The much-praised Cultural Quarters returns in a revised edition, offering new case studies and new chapters on the economics of cultural quarters and the importance of historical buildings. This ...definitive text provides a conceptual context for cultural quarters through a detailed discussion of urban design and planning.
Fifty years ago, urban waterfronts were industrial, polluted, and diseased. Today, luxury homes and shops line riverbanks, harbors, and lakes across Europe and North America. The visual drama of ...physical reconstruction makes this transition look swift and decisive, but reimaging water is a slow process, punctuated by small cultural shifts and informal spatial seizures that change the meaning of wet urban spaces. InThe Politics of Urban Water, Kimberley Kinder explores how active residents in Amsterdam deployed their cityscape when rallying around these concerns, turning space into a vehicle for social reform.
While market dynamics certainly contributed to the transformation of Amsterdam's shorelines, squatters, partiers, artists, historians, environmentalists, tourists, reporters, and government officials also played crucial roles in bringing waterscapes to life. Their interventions pulled water in new directions, connecting it to political discussions about affordable housing, cultural tolerance, climate change, and national identity. Over time, these political valences have become embedded in laws, norms, symbols, markets, and landscapes, bringing rich undercurrents of friction to urban shores. Amsterdam's development serves as both an inspiration and a cautionary tale for cities across Europe and North America where rapid new growth creates similar pressures and anxieties.
While urban preservation is almost as old as cities themselves, it has become increasingly controversial in modern cities. In this book, Yue Zhang presents a cross-national comparative analysis of ...the politics of urban preservation. Based on comprehensive archival research and more than two hundred in-depth interviews in Beijing, Chicago, and Paris, Zhang finds that urban preservation provides a tool for diverse political and social actors to frame their propositions and advance their favored courses of action. In cities from West to East, divergent political and economic interests have caused urban preservation to become contested. Exploring three of the world's great cities, Zhang deftly navigates readers through each case study, illustrating the complexities of the politics of urban preservation in each city. In Beijing, urban preservation was integral to promoting economic growth and enhancing the city's image during the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics; in Chicago, it is used to increase property values and revitalize neighborhoods; and in Paris, it offers a channel for national and municipal governments to compete for control over urban space. Although urban preservation serves various purposes in these cities, Zhang explains how different types of political fragmentation have affected the implementation of preservation initiatives in predictable ways, thus generating distinct patterns of urban preservation. A comparative urban politics study of unusual breadth, The Fragmented Politics of Urban Preservation gives us insight into the complex policy process of urban preservation through which political institutions are intertwined with interests and inclinations, fundamentally shaping the direction of urban development, the physical forms of cities, and the lives of citizens.
Small and midsized cities played a key role in the Industrial Revolution in the United States as hubs for the shipping, warehousing, and distribution of manufactured products. But as the twentieth ...century brought cheaper transportation and faster communication, these cities were hit hard by population losses and economic decline. In the twenty-first century, many former industrial hubs-from Springfield to Wichita, from Providence to Columbus-are finding pathways to reinvention. With innovative urban policies and design, once-declining cities are becoming the unlikely pioneers of postindustrial urban revitalization.Revitalizing American Citiesexplores the historical, regional, and political factors that have allowed some industrial cities to regain their footing in a changing economy. The volume discusses national patterns and drivers of growth and decline, presents case studies and comparative analyses of decline and renewal, considers approaches to the problems that accompany the vacant land and blight common to many of the country's declining cities, and examines tactics that cities can use to prosper in a changing economy. Featuring contributions from scholars and experts of urban planning, economic development, public policy, and education,Revitalizing American Citiesprovides a detailed, illuminating look at past and possible reinventions of resilient American cities.Contributors:Frank S. Alexander, Eugenie L. Birch, Paul C. Brophy, Steven Cochrane, Gilles Duranton, Sean Ellis, Kyle Fee, Edward Glaeser, Daniel Hartley, Yolanda K. Kodrzycki, Sophia Koropeckyj, Alan Mallach, Ana Patricia Muñoz, Jeremy Nowak, Laura W. Perna, Aaron Smith, Catherine Tumber, Susan M. Wachter, Kimberly A. Zeuli.
In Brazil and throughout the African diaspora, black women, especially poor black women, are rarely considered leaders of social movements let alone political theorists. But in the northeastern city ...of Salvador, Brazil, it is these very women who determine how urban policies are established. Focusing on the Gamboa de Baixo neighborhood in Salvador's city center,Black Women against the Land Grabexplores how black women's views on development have radicalized local communities to demand justice and social change.
InBlack Women against the Land Grab, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry describes the key role of local women activists in the citywide movement for land and housing rights. She reveals the importance of geographic location for understanding the gendered aspects of urban renewal and the formation of black women-led social movements. How have black women shaped the politics of urban redevelopment, Perry asks, and what does this kind of political intervention tell us about black women's agency? Her work uncovers the ways in which political labor at the neighborhood level is central to the mass mobilization of black people against institutional racism and for citizenship rights and resources in Brazil.
Highlighting the political life of black communities, specifically those in urban contexts often represented as socially pathological and politically bankrupt,Black Women against the Land Graboffers a valuable corrective to how we think about politics and about black women, particularly poor black women, as a political force.
Once a thriving metropolis on the banks of the Mississippi, St. Louis, Missouri, is now a ghostly landscape of vacant houses, boarded-up storefronts, and abandoned factories. The Gateway City is, by ...any measure, one of the most depopulated, deindustrialized, and deeply segregated examples of American urban decay. "Not a typical city," as one observer noted in the late 1970s, "but, like a Eugene O'Neill play, it shows a general condition in a stark and dramatic form."
Mapping Declineexamines the causes and consequences of St. Louis's urban crisis. It traces the complicity of private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, and federal housing policies in the "white flight" of people and wealth from the central city. And it traces the inadequacy-and often sheer folly-of a generation of urban renewal, in which even programs and resources aimed at eradicating blight in the city ended up encouraging flight to the suburbs. The urban crisis, as this study of St. Louis makes clear, is not just a consequence of economic and demographic change; it is also the most profound political failure of our recent history.
Mapping Declineis the first history of a modern American city to combine extensive local archival research with the latest geographic information system (GIS) digital mapping techniques. More than 75 full-color maps-rendered from census data, archival sources, case law, and local planning and property records-illustrate, in often stark and dramatic ways, the still-unfolding political history of our neglected cities.
Bowling for Communism illuminates how civic life functioned in Leipzig, East Germany's second-largest city, on the eve of the 1989 revolution by exploring acts of "urban ingenuity" amid catastrophic ...urban decay. Andrew Demshuk profiles the creative activism of local communist officials who, with the help of scores of volunteers, constructed a palatial bowling alley without Berlin's knowledge or approval. In a city mired in disrepair, civic pride overcame resentment against a regime loathed for corruption, Stasi spies, and the Berlin Wall. Reconstructing such episodes through interviews and obscure archival materials, Demshuk shows how the public sphere functioned in Leipzig before the fall of communism. Hardly detached or inept, local officials worked around centralized failings to build a more humane city. And hardly disengaged, residents turned to black-market construction to patch up their surroundings. Because such "urban ingenuity" was premised on weakness in the centralized regime, the dystopian cityscape evolved from being merely a quotidian grievance to the backdrop for revolution. If, by their actions, officials were demonstrating that the regime was irrelevant, and if, in their own experiences, locals only attained basic repairs outside official channels, why should anyone have mourned the system when it was overthrown?
For more than one hundred years, governments have grappled with the complex problem of how to revitalize distressed urban areas. In 1995, the original urban Empowerment Zones (Atlanta, Baltimore, ...Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia) each received a $100 million federal block grant and access to a variety of market-oriented policy tools to support the implementation of a ten-year strategic plan to increase economic opportunities and promote sustainable community development in high-poverty neighborhoods. In Collaborative Governance for Urban Revitalization, Michael J. Rich and Robert P. Stoker confront the puzzle of why the outcomes achieved by the original Empowerment Zones varied so widely given that each city had the same set of federal policy tools and resources and comparable neighborhood characteristics.
The authors' analysis, based on more than ten years of field research in Atlanta and Baltimore and extensive empirical analysis of EZ processes and outcomes in all six cities shows that revitalization outcomes are best explained by the quality of local governance. Good local governance makes positive contributions to revitalization efforts, while poor local governance retards progress. While policy design and contextual factors are important, how cities craft and carry out their strategies are critical determinants of successful revitalization. Rich and Stoker find that good governance is often founded on public-private cooperation, a stance that argues against both the strongest critics of neoliberalism (who see private enterprise as dangerous in principle) and the strongest opponents of liberalism (who would like to reduce the role of government).
This article focuses on the impact of the simultaneous implementation of dual laws on urban renewal implementation. Especially when the two laws have different case success rates. We refer to the ...agent-based model used by Acevedo et al. (2003) for the Los Angeles City Development Study. We used the Geographic Information System (GIS) data to replace the virtual grid. We selected the data of Taipei City for simulation. Compare with the "Urban Renewal Act" and the "Statute for Expediting Reconstruction of Urban Unsafe and Old Buildings" that are currently being implemented simultaneously. Simulations and studies were conducted based on the case success rate and the gap between the two laws. The study results show that only by widening the gap between the two laws can the "Urban Renewal Act" be used at a higher rate. This means clearer enforcement scope and conditions should be set in both regulations to avoid direct conflict.
This book explores and critiques the process of spatial regulation in post-war New York, focusing on the period after the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, examining the ideological underpinnings and ...practical applications of urban renewal, exclusionary zoning, anti-vagrancy laws, and order-maintenance policing. It argues that these practices were part of a class project that deflected attention from the underlying causes of poverty, eroded civil rights, and sought to enable real estate investment, high-end consumption, mainstream tourism, and corporate success.
