Urban Reinventions
Urban Reinventions

Author: Lynne Horiuchi

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2017-09-30

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 0824866053

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When it was built in 1937, Treasure Island was considered to be one of the largest man-made islands in the world. Located in the middle of San Francisco Bay, the 400-acre island was constructed out of dredged bay mud in a remarkable feat of Depression-era civil engineering by the US Army Corps of Engineers. Its alluring name is an allusion to the fabled remnants of the California Gold Rush found in the ocean sediment that formed the island. This collection of essays tells the story of San Francisco’s Treasure Island—an artificial, disconnected island that has paradoxically been central to the city’s urban ambitions. Conceived as a site for San Francisco’s first airport in an age of automobile and air transport, Treasure Island hosted the Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE) in 1939 and 1940, celebrating the completion of the Golden Gate and the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridges. With particular focus on Asia and Latin America, the GGIE promoted peace, harmony, and commerce in the Pacific. Treasure Island’s planned use as an airport was scuttled when World War II abruptly reversed the exposition’s message of Pacific unity, and the US government developed Treasure Island and the adjacent Yerba Buena Island into a naval training and transfer station, which processed 4,500,000 military personnel on their way to the Pacific theater. In the midst of a twenty-first-century high-tech boom and in one of the most expensive real-estate markets in the world, the city of San Francisco and its developers have proposed an ambitious model of military base reuse and green urbanism—a new eco-city of about 19,000 residents on Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island. The project is synonymous with a growing global trend toward large-scale, capital-intensive land developments envisioned around ideas of sustainability and spectacular place making. Seen against the successive history of development, future visions for Treasure Island are part of a process of building and erasure that Horiuchi and Sankalia call urban reinventions. This is a process of radical change in which artificial, detached, and delimited sites such as Treasure Island provide an ideal plane for tabula rasa planning driven by property, capital, and state control. With essays by contributors well known for their interdisciplinary work, Urban Reinventions demonstrates how a single site may be interpreted in multiple ways: as an artificial island, world’s fair site, military installation, a semi-derelict relic of past lives, a toxic site of nuclear waste, and a future eco-city and major real estate development. The volume offers a wide spectrum of critiques of race, imperialism, gendered Orientalism, military land use, property capital exchange, new eco-cities, sustainability, and waste as a byproduct of development. The book will be of interest to general readers as well as teachers, scholars, and practitioners in the fields of geography, architecture, city planning, urban design, history, environmental studies, American studies, Asian studies, and military history, among others.

Revolution Detroit
Revolution Detroit

Author: John Gallagher

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2013-03-15

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0814338577

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Readers interested in urban studies and recent Detroit history will appreciate this thoughtful assessment of the best practices and obvious errors when it comes to reinventing our cities.

The Reinvention of Distinction
The Reinvention of Distinction

Author: Van Nguyen-Marshall

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2011-11-17

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 9400723067

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This pioneering collection brings together an international group of scholars to explore the Vietnamese middle class. From the leisure pursuits of the colonial middle class to the impact of the new urban rich on landscape of the countryside, this interdisciplinary volume explores the ways in which middle classness has been practiced in a wide range of contexts throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. In addition to offering insights into how middle classness was and is constituted and negotiated, this collection illuminates the cultural and social conditions of two distinctive periods in Vietnamese history. Three historical chapters consider how middle class status was experienced and displayed under French colonialism and in 1960s republican. These chapters offer examinations of middle classness through recreation, consumption, and associational life. Six contemporary studies examine the modes of experimentation and practice within middle class urban Vietnam. Still a sensitive topic politically, the contemporary middle class, nascent but increasingly powerful, is exerting a strong impact on the shape of contemporary society and culture, as well as on urban and rural landscapes. This volume offers a series of studies which critically interrogate the practices of those who engage in or aspire to urban middle-class lifestyles in Vietnam both in the past and in the present.

Spatial Planning and Urban Development in the New EU Member States
Spatial Planning and Urban Development in the New EU Member States

Author: Uwe Altrock

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780754646846

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The new EU member states have been facing a wide range of planning and urban development problems since the transition in 2004. Bringing together specially commissioned articles on each of the ten countries, this volume examines these problems and their r

Staging the New Berlin
Staging the New Berlin

Author: Claire Colomb

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-06-17

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1136489363

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This book explores the politics of place marketing and the process of ‘urban reinvention’ in Berlin between 1989 and 2011. In the context of the dramatic socio-economic restructuring processes, changes in urban governance and physical transformation of the city following the Fall of the Wall, the ‘new’ Berlin was not only being built physically, but staged for visitors and Berliners and marketed to the world through events and image campaigns which featured the iconic architecture of large-scale urban redevelopment sites. Public-private partnerships were set up specifically to market the ‘new Berlin’ to potential investors, tourists, Germans and the Berliners themselves. The book analyzes the images of the city and the narrative of urban change, which were produced over two decades. In the 1990s three key sites were turned into icons of the ‘new Berlin’: the new Postdamer Platz, the new government quarter, and the redeveloped historical core of the Friedrichstadt. Eventually, the entire inner city was ‘staged’ through a series of events which turned construction sites into tourist attractions. New sites and spaces gradually became part of the 2000s place marketing imagery and narrative, as urban leaders sought to promote the ‘creative city’. By combining urban political economy and cultural approaches from the disciplines of urban politics, geography, sociology and planning, the book contributes to a better understanding of the interplay between the symbolic ‘politics of representation’ through place marketing and the politics of urban development and place making in contemporary urban governance.

Out of Ground Zero
Out of Ground Zero

Author: Joan Ockman

Publisher: Prestel Publishing

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13:

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The events that took place in New York on 11 September 2001 are the background for this series of essays exploring the response of different cities at different times to natural or man-made disaster. Case studies include the earthquake that shook Lisbon in 1755 and the bombing of Hiroshima.

Sociable Cities
Sociable Cities

Author: Peter Hall

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-05

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 1317635949

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Peter Hall and Colin Ward wrote Sociable Cities to celebrate the centenary of publication of Ebenezer Howard’s To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform in 1998 – an event they then marked by co-editing (with Dennis Hardy) the magnificent annotated facsimile edition of Howard’s original, long lost and very scarce, in 2003. In this revised edition of Sociable Cities, sadly now without Colin Ward, Peter Hall writes: ‘the sixteen years separating the two editions of this book seem almost like geological time. Revisiting the 1998 edition is like going back deep into ancient history’. The glad confident morning following Tony Blair’s election has been followed by political disillusionment, the fiscal crash, widespread austerity and a marked anti-planning stance on the part of the Coalition government. But – closely following the argument of Good Cities, Better Lives: How Europe discovered the Lost Art of Urbanism (Routledge 2013), to which this book is designed as a companion – Hall argues that the central message is now even stronger: we need more planning, not less. And this planning needs to be driven by broad, high-level strategic visions – national, regional – of the kind of country we want to see. Above all, Hall shows in the concluding chapters, Britain’s escalating housing crisis can be resolved only by a massive programme of planned decentralization from London, at least equal in scale to the great Abercrombie plan seventy years ago. He sets out a picture of great new city clusters at the periphery of South East England, sustainably self-sufficient in their daily patterns of living and working, but linked to the capital by new high-speed rail services. This is a book that every planner, and every serious student of policy-making, will want to read. Published at a time when the political parties are preparing their policy manifestos, it is designed to make a major contribution to a major national debate.

The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies
The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies

Author: Michael Storper

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2015-09-02

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0804796025

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Today, the Bay Area is home to the most successful knowledge economy in America, while Los Angeles has fallen progressively further behind its neighbor to the north and a number of other American metropolises. Yet, in 1970, experts would have predicted that L.A. would outpace San Francisco in population, income, economic power, and influence. The usual factors used to explain urban growth—luck, immigration, local economic policies, and the pool of skilled labor—do not account for the contrast between the two cities and their fates. So what does? The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies challenges many of the conventional notions about economic development and sheds new light on its workings. The authors argue that it is essential to understand the interactions of three major components—economic specialization, human capital formation, and institutional factors—to determine how well a regional economy will cope with new opportunities and challenges. Drawing on economics, sociology, political science, and geography, they argue that the economic development of metropolitan regions hinges on previously underexplored capacities for organizational change in firms, networks of people, and networks of leaders. By studying San Francisco and Los Angeles in unprecedented levels of depth, this book extracts lessons for the field of economic development studies and urban regions around the world.

America's New Downtowns
America's New Downtowns

Author: Larry Ford

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2003-07

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 9780801871634

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"Larry R. Ford is a professor of geography at San Diego State University who has taught urban geography for thirty years."--BOOK JACKET.

Dream City
Dream City

Author: Conrad Kickert

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-06-11

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0262351226

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Tracing two centuries of rise, fall, and rebirth in the heart of downtown Detroit. Downtown Detroit is in the midst of an astonishing rebirth. Its sidewalks have become a dreamland for an aspiring creative class, filled with shoppers, office workers, and restaurant-goers. Cranes dot the skyline, replacing the wrecking balls seen there only a few years ago. But venture a few blocks in any direction and this liveliness gives way to urban blight, a nightmare cityscape of crumbling concrete, barbed wire, and debris. In Dream City, urban designer Conrad Kickert examines the paradoxes of Detroit's landscape of extremes, arguing that the current reinvention of downtown is the expression of two centuries of Detroiters' conflicting hopes and dreams. Kickert demonstrates the materialization of these dreams with a series of detailed original morphological maps that trace downtown's rise, fall, and rebirth. Kickert writes that downtown Detroit has always been different from other neighborhoods; it grew faster than other parts of the city, and it declined differently, forced to reinvent itself again and again. Downtown has been in constant battle with its own offspring—the automobile and the suburbs the automobile enabled—and modernized itself though parking attrition and land consolidation. Dream City is populated by a varied cast of downtown power players, from a 1920s parking lot baron to the pizza tycoon family and mortgage billionaire who control downtown's fate today. Even the most renowned planners and designers have consistently yielded to those with power, land, and finances to shape downtown. Kickert thus finds rhyme and rhythm in downtown's contemporary cacophony. Kickert argues that Detroit's case is extreme but not unique; many other American cities have seen a similar decline—and many others may see a similar revitalization.