Focusing on a series of pivotal issues confronting Canadian cities and city-dwellers today, this volume address key themes in urban studies: the interaction between social relations and urban landscape, the status of the city in the new world economy, and the sociocultural complexity of urban populations. The fifteen essays presented here reflect the current preoccupations and perspectives of critically oriented urban researchers in Canada. The essays in Part 1, 'People, Places, Cultures, ' examine the nature of urban space and the links between this space and social relations, illustrating the fundamental principle that urban spaces are 'built values' and 'built politics' - physical expressions of social process. Part 2, 'The Economy of Cities, ' explores recent fundamental shifts in the economic character of Canadian cities, whose effect on the social and physical landscapes has been as dramatic as the explosive onset of industrialism was in the last century. Part 3, 'Urban Social Movements, ' focuses on the practices of social movements, including those oriented to gender, race, and the environment. Consisting largely of applied case studies, rather than broad thematic essays, City Lives and City Forms presents an overall argument for focused critical research in the urban field and suggests possible directions for the future.

Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews among a segment of Toronto's inner-city, middle-class population, Caulfield argues that the seeds of gentrification have included patterns of critical social practice and that the 'gentrified' landscape is highly paradoxical.

Who makes our cities, and what part do everyday users have in the design of cities? This book powerfully shows that city-making is a social process and examines the close relationship between the social and physical shaping of urban environments. With cities taking a growing share of the global population, urban forms and urban experience are crucial for understanding social injustice, economic inequality and environmental challenges. Current processes of urbanization too often contribute to intensifying these problems; cities, likewise, will be central to the solutions to such problems. Focusing on a range of cities in developed and developing contexts, Cities by Design highlights major aspects of contemporary urbanization: urban growth, density and sustainability; inequality, segregation and diversity; informality, environment and infrastructure. Offering keen insights into how the shaping of our cities is shaping our lives, Cities by Design provides a critical exploration of key issues and debates that will be invaluable to students and scholars in sociology and geography, environmental and urban studies, architecture, urban design and planning.

Considers how film and related visual media offer insights into the city, looking at the built environment as well as a lived social experience. It brings together an international group of filmmakers, architects, digital artists, designers and media journalists who critically read, reinterpret and create narratives of the city. 80 b/w illus.

City Rules offers a challenge to students and professionals in urban planning, design, and policy to change the rules of city-building, using regulations to reinvigorate, rather than stifle, our communities. Emily Talen demonstrates that regulations are a primary detriment to the creation of a desirable urban form. While many contemporary codes encourage sprawl and even urban blight, that hasn't always been the case-and it shouldn't be in the future. Talen provides a visually rich history, showing how certain eras used rules to produce beautiful, walkable, and sustainable communities, while others created just the opposite. She makes complex regulations understandable, demystifying city rules like zoning and illustrating how written codes translate into real-world consequences. Most importantly, Talen proposes changes to these rules that will actually enhance communities' freedom to develop unique spaces.

A summation and extension of Lynch's vision for the exploration of city form. With the publication of The Image of the City in 1959, Kevin Lynch embarked upon the process of exploring city form. Good City Form is both a summation and an extension of his vision, a high point from which he views cities past and possible. First published in hardcover under the title A Theory of Good City Form.

In this nuanced and groundbreaking history, Donna Murch argues that the Black Panther Party (BPP) started with a study group. Drawing on oral history and untapped archival sources, she explains how a relatively small city with a recent history of African

This is a book about how cities occupy space. We are not interested in architectural masterpieces, but the tools for reinventing city life. We try to provide a framework for the architecture and design of public space without aesthetic considerations. We identify several defining factors. First of all, history as the city today very much depends on how it was yesterday. The geographical location and the technology available at a point of time both play a constraining role in what can be done as well. Culture, in the form of social norms, laws and regulations, also restricts what is possible to do. On the other hand, culture is also important in guiding the ideas and aspirations that together inform what society wants the city to be. The city needs government intervention, or regulation, to ameliorate the problem posed by a tangle of externalities and public goods. We focus on two comparative case studies: the evolution of urban form in the US and how it stands in a sharp contrast with the evolution of urban form in Japan. We emphasise the difference in regulations between both jurisdictions. We study how differences in technological choices driven by culture (i.e. racial segregation), geography (i.e. the availability of land) and history (i.e. the mobility restrictions of the Tokugawa period) result in vast differences in mobility regarding the share of public transport, walking and cycling versus motorised private transport. American cities are constrained by rules that are much further from the neoliberal economic idea of free and competitive markets than the Japanese ones. Japanese planning promotes competition and through a granular, walkable city dotted with small shops, fosters variety in the availability of goods and services. We hypothesise how changing regulations could change the urban form to generate a greater variety of goods and to foster the access to those goods through a more equitable distribution of wealth. Critically, we point out that a desirably denser city must rely on public transport, and we also study how a less-dense city can be made to work with public transport. We conclude by claiming that changes in regulations are very unlikely to happen in the US, as it would require deep cultural changes to move from local to a more universal and less excluding public good provision, but they are both possible and desirable in other jurisdictions.