CiteULike: markups urbanism

Urban Patterns and Environmental Performance: What Do We Know?

Marina Alberti — 2008-03-10T14:36:28-00:00

Journal of Planning Education and Research, Vol. 19, No. 2. (1 December 1999), pp. 151-163.

This paper reviews the empirical evidence on the relationships between urban patterns and various dimensions of environmental quality and performance. I first examine approaches to measuring urban environmental perfomance, drawing on the concepts of carrying capacity, ecological footprint, environmental space, and appropriated ecosystem area. Since cities affect and are affected by ecological systems far beyond their physical boundaries, I propose including interactions at the local, regional, and global scales in the definition of environmental performance. I then systematcally review the current literature on the reltionship between four structural variables typically used to describe urban patternform, density, grain, and connectivity and four dimensions of environmental perfomance sources, sinks, ecological support systems, and human well-being. I conclude that what we measure and the scale of analysis affect the direction of observable urban ipacts. We must consider these factors as we select measures of urban environmental peformance. 10.1177/0739456X9901900205

Urban Form, Energy and the Environment: A Review of Issues, Evidence and Policy

WP Anderson — 2008-03-10T12:57:11-00:00

pp. 7-36.

The spatial configuration of cities and its relationship to the urban environment has recently been the subject of empirical, theoretical and policy research. Because of the disciplines involved, relevant articles are scattered over a large number of journals. The objective of this paper is to put the issues in perspective by reviewing the basic concepts and relationships involved, and to evaluate critically the current state of knowledge about urban form, energy utilisation and the environment. The scope of the paper is limited to urban transport energy use and the associated emissions. Suggestions for further progress in the field are offered, with emphasis placed on integrated urban models as useful and policy-sensitive analytical tools.

THE METABOLISM OF CITIES.

A WOLMAN — 2007-09-29T12:39:59-00:00

Sci Am, Vol. 213 (September 1965), pp. 179-190.

Global Networks, Linked Cities

Saskia Sassen — 2006-05-14T15:36:51-00:00

(01 March 2002)

Reimagining cities as nodes of an immense network of commercial and political transactions, sociologist Saskia Sassen has transformed Information Age geography. Global Networks, Linked Cities collects research, theory, and case studies examining cities in this context by Sassen and 19 other social scientists, focusing particularly on the recent explosive growth in areas formerly--now inaccurately--called the Third World. The jargon in Global Networks, Linked Cities can be fairly dense and the style arid, but the essays reward patient readers with insight into the interlinked worlds of finance, geography, communications, and geopolitics. Most of the pieces look closely at individual urban regions: Shanghai, Buenos Aires, and, interestingly, Beirut. All have much to tell us about the organic urban development coevolving with globalized commerce and communications, says editor Sassen. As barriers to free information flow erode, we see mergers between political, business, and academic entities.Global Networks, Linked Cities shows us how this is happening and how to think about what's coming next. --Rob Lightner Authors look at how information flows have bound global cities together in networks, creating a global city web whose constituent cities become 'global' through the networks they participate in. Investigates emerging global cities in the developing world. Softcover. Hardcover available.

Splintering Urbanism; Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition

Stephen Graham — 2006-05-01T06:24:28-00:00

(01 June 2001)

This work offers a path-breaking analysis of the nature of the urban condition at the start of the new millennium. Adopting a global and interdisciplinary perspective, it reveals how new technologies and increasingly privatised systems of infrastructure provision--telecommunications, highways, urban streets, energy, and water--are supporting the splintering of metropolitan areas across the world.

Urban Sprawl and Public Health: Designing, Planning, and Building for Healthy Communities

Howard Frumkin — 2007-08-24T17:06:25-00:00

(09 July 2004)

In Urban Sprawl and Public Health, Howard Frumkin, Lawrence Frank, and Richard Jackson, three of the nation's leading public health and urban planning experts explore an intriguing question: How does the physical environment in which we live affect our health? For decades, growth and development in our communities has been of the low-density, automobile-dependent type known as sprawl. The authors examine the direct and indirect impacts of sprawl on human health and well-being, and discuss the prospects for improving public health through alternative approaches to design, land use, and transportation. Urban Sprawl and Public Health offers a comprehensive look at the interface of urban planning, architecture, transportation, community design, and public health. It summarizes the evidence linking adverse health outcomes with sprawling development, and outlines the complex challenges of developing policy that promotes and protects public health. Anyone concerned with issues of public health, urban planning, transportation, architecture, or the environment will want to read Urban Sprawl and Public Health.

Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory

Edward Soja — 2007-08-24T13:34:17-00:00

(09 February 1989)

Thirdspace: Expanding the Geographical Imagination

Edward Soja — 2007-08-24T13:32:02-00:00

(01 October 1996)

Contemporary critical studies have recently experienced a significant spatial turn. In what may eventually be seen as one of the most important intellectual and political developments in the late twentieth century, scholars have begun to interpret space and the embracing spatiality of human life with the same critical insight and emphasis that has traditionally been given to time and history on the one hand, and social relations and society on the other. Thirdspace is both an enquiry into the origins and impact of the spatial turn and an attempt to expand the scope and practical relevance of how we think about space and such related concepts as place, location, landscape, architecture, environment, home, city, region, territory, and geography.The book's central argument is that spatial thinking, or what has been called the geographical or spatial imagination, has tended to be bicameral, or confined to two approaches. Spatiality is either seen as concrete material forms to be mapped, analyzed, and explained; or as mental constructs, ideas about and representations of space and its social significance. Edward Soja critically re-evaluates this dualism to create an alternative approach, one that comprehends both the material and mental dimensions of spatiality but also extends beyond them to new and different modes of spatial thinking.Thirdspace is composed as a sequence of intellectual and empirical journeys, beginning with a spatial biography of Henri Lefebvre and his adventurous conceptualization of social space as simultaneously perceived, conceived, and lived. The author draws on Lefebvre to describe a trialectics of spatiality that threads though all subsequent journeys, reappearing in many new forms in bell hooks evocative exploration of the margins as a space of radical openness; in post-modern spatial feminist interpretations of the interplay of race, class, and gender; in the postcolonial critique and the new cultural politics of difference and identity; in Michel Foucault's heterotopologies and trialectics of space, knowledge, and power; and in interpretative tours of the Citadel of downtown Los Angeles, the Exopolis of Orange County, and the Centrum of Amsterdam.

Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions

Edward Soja — 2007-08-24T10:42:26-00:00

(31 March 2000)

The Los Angeles School of Urbanism: An Intellectual History

M Dear — 2007-08-24T09:57:30-00:00

pp. 493-509.

Los Angeles, or more precisely, the Southern California region, has many claims on our attention, but until recently it has been regarded as an exception to the rules governing American urban development. Since the mid-1980s, a remarkable outpouring of scholarship has given birth to a "Los Angeles School" of urbanism. This essay outlines the intellectual history of the LA School, explains the distinctiveness of its break with previous traditions (especially those of the Chicago School), and advocates the need for a comparative urban analysis that utilizes Los Angeles not as a new urban "paradigm," but as one of many exemplars of contemporary urban process.