Urban Renewal and Resistance: Race, Space, and the City in the Late Twentieth to Early Twenty-First Century examines how urban spaces are rhetorically constructed through discourses that variously justify or resist processes of urban growth and renewal. This book combines insights from critical geography, urban studies, and communication to explore how urban spaces, like Detroit and Harlem, are rhetorically structured through neoliberal discourses that mask the racialized nature of housing and health in American cities. The analysis focuses on city planning documents, web sites, media accounts, and draws on insights from personal interviews in order to pull together a story of city growth and its consequences, while keeping an eye on the ways city residents continue to confront and resist control over their communities through counter-narratives that challenge geographies of injustice. Recommended for scholars of communication studies, journalism, sociology, geography, and political science.

The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal examines how postwar thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic considered urban landscapes radically changed by the political and physical realities of sprawl, urban decay, and urban renewal. With a sweep that encompasses New York, London, Berlin, Philadelphia, and Toronto, among others, Christopher Klemek traces changing responses to the challenging issues that most affected the lives of the world’s cities. In the postwar decades, the principles of modernist planning came to be challenged—in the grassroots revolts against the building of freeways through urban neighborhoods, for instance, or by academic critiques of slum clearance policy agendas—and then began to collapse entirely. Over the 1960s, several alternative views of city life emerged among neighborhood activists, New Left social scientists, and neoconservative critics. Ultimately, while a pessimistic view of urban crisis may have won out in the United States and Great Britain, Klemek demonstrates that other countries more successfully harmonized urban renewal and its alternatives. Thismuch anticipated book provides one of the first truly international perspectives on issues central to historians and planners alike, making it essential reading for anyone engaged with either field.

In the past decade, urban regeneration policy makers and practitioners have faced a number of difficult challenges, such as sustainability, budgetary constraints, demands for community involvement and rapid urbanization in the Global South. Urban regeneration remains a high profile and important field of government-led intervention, and policy and practice continue to adapt to the fresh challenges and opportunities of the 21st century, as well as confronting long standing intractable urban problems and dilemmas. This Companion provides cutting edge critical review and synthesis of recent conceptual, policy and practical developments within the field. With contributions from 70 international experts within the field, it explores the meaning of ‘urban regeneration’ in differing national contexts, asking questions and providing informed discussion and analyses to illuminate how an apparently disparate field of research, policy and practice can be rendered coherent, drawing out common themes and significant differences. The Companion is divided into six sections, exploring: globalization and neo-liberal perspectives on urban regeneration; emerging reconceptualizations of regeneration; public infrastructure and public space; housing and cosmopolitan communities; community centred regeneration; and culture-led regeneration. The concluding chapter considers the future of urban regeneration and proposes a nine-point research agenda. This Companion assembles a diversity of approaches and insights in one comprehensive volume to provide a state of the art review of the field. It is a valuable resource for both advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in Urban Planning, Built Environment, Urban Studies and Urban Regeneration, as well as academics, practitioners and politicians.

Drawing together leading urban academics, this book provides the first detailed and cohesive exploration of contemporary urban regeneration in Australian cities. It explores the multiple aspects and processes of regeneration, including planning policy (strategic and regulatory), development financing, sustainability, remediation and transport. The book puts forward a unique and innovative ‘scaled’ analysis of urban regeneration, which positions urban regeneration as more than just large-scale redevelopment projects. It examines the processes of urban change which occur outside inner suburbs, which contribute to regenerating the city as a whole. The book moves beyond the planning and economic considerations of the regeneration process to describe the social and cultural aspects of regeneration. In doing so, it focuses on the management of higher-density environments, culture as a trigger for regeneration, and community opposition to the regeneration process. Urban Regeneration in Australia would benefit academics, students and professionals of urban geography and planning, as well as those with a particular interest in Australian urbanism.

Moving beyond the usual good-versus-evil story that pits master-planner Robert Moses against the plucky neighborhood advocate Jane Jacobs, Samuel Zipp sheds new light on the rise and fall of New York's urban renewal in the decades after World War II. Focusing on four iconic "Manhattan projects"--the United Nations building, Stuyvesant Town, Lincoln Center, and the great swaths of public housing in East Harlem--Zipp unearths a host of forgotten stories and characters that flesh out the conventional history of urban renewal. He shows how boosters hoped to make Manhattan the capital of modernity and a symbol of American power, but even as the builders executed their plans, a chorus of critics revealed the dark side of those Cold War visions, attacking urban renewal for perpetuating deindustrialization, racial segregation, and class division; for uprooting thousands, and for implanting a new, alienating cityscape. Cold War-era urban renewal was not merely a failed planning ideal, Zipp concludes, but also a crucial phase in the transformation of New York into both a world city and one mired in urban crisis.

Originally published in 1981, Urbanization and Urban Planning in Capitalist Society, is a comprehensive collection of papers addressing urban crises. Through a synthesis of current discussions around various critical approaches to the urban question, the book defines a general theory of urbanization and urban planning in capitalist society. It examines the conceptual preliminaries necessary for the establishment of capitalist theory and provides a theoretical exposition of the fundamental logic of urbanization and urban planning. It also provides a detailed discussion of commodity production and its effects on urban development.

Providing an overview of urban social movements from a diverse range of both empirical and theoretical perspectives, this Handbook includes not only a critical analysis of the transformations that have occurred in the urban landscape recently, but also sheds light on the strategies implemented by social actors in various socio-political and cultural contexts. It focuses on understanding better how and to what extent collective action around urban issues remains relevant in our modern world. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

Provides comprehensive coverage of major topics in urban and regional studies Under the guidance of Editor-in-Chief Anthony Orum, this definitive reference work covers central and emergent topics in the field, through an examination of urban and regional conditions and variation across the world. It also provides authoritative entries on the main conceptual tools used by anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, and political scientists in the study of cities and regions. Among such concepts are those of place and space; geographical regions; the nature of power and politics in cities; urban culture; and many others. The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies captures the character of complex urban and regional dynamics across the globe, including timely entries on Latin America, Africa, India and China. At the same time, it contains illuminating entries on some of the current concepts that seek to grasp the essence of the global world today, such as those of Friedmann and Sassen on ‘global cities’. It also includes discussions of recent economic writings on cities and regions such as those of Richard Florida. Comprised of over 450 entries on the most important topics and from a range of theoretical perspectives Features authoritative entries on topics ranging from gender and the city to biographical profiles of figures like Frank Lloyd Wright Takes a global perspective with entries providing coverage of Latin America and Africa, India and China, and, the US and Europe Includes biographies of central figures in urban and regional studies, such as Doreen Massey, Peter Hall, Neil Smith, and Henri Lefebvre The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies is an indispensable reference for students and researchers in urban and regional studies, urban sociology, urban geography, and urban anthropology.

This report, through personal interviews with 100 reasonably well informed people, gives consideration to the appropriate role of citizens in neighbourhood improvement programs.

Our world today is experimenting a time of great power but also of tremendous resistances. Everywhere, people are brought together by similar burdens and frustration and creatively think about how to counter the forms of domination they are ascribed to. In academia as well there is an awakening among scholars to further investigate these multiple forms of resistance and equip the field with useful and empowering knowledge. This book aims at presenting some of these findings and reflecting upon the implications, social relevance, and ethical challenges of the growing field of Resistance Studies.