“Actual Center of Detroit”: Method, Management, and Decentralization in Albert Kahn's General Motors Building

2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Abrahamson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Automotive Industry ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
General Motors ◽  
Corporate Management ◽  
Architectural Practice ◽  
The City

In the period 1919–22, two events catalyzed General Motors’ nascent dominance in the automotive industry: the company built a monumental headquarters in Detroit, designed by Albert Kahn Associates and located on what was then the periphery of the city; and a restructuring of the corporation was enacted at the behest of several newly appointed executives, including Alfred P. Sloan. In “Actual Center of Detroit”: Method, Management, and Decentralization in Albert Kahn's General Motors Building, Michael Abrahamson explores the conjunction between these events, arguing that both manifest a struggle with immense size. To cope with the bigness of buildings, corporations, and urban environments, GM and the Kahn firm developed strategies that set the agenda for architectural practice, corporate management, and urban development for the twentieth-century United States. Together, these strategies reveal the entwined forces that influenced the design of the General Motors Building.

Urban Transformation in the City of Riyadh: A Study of Plural Urban Identity

2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 70-79
Author(s):  
Mashary A. Al Naim
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Urban Transformation ◽  
Urban Identity ◽  
Main Challenge ◽  
The City ◽  
Transformation Processes

Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, has been witnessing rapid urban transformation processes during the 20th century, which have had various kinds of impact on the evolution of its urban identity. This paper therefore attempts to investigate how the new urban concepts, which were introduced by modernization and globalization, caused a conflict of identities and how this has resulted in dividing Riyadh into opposing urban entities. The main challenge in establishing a cohesive urban identity in Riyadh is based on the long-term conflict between traditional forms of urbanism and modern ways of urban development. The paper thus investigates the urban transformation of Riyadh from the beginning of the twentieth century until the present day. The main objective of this historic analysis is to capture the various ways inhabitants have perceived surrounding urban environments and how this has been influencing urban planning activities. The applied methodologies include the evaluation of historic documents, such as official reports and plans.

scholarly journals De-centring Managua: post-earthquake reconstruction and revolution in Nicaragua

Urban History ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 663-685
Author(s):  
DAVID JOHNSON LEE
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Earthquake Reconstruction

ABSTRACT:The reconstruction of Managua following the 1972 earthquake laid bare the contradictions of modernization theory that justified the US alliance with Latin American dictators in the name of democracy in the Cold War. Based on an idealized model of urban development, US planners developed a plan to ‘decentralize’ both the city of Managua and the power of the US-backed Somoza dictatorship. In the process, they helped augment the power of the dictator and create a city its inhabitants found intolerable. The collective rejection of the city, the dictator and his alliance with the United States, helped propel Nicaragua toward its 1979 revolution and turned the country into a Cold War battleground.

scholarly journals The Zoning Map and American City Form

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven T. Moga
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Visual Communication ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
American City ◽  
Planning Practice ◽  
Common Mode ◽  
Municipal Policy ◽  
The Past ◽  
The City

This paper investigates a common mode of visual communication in planning practice, the use of maps to regulate urban development. Holding equal legal status with the text, the zoning map was invented in the early twentieth century as a tool for implementing municipal policy and, although debated, modified, and sometimes repurposed over the past nine decades, it remains standard. Mundane and largely taken for granted, the zoning map itself has aroused little scholarly interest. However, as an image of the city and as a graphic intermediary used in administrative processes, it reveals how planning thought is embedded in planning tools.

scholarly journals Arqueologia Urbana: a cidade de Lagos como caso de Estudo

2020 ◽  
pp. 273-284
Author(s):  
Cátia Neto
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Regulatory Framework ◽  
Urban Archaeology ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Rapid Pace ◽  
The City

Due to the rapid pace of urban development in many cities, urban archaeology tends to project itself, contributing to a new regulatory framework that requires this type of work in the historic centers, being necessary to adapt and develop methods to work in urban environments. One of the main problems, if not the main one, associated with urban archaeology is precisely the question of the rescue/preventive archaeology performed by archaeology companies being seen by many of the specialists as an impediment to the production of knowledge about the city and its history, so one will try to understand why Preventive Archaeology is seen as an impediment to the production of knowledge.

Ideas of the City in Asian Settings

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Complex Objects ◽  
Vast Array ◽  
Asian Cities ◽  
The City ◽  
Multiple Actors

At a time when intense dynamics of urban development of Asian cities puzzle and disorient, Ideas of the City in Asian Settings offers knowledge about the concepts, representations, and ideas that lie beneath the historical and contemporary production of cities in Asia, in order to deepen our understanding of the processes and meanings of urban development in the continent. The book sheds more light on the vast array of rules and innovations and aspirations that make cities into complex objects that are continuously ‘in the making’. Because Asian cities have experienced unprecedented dynamics of urban development during the last fifty years, they are considered as crucial places to question the perspectives that multiple actors project onto changing urban environments, as well as the evolution of the role of cities in globalisation.

Latino Urbanism and the Geography of Opportunity

Latino City ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Llana Barber
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Latino Migration ◽  
Essential Questions ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Mike Davis ◽  
The City

As any ten-year-old in East L.A., or Philly’s El Norte knows, borders tend to follow working-class Latinos wherever they live and regardless of how long they have been in the United States. Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism As the twentieth century drew to a close, Lawrence barely resembled the city it had been at the end of World War II. While its landscape was still dominated by brick mills and triple-decker homes, its economy and population had been profoundly transformed by suburbanization, deindustrialization, and Latino immigration. As scholars develop a distinct historiography of postwar Latino urbanism, Lawrence may not prove to be typical—as no city could possibly be—but its history nonetheless provides a set of essential questions to address: What was the role of U.S. imperialism in the Latinization (and globalization) of U.S. cities in the late twentieth century? How did race and class segregation in the era of suburbanization and urban crisis impact Latino settlement patterns and experiences? How did Latinos fight against disinvestment and discrimination and strive to claim their right to the city? Where did Latinos fit in the larger stigmatization of the “inner city” and the broad turn to conservatism that this discourse helped enable? From the periphery of U.S. empire to the ghettos at its center, Latino migration in the crisis era was a protracted struggle against containment and marginalization. Imperial migrants fought to have in the United States what U.S. intervention had denied them at home, pushing back against barriers of race and class in a segregated metropolitan landscape....

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy K. DeFalco Lippert
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

Pictures wielded considerable power in nineteenth-century society, shaping the way that Americans portrayed and related to one another, and presented themselves. This is not only a history through pictures, but a history of pictures: it departs from most historians’ approaches to images as self-explanatory illustrations, and instead examines those images as largely overlooked primary source evidence. Consuming Identities charts the growth of a commodified image industry in one of the most diverse and dynamic cities in the United States, from the gold rush to the turn of the twentieth century. The following chapters focus on the circulation of human representations throughout the city of San Francisco and around the world, as well as the cultural dimensions of the relationship between people, portraits, and the marketplace. In so doing, this work traces a critical moment in the shaping of individual modern identities.

VENETIANS REVIVALS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: EXAMPLES OF NEO-MEDIEVALIST ARCHITECTURE IN THE RIO DEL GAFFARO AREA

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 223
Author(s):  
Silvia Mazzetto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
Thin Line ◽  
The City ◽  
The Way

This paper presents some examples of architectural revivals created by a promising Venetian architect at the beginning of the twentieth century, in a marginal area of the city of Venice known as Rio del Gaffaro that was subjected to an intense phenomenon of redevelopment and urban development, following the construction of new road and rail links to the mainland. The original hypotheses for the evolution of the lagunar city, proposed by their author, use an innovative compositional syntax that becomes the thin line of division between traditionally antagonistic references such as classicism and modernism, or orientalism and localism, in some of the best examples of neo-medievalist revival in early 20th century Venice. In particular, the use of historical reference in the composition of the new architectural forms establishes an intense, but quiet and pacific dialogue between the ancient and the modern. In this comparison, all interruptions between past and present are removed, not only in the composition of the residential architectural cell but also in the formation of the new urban fabric into which it is inserted. This way of reinventing history was to open the way for many subsequent readings and interpretations by other Venetian architects. 

Not Yet Fallen: Memory, Trace and Time in Stéphane Couturier's City Photography

2014 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-185
Author(s):  
Shirley Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Melting Point ◽  
Memory Trace ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Urban Change ◽  
Technological Evolution ◽  
Modular Architecture ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
First Case ◽  
The City

Harnessing concepts related to memory, trace, time and the archive, this article examines in detail the highly distinctive city photography of French photographer Stéphane Couturier. It focuses on the ways in which two of Couturier's major series, Archéologie urbaine (1994–2010) and Melting Point (2005–13), investigate the fabric of urban environments in Europe and beyond, concentrating in the first case on heritage layers and pockets of demolition or reconstruction, and in the second on the pervasive modular architecture of urban and peri-urban blocks. The article analyses the tension in Couturier between the photograph as documentary and as art, and situates the photographer – an architect by training – with regard to key nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century predecessors whose studies of the city in photography and in painting appear to resurface in his work and whose engagement with urban change and technological evolution he shares and updates for our time.

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