What is the capacity of mapping to reveal the forces at play in shaping urban form and space? How can mapping extend the urban imagination and therefore the possibilities for urban transformation? With a focus on urban scales, Mapping Urbanities explores the potency of mapping as a research method that opens new horizons in our exploration of complex urban environments. A primary focus is on investigating urban morphologies and flows within a framework of assemblage thinking – an understanding of cities that is focused on relations between places rather than on places in themselves; on transformations more than fixed forms; and on multi-scale relations from 10m to 100km. With cases drawn from 30 cities across the global north and south, Mapping Urbanities analyses the mapping of place identities, political conflict, transport flows, streetlife, functional mix and informal settlements. Mapping is presented as a production of spatial knowledge embodying a diagrammatic logic that cannot be reduced to words and numbers. Urban mapping constructs interconnections between the ways the city is perceived, conceived and lived, revealing capacities for urban transformation – the city as a space of possibility.

What is the capacity of mapping to reveal the forces at play in shaping urban form and space? How can mapping extend the urban imagination and therefore the possibilities for urban transformation? With a focus on urban scales, Mapping Urbanities explores the potency of mapping as a research method that opens new horizons in our exploration of complex urban environments. A primary focus is on investigating urban morphologies and flows within a framework of assemblage thinking – an understanding of cities that is focused on relations between places rather than on places in themselves; on transformations more than fixed forms; and on multi-scale relations from 10m to 100km. With cases drawn from 30 cities across the global north and south, Mapping Urbanities analyses the mapping of place identities, political conflict, transport flows, streetlife, functional mix and informal settlements. Mapping is presented as a production of spatial knowledge embodying a diagrammatic logic that cannot be reduced to words and numbers. Urban mapping constructs interconnections between the ways the city is perceived, conceived and lived, revealing capacities for urban transformation – the city as a space of possibility.

Modern day and technology-rich environments require a reconceptualization of how the nature of technology influences urban areas. Rethinking the way we apply these technologies will not only alter the way people communicate and interact, but it will also alter how individuals learn and explore the world around them. Ambient Urbanities as the Intersection Between the IoT and the IoP in Smart Cities offers insights about the ambient in 21st century smart cities, learning cities, responsive cities, and future cities, and highlights the importance of people as critical to the urban fabric of smart cities that are increasingly embedded with pervasive and often invisible technologies. The book, based on an urban research study, explores urbanity from multiple perspectives ranging from the cultural to the geographic. While highlighting topics including digital literacies, smarter governance, and information architectures, this book is ideally designed for students, educators, researchers, the business community, city government staff and officials, urban practitioners, and those concerned with contemporary and emerging complex urban challenges and opportunities.

With the UN-Habitat estimating that by 2035 the majority of the world’s population will be living in metropolitan areas, this cutting-edge Research Handbook explores the emerging field of urban design and its place in contemporary scholarship.

This book is an unusual attempt to study urban regeneration. First, it is based on mapping the realities of urban regeneration case study examples and their impacts on people, places, and city life experiences. Second, it is context-specific, exploring only a particular region rather than covering one country or multiple locations. Hence, the aim is to avoid generic and global solutions but rather focus on local pathways and directions. Third, it delves into specific case study examples that could share some lessons for research, practice, and academia, particularly in the field of urban regeneration. This book is the first of (hopefully) many more on the way in urban mapping studies with various themes and focus areas. The ultimate goal is to ensure urban mapping is recognized well and practiced extensively in research and education. It is essential to map realities in cities and communities, those that we usually witness but should be experienced, perceived, and touched—not just via desk research. Mapping techniques are more than just common tools in urbanism, urban geography, urban studies, urban planning, etc. They are not just tools but inventive ways of understanding cities, places, communities, experiences, and people. Thus, in this book, we try to understand more about people and places through life experiences and mapping the urban regeneration projects of multiple cities in Yunnan Province. This collection is based on a very concise context-specific research focused on only one region. The decision to do so is intentional, just because contextual, cultural, and local attributes need to be looked at more accurately, considerably, and dexterously. Hence, this collection delves into case study examples of an inspiring location where traditions remain, resources are plenteous, and cultures are diverse. Yunnan is one of the few provinces left in China that offers a lot for comprehensive research studies at the urban, rural, and township levels. The experiences we gained from mapping studies, observations, and multi-stakeholder engagements are exceptionally rich and vibrant, allowing us to think more holistically and find ways and suggestions beyond just the generic globalized models elsewhere. We hope the book will be useful to various stakeholders, particularly urban specialists, researchers, and students. It is also a valuable collection for policymakers, decision-makers, and governmental authorities, who should refrain from top-down processes and bring back people to the heart of urban regeneration processes.

As an evolving and contested field, urban design has been made, unmade, and remade at the intersections of multiple disciplines and professions. It is now a decisive moment for urban design to reflect on its rigour and relevance. This handbook is an attempt to seize this moment for urban design to further develop its theoretical and methodological knowledge base and engage with the question of "what urban design can be" with a primary focus on its research. This handbook includes contributions from both established and emerging scholars across the global North and global South to provide a more field-specific entry point by introducing a range of topics and lines of inquiry and discussing how they can be explored with a focus on the related research designs and methods. The specific aim, scope, and structure of this handbook are appealing to a range of audiences interested and/or involved in shaping places and public spaces. What makes this book quite distinctive from conventional handbooks on research methods is the way it has been structured in relation to some key research topics and questions in the field of urban design regarding the issues of agency, affordance, place, informality, and performance. In addition to the introduction chapter, this handbook includes 80 contributors and 52 chapters organised into five parts. The commissioned chapters showcase a wide range of topics, research designs, and methods with references to relevant scholarly works on the related topics and methods.

This book advances the agenda of informality as a transnational phenomenon, recognizing that contemporary urban and regional challenges need to be addressed at both local and global levels. This project may be considered a call for action. Its urgency derives from the impact of the pandemic combined with the effects of climate change in informal settlements around the world. While the notion of “the informal” is usually associated with the analysis and interventions in informal settlements, this book expands the concept of informality to acknowledge its interdisciplinary parameters. The book is geographically organized into five sections. The first part provides a conceptual overview of the notion of “the informal,” serving as an introduction and reflection on the subject. The following sections are dedicated to the principal regions of the Global South—Latin America, US–Mexico Borderlands, Asia, and Africa—while considering the interconnections and correspondences between urbanism in the Global South and the Global North. This book offers a critical introduction to groundbreaking theories and design practices of informality in the built environment. It provides essential reading for scholars, professionals, and students in urban studies, architecture, city planning, urban geography, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, economics, and the arts. As a critical survey of informality, the book examines history, theory, and production across a range of informal practices and phenomena in urbanism, architecture, activism, and participatory design. Authored by a diverse and international cohort of leading educators, theorists, and practitioners, 45 chapters refine and expand the discourse surrounding informal cities.

While often seen as unplanned or spontaneous, informal settlement is better understood as a mode of production: a co-evolution of architecture, urban design and planning that embodies informal rules and shapes urban development. The Atlas of Informal Settlement is a comparative study of the spatial logic of informal settlement based on mapping and analysing the evolution of urban form (morphogenesis) in 51 contemporary settlements across the planet – the first of its kind and a fundamental change in thinking for urban studies and built environment professionals. Each of the 51 case studies uses maps and aerial photographs to examine key stages of development, showing how informal settlement adapts to different contexts of political economy, topography, culture, climate and land tenure; revealing a complex range of actors from settlers and states to land mafias and pirate developers. It demonstrates the range of design processes and formal outcomes; how the informal becomes formalized and vice versa. Interspersed with short chapters introducing key theoretical concepts, the Atlas shows how such practices may or may not produce 'slums', and how settlement is already a form of 'upgrading'. Informal settlement is the primary mode of production of affordable housing and neighbourhood infrastructure within cities of the Global South; with detailed mapping and profiling of 51 settlements this book shows how such urban morphologies emerge in terms of architecture, urban design and planning.

The New Companion to Urban Design continues the assemblage of rich and critical ideas about urban form and design that began with the Companion to Urban Design (Routledge, 2011). With chapters from a new set of contributors, this sequel offers a more comparative perspective representing multiple voices and perspectives from the Global South. The essays in this volume are organized in three parts: Part I: Comparative Urbanism; Part II: Challenges; and Part III: Opportunities. Each part contains distinct sections designed to address specific themes, and includes a list of annotated suggested further readings at the end of each chapter. Part I: Comparative Urbanism examines different variants of urbanism in the Global North and the Global South, produced by a new economic order characterized by the mobility of labor, capital, information, and technology. Part II: Challenges discusses some of the contemporary challenges that cities of the Global North and the Global South are facing and the possible role of urban design. This part discusses spatial claims and conflicts, challenges generated by urban informality, explosive growth or dramatic shrinkage of the urban settlement, gentrification and displacement, and mimesis, simulacra and lack of authenticity. Part III: Aspirations discusses some normative goals that urban design interventions aspire to bring about in cities of the Global North and the Global South. These include resilience and sustainability, health, conservation/restoration, justice, intelligence, access and mobility, and arts and culture. The New Companion to Urban Design is primarily intended for scholars and graduate students interested in cities and their built environment. It offers an invaluable and up-to-date guide to current thinking across a range of disciplines including urban design, planning, urban studies, and geography.