The Dead City unearths meanings from such depictions of ruination and decay, looking at representations of both thriving cities and ones which are struggling, abandoned or simply in transition. It reveals that ruination presents a complex opportunity to envision new futures for a city, whether that is by rewriting its past or throwing off old assumptions and proposing radical change. Seen in a certain light, for example, urban ruin and decay are a challenge to capitalist narratives of unbounded progress. They can equally imply that power structures thought to be deeply ingrained are temporary, contingent and even fragile. Examining ruins in Chernobyl, Detroit, London, Manchester and Varosha, this book demonstrates that how we discuss and depict urban decline is intimately connected to the histories, economic forces, power structures and communities of a given city, as well as to conflicting visions for its future.

War and the City examines the geopolitical significance of the Lebanese Civil War through a micro-level exploration of how the urban landscape of Beirut was transformed by the conflict. Focusing on the initial phase of the war in 1975 and 1976, the volume also draws significant parallels with more recent occurrences of internecine conflict and with the historical legacies of Lebanon's colonial past. While most scholarship has thus far focused on post-war reconstruction of the city, the initial process of destruction has been neglected. This volume thus moves away from formal macro-level geopolitical analysis, to propose instead an exploration of the urban nature of conflict through its spaces, infrastructures, bodies and materialities. The book utilizes urban viewpoints in order to highlight the nature of sovereignty in Lebanon and how it is inscribed on the urban landscape. War and the City presents a view of geopolitics as not only shaping narratives of international relations, but as crucially reshaping the space of cities.

Peter Ackroyd: The Ludic and Labyrinthine Text offers the reader the first major critical study in English of one of Britain's most inventive, playful and significant writers of the twentieth century. This study playfully, yet rigorously engages with these aspects of literary stylistics and personal and national identity so important in Ackroyd's work. Rejecting the postmodern label previously attached to the author, Gibson and Wolfreys provide a consideration of all Ackroyd's writing to date, from his poetry and critical thought, to his novels and biographies, offering an indispensable account to anyone interested in Ackroyd and the condition of the novel at the end of the twentieth century.

The American urban scene, and in particular New York's, has given us a rich cultural legacy of slang words and phrases, a bonanza of popular speech. Hot dog, rush hour, butter-and-egg man, gold digger, shyster, buttinsky, smart aleck, sidewalk superintendent, yellow journalism, breadline, straphanger, tar beach, the Tenderloin, the Great White Way, to do a Brodie--these are just a few of the hundreds of popular words and phrases that were born or took on new meaning in the streets of New York. In The City in Slang, Irving Lewis Allen traces this flowering of popular expressions that accompanied the emergence of the New York metropolis from the early nineteenth century down to the present. This unique account of the cultural and social history of America's greatest city provides in effect a lexicon of popular speech about city life. With many stories Allen shows how this vocabulary arose from city streets, often interplaying with vaudeville, radio, movies, comics, and the popular songs of Tin Pan Alley. Some terms of great pertinence to city people today have unexpectedly old pedigrees. Rush hour was coined by 1890, for instance, and rubberneck dates to the late 1890s and became popular in New York to describe the busloads of tourists who craned their necks to see the tall buildings and the sights of the Bowery and Chinatown. The Big Apple itself (since 1971 the official nickname of New York) appeared in the 1920s, though first in reference to the city's top racetracks and to Broadway bookings as pinnacles of professional endeavor. Allen also tells fascinating stories behind once-popular slang that is no longer in use. Spielers, for example, were the little girls in tenement districts who danced ecstatically on the sidewalks to the music of the hurdy-gurdy men and, when they were old enough, frequented the dance halls of the Lower East Side. Following the trail of these words and phrases into the city's East Side, West Side, and all around the town, from Harlem to Wall Street, and into the haunts of its high and low life, The City in Slang is a fascinating look at the rich cultural heritage of language about city life.

American ruins have become increasingly prominent, whether in discussions of “urban blight” and home foreclosures, in commemorations of 9/11, or in postapocalyptic movies. In this highly original book, Nick Yablon argues that the association between American cities and ruins dates back to a much earlier period in the nation’s history. Recovering numerous scenes of urban desolation—from failed banks, abandoned towns, and dilapidated tenements to the crumbling skyscrapers and bridges envisioned in science fiction and cartoons—Untimely Ruins challenges the myth that ruins were absent or insignificant objects in nineteenth-century America. The first book to document an American cult of the ruin, Untimely Ruins traces its deviations as well as derivations from European conventions. Unlike classical and Gothic ruins, which decayed gracefully over centuries and inspired philosophical meditations about the fate of civilizations, America’s ruins were often “untimely,” appearing unpredictably and disappearing before they could accrue an aura of age. As modern ruins of steel and iron, they stimulated critical reflections about contemporary cities, and the unfamiliar kinds of experience they enabled. Unearthing evocative sources everywhere from the archives of amateur photographers to the contents of time-capsules, Untimely Ruins exposes crucial debates about the economic, technological, and cultural transformations known as urban modernity. The result is a fascinating cultural history that uncovers fresh perspectives on the American city.

Essential reading for students and practitioners of urban design, this collection of essays introduces the 6 dimensions of urban design through a range of the most important classic and contemporary key texts. Urban design as a form of place making has become an increasingly significant area of academic endeavour, of public policy and professional practice. Compiled by the authors of the best selling Public Places Urban Spaces, this indispensable guide includes all the crucial definitions and various understandings of the subject, as well as a practical look at how to implement urban design that readers will need to refer to time and time again. Uniquely, the selections of essays that include the works of Gehl, Jacobs, and Cullen, are presented substantially in their original form, and the truly accessible dip-in-and-out format will enable readers to form a deeper, practical understanding of urban design.

This volume deals with the materialization of identity in urban space. Urban spaces played an important role in the formation of national identities in post-socialist successor states, whereas the articulation of national identities markedly affected the appearance of the post-socialist cities. Opened by an overview of the research on (post)socialist cities in recent urban history, the book traces the post-socialist intertwining of space and identities in case studies that include Astana and Almaty, Chisinau and Tiraspol, and Skopje, while also linking it to the socialist urbanism, exemplified by the case study on postwar Minsk.

From the earliest periods of architecture and building, architects’ actions have been conditioned by rules, regulations, standards, and governance practices. These range from socio-cultural and religious codes seeking to influence the formal structure of settlement patterns, to prescriptive building regulations specifying detailed elements of design in relation to the safety of building structures. In Architectural Design and Regulation the authors argue that the rule and regulatory basis of architecture is part of a broader field of socio-institutional and political interventions in the design and development process that serve to delimit, and define, the scope of the activities of architects. The book explores how the practices of architects are embedded in complex systems of rules and regulations. The authors develop the understanding that the rules and regulations of building form and performance ought not to be counterpoised as external to creative processes and practices, but as integral to the creation of well-designed places. The contribution of Architectural Design and Regulation is to show that far from the rule and regulatory basis of architecture undermining the capacities of architects to design, they are the basis for new and challenging activities that open up possibilities for reinventing the actions of architects.

The shrinking city phenomenon is a multidimensional process that affects cities, parts of cities or metropolitan areas around the world that have experienced dramatic decline in their economic and social bases. Shrinkage is not a new phenomenon in the study of cities. However, shrinking cities lack the precision of systemic analysis where other factors now at work are analyzed: the new economy, globalization, aging population (a new population transition) and other factors related to the search for quality of life or a safer environment. This volume places shrinking cities in a global perspective, setting the context for in-depth case studies of cities within Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, Germany, France, Great Britain, South Korea, Australia, and the USA, which consider specific economic, social, environmental, cultural and land-use issues.