Cities Of Tomorrow Research Articles

Book Review: Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design since 1880

Book Review: <i>Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design since 1880</i>

From Today's City to Tomorrow's City: An Empirical Investigation of Urban Land Assembly

Because urban areas are fundamentally constrained by the boundaries of land ownership, economic and technological shocks cannot modify the urban landscape without also changing the delineation of land. In this paper, we ask if urban land markets are capable of producing such changes in land delineation. Specifically, we test if there is enough land assembly – the legal joining together of two or more parcels of land – to put land to its highest value use. Failure to assemble land may reduce agglomerative benefits, produce urban blight, push growth to the city edge and away from the core; ultimately it may cause cities to forfeit economic growth. We develop a simple theoretical framework which provides a testable hypothesis: in the absence of market frictions, the price of land sold for assembly should not exceed the price of land sold for other uses. This hypothesis does not hold when frictions, such as holdouts and land use regulation, drive the market for land assembly. We test this hypothesis using a novel data set that follows each of the 2.3 million parcels in Los Angeles County over a twelve year period and allows us to observe all instances of assembly. Using panel data methods, we find that to-be-assembled land trades at a 40 percent premium. Thus, we find that urban land markets are subject to significant frictions that prevent assemblies and produce sclerotic urban redevelopment. Additional empirical results suggest that private market frictions, such as holdouts, play an important role in blocking assembly.

Sir Peter Geoffrey Hall

Sir Peter Geoffrey Hall

Gaetano Vinaccia’s (1881–1971) Theoretical Work on the Relationship between Microclimate and Urban Design

Because of his classification as a minor architect, Gaetano Vinaccia’s (1881–1971) role in the history of architecture has not been studied in depth. Despite the fact that his impact on the debate about rational architecture was limited, the depth and scientific accuracy of his theoretical contribution to the field of microclimatology in relation to urban design issues deserve to be highlighted, especially today when environmental and bioclimatic questions arise strongly in architecture and planning. Thus, this work aims to reconsider this figure by describing the—unfavorable—context in which his work evolved, by bringing to light his most brilliant statements, by reading his scientific productions, and by starting to consider the validity of some of Vinaccia’s intuitions and their actual correspondence with contemporary research. The question of whether Vinaccia can be considered as an innovator (or not) largely derives from the point of view of architectural criticism and the fact that he did not have a well-defined discipline in which to be classified. Despite the fact that his The City of Tomorrow (1943–1952), which is the first complete treatise on the subject, reveals that he was an absolute pioneer, he has had no chance to influence architecture and urbanism until today.

Food and planning: reimaging the city of tomorrow?

Dopo aver brevemente delineato i tratti dell’emergente comunita scientifica attorno alla nozione di ‘sustainable food planning’, il presente articolo analizza criticamente tre dei segnali che maggiormente connotano il manifestarsi di questa nuova sensibilita urbana verso il cibo che nel corso dell’ultimo decennio ha iniziato a prendere piede nel nord del mondo: il riconoscimento del cibo come sistema urbano e territoriale, nonche oggetto di studio e competenza anche della pianificazione; l’entrata in campo della citta come attore, e non solo mero ricettore, attraverso la messa a punto di nuovi strumenti di governo locale, quali piani e strategie per il sistema agro-alimentare urbano; e, infine, l’affermarsi di nuovi attori e luoghi istituzionali a sostegno dell’intero processo di recupero della conoscenza e di individuazione delle possibili azioni da intraprendere a livello locale

Aerial Homesteading: Aerofuturism in Interwar America

Aviation . . . operates in a medium which knows no frontiers but touches alike all countries of the earth.-Franklin D. Roosevelt, Letter to the National Aviation Forum (1939)1The airplane indicts the city.-Le Corbusier, Aircraft (1935)2Fantastic sky cities and streamlined aerial dwellings prominently marked the American popular culture of the 1930s. Colorfully populated by aviators, scientists, and villains, and attracting high-altitude skirmishes, odd hermitages, and thinly wrought romances, the futuristic technological utopias of the interwar aerial imaginary did not rise in a vacuum. Rather, they were the most current addition to a long-standing Western discourse network of speculative aerial literature and culture, or aerofuturism} Or so imagined Hugo Gernsback, prominent figure of 1930s speculative fiction.4 He mused that the contemporary air stories like those he edited and published in Air Wonder Stories (1929-30) channeled an aerofuturist transgenerational dialogue that put works such as Edgar Allan Poe's Hoax (1844), Jules Verne's African intrigue in Five Weeks in a Balloon (1869), and H. G. Wells's belligerent European tale The War in the Air (1908) in conversation.5 In addition to being part of an enduring discourse of aerial fantasy, however, the fantastic air dwellings of the 1930s also underscored a technological utopianism specific to the American interwar imaginary. These air cities consolidated the public interest in the newest aviation technologies and the changing idea of the Western frontier, and they became a way to mediate public fears regarding global cityscapes increasingly threatened by aerial warfare.At first glance, the homesteads and cities of 1930s aerofuturism that fascinated and discursively linked authors, designers, engineers, and policymakers during the interwar period overtly use air space as America's next variant of the Western frontier. Of these aerial dwellings, two vibrant and seemingly oppositional collections stand out.6 On the one hand is the collective air pulp fiction of the early 1930s, where air becomes a place for imagined homesteading atop striking sky cities. Appearing often and prominently in publications such as Hugo Gernsback's Air Wonder Stories, these aerial built environments offered an array of different lodgings: a house in the clouds, myriad floating islands, massive sky cities, and even, once, the airborne remnants of Atlantis (see figures 1 and 2). The pulps reveal complex aerial lineages to historic architectures but consistently discard utopian facades as their plots devolve into chaos and cities in flames.Seemingly in contrast to such Byzantine integrations with the preexisting city and exuding hyperutopian aesthetics, on the other hand, were the remarkable aerofuturist conurbations at the 1939 New York World's Fair, which include Democracity, Focal Exhibit No. 5, and Futurama. Their building faces, cloaked in the architecture of pristine optimism, were quite removed from the heady fatalism of the air pulp fiction. Tomorrow's cities viewed through aerial perspectives at the World's Fair offered radical utopian spaces abstracted from existing historical built environments. Equally built upon the geographic idea of the American frontier, with massive, detailed cities viewed from the air or lifted into the sky, these aerial structures were built upon broad expanses of undeveloped earth that, unlike the air pulp fiction earlier in the decade, ignored an air-war analog and radically erased the references to cities of the past.Existing scholarship tends to mirror this perceived difference between the two air-city collections, with many critics noting that the pulp fiction of the early 1920s offers the simple, earnest, purely utopian tradition that is noticeably on the decline by the 1930s/ which fits with the wary use of it in the air pulps whose sky utopias quickly and consistently move to dystopian ruin. Regarding the World's Fair, in contrast, even the sharpest critics who examine its aerocities tend to attribute the city functions to an earnest, naive utopianism of the time and place of the exhibition. …

Cities of Tomorrow: A Synthesis of Virtual and Physical Communities

Abstract The pervasive presence of technology impacts methods of expression, identity, forms of social relationships, and ways of learning. Designing educational experiences requires an understanding of the new dynamics being brought on by ubiquitous computing and learning made possible through emergent digital technologies. This essay employs a vision of the contemporary city as a framework in understanding the technical and social aspects of art education in an age of digital visual information. The essay specifically draws on Lynch’s (1960) theory of visual perception of the city, which studies the material image of the city held by its inhabitants. This essay also takes Jacobs’s (1961) considerations beyond forms and tools to the living extensions of individuals and communities. The essay illuminates the argument that technology-mediated communication has transformed our notion of the relation between place and community, and moves beyond discussions of "technology as a tool" to focus on the relational combination of technology, communities, institutions, and societies. In this view, co-location is enacted and represented differently in actual and virtual spaces (Schroeder, 2006), each of which uniquely shape educational interactions.

Beyond Defining the Smart City. Meeting Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches in the Middle

This paper aims to better frame the discussion and the various, divergent operationalisations and interpretations of the Smart City concept. We start by explicating top-down approaches to the Smart City, followed by what purely bottom-up initiatives can look like. We provide a clear overview of stakeholders’ different viewpoints on the city of tomorrow. Particularly the consequences and potential impacts of these differing interpretations and approaches should be of specific interest to researchers, policy makers, city administrations, private actors and anyone involved and concerned with life in cities. Therefore the goal of this article is not so much answering the question of what the Smart City is, but rather what the concept can mean for different stakeholders as well as the consequences of their interpretation. We do this by assembling an eclectic overview, bringing together definitions, examples and operationalisations from academia, policy and industry as well as identifying major trends and approaches to realizing the Smart City. We add to the debate by proposing a different approach that starts from the collective, collaboration and context when researching Smart City initiatives.

Tomorrow's cities: a framework to assess urban resilience

Urbanisation is one of the great driving forces of the twenty-first century. Cities generate both productivity and creativity, and the benefits offered by high-density living and working contribute to sustainability. Cities comprise multiple components, forming both static and dynamic systems that are interconnected directly and indirectly on a number of levels. Bringing together large numbers of people within a complex system can lead to vulnerability from a wide range of hazards, threats and trends. The key to reducing this vulnerability is the identification of critical systems and determination of the implications of their failure and their interconnectivities with other systems. One emerging approach to these challenges focuses on building resilience – defined here as the degree to which a system can continue to function effectively in a changing environment. This paper puts forward a framework designed to help engineers, planners and designers to support cities in understanding the hazards, threats and trends that can make them vulnerable, and identify focus areas for building resilience into the systems, which allow it to function and prosper. Four case studies of cities whose resilience was tested by recent extreme weather events are presented, seeking to demonstrate the application of the proposed framework.

Mega Screens for Mega Cities

This article considers how networked large urban screens can act as a platform for the creation of an experimental transnational public sphere. It takes as a case study a specific Australia-Korea cultural event that linked large screens in Federation Square, Melbourne, and Tomorrow City, Incheon, 1 through the presentation of SMS-based interactive media art works. The article combines theoretical analyses of global citizenship, mobility, digital technologies, and networked public space with empirical analyses of audience response research data collected during the screen event. The central argument is that large public screens can offer a strategic site for examining transformations in the constitution of public agency in a digitized, globalized environment. The idea of ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ is finally proposed as a conceptual framework for understanding how new forms of transnational public agency in mediated public spaces might operate.

Guiding in the City of Tomorrow: Materializing the Future Through Future and Present Components

This paper explores an intrinsic case of a guided tour of a future city: Stockholm Royal Seaport. Whereas guided city tours usually aim at educating and enlightening those guided about the past and present of the place visited – building the truth claim by relating what is said in the tour to the physical environment of the tour – the case described in this paper offers the opportunity to explore how the urban future is made material to those guided. The study shows that the guide's actions materialized the urban future in two ways: by using future components of the future and by using present components of the future. Based on this analysis, we conclude that both these ways function as ways of confirming the present.

How IT-Enabled Services Can Help to Change our World Building Networks for the Energy-Efficient City of Tomorrow

How natural resources are used in modern society is considered a high-priority topic within national and international political and social debate. Increases in energy efficiency, the use of renewable energy sources and emission control are important aspects of this subject that must be considered. A deeper understanding of existing infrastructure and the willingness to change on an individual and social level are needed, while determining factors like demographic change are taken into account. This paper introduces the energy-efficient city of tomorrow as a city of socio-technical networks that interact and are a basis for energy-related optimizations. Furthermore, the authors discuss the special role that IT-enabled services can play in understanding and changing those networks. To illustrate, the authors present a service as a case study that illustrates how services can provides relevant information and help to induce change.

Thinking Caused by Rereading Howard's &lt;i&gt;Garden Cities of Tomorrow&lt;/i&gt; after a Century

Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow is the first professional book of modern city plan in general, but there are many misunderstandings of the book and writer today. To be strict, Garden Cities of Tomorrow is not a book of city plan simply and Howard is not a traditional city planner. Although Howard's idea of “Sociable Cities” involves clear thinking of social reformism utopian, Garden Cities of Tomorrow is the most important and influential masterpiece in the history of city plan in the 20th century.

Designing tomorrow: America's world's fairs of the 1930s

In midst of Great Depression, America's World's Fairs of 1930s gave hope to millions, sustaining assembled with visions of future progress. These grand expositions in Chicago, San Diego, Dallas, Cleveland, New York, and San Francisco showcased an optimistic, consumerist future society and symbolized Modernist message of progress through design. Designing Tomorrow celebrates influence and impact of these international expositions. Offering an overview of fairs and detailed discussions of individual works, distinguished authors examine how designers reconciled radical European Modern style with American tradition. Works by Edward H. Bennet, Gilbert Rohde, George Keck, Richard Neutra, and others illuminate ways in which Modernism became an integral component of vocabulary of American design. Additional essays highlight visual power of these expositions, featuring rare artifacts and photographs of objects including models and plans for the houses and cities of tomorrow, streamlined trains, modern furnishings, and first televisions.

Urban Food Security: Feeding Tomorrow's Cities

Abstract Urban food riots have already destabilised governments. Can the world's cities be fed? Paul Teng, Margarita Escaler and Mely Caballero-Anthony say that city-dwellers may have to grow more of their own food.

Rethinking tomorrow's cities: Emerging issues on city foresight

Rethinking tomorrow's cities now, builds our capacity to act with foresight and create resilient and liveable places. I use methods from the futures studies field, particularly macrohistory, to provoke our current patterns of city making. From macrohistory, the grand patterns of social change reveal some of the key systems dynamics influencing the rise and fall of cities in civilisation. The key urban system dynamics in the broadest sense provide a meta-framework of emerging issues shaping new urban challenges or opportunities for our towns and cities. The hope drawn from the past and present is to focus our urban interventions in the key areas to create future cities of wonder and purpose. The implications of the emerging issues (critical focus areas of city foresight) that arise from the macrohistorical analysis are discussed using the case study of the Maroochy 2025 community visioning project. 2025 is a community driven project to develop shared visions and action plans for the Maroochy Shire 1 1 Maroochy Shire is a “sea change” community on the Sunshine coast in Queensland Australia, and is dealing with rapid population increase, major infrastructure and social issues and significant demographic changes. towards the year 2025, for the purpose of creating an empowering and community owned response to the challenges facing them locally and globally.

The Revanchist Renewal of Yesterday's City of Tomorrow

Although planned as the City of Tomorrow, the Bijlmer district in Amsterdam quickly became the quintessential symbol of urban decline. Today, even with half of the planned renewal of the Bijlmer completed, the alleged success of this urban revitalisation programme is questionable. Parts of the middle class did not move out and some are even returning to the Bijlmer; the combination is producing a type of black gentrification, which forces the undesirables like drug users, homeless people and undocumented immigrants to leave. This revanchist renewal not only benefits the middle and lower-class population of the district, but it also serves the interests of private developers. European revanchism makes the city safe for corporate investment and aims to restore social order as well as stimulating the development of a strong middle class. This paper demonstrates how hard revanchist policies are demanded not only by private developers but also by the middle and lower classes, and they exist alongside soft caring policies, even for the undesirables.

Measuring the structural determinants of urban travel demand

To be best prepared for tomorrow's cities we need to forecast urban travel demand. To this end, this study calibrates an urban travel demand model, which uses the principal structural variables that have been identified in the literature. It uses a robust econometric method, which has been little applied in the sphere of transportation. The results show that two variables stand out from the others: the user cost of transport – by private car and public transport – and urban density. It is surprising, but explicable with the available data, that the demand functions estimated for a given country are independent from the group of countries to which it belongs.

The role of municipal committees in the development of an integrated urban water policy in Belo Horizonte, Brazil

This paper discusses the challenges involved in adopting an integrated approach to urban water policies and management, a particularly problematic issue in Brazil due to the incomplete nature of urbanization, defined as the lack of adequate and/or universalized access to infrastructure and services, informal housing and conflicts between environmental protection and social housing needs. In the last two decades strong social movements have influenced urban environmental policies from national to local levels. In Belo Horizonte since 1993, decision-making processes have involved important mechanisms of democratic inclusion, which have contributed to fairer urban policies. A brief discussion of the concept of governance follows, introducing the municipal urban policy within which drainage and sanitation policies have been implemented. This paper presents the constitutional and institutional role of the five municipal committees dealing with water governance issues, as they are important arenas for civil society participation. The main constraints to achieving integrated urban water governance at the local level and the extent to which such policies are able to reduce social inequalities and promote social environmental justice in the use and appropriation of urban water, are discussed. This paper is part of the SWITCH-Sustainable Water Management Improves Tomorrow's Cities' Health-research network.

City of the future

The article presents a Malmo suburb in Sweden as the city of the future. It highlights the struggles of the city for sustainable living to become a model for the city of tomorrow.