The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. In New Urban Spaces, Neil Brenner argues that understanding these mutations of urban life requires not only concrete research, but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit-the city or the metropolis-and explores the multiscalar constitution and periodic rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric. Drawing on critical geopolitical economy and spatialized approaches to state theory, Brenner offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban space and their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as radically revisable: key urban concepts must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate.

Public Places - Urban Spaces is a holistic guide to the many complex and interacting dimensions of urban design. The discussion moves systematically through ideas, theories, research and the practice of urban design from an unrivalled range of sources. It aids the reader by gradually building the concepts one upon the other towards a total view of the subject. The author team explain the catalysts of change and renewal, and explore the global and local contexts and processes within which urban design operates. The book presents six key dimensions of urban design theory and practice - the social, visual, functional, temporal, morphological and perceptual - allowing it to be dipped into for specific information, or read from cover to cover. This is a clear and accessible text that provides a comprehensive discussion of this complex subject.

Books in this series introduce readers to the exciting world of insects and arachnids. Each title uses simple text and vibrant photographs to introduce one important bug feature or behavior. In âeoeBug Babies,âe children learn how baby bugs are born, what they look like, and how they grow.

The Power of New Urban Tourism explores new forms of tourism in urban areas with their social, political, cultural, architectural and economic implications. By investigating various showcases of New Urban Tourism within its social and spatial frames, the book offers insights into power relations and connections between tourism and cityscapes in various socio-spatial settings around the world. Contributors to the volume show how urban space has become a battleground between local residents and visitors, with changing perceptions of tourists as co-users of public and private urban spaces and as influencers of the local economies. This includes different roles of digital platforms as resources for access to the city and touristic opportunities as well as ways to organise and express protest or shifting representations of urban space. With contemporary cases from a wide disciplinary spectrum, the contributors investigate the power of New Urban Tourism in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe and Oceania. This focus allows a cross-cultural evaluation of New Urban Tourism and its dynamic, and changing conception transforming and subverting cities and tourism alike. The Power of New Urban Tourism will be of great interest to academics, researchers and students in the fields of cultural studies, sociology, the political sciences, economics, history, human geography, urban design and planning, architecture, ethnology and anthropology.

The two decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union brought great changes to the new nations on its periphery. This text offers a detailed ethnographic look at one area of change - the use and understanding of public space in the region's cities.

Simultaneously analysing the restructuring of urban governance and the transformation of national states under globalising capitalism, 'New State Spaces' is a mature analysis of broad interdisciplinary interest.

The Social Life Of Small Urban Spaces.

Alternative urban spaces across civic, private, and public spheres emerge in response to the great challenges that urban actors are currently confronted with. Labour markets are changing rapidly, the availability of affordable housing is under intensifying pressure, and public spaces have become battlegrounds of urban politics. This edited collection brings together contributors in order to spark an international dialogue about the production of alternative urban spaces through a threefold exploration of alternative spaces of work, dwelling, and public life. Seeking out and examining existing alternative urban spaces, the authors identify the elements that provide opportunities to create radically different futures for the world’s urban spaces. This volume is the culmination of an international search for alternative practices to dominant modes of capitalist urbanisation, bringing together interdisciplinary, empirically grounded chapters from hot spots in disparate cities around the world. Offering a multidisciplinary perspective, The Production of Alternative Urban Spaces will be of great interest to academics working across the fields of urban sociology, human geography, anthropology, political science, and urban planning. It will also be indispensable to any postgraduate students engaged in urban and regional studies.

There have been numerous possible scenarios depicted on the impact of the internet on urban spaces. Considering ubiquitous/pervasive computing, mobile, wireless connectivity and the acceptance of the Internet as a non-extraordinary part of our everyday lives mean that physical urban space is augmented, and digital in itself. This poses new problems as well as opportunities to those who have to deal with it. This book explores the intersection and articulation of physical and digital environments and the ways they can extend and reshape a spirit of place. It considers this from three main perspectives: the implications for the public sphere and urban public or semi-public spaces; the implications for community regeneration and empowerment; and the dilemmas and challenges which the augmentation of space implies for urbanists. Grounded with international real -life case studies, this is an up-to-date, interdisciplinary and holistic overview of the relationships between cities, communities and high technologies.

In 1970, Henri Lefebvre put forward the radical hypothesis of the complete urbanization of society, a circumstance that in his view required a radical shift from the analysis of urban form to the investigation of urbanization processes. Drawing together classic and contemporary texts on the "urbanization question", this book explores various theoretical, epistemological, methodological and political implications of Lefebvre's hypothesis. It assembles a series of analytical and cartographic interventions that supersede inherited spatial ontologies (urban/rural, town/country, city/non-city, society/nature) in order to investigate the uneven implosions and explosions of capitalist urbanization across places, regions, territories, continents and oceans up to the planetary scale.