scholarly journals Debates atuais sobre a teoria urbana: uma avaliação crítica/Current debates in urban theory: A critical assessment

2018 ◽  
pp. 30-62
Author(s):  
Michael Storper ◽  
Allen J Scott
Keyword(s):  
Urban Form ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Common Language ◽  
Assemblage Theory ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Urban Research ◽  
Urban Economic ◽  
Urban Analysis ◽  
Colonial Urbanism

Os estudos urbanos atualmente são marcados por muitos debates ativos. Em um artigo anterior, abordamos alguns desses debates propondo um conceito fundamental de urbanização e de forma urbana para identificar uma linguagem comum para a pesquisa urbana. No presente trabalho, faremos uma breve recapitulação desse quadro. Utilizaremos então este material preliminar como base para uma crítica das três versões atualmente mais influentes da análise urbana, a saber, a teoria urbana pós-colonial, as abordagens teóricas do agenciamento e da urbanização planetária. Nós avaliaremos cada uma dessas versões e cada uma delas pretende ser considerada a melhor abordagem sobre as realidades urbanas. Faremos a crítica de: a) teoria urbana pós-colonial, por seu particularismo e sua insistência na provincianização do conhecimento, b) abordagens teóricas do agenciamento, por sua indeterminação e ecletismo, e c) urbanização planetária, pela desvalorização radical das forças de aglomeração e de nodalidade na geografia urbano-econômica.Palavras-chave: Teoria da aglomeração, teoria do agenciamento, teoria da urbanização planetária, urbanismo pós-colonial, teoria urbanaABSTRACTUrban studies today is marked by many active debates. In an earlier paper, we addressed some of these debates by proposing a foundational concept of urbanisation and urban form as a way of identifying a common language for urban research. In the present paper we provide a brief recapitulation of that framework. We then use this preliminary material as background to a critique of three currently influential versions of urban analysis, namely, postcolonial urban theory, assemblage theoretic approaches and planetary urbanism. We evaluate each of these versions in turn and find them seriously wanting as statements about urban realities.We criticise (a) postcolonial urban theory for its particularism and its insistence on the provincialisation of knowledge, (b) assemblage theoretic approaches for their indeterminacy and eclecticism and (c) planetary urbanism for its radical devaluation of the forces of agglomeration and nodality in urban-economic geography.Keywords: agglomeration theory, assemblage theory, planetary urbanisation theory, post-colonial urbanism, urban theory.

Theorizing Regulation-in-City for Homeless People’s Subaltern Strategy and Informality: Societalization, Metabolism, and Classes With(out) Housing

2021 ◽  
pp. 089692052110205
Author(s):  
Mahito Hayashi
Keyword(s):  
Urban Studies ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Homeless People ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Theoretical Explanation ◽  
Urban Metabolism ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Housing Consumption ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Critical Urban Theory

This paper aims to expand critical urban theory and spatialized political economy through developing a new, broad-based theoretical explanation of homelessness and the informal housing of the deprived in public spaces. After reviewing an important debate in geography, it systematicallyreasserts the relevance of class-related concepts in urban studies and, mobilizing post-determinist notions, it shows how a class-driven theory can inform the emergence of appropriating/differentiating/reconciliating agency from the material bedrock of urban metabolism and its society-integrating effect (societalization). The author weaves an urban diagnostic web of concepts by situating city-dwellers—classes with(out) housing—at the material level of metabolism and then in the sociopolitical dynamic of regulation, finding in the two realms urban class relations (enlisted within societalization) and agency formation (for reregulation, subaltern strategies, and potential rapprochement). The housing classes are retheorized as a composite category of hegemonic dwellers who enjoy housing consumption and whose metabolism thus appears as the normative consumption of public/private spaces. Homeless people are understood as a subaltern class who lacks housing consumption and whose metabolism can produce “housing” out of public spaces, in opposition to a hegemonic urban form practiced by the housing classes. These urban class relations breed homeless–housed divides and homeless regulation, and yet allow for agency’s creative appropriation/differentiation/reconciliation. This paper avoids crude dichotomy, but it argues that critical urban theory can productively use this way of theorization for examining post-determinist urban lifeworlds in relation to the relative fixity of urban form, metabolic circuits, and class relations.

What Happened to Gender Relations on the Way from Chicago to Los Angeles?

2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daphne Spain
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
World War ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Cultural Forces ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Way

From the Chicago human ecologists to the Los Angeles postmodernists, urban theorists have tried to understand how space is structured by technological, political, economic, and cultural forces; gender is seldom examined. Yet both women’s status and urban form underwent significant changes following World War II. As the home became less predictably the center of women’s lives, the monocentric city was evolving into the polycentric metropolis. This article suggests that gender relations also have spatial implications for the metropolis, and that urban theory would be more comprehensive if it incorporated historically parallel developments in the literature on gender and space.

scholarly journals A Review of Robert Shaw, The Nocturnal City. London: Routledge, 2018, 126 pр.

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (48) ◽  
pp. 239-251
Author(s):  
Fedor Veselov
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Night Time ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Artificial Lighting ◽  
The Public ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
New Research ◽  
The City

This review focuses on the book The Nocturnal City written by the British social geographer Robert Shaw. The author’s major objective is to put the night at the center of the research agenda in urban studies, to contribute to urban theory in general, and to open up a new research field — nightology. The theoretical ambition for Shaw is an attempt to establish a dialogue between planetary urbanism (critical urban theory) and the post-structuralist understanding of the city (assemblage thinking). The author employs the conceptual model of ‘three ecologies’ developed by Felix Guattari; it considers the city as consisting of three interconnected layers: ‘self — society — earth’. Another important analytical tool is the post-colonial metaphor of the night as a frontier, which Shaw develops, considering specificities of the nocturnal city: infrastructures of artificial lighting and cleaning, the night-time economy, the changing aesthetics of cities at night and the experience of night-time at home, beyond the public space. The book does not offer a ready-made solution to theoretical problems and reveals just a little of the empirical diversity of nocturnal cities, but it is recommended as an introduction to a new field — nightology (especially for the Russian social sciences) — and as an elaboration of the discussion around the compatibility of critical urbanism and assemblage thinking in urban theory.

scholarly journals Urban form and economic sustainability in housing projects

2021 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamed Mahmoud Ahmed Abdel Ghaffar ◽  
Noha Ahmed Abd El Aziz
Keyword(s):  
Population Density ◽  
Public Transportation ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Economic Sustainability ◽  
Land Use Pattern ◽  
Housing Projects ◽  
Urban Economic ◽  
The Impact

AbstractUrban areas in metropolitan cities like Cairo suffer from economic, social, and environmental predicaments. Urban economic sustainability is an approach that reforms the urban performance to gain direct benefits such as minimizing costs and maximizing profits and indirect benefits as better social, environmental, and cultural aspects. This research suggests applying such an approach to enhance Egyptian housing projects. The main research question is how to evaluate the economic sustainability of urban forms?. The study presents a “Sustainable Urban Economy model” (SUE model) linking urban fabric, land use pattern, transportation, and street network design with economic sustainability. Research methods and tools include interviews (Delphi method) with 25 urban planning/design and urban economic experts to refine the model. Results show the most effective components of the urban form on economic sustainability (accessibility and degree of permeability, population density, built, and the impact of sub-indicators on the main components. Moreover, results indicate that the seven most influential indicators are the built-up to total space ratio, mixed-use ratio, built-up ratio, population density, floor area ratio, degree of accessibility, and public transportation. Experts suggested values for the seven indicators to measure how the urban form can achieve high economic, environmental, and social performance in the Egyptian context.

The Metonymic Urbanism of Twenty-first-century Mumbai

Urban Studies ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (13) ◽  
pp. 2955-2973 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Harris
Keyword(s):  
Policy Formation ◽  
First Century ◽  
Urban Research ◽  
European Cities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Urban Analysis ◽  
The City ◽  
Geographical Imaginations ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Research And Policy

Over the past decade, Mumbai has increasingly been understood as representative of new forms, trajectories and processes of 21st-century urbanism. This has been a welcome rejoinder to a continued predominance of North American and European cities within international urban research and debate. Yet it is important to query what theory cultures and geographical imaginations have been mapped onto Mumbai in this recent emphasis on the city. This paper argues that, unless Mumbai’s specificities and grounded realities are used to disrupt and reframe existing urban analysis, there is a risk of replicating the comparative perspectives and visions of élite policy-making. This does not mean conferring paradigmatic status on Mumbai or isolating Mumbai as an exceptional form of contemporary urbanism, but instead generating new theoretical dialogue and opening up new channels of urban research and policy formation within a wider world of cities.

Cold Chicago: Uncivil Modernity, Urban Form, and Performance in the Upstart City

2009 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 10-36
Author(s):  
Loren Kruger
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Built Environments ◽  
Paris Commune ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
And Performance

Since the Haymarket massacre of 1886, Chicagoans have buried and resurrected the city's experiences in performances, politics, and built environments. From Sullivan to Gehry to Chris Ware, from socialist militancy to immigrants' rights, from 19th-century commemorations of the Paris Commune to 21st-century stagings of architectural and political conflicts, Chicago has generated drama in urban theory and practice as well as in theatre.

Vocabularies of Spatiality in French Colonial Urbanism: Some Covert Rationales of Street Names in Colonial Dakar, West Africa and Saigon, Indochina

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (8) ◽  
pp. 1109-1127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ambe J. Njoh ◽  
Esther P. Chie
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Political Power ◽  
French West Africa ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
French Military ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Colonial Urbanism

The study analyses toponymic practices in two colonial spaces on two continents. The colonial spaces, Dakar and Saigon, were capitals of the Federation of French West Africa and French Indochina, respectively. Toponymy is used as a tool to articulate socio-cultural and political power in both spaces; also, streets were christened after French military, politico-administrative and religious personalities. Two differences are noted. First, streets in colonial Saigon were named after French military heroes and clergymen, while streets in Dakar were named after French political luminaries. Second, post-colonial Saigon witnessed efforts to re-appropriate the city’s identity, but not so in Dakar.

scholarly journals Flows from early Modernism into the Interior Streets of Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-62
Author(s):  
Karin Theunissen
Keyword(s):  
Urban Form ◽  
Las Vegas ◽  
Architectural Discourse ◽  
Urban Research ◽  
Robert Venturi ◽  
New Type ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Denise Scott Brown ◽  
Commercial Environment

In 1972 the famous diagram of the ‘Decorated Shed’ was introduced into the architectural discourse; it implied a definition of ‘architecture as shelter with decoration on it’ [1]. The diagram was part of urban research into the commercial environment of Las Vegas that was interpreted by the researchers – Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour – as ‘a new type of urban form’ that they meant ‘to understand’ in order ‘to begin to evolve techniques for its handling’. Yet the critique on this and other research and designs by Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown focused essentially on questions of form and more specifically of the image of architecture.

5. Reconceptualizing College Impact Studies Through a Fractal Assemblage Theory

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-114
Author(s):  
Laura Elizabeth Smithers
Keyword(s):  
Student Growth ◽  
Higher Education Research ◽  
Common Language ◽  
Assemblage Theory ◽  
College Impact ◽  
Impact Studies ◽  
Student Change ◽  
The Common ◽  
Growth And Change ◽  
Institutional Relationships

<?page nr="89"?>Abstract College impact studies have formed the common sense of understanding institutional relationships to student growth and change for decades. In this time, they have become entangled with the production of the neoliberal university. This paper1 presents an alternative theorization of student change on campus, a fractal assemblage theory. Assemblage theory is discussed through a single common language of major assemblage theory concepts across four authors. After exploring these concepts in depth, this paper returns to the stakes of assemblage theory: higher education research not to channel student to predetermined outcomes, but to create student futures in excess of our imaginations.

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