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General Works Articles/Books about Individual Films Bibliography of articles/books about Metropolis (Fritz Lang) Bibliography of articles/books about Blade Runner (Ridley Scott) Abrams, Janet "Cine City: films en beschouwingen van de stedelijke ruimte 1895-1995 = Cine City: film and perceptions of pace 1895-1995." Archis 1994 July, n.7, p.10-12, Adil, Alev "Longing and (Un)belonging: Displacement and Desire in the Cinematic City." Paper from the Conference "INTER: A European Cultural Studies Conference in Sweden", organised by the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden (ACSIS) in Norrköping 11-13 June 2007. Conference Proceedings published by Linköping University Electronic Press Aitken S. "Turnng the Self: City Space and SF Horror Movies." Lost in space : geographies of science fiction / edited by Rob Kitchin and James Kneale. London ; New York : Continuum, 2002. MAIN Stack PN3433.6.L67 2002 Albrecht, Donald. "Architecture and film: Utopia descending." Modulus 1987, no.18, p.[120]-133 Albrecht, Donald. Designing dreams : modern architecture in the movies New York : Harper & Row, c1986. ENVI: PN1995.9.S4 A41 1986 Albright, Deron. "Tales of the City: Applying Situationist Social Practice to the Analysis of the Urban Drama." Criticism-A Quarterly for Literature & the Arts. 45(1):89-108. 2003 Winter Aldrige, Henry B. "From Delight to Disaster: Images of New York City in Feature Films. (Cinema Studies).(Brief Article)." Michigan Academician 34.1 (Spring 2002): 22(1). AlSayyad, Nezar "The cinematic city: between modernist utopia and postmodernist dystopia." Built environment 2000, v.26, n.4, p.268-281 AlSayyad, Nezar Cinematic Cities: Historicizing the Modern from Reel to Real [Video] In this lecture Nezar AlSayyad, professor of Architecture, Planning and Urban History at UCB, addresses some of the themes in his book Cinematic cities, historicizing the modern from reel to real. This event took place at the University of California, Berkeley on November 28,

THE NEW URBAN QUESTION Urbanism beyond Neo-Liberalism Conference Themes | The New Urban Question | The New Urban Economy | The Urbanized Society | Urban Technologies and Sustainability | | The Transformation of Urban Form | The Design of the New Urban Space | The New Metropolitan Region | | New Approaches of Urban Governance | Changing Planning Cultures | [ Click here to download all papers at once] Table of contents Introduction Jürgen Rosemann The New Urban Question Beyond The Crisis: Towards a New Urban Paradigm Laura Burkhalter and Manuel Castells Bridging the Ecologies of Cities and of Nature Saskia Sassen Looking Forward to Architecture of the New Millennium Wu Liangyong Fibercity as a Paradigm Shift of Urban Design Hidetoshi Ohno Dutch Spatial Planning and Hierarchy: Making Differences, Think-do-act, and Renewed Re-activism Henk W.J. Ovink The Formation of the West Coast Metropolitan Region of Taiwan in the Network Society Chu-Joe Hsia ^ back to top The New Urban Economy Full papers Studies on Asian Mixed Use Urban Blocks and Their Applications on the Mono-functional Office Districts in the Netherlands Tsaijer Cheng, Changfang Luo Mega-event Strategy As a Tool of Urban Transformation: Sydney's Experience Yawei Chen, Marjolein Spaans The Strength of Connections: Innovation Engines in Creative Industries A.P. Drogendijk, M. J. W. van Twist Tracing the Roots of Cultural Industries: Employment Trends in Cultural Industries in Dutch Cities Since 1899 Michaël Deinema and Robert Kloosterman Tourism and Urban Economy: Branding Cities and Producing Contradictory Spaces of Consumption L. Girardi, P. F. Meliani The Decline of The Industrial City: the Limits of Neoliberal Urban Regeneration Tahl Kaminer The Mall in the Online Shopping Era Cristian Suau, Margarita Munar Bauzá Macau's Urban Image Production - Before and After the Credit Crunch Hendrik Tieben Global Capitals Role in the (De)Structuration of Urban Space Nikolaos T

City Solutions The City Solution Why cities are the best cure for our planet's growing pains By Robert Kunzig Photograph by Chia Ming Chien At the time of Jack the Ripper, a hard time for London, there lived in that city a mild-mannered stenographer named Ebenezer Howard. He's worth mentioning because he had a large and lingering impact on how we think about cities. Howard was bald, with a bushy, mouth-cloaking mustache, wire-rim spectacles, and the distracted air of a seeker. His job transcribing speeches did not fulfill him. He dabbled in spiritualism; mastered Esperanto, the recently invented language; invented a shorthand typewriter himself. And dreamed about real estate. What his family needed, he wrote to his wife in 1885, was a house with "a really nice garden with perhaps a lawn tennis ground." A few years later, after siring four children in six years in a cramped rental house, Howard emerged from a prolonged depression with a scheme for emptying out London. London in the 1880s, you see, was booming, but it was also bursting with people far more desperate than Howard. The slums where the Ripper trolled for victims were beyond appalling. "Every room in these rotten and reeking tenements houses a family, often two," wrote Andrew Mearns, a crusading minister. "In one cellar a sanitary inspector reports finding a father, mother, three children, and four pigs! … Elsewhere is a poor widow, her three children, and a child who had been dead thirteen days." The Victorians called such slums rookeries, or colonies of breeding animals. The chairman of the London County Council described his city as "a tumour, an elephantiasis sucking into its gorged system half the life and the blood and the bone of the rural districts." Urban planning in the 20th century sprang from that horrified perception of 19th-century cities. Oddly, it began with Ebenezer Howard. In a slim book, self-published in 1898, the man who spent his days transcribing the ideas of others articu

Alain Bertaud 阿兰 .柏图 A web page dedicated to the study of urban spatial structures It is necessary to bridge the gap between the 50 years of progress in urban economic research and the intellectual stagnation typically found in operational urban planning. It is unfortunate that the main audience of most urban economists are other urban economists rather than urban practitioners. Urban planners, meanwhile, are most of the time working without any reference to a theoretical framework. However, urban planners are taking day to day decisions that affect the lives and livelihood of millions of people. As an urban planner, my goal is to translate the theories (and sometime the jargon) and equations of urban economists into approaches and methods which can lead to concrete decision making in the everyday world of an urban planning office. The following reports and papers, always produced at the request of a municipality or of an urban investor (mostly the World Bank), illustrate these new approaches and methods. This is only a beginning. I am currently working on a book titled "Order without design". This book will use a data base developed over 35 years of urban planning work around the world. The book will aims at providing a theoretical framework for operational planning based on current urban economic research. Alain Bertaud' s Reports and papers that can be downloaded from this site: Click icon above for an enlarged image of average built-up densities in 49 cities. Urban Spatial Structures and City Planning Comparative Urban structures Asian Cities African Cities European cities North, Central and South American Cities Land Use and Financial Models (AKA "Bertaud Model") Links ab A. Urban Spatial Structures and City Planning "The Spatial Organization of cities" (PDF file; 3.9 Meg) " Urban Planning and Air Pollution in South Asia" (PDF; 0.3 Meg) "Efficiency in Land Use and Infrastruct

Research Papers 220)     Cowen, Deborah and Vanessa Parlette Inner Suburbs at Stake: Investing in Social Infrastructure in Scarborough, June 2011, 86pp. ISSN 0316-0068; ISBN 978-0-7727-1482-4. 219)     Jim Simmons, Larry Bourne, and Shizue Kamikihara, The Changing Economy of Urban Neighbourhoods: An Exploration of Place of Work Data for the Greater Toronto Region, December 2009, 44 pp. ISBN 978-0-7727-1477-0 218)     Greg Suttor, Rental Paths from Postwar to Present: Canada Compared, December 2009, 59 pp. ISBN 978-0-7727-1476-3 217)     Michael Noble, Lovely Spaces in Unknown Places: Creative City Building in Toronto's Inner Suburbs, March 2009, 50 pp. ISBN 978-0-7727-1474-9 216)     Jason Hackworth, Habitat for Humanity and the Neoliberal Media: A Comparison of News Coverage in Canada and the United States, March 2009, 39 pp. ISBN 978-0-7727-1473-2 215)     David Wachsmuth, From Abandonment to Affordable Housing: Policy Options for Addressing Toronto's Abandonment Problem, November 2008, 48 pp. ISBN 978-0-7727-1472-5 214)     Katharine N. Rankin, with the assistance of Jim Delaney, Courtney Hood, Justin Ngan and Sabin Ninglekhu, Commercial Change in Toronto's West-Central Neighbourhoods, September 2008 ISBN-13 978-0-7727-1471-8 213)     Emily Paradis, Sylvia Novac, Monica Sarty, J. David Hulchanski, Better Off in a Shelter? A Year of Homelessness and Housing among Status Immigrant, Non-Status Migrant, and Canadian-Born Families, July 2008, 89 pp. ISBN-13 978-0-7727-1469-5 212)     Duncan Maclennan, Housing for the Toronto Economy, July 2008, 72 pp. ISBN 978-0-7727-1468-8 211)     R. Alan Walks and Richard Maaranen, The Timing, Patterning, & Forms of Gentrification & Neighbourhood Change in Montreal, Toronto, & Vancouver, 1961 to 2001, May 2008, 109 pp. ISBN 978-0-7727-1465-7 210)     Jason Hackworth, Neoliberalism, Social Welfare, and the Politics of Faith in the United States, June 2007, 36 pp. ISBN 978-0-7727-145

The City: Analyzing Contemporary Transformations and Structures University of Bielefeld, Germany - Workshop March 9-10, 2012 Abstracts: October 1, 2011 Today, we focus on different aspects of urbanity when we talk about characteristics of and challenges for contemporary societies and their built environment. Depending on the respective point of view, demographic changes, the anticipated climate change potentially altering human behavior, the different appreciation of knowledge and information or transformations in production patterns are taken as factors affecting the appearance, the characteristics and the functions of the places of societies - and therewith also of cities. Social sciences dealing with urban phenomena generally ask for the interrelations of the social and the physical/spatial. Urban structures, understood as results of social processes, are in focus.But there are different thematic traditions: In Germany, social inequality in cities, resulting in social and spatial segregation, has long been a topic of great importance. In the Anglo-American context, housing and racial differences have been major research areas for several decades. In addition to these specific traditions of studying the city, phenomena themselves show regionally differing characteristics, greatly visible in the cases of shrinking cities and mega cities. And processes of urban transformation have always had transnational, maybe even global facets, too, as it can be seen in the case of global cities. The workshop asks for both urban transformations and urban structures that can be analyzed by social scientists. What are recent developments and transformations of cities? What are the specific challenges researchers are confronted with in these cities? How can we adequately analyze and analytically formulate contemporary urban phenomena? In what respect do cities possess features that are specific for the late 20th and beginning 21st century, i.e. what are typical structur

Urban Assemblages By PE A new book edited by Ignacio Farías and Thomas Bender (2009): Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies, in the Questioning Cities Series by Routledge. This book takes it as a given that the city is made of multiple partially localized assemblages built of heterogeneous networks, spaces, and practices. The past century of urban studies has focused on various aspects-space, culture, politics, economy-but these too often address each domain and the city itself as a bounded and cohesive entity. The multiple and overlapping enactments that constitute urban life require a commensurate method of analysis that encompasses the human and non-human aspects of cities-from nature to socio-technical networks, to hybrid collectivities, physical artefacts and historical legacies, and the virtual or imagined city. This book proposes-and its various chapters offer demonstrations-importing into urban studies a body of theories, concepts, and perspectives developed in the field of science and technology studies (STS) and, more specifically, Actor-Network Theory (ANT). The essays examine artefacts, technical systems, architectures, place and eventful spaces, the persistence of history, imaginary and virtual elements of city life, and the politics and ethical challenges of a mode of analysis that incorporates multiple actors as hybrid chains of causation. The chapters are attentive to the multiple scales of both the object of analysis and the analysis itself. The aim is more ambitious than the mere transfer of a fashionable template. The authors embrace ANT critically, as much as a metaphor as a method of analysis, deploying it to think with, to ask new questions, to find the language to achieve more compelling descriptions of city life and of urban transformations. By greatly extending the chain or network of causation, proliferating heterogeneous agents, non-human as well as human, without limit as to their enrolment in ur

In 1871, the city of Chicago was almost entirely destroyed by what became known as The Great Fire. Thirty-five years later, San Francisco lay in smoldering ruins after the catastrophic earthquake of 1906. Or consider the case of the Jerusalem, the greatest site of physical destruction and renewal in history, which, over three millennia, has suffered wars, earthquakes, fires, twenty sieges, eighteen reconstructions, and at least eleven transitions from one religious faith to another. Yet this ancient city has regenerated itself time and again, and still endures. Throughout history, cities have been sacked, burned, torched, bombed, flooded, besieged, and leveled. And yet they almost always rise from the ashes to rebuild. Viewing a wide array of urban disasters in global historical perspective, The Resilient City traces the aftermath of such cataclysms as: --the British invasion of Washington in 1814 --the devastation wrought on Berlin, Warsaw, and Tokyo during World War II --the late-20th century earthquakes that shattered Mexico City and the Chinese city of Tangshan --Los Angeles after the 1992 riots --the Oklahoma City bombing --the destruction of the World Trade Center Revealing how traumatized city-dwellers consistently develop narratives of resilience and how the pragmatic process of urban recovery is always fueled by highly symbolic actions, The Resilient City offers a deeply informative and unsentimental tribute to the dogged persistence of the city, and indeed of the human spirit.

Meeting ThemeThroughout history the economic growth, decline, and resurgence of urban centers has been variously affected by political developments. The morphology of cities has followed ideological ideas about the role and function of urban centers, often consciously put into place by local, state, and colonial leaders. This annual meeting will explore the impacts of the political economy underlying the growth and development of cities on the lived experiences of urbanites. How do these policies affect the ability of city residents to earn reasonable livings? How do they facilitate or discourage the creation of local structures to create meaningful lives? How does the environmental impact of dense urban populations restrain or modulate city growth? We are especially interested in the ways that various political economies encourage or discourage the movement of specific urban groups. In deep history, political leaders increased urban populations by encouraging artisans and traders to establish themselves locally and increasing labor availability through practices like slavery. They created neighborhoods with specific functions and purposes, many of which were associated with particular ethnic groups. In more recent history, governments created ghettos or ethnic enclaves within urban centers and discouraged city growth through tools such as urban residence permits. Today, political instruments such as zoning regulations, planned development initiatives, and slum rehabilitation programs all constrain or mediate economic activities and population movements into and within urban centers. These topics have been studied in various ways by archaeologists, socio-cultural anthropologists, and economists. Thus, economic anthropology offers a valuable perspective to understand these issues as the discipline is concerned with the interplay of urbanism, political economy, cultural identity, social change, and development within past and present local contexts. Among the issues t

Due to request of delaying the submission by several authors, the deadline of "Cities, Technologies and Planning" (CTP 12) for submitting full paper has been extended to 28 February, 2012.  Due to request of delaying the submission by several authors, the deadline of "Cities, Technologies and Planning" (CTP 12) for submitting full paper has been extended to 28 February, 2012. "Cities, Technologies and Planning" CTP 12   http://www.unibas.it/utenti/murgante/ctp_12/descr.html in conjunction with The 2012 International Conference on Computational Science and its Applications (ICCSA 2012) June 18th  - June 20th, 2012 Federal University of Bahia , Salvador de Bahia, Brasil  http://www.iccsa.org/ Description 'Share' term has turned into a key issue of many successful initiatives in recent times. Following the advent of Web 2.0, such positive experiences based on mass collaboration generated "Wikinomics" have become "Socialnomics", where "Citizens are voluntary sensors". During the past decades, the main issue in GIS implementation has been the availability of sound spatial information. Nowadays, the wide diffusion of electronic devices providing geo-referenced information have resulted in the production of extensive spatial information datasets. This trend has led to "GIS wikification", where mass collaboration plays a key role in main components of spatial information frameworks (hardware, software, data, and people). Some authors (Goodchild, 2007) talk about "Volunteered Geographic Information" (VGI), as the harnessing of tools to create, assemble, and disseminate geographic information provided by individuals voluntarily creating their own contents by marking the locations of occurred events or by labeling certain existing features. not already been shown on map. The term "neogeography" is often adopted to describe people activities when using and creating their own maps, geo-tagging pictures,

Knowledge cities: approaches, experiences and perspectives Francisco Javier Carrillo 0 Resenhas Elsevier Butterworth Heinemann, 2006 - 290 páginas Knowledge Cities are cities that possess an economy driven by high value-added exports created through research, technology, and brainpower. In other words, these are cities in which both the private and the public sectors value knowledge, nurture knowledge, spend money on supporting knowledge dissemination and discovery (ie learning and innovation) and harness knowledge to create products and services that add value and create wealth. Currently there are 65 urban development programs worldwide formally designated as knowledge cities. Knowledge-based cities fall under a new area of academic research entitled Knowledge-Based Development, which brings together research in urban development and urban studies and planning with knowledge management and intellectual capital. In this book, Francisco Javier Carillo of the Monterrey Institute of Technology (ITESM) brings together a group of distinguished scholars to outline the theory, development, and realities of knowledge cities. Based on knowledge-based development, the book shows how knowledge can be and is placed at the center of city planning and economic development to enable knowledge flows and innovation to provide a sustainable environment for high value-added products and services. *Well-respected editor brings together distinguished scholars to outline cutting-edge area of research *Interdisciplinary perspectives from urban studies and planning, regional development, knowledge management and intellectual capital *Key benefit is the focus on knowledge in city design, development, and management

Publications 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1999 | 1998 | 1997 2010 Gregory Spencer, Tara Vinodrai, Meric Gertler, and David Wolfe, "Do Clusters Make a Difference: Defining and Assessing their Economic Performance", Regional Studies, 44:6 (July, 2010): 697-715. David A. Wolfe, "The Strategic Management of Core Cities: Path Dependency and Economic Adjustment in Resilient Regions", special issue of the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 3:1 (March, 2010): 139-52. 2009 David A. Wolfe, "21st Century Cities in Canada: The Geography of Innovation," the 2009 CIBC Scholar-in-Residence Lecture, (Ottawa: Conference Board of Canada, 2009). David A. Wolfe, "Universities and Knowledge Transfer: Powering Local Economic and Cluster Development," in G. Bruce Doern and Christopher Stoney, eds, Research and Innovation Policy: Changing Federal Government-University Relations, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009): 265-287. David A. Wolfe, "Social Dynamics of Innovation and Civic Engagement in City Regions," special issue on Social Innovation and Territorial Development, Canadian Journal of Regional Science 32:1 (Spring, 2009): 59-72. David A. Wolfe, "The Waterloo ICT Cluster," in Clusters, Innovation and Entrepreneurship: International Comparisons, eds Jonathan Potter and Gabriela Miranda (Paris: OECD, 2009): 193-216. David Arthurs, Erin Cassidy, Charles Davis and David A. Wolfe, "Indicators to Support Innovation Cluster Policy," International Journal of Technology Management 45:3/4 (2009): 263-279. David A. Wolfe, "Introduction: Embedded Clusters in a Global Economy," European Planning Studies, 17:2 (Feb. 2009): 179-87. Matthew Lucas, Anita Sands and David A. Wolfe, "Regional Clusters in a Global Industry: ICT Clusters in Canada," European Planning Studies 17:2 (February 2009): 189-209. John N. H. Britton, Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay, Richard Smith, "Contrasts in Cluster

eview of Peter Norton's "Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City" This review of mine was just published in Isis, volume 100 (June, 2009), 426-7: Peter D. Norton. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. (Inside Technology.) xii + 396 pp., illus., figs., index. Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 2008. $35 (cloth). During the early 1960s, as the Golden Age of the automobile in America began to wane, several commentators, including Lewis Mumford, raised the critical question of whether the automobile existed for the modern city or the city for the automobile? How and when the automobile became central to urban life is deftly addressed in Peter Norton's Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. This study is certainly one of the most important monographs focusing on the place of the automobile in American society within a historical context to appear in recent times, and interestingly supplements David Blanke's Hell on Wheels: The Promise and Peril of America's Car Culture, 1900-1940 (University of Kansas Press, 2007). In the process of telling his story, Norton convincingly demonstrates that it was people acting within interest groups who decided how the automobile would be used; this is not a tale of a technology having an irrepressible effect on the marketplace. Norton, who teaches in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia, blends an empirical study of a battle for urban streets with a theoretical analysis based on social constructivist theory. His effort is well balanced, clearly articulated, and fundamentally successful, with little of the dense abstract analysis that tends to drive a good number of general readers away from this kind of scholarship. Above all, Fighting Traffic is an engaging story that pits a number of diverse constituencies in a struggle over who would control city streets. These groups included pedestrians, safety refo

Model Cities: the Construction of Urban Exemplarity 20 May 2011 * Geography Institute * University of Neuchâtel City governments, planners and policy-makers are increasingly modeling their urban policies on successful 'best practices' borrowed from elsewhere. Some cities have thus become 'model cities', to such an extent that their name resonates with urban policy-makers all over the world. Expressions such as 'Vancouverism', or the 'Barcelona model', have become global references of exemplarity among urban practitioners and researchers. Yet, while there is a growing body of literature on the circulation and reproduction of urban models in diverse locations, we still have a limited understanding of the ways in which model cities acquire paradigmatic status. The workshop will try to deepen our grasp of this phenomenon by examining the historical and political processes behind the construction of urban exemplarity, and by analysing the 'careers' and trajectories of model cities. Guest speakers Shane Ewen, Leeds Metropolitan University: From the Megalopolis to the City of Bits: Approaches Towards the History of the Model City Jennifer Robinson, University College London and MOVE Network-UNINE: The Topological Spaces of Policy Learning: how Urban Policy Ideas Circulate Kevin Ward, Manchester University: Relational Comparisons: the Assembling of Cleveland's Waterfront Plan Andy Thornley, London School of Economics: Olympic Model Meets Real Cities Emeline Bailly, Université Paris-Est: Cross-cultural Urbanism The workshop is organised by Prof. Ola Söderström, Prof. Francisco Klauser and Dr. Laurence Crot, Geography Institute, University of Neuchâtel. A detailed programme will be posted on the Geography Institute's website starting 1st May 2011 (http://www2.unine.ch/inst_geographie). Attendance of the workshop is free and open to all but requires pre-registration. For registration and practical information (travel, accommodation, meals) pl

CALL FOR PAPERS RETHINKING URBAN INCLUSION: SPACES, MOBILISATIONS, INTERVENTIONS to be held in Coimbra, Portugal, 28-30 June 2012 With almost half the world's population living in cities, questioning the urban dimension of social inclusion and exclusion is imperative. Urban inclusion is increasingly influenced - and often constrained - by intertwined processes of economic globalization, state re-articulation, polarization and diversification of (local) populations and the political practices they add to the city. Educational, health and environmental inequalities, segregation, unemployment, lack of political participation, discrimination and the inability to deal with different forms of participation are all phenomena of exclusion with a local dimension but a multi-scalar nature. At the same time, acting towards social inclusion is developed around ideas, knowledge(s), experiences, resources and capacities which are (dis)located across an array of arenas and distributed among different actors. While traditional concepts and practices of urban inclusion centered on institutions and top-down decision-making seem inadequate to tackle this complexity, new ones are often in their infancy and may be in tension with more established policies. Contesting the centrality of the state and market pervasiveness, a new variety of counter-hegemonic positions and projects, and alternative visions of urban democracy and justice that inform bottom-up and participatory approaches to urban inclusion, have become popular in the Global South, while their transposition to cities in the Global North have met resistance or hardly gone beyond theorization.  The Conference aims to understand and ultimately rethink social inclusion at the urban scale, as the product of broader dynamics and the interaction of different actors and languages. How can we trace, define, and challenge the new subtle forms of social and territorial exclusion, trying to reinvent urban in

Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies Ignacio Farfas, Thomas Bender 0 Resenhas Taylor & Francis, 16/08/2011 - 352 páginas This book takes it as a given that the city is made of multiple partially localized assemblages built of heterogeneous networks, spaces, and practices. The past century of urban studies has focused on various aspects "space, culture, politics, economy "but these too often address each domain and the city itself as a bounded and cohesive entity. The multiple and overlapping enactments that constitute urban life require a commensurate method of analysis that encompasses the human and non-human aspects of cities "from nature to socio-technical networks, to hybrid collectivities, physical artefacts and historical legacies, and the virtual or imagined city. This book proposes "and its various chapters offer demonstrations "importing into urban studies a body of theories, concepts, and perspectives developed in the field of science and technology studies (STS) and, more specifically, Actor-Network Theory (ANT). The essays examine artefacts, technical systems, architectures, place and eventful spaces, the persistence of history, imaginary and virtual elements of city life, and the politics and ethical challenges of a mode of analysis that incorporates multiple actors as hybrid chains of causation. The chapters are attentive to the multiple scales of both the object of analysis and the analysis itself. The aim is more ambitious than the mere transfer of a fashionable template. The authors embrace ANT critically, as much as a metaphor as a method of analysis, deploying it to think with, to ask new questions, to find the language to achieve more compelling descriptions of city life and of urban transformations. By greatly extending the chain or network of causation, proliferating heterogeneous agents, non-human as well as human, without limit as to their enrolment in urban assemblages, Actor-Network Theory offers a

Session for AAG annual conference: Toward an Engaged Geographic Analysis of Food Deserts and its Contestation through Community Gardening in Inner-City Urban Areas  Co-organizers: Timothy L. Hawthorne, Columbus State University Rina Ghose, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee  Description: Food security has emerged as a major global problem exacerbated by volatility in market prices. Creation of food deserts in the inner-city neighborhoods of urban America has been a particularly significant problem. With increasing outward expansion, communities and neighborhoods in and near the central city are suffering from a loss of population, incomes, and resources. The loss of grocery stores that sell fresh produce, in particular, is problematic for these communities given the significant drop in health outcomes tied to food inaccessibility. To make matters worse, a lack of access to affordable and conveniently located produce and grocery stores disproportionately affects lower income (and in many cases minority) population groups that still live in or near central city neighborhoods. Food deserts, or areas where fresh produce and grocery stores are scarce, are becoming a reality in the nation's lower income, central city communities. Some central city community residents and activists have sought to mitigate this lack of access through the grass-roots creation of community urban gardens in vacant lots. This movement is particularly gaining momentum as the effects of deindustrialization and disinvestment become more apparent, as many inner-cities contain empty lots from the loss of industries as well as from the housing crisis. The geographic analysis of urban gardening in inner-city as a response to local food insecurity, through engaged scholarship and partnerships with local residents, offers an interesting avenue of research related to urban quality-of-life. In this session, we offer a variety of theoretical approaches, research methodologies and empirical findings fo

Martin Horak. Governing the Post-Communist City: Institutions and Democratic Development in Prague. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. xii + 270 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8020-9328-8. Reviewed by Carlos Nunes Silva (Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning , University of Lisbon) Published on H-Urban (October, 2010) Commissioned by Alexander Vari Institutional Change and Local Government Performance in Prague In Governing the Post-Communist City Martin Horak examines and assesses the performance of democratic local government in the first decade of post-communist Prague (1990-2000). In his analysis, Horak considers, among other dimensions, the process through which policies are produced, the degree of openness in the policy process, the ability to govern systematically, and the input from societal actors. The decision to use a local case and a holistic perspective to study post-communist politics proves wise as it allows a better understanding of post-communist transformations than would have been possible through a national case study. The book is organized into six chapters focused on two main research questions: 1) what impacts did the nature of the decision-making environment have on the behavior of political leaders in early post-communist Prague; and 2) what were the longer-term effects of this decision-making behavior? Horak argues, in the first case, that Prague's local politicians reacted to their unstable and institutionally incoherent environment by seeking simple, short-term solutions in key areas of urban policy. In the second case, his argument is that increasing returns processes were responsible for the maintenance of Prague's mix of institutional forms, which were created by decisions taken during the early post-communist period. Two different policy areas are examined: freeways construction and the management of Prague's historical center. In chapter 1, Horak offers an introductory account of institutional changes and governme

The cost of auto orientation MONDAY, JANUARY 2, 2012 | CHARLES MAROHN In the United States we've proceeded for sixty years with reconfiguring our public spaces to accommodate the automobile. The built in assumption of this approach, especially when it comes to commercial property, is that the more cars driving by the better. What we've overlooked in our haste to "modernize" is the lower return on investment we get from this approach, even under ideal conditions. Today we need the humility to acknowledge that our ancestors -- who built in the traditional style -- may have known what they were doing after all. After a nice break, we want to welcome everyone back and wish you all a fantastic 2012. We're still dedicated to publishing this blog at least three days a week (typically Monday, Wednesday and Friday) as well as releasing a podcast every week or two. We've got one other channel here we'll be starting next week, so stay tuned. If you'd like to stay informed with what's going on with the Strong Towns movement, sign up for our newsletter. We don't share your address and we don't spam. We do bite though, at least rhetorically. Highway 210 runs east/west through downtown Brainerd. In the hierarchical road system, it is the top of the pyramid and would be classified in most places as a "major arterial". It is designed as a STROAD (a street/road hybrid), attempting to apply highway design standards to what otherwise would be an urban street. In doing so, it has dramatically transformed the land use pattern of the area. The picture below highlights two blocks that front the highway corridor. The one on the left, which we've labeled "old and blighted", is a block that has retained its traditional development pattern. To the right we have identified the "shiny and new" area, the block that has recently been transformed to an auto-oriented development style, to the glee of city officials and local economic development advocates. In between is a hybrid of the two; part

What Is a City? Rethinking the Urban after Hurricane Katrina Edited by Phil Steinberg and Rob Shields Cutting-edge thinking on contemporary urban spaces Reviews "Steinberg and Shields have assembled a sparkling collection of theoretically provocative and conceptually innovative essays. These not only expose the distinctive social, spatial and cultural characteristics of pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans which, with delayed federal intervention, turned the hurricane's assault into a 'racially differentiated disaster,' but extend their comments into a critique of contemporary urban theory. Addressing such wide-ranging topics as automobility, the significance of memory, creole urbanism, and New Orleans mythology, this original and interdisciplinary collection will appeal to all urbanists, whether scholars, students, or practitioners, and also to those with interests in disaster relief and climate change." -Anthony D. King, Emeritus Professor of Art History and of Sociology, State University of New York at Binghamton "What Is a City? offers sensitive and nuanced explorations of the urban approached through themes of nature, mobility, community, and memory. The contributors present a thorough, insightful, and revealing portrait of one city's experience at a pivotal moment in its historical trajectory. This is a technically adept, keenly observed, and emotionally gripping work, standing at the cutting edge of urban analysis, interpretive method, and geographic conceptualization." -Robert W. Lake, author of Locational Conflict More / Hide Description The devastation brought upon New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent levee system failure has forced urban theorists to revisit the fundamental question of urban geography and planning: What is a city? Is it a place of memory embedded in architecture, a location in regional and global networks, or an arena wherein communities form and reproduce themselves? Planners, architects, policymakers, and geogra