Once the cosmopolitan center of the Middle East, Beirut was devastated by the civil war that ran from 1975 to 1991, which dislocated many residents, disrupted normal municipal functions, and ...destroyed the vibrant downtown district. The aftermath of the war was an unstable situation Sawalha considers “a postwar state of emergency,” even as the state strove to restore normalcy. This ethnography centers on various groups’ responses to Beirut’s large, privatized urban-renewal project that unfolded during this turbulent moment. At the core of the study is the theme of remembering space. The official process of rebuilding the city as a node in the global economy collided with local day-to-day concerns, and all arguments invariably inspired narratives of what happened before and during the war. Sawalha explains how Beirutis invoked their past experiences of specific sites to vie for the power to shape those sites in the future. Rather than focus on a single site, the ethnography crosses multiple urban sites and social groups, to survey varied groups with interests in particular spaces. The book contextualizes these spatial conflicts within the discourses of the city’s historical accounts and the much-debated concept of heritage, voiced in academic writing, politics, and journalism. In the afterword, Sawalha links these conflicts to the social and political crises of early twenty-first-century Beirut.
In October, the United Nations will launch its New Urban Agenda at the Habitat III conference on housing and sustainable urban development in Quito, Ecuador. This declaration aims to harness the ...power of cities as engines of sustainable development. Yet the road to Quito is uphill: cities are integrated poorly into multilateral diplomacy, and limits to their powers and budgets threaten their effectiveness as global change-makers.
The “stove-pipe” way of thinking has been mostly used in mitigating carbon emissions and managing socioeconomics because of its convenience of implementation. However, systems-oriented approaches ...become imperative in pursuit of an efficient regulation of carbon emissions from systems as complicated as urban systems. The aim of this paper is to establish a dynamic network approach that is capable of assessing the effectiveness of carbon emissions mitigation in a more holistic way. A carbon metabolic network is constructed by modeling the carbon flows between economic sectors and environment. With the network shocked by interventions to the sectoral carbon flows, indirect emissions from the city are accounted for under certain carbon mitigation strategies. The nonzero-sum relationships between sectors and environmental components are identified based on utility analysis, which synthesize the nature of direct and indirect network interactions. The results of the case study of Beijing suggest that the stove-pipe mitigation strategies targeted the economic sectors might be not as efficient as they were expected. A direct cutting in material or energy import to the sectors may result in a rebound in indirect emissions and thus fails to achieve the carbon mitigation goal of the city as a whole. A promising way of foreseeing the dynamic mechanism of emissions is to analyze the nonzero-sum relationships between important urban components. Thinking cities as systems of interactions, the network approach is potentially a strong tool for appraising and filtering mitigation strategies of carbon emissions.
Opposing the spatial degeneration of cities requires a wide range of efforts which combine, among others, activities related to blue and green infrastructure (BGI). This paper examines the scope and ...manner of using BGI to revitalise space in municipal revitalisation programmes (MRP). In the first part of the study, the theoretical framework for the studied issues has been outlined based on subject literature. The manner of understanding BGI and revitalisation in the current legal system has been defined. The analysis covered 60 MRPs from 2016 to 2021 in accordance with the methodology set out in the second part of the study, based on how often BGI appeared in key MRP sections such as in-depth diagnosis of revitalisation area, the objectives and directions of the process, and the revitalisation projects. The last part of the paper describes the results of analysis and their evaluation. One of the main conclusions of the work we conducted is that BGI elements appear quite frequently in revitalisation programmes; however, their full potential remains untapped. The projects carried out in the studied area have rarely had the form of complex urban projects. The main method of using BGI in MRPs is currently the technical dimension that focuses on improving the quality of existing resources. To a lesser extent, revitalisation projects that use the BGI concept are reflected in the social and occasionally in the natural dimension. Keywords: urban renewal, space shaping, urban degraded areas, green areas, nature-based solutions, urban revitalisation projects, urban resilience JEL Classification Codes: Q01, Q26, R58 Przeciwdzialanie degradacji przestrzennej miast wymaga szerokiego pola dzialan laczacych m.in. rozwiazania z zakresu blekitno-zielonej infrastruktury (BZI). Praca bada zakres i sposob wykorzystania BZI w rewitalizacji przestrzeni w gminnych programach rewitalizacji (GPR). W pierwszej czesci opracowania, w oparciu o literature przedmiotu okreslono ramy teoretyczne dla badanych zagadnien. Okreslono sposob rozumienia BZI oraz rewitalizacji w oparciu o obowiazujacy system prawny. Analiza objela 60 GPR z lat 2016-2021, zgodnie ze sformulowana w drugiej czesci pracy metodyka, opierajaca sie o ocene wystepowania BZI w kluczowych elementach GPR takich jak: diagnoza poglebiona obszaru rewitalizacji, cele i kierunki procesu oraz przedsiewziecia rewitalizacyjne. Ostatnia czesc pracy stanowi opis wynikow analizy i ich ocene. Jeden z glownych wnioskow przeprowadzonych prac wskazuje na stosunkowo czesta obecnosc elementow BZI w rewitalizacji, jednakze pelny potencjal BZI pozostaje niewykorzystany. Realizowane przedsiewziecia w badanym zakresie rzadko przyjmowaly forme przedsiewziec o kompleksowym charakterze urbanistycznym. Glownym sposobem wykorzystania BZI w GPR jest obecnie wymiar techniczny skupiajacy sie na poprawie stanu istniejacych zasobow. W mniejszym stopniu przedsiewziecia rewitalizacyjne wykorzystujace koncepcje BZI maja swoje odzwierciedlenie w wymiarze spolecznym oraz sporadycznie przyrodniczym. Slowa kluczowe: odnowa miast, ksztaltowanie przestrzeni, miejskie tereny zdegradowane, tereny zieleni, rozwiazania oparte na przyrodzie, urbanistyczne przedsiewziecia rewitalizacyjne, odpornosc miejska Kody klasyfikacji JEL: Q01, Q26, R58
Disasters-natural ones, such as hurricanes, floods, or earthquakes, and unnatural ones such as terrorist attacks-are part of the American experience in the twenty-first century. The challenges of ...preparing for these events, withstanding their impact, and rebuilding communities afterward require strategic responses from different levels of government in partnership with the private sector and in accordance with the public will.
Disasters have a disproportionate effect on urban places. Dense by definition, cities and their environs suffer great damage to their complex, interdependent social, environmental, and economic systems. Social and medical services collapse. Long-standing problems in educational access and quality become especially acute. Local economies cease to function. Cultural resources disappear. The plight of New Orleans and several smaller Gulf Coast cities exemplifies this phenomenon.
This volume examines the rebuilding of cities and their environs after a disaster and focuses on four major issues: making cities less vulnerable to disaster, reestablishing economic viability, responding to the permanent needs of the displaced, and recreating a sense of place. Success in these areas requires that priorities be set cooperatively, and this goal poses significant challenges for rebuilding efforts in a democratic, market-based society. Who sets priorities and how? Can participatory decision-making be organized under conditions requiring focused, strategic choices? How do issues of race and class intersect with these priorities? Should the purpose of rebuilding be restoration or reformation? Contributors address these and other questions related to environmental conditions, economic imperatives, social welfare concerns, and issues of planning and design in light of the lessons to be drawn from Hurricane Katrina.
Beyond Rustchronicles the rise, fall, and rebirth of metropolitan Pittsburgh, an industrial region that once formed the heart of the world's steel production and is now touted as a model for reviving ...other hard-hit cities of the Rust Belt. Writing in clear and engaging prose, historian and area native Allen Dieterich-Ward provides a new model for a truly metropolitan history that integrates the urban core with its regional hinterland of satellite cities, white-collar suburbs, mill towns, and rural mining areas.
Pittsburgh reached its industrial heyday between 1880 and 1920, as vertically integrated industrial corporations forged a regional community in the mountainous Upper Ohio River Valley. Over subsequent decades, metropolitan population growth slowed as mining and manufacturing employment declined. Faced with economic and environmental disaster in the 1930s, Pittsburgh's business elite and political leaders developed an ambitious program of pollution control and infrastructure development. The public-private partnership behind the "Pittsburgh Renaissance," as advocates called it, pursued nothing less than the selective erasure of the existing social and physical environment in favor of a modernist, functionally divided landscape: a goal that was widely copied by other aging cities and one that has important ramifications for the broader national story. Ultimately, the Renaissance vision of downtown skyscrapers, sleek suburban research campuses, and bucolic regional parks resulted in an uneven transformation that tore the urban fabric while leaving deindustrializing river valleys and impoverished coal towns isolated from areas of postwar growth.
Beyond Rustis among the first books of its kind to continue past the collapse of American manufacturing in the 1980s by exploring the diverse ways residents of an iconic industrial region sought places for themselves within a new economic order.
The origins of gentrification date back to World War I—only it was sometimes known as "remodeling" then. Dennis Gale's insightful book, The Misunderstood History of Gentrification, provides a ...recontextualization of American gentrification, planning, and policymaking. He argues that gentrification must be understood as an urban phenomenon with historical roots in the very early twentieth century. Gale uses solid empirical evidence to trace the embryonic revitalization of Georgetown, Greenwich Village, Beacon Hill, and elsewhere back to 1915. He shows how reinvestment and restoration reversed urban decline and revitalized neighborhoods. The Misunderstood History of Gentrification also explains how federal policies such as the Urban Redevelopment Program (later named Urban Renewal), which first emerged in 1949, razed urban slums and created an "urban crisis" that persisted in the 1960s and '70s. This situation soon prompted city gentrifiers and historic preservationists to reuse and rehabilitate existing structures. Within a more expansive historical framework, Gale offers a fresh perspective on and debunks misperceptions about gentrification in America.
How did neighborhood groceries, parish halls, factories, and even saloons contribute more to urban vitality than did the fiscal might of postwar urban renewal? With a novelist's eye for telling ...detail, Douglas Rae depicts the features that contributed most to city life in the early "urbanist" decades of the twentieth century. Rae's subject is New Haven, Connecticut, but the lessons he draws apply to many American cities.
City: Urbanism and Its Endbegins with a richly textured portrait of New Haven in the early twentieth century, a period of centralized manufacturing, civic vitality, and mixed-use neighborhoods. As social and economic conditions changed, the city confronted its end of urbanism first during the Depression, and then very aggressively during the mayoral reign of Richard C. Lee (1954-70), when New Haven led the nation in urban renewal spending. But government spending has repeatedly failed to restore urban vitality. Rae argues that strategies for the urban future should focus on nurturing the unplanned civic engagements that make mixed-use city life so appealing and so civilized. Cities need not reach their old peaks of population, or look like thriving suburbs, to be once again splendid places for human beings to live and work.
The moral economy of cities Ruppert, Evelyn Sharon
The moral economy of cities,
2006, 20060308, 2006, 2005-01-01, 2006-12-15, 20060101
eBook
Using the redevelopment of the Yonge-Dundas intersection in downtown Toronto in the mid-1990s as a case study, Ruppert examines the language of planners, urban designers, architects, and marketing ...analysts to reveal the extent to which moralization legitimizes these professions in the public eye.
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