Cities Look Research Articles

Constructivism in the Urals: 21st century studies

The article features a comprehensive review of recent research on the history of Constructivism in the Urals. Various experimental urban solutions in Ural cities and towns, innovative models of quarter planning, and the typological diversity of public, residential, and industrial buildings built in Constructivist style makes Ural region distinct from other parts of the country. The introduction of contemporary building materials and designs and novel research into the usage of space can be seen in diverse buildings in Perm, Chelyabinsk, Magnitogorsk, Kurgan, Nizhny Tagil, Sverdlovsk, Zlatoust, Nadezhdinsk, and others. The social and artistic direction of Constructivism as an ultra-modern creative movement greatly influenced the new architectural look of cities in the Urals. It also transformed the language of architecture and the visual imagery of buildings: it allowed for the creation of new, unprecedented architectural types and changed people’s ideas about convenience, style, and quality of life. From the mid-1930s until the early 1990s, many towns in the Urals were closed off to foreign researchers: the publication of books and articles about Constructivism was also prohibited. This is why the first serious publications about the Constructivist heritage of the Urals appeared only at the beginning of the 21 st century. Thus began a rise in scholarship on this subject.

After the trawl: Memory and afterlife in the wake of Hull’s distant-water fishing industry

This paper offers an overview of Byrne’s recent research into the economic, social, spatial and cultural consequences of the decline of Hull’s distant-water trawl fishery after the 1976 Cod Wars. The research combines documentary sources with oral history narratives to examine memories of decline and adjustment, at sea and on shore, as a once localised industry turned towards a global arena. In cultural terms, Byrne establishes the longstanding ties between industry, district and workforce in the dockside neighbourhood of Hessle Road, before engaging narratives of fractured place-based relationships to explore the ensuing divorce between a maritime industry and its cultural landscape. Finally, as Hull’s trawl fishery recedes in terms of popular memory, the research examines how fishing heritage is currently represented by groups in the modern city and seeks the ‘right place’ for a fishing past as the city looks to the future.

Great cities look small.

Great cities connect people; failed cities isolate people. Despite the fundamental importance of physical, face-to-face social ties in the functioning of cities, these connectivity networks are not explicitly observed in their entirety. Attempts at estimating them often rely on unrealistic over-simplifications such as the assumption of spatial homogeneity. Here we propose a mathematical model of human interactions in terms of a local strategy of maximizing the number of beneficial connections attainable under the constraint of limited individual travelling-time budgets. By incorporating census and openly available online multi-modal transport data, we are able to characterize the connectivity of geometrically and topologically complex cities. Beyond providing a candidate measure of greatness, this model allows one to quantify and assess the impact of transport developments, population growth, and other infrastructure and demographic changes on a city. Supported by validations of gross domestic product and human immunodeficiency virus infection rates across US metropolitan areas, we illustrate the effect of changes in local and city-wide connectivities by considering the economic impact of two contemporary inter- and intra-city transport developments in the UK: High Speed 2 and London Crossrail. This derivation of the model suggests that the scaling of different urban indicators with population size has an explicitly mechanistic origin.

Tshwane and spaces of power in South Africa

South Africa has multiple national capitals. The largest arm of the government – the executive and administration – is seated in Pretoria whose municipal authority has adopted the name City of Tshwane since the regime change of 1994. Founded in 1855, the city now has 3 million inhabitants: it is also part of a much larger ‘city region’, including Johannesburg, with a population over 12 million, concentrating the major part of economic power in the country. The city has witnessed, indeed to some extent hosted, remarkable changes in South African society over the past two decades. Most obviously, the composition of the government has altered greatly. Yet these signs of change are not unilateral; beside the persistence of older forms, there exist obvious elements of symbolic change. The ways the city looks, is laid out, and functions are elaborated. This paper considers the national and global positioning of the city.

Lust, Commerce, and Corruption: An Account of What I Have Seen and Heard, by an Edo Samurai by Mark Teeuwen et al. (review)

Reviewed by: Lust, Commerce, and Corruption: An Account of What I Have Seen and Heard, by an Edo Samurai by Mark Teeuwen et al. Laura Nenzi Lust, Commerce, and Corruption: An Account of What I Have Seen and Heard, by an Edo Samurai. Translated by Mark Teeuwen, Kate Wildman Nakai, Miyazaki Fumiko, Anne Walthall, and John Breen. Edited and introduced by Mark Teeuwen and Kate Wildman Nakai. Columbia University Press, 2014. 496 pages. Hardcover $50.00/£34.50. In the opening and closing scenes of the film Garibaldi’s Lovers (Il comandante e la cicogna, directed by Silvio Soldini, 2012), a dejected Giuseppe Garibaldi—in the form of his equestrian statue erected near the busy intersection of a contemporary Italian city—looks down at the country he had helped create a century and a half earlier and bemoans its sorry state. What the general sees from his vantage point atop the monument is a parade of backstabbers, vandals, and buffoons engaging in acts of incivility, abuse, and deception: “They yearn not for the common good or for justice,” he laments; “they’ve lost sight of real ideals and are duped by petty promises.” Unlike Garibaldi, the samurai who penned Seji kenbunroku (Matters of the World: An Account of What I Have Seen and Heard, 1816) under the pseudonym Buyō Inshi did not contribute to the unification of his country, but in many ways his comments echo those of the maker of modern Italy, or at least those of his cinematographic reincarnation. Like Garibaldi, Buyō, too, laments the decline of a society that has forgotten the ideals upon which it was built and in which almost everyone has been “carried away by luxury and crimes of passion” (p. 345). To the joy of scholars and instructors of early modern Japanese history, Buyō’s woeful assessment of his times is now available in English as Lust, Commerce, and Corruption: An Account of What I Have Seen and Heard, by an Edo Samurai. The book is highly accessible owing to the quality of the translation; the inclusion of several maps and a glossary; the addition of annotations and citations of the sources Buyō quotes without attribution; and the editorial choice to break down Buyō’s narrative into distinct sections absent in the original work. Moreover, the delightfully thorough introductory essay (“Buyō Inshi and His Times”) situates Buyō’s work within its broader historical context and offers a compelling list of the specific events that likely shaped his worldview: the ineffective reforms launched during the Kyōhō and Kansei periods, which resulted in compromises with merchants rather than in the curbing of their powers, and the economic woes of the Kantō region, which Buyō “projects . . . on Japan as a whole” (p. 27). Thus, Lust, Commerce, and Corruption makes a difficult and important Edo-period text not only accessible to students but useful to scholars as well. [End Page 155] Buyō’s work is a good reminder that, for some observers of the time, the glitzy urban culture of the late Edo period did not elicit feelings of joy and celebration, but of nostalgia and disappointment. The gist of Buyō’s argument is that the Great Peace “transformed the world” (p. 42), paving the way for freedoms and excesses that turned a once-perfect society on its head. Money ruined everything, according to Buyō; as he puts it, “the world has grown too prosperous for its own good” (p. 175). The only way to halt the collapse of society entails a return to the ways of the past. Buyō’s holy grail is the age of the Divine Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu, about whom he always speaks “in awe” (p. 426) and in virtually hagiographic terms. Buyō’s lengthy disquisition on the ills of his day opens with a somber assessment of the detrimental repercussions of peace and affluence on the samurai: some warriors have become “concerned solely with convenience” (p. 42), others are destitute and “with their backs against the wall” (p. 59), and most have lost any sense of what it means to be a fighter and “have become like women” (p. 43). In chapter 2, Buyō turns to the farmers, scolding those who...

Composing Urban Orders from Rubbish Electronics: Cityness and the Site Multiple

AbstractWhat do cities look like when rubbish electronics are the vehicle with which they are explored? This article is an experiment designed to offer a response to that question, and in doing so to productively intervene in the conversation about ‘cityness', ‘metrocentricity' and ‘subaltern urbanism'. We intervene by following flows of rubbish electronics and the action that enacts them as waste and value, drawing on fieldwork in Dhaka, Singapore, Accra and Canada's Greater Golden Horseshoe. Our intervention is an experiment in writing an urban geography of rubbish electronics as a site multiple. We show how following the circulation of rubbish electronics offers a manyfolded synopsis of cities: urban enclaves of high finance and the information economy are also industrial waste producers. Peri‐urban industrial zones are also managers of brands, legal liability and corporate public relations. Cities off the map are also urban innovation systems, while waste is rekindled as value and accumulated as poison. Thereby we suggest how a sensitivity to the site multiple may be a helpful way of grappling with shifting ontology and the performativity of our research practices in urban studies.

Alcohol Ads on Public Transit: Policies From Major Metropolitan Areas in the United States

The harm and costs to society from underage drinking are significant, conservatively estimated at $27 billion annually in the United States. Youth exposed to more alcohol advertising start drinking earlier, consume more, and experience more alcohol‐related problems. Despite contributions of alcohol advertising to youth exposure and harm, some cities look to alcohol ads on public transit for new revenue. We conducted this limited study to describe the presence and types of alcohol advertising policies for public transit in major metropolitan areas in the United States. We analyzed policies from agencies in major metropolitan areas to find whether they ban or allow alcohol advertising on public transit. We then categorized alcohol ad ban language according to its location in agency policy, contract requirements, or government policy. Thirteen agencies (50 percent) explicitly banned alcohol advertising in contract language, formal agency policy, government policy, or a combination of these. Another 13 (50 percent) allowed alcohol advertising. Despite industry claims, agencies and cities can refuse alcohol ads and adopt formal policy to ban alcohol advertising on public transit. Future revenue could be gained from advertising products that do not pose serious threats to public health and safety, especially to youth.

Conventions and Gaming in Las Vegas: Friends, Enemies, or Strangers?

As cities look at various industries to strengthen their economies, officials have begun to examine conventions and gaming more closely as they have often been considered “recession-proof.” This study utilizes time series regression to analyze the effects of convention attendance and hotel occupancy on monthly gaming revenues for Las Vegas from 2002 to 2013. Three commonly held opposing viewpoints in trade literature are that conventions reduce, augment, or complement gaming. These viewpoints produced the hypotheses for this study. It was found that convention attendance had no significant relationship with gaming revenue; however, citywide hotel occupancy was found to have a significant positive relationship with gaming revenue. This finding rules out the reduction and augmentation hypotheses.

Heather D. DeHaan. Stalinist City Planning: Professionals, Performance, and Power.

The leaders of the Soviet Union had as their avowed goal the construction of a socialist society. But never before in history had there been a socialist state, and there was no blueprint for building socialism. A consensus existed among Communist Party members that socialist construction required industrialization and urbanization, but what would Soviet cities look like? How would they differ from urban centers in capitalist countries? Stalinist city planners had a crucial role to play in shaping the new Soviet society. They were responsible for the layout of new and expanding cities, and they also allocated space to competing urban interests, thereby determining the prominence of industrial, educational, medical, and retail facilities and institutions. These city planners are the subject of Heather D. DeHaan's excellent monograph. DeHaan focuses on professional planners in Nizhny Novgorod, an important industrial center east of Moscow on the Volga River. The head planner, Alexander Platonovich Ivanitskii, arrived in Nizhny Novgorod in 1928 to oversee the city's rapid expansion during the First Five-Year Plan. Though not a Communist Party member, he embraced Soviet power for the opportunity it afforded him to fashion a more rational and productive society. Like many other non-party professionals, both in urban planning and in other fields, he shared a number of goals with party leaders and even accepted their assault upon private property, given that it expanded officials' control of urban space. In DeHaan's nuanced reading, Ivanitskii and other planners were neither collaborators with nor victims of the Stalinist regime. Unable to realize the Western ideal of autonomous professionalism, they worked within the Soviet system to pursue their seldom-achieved agenda of scientific and aesthetic urban design.

The Natural City: Re-Envisioning the Built Environment

The Natural City: Re-Envisioning the Built Environment

‘You’re making our city look bad’: Olympic security, neoliberal urbanization, and homeless youth

Drawing on ethnographic research with homeless and street-involved youth in Vancouver before, during, and after the 2010 Olympic Games, this article offers a portrait of neoliberal urbanization as experienced by a city’s most marginalized residents. Taking as paradigmatic the aspirational goals of Olympic host cities to enhance their reputation as ‘global cities’, the article explores what this means for homeless youth through three processes: city cleansing, city marketing, and self-regulation. Examining how each of these are imbricated with policing and security practices, the article offers an in-depth look at how these abstractions are lived by homeless youth in the everyday. The article concludes by suggesting that marginalized young people are not the beneficiaries of Olympic legacies, despite promises made by organizing committees. In contrast, findings indicate that homeless young people are further marginalized by the Olympics, providing support for previous research that aligns mega-events with neoliberal outcomes.

San Antonio As a Face of the Future

San Antonio As a Face of the Future

Night Ferry

Night Ferry Richie Hofmann (bio) I. Night Ferry Everywhere the city looks over my shoulder. The air grows colder and sticks to wet stones, the old houses rescued from the rising water, even the covered boat where I take refuge from the wind, still it tousles the pages of my guidebook. The ferry disengages from the docks, and I am far away. The Adriatic salts the undersides of boats as they depart from the city, fade. I lean and see what is made in their wake. I know I will not find my dissolution here in this city of water and stone, where I’m a hierophant to the past. They enchant me, these things. I always knew they’d make the veil I’d glimpse things through. Tonight, distantly, the cold air comes off the square, where all those people, bundled in winter coats, line up to buy tickets for the boats. Everywhere the city disguises them from each other. The black ferry moves. The water rises in the dark. The people disembark. [End Page 75] II. The Marriage of the Sea The city remembered nothing of what I dreamed. Only how strange it seemed from the water when the Doge’s hand, or his black glove, opened, and he released the ring to wed the Adriatic, and the ring settled twice: first, on the lagoon’s surface, which represented, I thought, the comfort of the living moment, and which yielded to the ring; and, later, in the earth beneath the water, which was fierce as history, and which yielded to it also, after many years, and found stasis in the past, which was its rest, not in the luster of ceremonies, but in the darkness which comes after. III. Self-Portrait in Venetian Mask The mask with a long sharp beak I found, an antique in a store of relics, displayed on the wall. The mask I tried on. Like a shade, it kept me from my life. You, too, have wishedfor something else, you have vanished [End Page 76] almost fully, the mask said, as if a mask critiquing itself could convince me it was not my own mouth speaking. IV. Serenissima Elegy The city cleaved things: together and apart: a bridge restrained one ancient house from another: the whole city was reflected below the city: the bridge where they hanged prisoners: the tableau of bodies held suspended as on a frieze, splendid with color and movement: thousands of bits of glass: small islands of gold and purple and bronze glued into images: a pagan nude with a feather: halos in concentric rings: the rudder cut its dark path through the water, pushing wake to either side, as if sorting testimonies of love from jealousy: from above, it must have looked like the black canal was rent apart, halved, no matter where I went. [End Page 77] Richie Hofmann Richie Hofmann is the recipient of a 2012 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, among other honors. His poems have appeared in a number of magazines, including Poetry, FIELD, Yale Review, and the New Yorker. He is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Copyright © 2013 Middlebury College Publications

A city looks to its past to discover its future: a retrospective case study examining the evolution of an artificial white-water river development

In the 1980s, waterfront redevelopment became a widely accepted strategy related to transforming derelict urban centres from ports to playgrounds. The primary motivating forces behind waterfront redevelopment have been either economic or the ‘abandoned doorstep’ argument with secondary considerations related to improving quality of life by creating open space opportunities for recreation and tourism. While these primary motivating forces behind waterfront redevelopment have been well documented, little attention has been given to the role that unique recreational developments can play in waterfront revitalization efforts. The purpose of this case study was to examine how the construction of an artificial white-water river contributed to a community's revitalization 25 years after its development. Data collection included content analysis of written material dating back 25 years, individual interviews and a focus group with community leaders. At the onset of the construction project, four goals were identified which included to: (1) begin redeveloping the urban core, (2) develop a recreational water feature, (3) extend the park system, and (4) create a fish passage. Findings are categorized based on the a priori goals of the project 25 years ago in addition to two emergent themes: a renewed community identity and operational challenges. The city's ability and vision to develop a comprehensive strategy with a variety of uses has contributed to the role this artificial white-water river has played in revitalizing the community.

To Thrive, Survive, and Prosper as an Ordinary Urbanite

To Thrive, Survive, and Prosper as an Ordinary Urbanite William Jankowiak (bio) Xuefei Ren. Urban China. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. xx, 218 pp. Paperback $22.95, isbn 978-0-7456-5359-4. China, one of the world’s oldest agrarian civilizations, will very soon become one of the world’s youngest urban civilizations. In this brief, albeit impressive, overview, Xuefei Ren has provided a much needed comparative framework for understanding the range of the urban scale and, more important, shows how ordinary Chinese are trying to thrive, survive, and prosper. He focuses on fifteen cities and tries, when possible, to include smaller and mid-range cities, where China is seeing its most rapid growth. The country’s rapid urbanization is helping to lift hundreds of millions of rural Chinese out of poverty. At the same time, the new second-tier cities are locked into a ferocious competition and spawning ambitious development plans. Today, it seems as if every Chinese city wants to develop into a world city with an international airport, six-lane highways, and export zones. The concept of integrated growth, however, appears to be a foreign concept. China has 129 cities with a population over one million, compared to nine in the United States. The Chinese urban population is growing at 2.5 percent a year, making it one of the fastest growing rates in the world. Most of this growth is pushed at the local level, beyond the guidance of central government. The result is often wasteful replication as well as exciting creative innovation. How can we make sense of this enormous social change? Ren argues that the neoliberal model is overly materialistic in its power to explain. It ignores the persistence of historical forces, such as the socialist legacy (e.g., high literacy rates, good education, long adult life expectancy) and its postsocialist institutional arrangements (e.g., creation of township and village enterprises) that laid the structural foundation for China’s economic takeoff. The neoliberal model cannot explain the short period of time in which China has become the second largest economy in the world, nor why other emergent economies—India, Russia, [End Page 38] and Brazil—that also embrace neoliberal policies have not grown at a similar pace. Ren points out that socialist urban policies were characterized as industrialization without urbanization, while in the reform era urbanization was funded through large-scale capital accumulation. In this way, China’s economic boom is an urban boom, and its economic miracle is an urban marvel. Ren discusses how urban sites are governed. He notes that Chinese cities are embedded in a complex system of hierarchical and horizontal authorities. He finds that decision-making power has shifted from central ministries to territorial authorities, especially to its municipal governments. The expansion of cities is directly linked to control over rural land. Nearly three hundred counties have been converted into cities, by order from the central government. This resource of power has provided government officials with the ability to undertake massive urban construction that has changed the urban landscape. This process has further resulted in an expansion of the outward acquisition of more land. The relocation of heavy industries from the inner cities relieves population pressure and encourages property development. Together, these policies have produced a hybrid land market with public ownership and private use rights. Why do Chinese cities look the way they do? An examination in settlement types finds that the state plays a critical role in remaking the city. By pushing policies such as “master plans, sponsorship of international architects, partnerships with private capital, and repression of popular demands” (p. 115), the central government contributed to the creation of numerous satellite towns found on the outskirts of every large Chinese city. The satellite towns serve as entry points for rural migrant workers to transition from the farm to the city. China’s urban transformation has also resulted in a huge socioeconomic status gap: migrants account for only a third of urban residents. China’s antiquated hukou system turns 221 million migrant workers into second-class citizens in their own country. Migrants live in villages in the city (ViCs) (chengzhongcun) that supply them with cheap lodging and proximity...

How polycentric is a monocentric city? Centers, spillovers and hysteresis

We assess the extent to which firms in an environment of decreasing transport costs and industrial transformation value the benefits of proximity to a historic CBD and agglomeration economies in their location decisions. Taking a hybrid perspective of classical bid-rent theory and a world where clustering of economic activity is driven by between-firm spillovers, Berlin, Germany, from 1890 to 1936 serves as a case in point. Our results suggest that the average productivity effect of a doubling of between- firm spillovers over the study period increases from 3.5% to 8.3%. As the city transforms into a service-based economy, several micro agglomerations emerge. Their locations close to the CBD still make the city look roughly monocentric. This is in line with a hysteresis effect in which second-nature geography drives the ongoing strength of a historic city center even though the importance of the originally relevant first-nature geography has vanished.

American Cities and American Political Science—a Look at Thick Injustice

The back cover of Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom's Justice and the American Metropolis concisely lays out a central challenge of contemporary politics: “Today's American cities and suburbs are the sites of ‘thick injustice’—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.” The fact that the topic of “urban politics” is not a major theme of political science scholarship both reflects and exacerbates this challenge. And so we have decided to invite a diverse group of social scientists to discuss the book in light of the very big question that it poses: How do American cities look when assessed in terms of their “justice” (or “injustice”), and how might they look if they were assessed in these terms more seriously? In considering this question, discussants have also been asked to consider a related question: How does American political science look when assessed in terms of the extent to which it takes the question of urban justice and injustice seriously?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

American Cities and American Political Science—a Look at Thick Injustice

The back cover of Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom's Justice and the American Metropolis concisely lays out a central challenge of contemporary politics: “Today's American cities and suburbs are the sites of ‘thick injustice’—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.” The fact that the topic of “urban politics” is not a major theme of political science scholarship both reflects and exacerbates this challenge. And so we have decided to invite a diverse group of social scientists to discuss the book in light of the very big question that it poses: How do American cities look when assessed in terms of their “justice” (or “injustice”), and how might they look if they were assessed in these terms more seriously? In considering this question, discussants have also been asked to consider a related question: How does American political science look when assessed in terms of the extent to which it takes the question of urban justice and injustice seriously?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

American Cities and American Political Science—a Look at Thick Injustice

The back cover of Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom'sJustice and the American Metropolisconcisely lays out a central challenge of contemporary politics: “Today's American cities and suburbs are the sites of ‘thick injustice’—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.” The fact that the topic of “urban politics” is not a major theme of political science scholarship both reflects and exacerbates this challenge. And so we have decided to invite a diverse group of social scientists to discuss the book in light of the very big question that it poses: How do American cities look when assessed in terms of their “justice” (or “injustice”), and how might they look if they were assessed in these terms more seriously? In considering this question, discussants have also been asked to consider a related question: How does Americanpolitical sciencelook when assessed in terms of the extent to which it takes the question of urban justice and injustice seriously?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

American Cities and American Political Science—a Look at Thick Injustice

The back cover of Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom'sJustice and the American Metropolisconcisely lays out a central challenge of contemporary politics: “Today's American cities and suburbs are the sites of ‘thick injustice’—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.” The fact that the topic of “urban politics” is not a major theme of political science scholarship both reflects and exacerbates this challenge. And so we have decided to invite a diverse group of social scientists to discuss the book in light of the very big question that it poses: How do American cities look when assessed in terms of their “justice” (or “injustice”), and how might they look if they were assessed in these terms more seriously? In considering this question, discussants have also been asked to consider a related question: How does Americanpolitical sciencelook when assessed in terms of the extent to which it takes the question of urban justice and injustice seriously?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor