapter on dog-walking in Victorian and Edwardian London. Animal Cities makes a significant contribution to animal studies and is of interest to historical geographers, urban, cultural, social and economic historians and historians of policy and planning.