Producing and living the high-rise: New contexts, old questions?

Edited by Manoel Rodrigues Alves, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil et al.

The purpose of the book is to assess the process of urban verticalization in different contexts through time, to provide insight into the relationships between highrise design and the way inhabitants negotiate them in their everyday lives, to assess how planners, politicians, and designers negotiate residential highrises in the strategies they develop for building the city and to introduce urban narratives and cartographies. Verticalization, although not new, currently takes place in a very different context than post-1945. Today, highrise residential buildings are more than architectural solutions: they are commodities in a global market where capital flows are fixed by developers and municipalities. Our exploration of residential verticalization is anchored in case studies, revealing different types of local-global negotiations in the design of the city, and has been framed by three interrelated dynamics: first, the complex relationships within the financialization of real estate markets, revealing differences in the types of local-global negotiations in the construction of the neo-liberal city; secondly, the most developed, anchors residential verticalization in the processes of socio-spatial differentiation within cities (mostly identified as gentrification associated to processes of urban renewal and densification; the third, related to readings and interpretations of the urban landscape and social, spatial practices and its iconographic and cartographic representations. This book is of interest to academics, students, planners, architects, and urban studies professionals. It shows that the chosen research object is an increasingly relevant angle of analysis of the contemporary city. It also provides a better knowledge of the processes of residential verticalization, their impact on the privatization of the urban space, and on urban segregation or fragmentation.

Development in Africa's Informal Settlements: Below the Proletariat

Angela R. Pashayan, American University, Washington, DC

This book discusses the effectiveness of international development programs in African informal settlements (slums). It also represents the voices of slum dwellers and how they view the programs offered. With over 60% of Africans living in slums, the book intends to foster dialogue among development professionals to determine how to improve service to their clients, people experiencing extreme poverty. This book examines the critical thinking disconnect between development professionals and slum dwellers. It enables practitioners, professors, and their students to investigate the gap between the types of development programs offered versus what is most beneficial to reduce extreme poverty in slum communities. With a sample of 500 residents from Mukuru Slum in Nairobi, Kenya, and 100 development professionals with expertise in poverty reduction in slums, this book sheds light on the similarities and differences between various programs. Most importantly, this book provides a theoretical way forward (The Theory of Extreme Poverty Reduction) based on Freirean pedagogy to stimulate discussion on how to program new strategies for authentic dialogue with slum dwellers that leads to the critical consciousness necessary for successful poverty reduction.

The Complex City: Social and Built Approaches and Methods

Edited by Caroline Donnellan, Boston University; Global Programs, London, UK

'The Complex City: Social and Built Approaches and Methods' explores different ways of understanding the city. The social city approach proceeds from the ground-up, it focuses on human interactions shaped by economic and environmental processes. The built city method looks through a top-down lens, examining policy and planning for buildings and infrastructure, including utilities and energy networks. This volume is different from other city anthologies in that it explores them through their differences, by presenting each chapter in one of the two categories. While there is invariably an overlap between the two areas, they are distinct positions. In doing so the book identifies how, despite their often adversarial approaches, they both belong to the same city. As essential components of the city they should not necessarily be resolved, as it is in this friction where creativity and innovation happens. 'The Complex City: Social and Built Approaches and Methods' is concerned about the ideas and solutions that they both offer. The book’s originality stems from this duality, and from its recognition that cities are living, organic, protean places of opportunity, crisis, conflict and challenge. The chapters demonstrate the complexity of cities as a set of ideas concerning what they engender, how they function and why they continue to act as a catalyst for different kinds of human activity. They explore issues of socio-political import and questions of the city as a physically constructed space. The themes are diverse and include the inception of the city as a place of competition to centres of regeneration and urban withdrawal. They cover a range of city and urban regions from Athens to Wellington from site specific singular perspectives to comparative assessments. The questions they raise include how do we inhabit urban areas, how do we make plans for them, and how do we, at times, ignore them entirely.

Paris in the Americas: Yesterday and Today

Edited by Carole Salmon, Furman University

Across centuries, France -and especially its capital city, Paris- established itself as a major source of influence across the Americas through colonization, diplomacy and political influence, but also through intellectualism and cultural productions of all sorts, either by imposition, exportation or as a trend of fashion via a bilateral transatlantic movement of people and ideas. In itself, the influence of Paris, the “capital of the world,” as Patrice Higonnet (2002) analyzes it, is similar to a phantasmagoria, which results in a transatlantic fascination for the city of lights and all the tangible or intangible elements that function as its embodiment. As Stuart Hall explains, understanding cultures and languages and their representations through various manifestations presupposes that we can identify, understand and interpret the signs that constitute their core identity. (Hall 2013). In an interdisciplinary approach, this multi-authored, edited volume examines the long-established relationships between Paris and cities across the American continent, in the past as well as in the present time. In order to explore all aspects of Paris’s influence(s) in the Americas, this volume is organized around two main axes of analysis: first, in a geographical progression from North to South, the reader is invited to reflect upon cultural productions that demonstrate the many influences of Paris in the Americas through theater, literature, philosophy, fashion and cinema (chapters 1 to 6). In the following chapters (7 to 11), the volume focuses particularly on a variety of urban connections that take the reader from South to North this time, analyzing tangible architectural and urban design influences of Paris in major cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, New York, or Washington D.C. In today’s global world, this multifaceted study of Paris’ visible and invisible influences in the Americas clearly reveals the transnational intersections of spaces, languages, people and cultures.

Participatory Practice in Space, Place, and Service Design

Questions of Access, Engagement and Creative Experience

Edited by Kelly L. Anderson, Monash University

'Participatory Practice in Space, Place, and Service Design' is premised on a belief in the importance of participatory practices in finding creative solutions to the plethora of problems we face today. It argues that engaging professions with the public in mutual exploration, analysis, and creative thinking is essential. It not only ensures better quality products, places, services, and a greater sense of civic agency but also facilitates fuller access to them and the life opportunities they can unleash. This book offers a uniquely varied perspective of the myriad ways in which participatory practices operate across disciplines and how they impact the worlds and communities we create and inhabit. This book suggests that participatory practices are multi-disciplinary and relevant in fields as diverse as design, architecture, education, health care, sustainability, and community activism, to name a few of those discussed here. How do designed objects and environments affect wellness, creativity, learning, and a sense of belonging? How do products and services affect everyday experience and attitudes towards issues such as sustainability? How does giving people a creative voice in their own education, services, and built environments open up their potential and strengthen identity and civic agency? Addressing these questions requires a rethinking of relations between people, objects, and environments; it demands attention to space, place, and services.