Abstract
What do we mean by the changing nature of urban change? First of all, in the 20th and 21st centuries, cities have been changing in different and dramatic ways, whether through grassroots mobilizations, through technological leaps, or through profit-driven speculations. Second, our understanding of how cities change has also been evolving, in particularly through empirical work that challenges the broad-brush universalizations of conventional thinking. The authors of the six selected articles take us through an around-the-world tour of cities and regions that range from Mulhouse in France to Dakar in Senegal to Las Vegas in the United States to Bogota in Colombia and beyond. Each author carefully examines the nature of urban change and how planners, developers, and citizens are either dealing with that change or even shaping it. Together, what the articles suggest is that we need a more fine-grained understanding of the city as flux in order to obtain better theoretical insights as well as urban practices that can better manage and ultimately shape urban change to benefit citizens, especially those who are marginalized.
Highlights
Urbanists— those with backgrounds in pro‐ fessional fields like architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and city planning—tend to be trained to view the city as an object that is planned, designed, and built according to definitive visions
The article “Fits‐and‐Starts: The Changing Nature of the Material City” by Aseem Inam (2022) pushes our understanding of cities in flux much further by examining one type of prominent urban change— ”fits‐and‐starts”—which is concentrated in space and time and that has high economic and environmental costs
The building of Potosí in Bogotá is not an isolated or exceptional phe‐ nomenon but rather part of larger struggles that tend to be marginalized in the way change is conceptualized and has to be brought into conversation with differ‐ ent experiences in other cities, which this thematic issue endeavors to do. This thematic issue of Urban Planning on the topic “City as Flux: Interrogating the Changing Nature of Urban Change” invited scholars who study urban change but are interested in matters of practice, including those that can lead to meaningful change such as fundamental urban transformation
Summary
Urbanists— those with backgrounds in pro‐ fessional fields like architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and city planning—tend to be trained to view the city as an object that is planned, designed, and built according to definitive visions. While urban geographers and historians have stud‐ ied change for quite a while, such thinking has not yet permeated the world of urban practice in a meaningful manner. Why would such a reversal of ontological pri‐ orities be helpful? It would be helpful for three reasons. It would enable researchers to obtain a more complete understanding of the micro‐processes of urban change at work. As well as not knowing much about the micro‐processes of change, we often do not know enough about how change is accomplished. In order to understand this, we would need analysis of urbanism that was fine‐grained enough to show how change was accomplished on the ground; that is, how ideas were translated into action, and by so doing, how they got modified, adapted, and changed. Strategies for change that are informed by that view often do not produce change, let alone transformation
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