Showing papers on "Urbanism published in 1993"

The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community

Abstract: The costs, problems and realities of urban sprawl are everywhere. What has worked for the past 40 years can not be sustained or expanded further. New Urbanism, dynamic new planning and design concepts, is beginning to provide some hope that past mistakes of urban development need not be repeated. There is a broad and growing trend toward the restoration of community and a preservation of environmental resources. Almost a nostalgic return to smaller and more intimate neighborhoods, new urbanism integrates housing, shops, workplaces, parks and civic facilities into close-knit communities. Walkways, public places and parks are central to the planning. A wide range of housing styles offers affordability to all economic levels of a community. Public transportation is an important part of any design proposal. This book provides 24 case studies describing projects from Seaside in Florida to Cite Internationale in Canada and is an invaluable guide for architects, urban planners, civic leaders and concerned and interested citizens.

Urban Sociology, Capitalism and Modernity

Abstract: Introduction - The Roots of Urban Sociology - The Economic Bases of Urban Form - Inequality and Social Organisation in the City - Perspectives on Urban Culture - Modernity, Post-modernity, and Urban Culture - Urban Politics - Conclusion: Urban Sociology, Capitalism and Modernity - References

The Cultural Meaning of Urban Space

Abstract: Introduction by Robert Rotenberg The Language of Place The Geography of Emptiness by Gary W. McDonogh On the Salubrity of Sites by Robert Rotenberg Chinese Privacy by Deborah Pellow Rediscovering Shitamachi: Subculture, Class, and Tokyo's "Traditional" Urbanism by Theodore C. Bestor Place in the City We Have Always Lived Under the Castle: Historical Symbols and the Maintenance of Meaning by John Mock Cultural Meaning of the Plaza: The History of the Spanish American Gridplan-Plaza Urban Design by Setha M. Low Italian Urbanscape: Intersection of Private and Public by Donald S. Pitkin Mapping Contested Terrains: Schoolrooms and Streetcorners in Urban Belize by Charles Rutheiser Planning and Response Beyond Built Form and Culture in the Anthropological Study of Residential Community Spaces by Margaret Rodman Housing Abandonment in Inner-City Black Neighborhoods: A Case Study of the Effects of the Dual Housing Market by Susan D. Greenbaum Access to the Waterfront: Transformations of Meaning on the Toronto Lakeshore by Matthew Cooper Public Access on the Urban Waterfront: A Question of Vision by R. Timothy Sieber Bibliography Index

Contemporary urban sociology

Abstract: Introduction 1. Contemporary theories of urbanism and community 2. Urban ecology and its critics 3. Urban political economy and its critics 4. The third world and the world system 5. Agency, structure, and urban sociology Bibliography Index of names Index of subjects.

The Pulse Model: Genesis and Accommodation of Specialization in the Middle Niger*

Abstract: By the mid-first millennium a.d., Middle Niger cities took the form of many separate mounds clustered together. Many of these mounds may have been settlements of specialists. This distinctive city form may have had its origin in segmented, but articulated, Late Stone Age communities in the southern Sahara. The Pulse Model is an attempt to reconstruct the circumstances of environmental change and interactions among these communities that encouraged occupational specialization. The model predicts the best locations to search for evidence of early specialization, namely the several north–south trending palaeochannels of the southern Sahara. There, groups increasingly concerned with intensification of production within separate microenvironments would nevertheless have been in close contact. Climate shifts over the past several millennia create a ‘pulse’ of population movements, or shifts of ecological adaptations, along these long corridors. However, adaptation to climate change and stress incompletely explains the emergence of specialization. Tradition, myths, legends and material reinforcements of divisions between present-day ethnic and artisan groups in the Middle Niger suggest the ways in which corporate identity may have been constructed and maintained in the very distant past. If corporate identity can emerge in a form that discourages conflict between groups, the result might be increasingly specialized responses to climate change and to the economic and social opportunities of early urbanism. There should be no sharp discontinuity between the emerging specialization of the last millennia b.c. and the earlier clustered urbanism of cities such as Jenne-jeno. Middle Niger urbanism is an intensification of prehistoric social dynamics, not a revolutionary process.

Urban ecology and health in the third world

Abstract: 1. Human biological approaches to the study of Third World urbanism 2. Social and cultural influences in the risk of cardiovascular disease in urban Brazil 3. The urban disadvantage in the developing world and the physical and mental growth of children 4. Differences in endocrine status associated with urban-rural patterns of growth and maturation in Bundi (Gende speaking) adolescents of Papua New Guinea 5. Nutritionally vulnerable households in the urban slum economy: a case study from Khulna, Bangladesh 6. Urban-rural differences in growth and diarrhoeal morbidity of Filipino infants 7. Child health and growth in urban South Africa 8. From countryside to town in Morocco: ecology, culture and public health 9. Urban-rural population research: a town like Alice 10. Selection for rural-to-urban migrants in Guatemala 11. Health and nutrition in Mixtec Indians 12. Urban health and ecology in Bunia, N-E Zaire, with special reference to the physical development of children 13. Food for thought: meeting a basic need for low income urban residents 14. Immunological parameters in north-east Arnhem Land Aborigines: consequences of changing settlement patterns and lifestyles 15. Amerindians and the price of modernization 16. Sex ratio determinants in Indian populations: studies at national, state and district levels 17. Polarization and depolarization in Africa 18. Urbanization in the Third World: health policy implications Index.

New world complex societies: Recent economic, social, and political studies

Abstract: Archaeologists working on the complex societies of Latin America have made impressive empirical advances on a number of fronts during the past five years. This article focuses on economic, social, and political issues, using the following topics for organization: intensive agriculture, demography, exchange, households, urbanism, chiefdoms, and state-level polities. For each topic, I review recent archaeological research and summarize pertinent theoretical issues. Unfortunately, the heavy accumulation of new archaeological results is not matched by the conceptual advances that are needed to explore the analytical significance of the data.

Modernity, Urbanism, and Modern Consumption: A Comment:

Abstract: The paper by Glennie and Thrift (1992) is a most welcome and penetrating confrontation with the growth in the literature across the social sciences on the topic of consumption. The purpose of this comment is less to question their assessment, although this does not imply agreement with their views nor with their emphases, than to add both to its critical edge and to its constructive potential. The starting point here is to observe that, despite the growing study of consumption across the social sciences, an effective interdisciplinary approach has not emerged—even if there are common themes such as commodification, fragmentation, etc. A natural question is why is this so. From an intellectual point of view, an explanation is to be found in the limited overlap between the separate disciplines in general, although this appears to be stronger in the case of consumption. Further, much of the literature on consumption has been an attempt to comprehend it through the imposition of ready-made theories (usually derived for other purposes). Thus, sociology can employ the concepts of emulation and distinction, anthropology resorts to ritual and symbolism, psychology uses definitions of identity, etc. These concepts arc then applied to consumption or particular items of consumption. In the literature, these approaches either serve mechanically as general theories of consumption (as in economics where, for utility theory, it does not matter which goods are actually involved) and overgeneralise, or they are specific to a particular good (as in masculinity and fast cars, for example) and so cannot form the raw material for integration with other theories and disciplines. Thus, it is possible to derive multidisciplinary approaches by gathering together the explanatory variables from each of the disciplines, but these do not form an interdisciplinary approach. Indeed, whether or not derived from colonising theory previously employed for some other purpose, consumption has been treated within disciplines by the application of internally generated 'horizontal' factors. By this is meant appeal to general factors that apply across society and across consumption as a whole. This poses a considerable barrier to the formation of an interdisciplinary approach.

Urban anthropology in China

Abstract: List of tables List of figures and maps List of photographs Acknowledgements A. AN URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY OF CHINA Of Disciplinary Births, Gregory Eliyu Guldin Present Tasks of Urban Anthropology in China, Ruan Xihu B. COMPARATIVE URBANISM: SOCIALIST AND ASIAN CITIES Introduction: Transcending the Urban-rural Dichotomy, Aidan Southall Urban Theory and the Chinese City, Aidan Southall East European Socialist Cities: How Different Are They?, Ivan Szelenyi Soviet Urbanization Paradoxes, Ovsey Shkaratan Transitional Urbanism Reconsidered: Post-colonial Development of Calcutta and Shangai, Tridib Banerjee Western Planning Concepts and Response to the Metropolitan Transformation Process: Hong Kong's Specific Adaption, R. Yin-Wang Kwok Urbanization and the Urban Policies in Tokyo from 1945 to 1985, Kiyotaga Aoyagi C. CHINESE URBANIZATION Introduction: Small Towns and Urbanization, Aidan Southall The Development of China's Small Towns, Wang Xiaoyi The Political Economy of Chinese Urbanization: Guagdong and the Pearl River Delta Region, Graham E. Johnson An Approach to the Problems of Population Movement and Cultural Adaption in the Urbanizing Pearl River Delta, Zhou Daming Ideology and Pragmatism in China's Urban Land Reform, Vesna Vucinic D. CHINESE URBAN ETHNICITY Introduction: Urban Ethnicity, Aidan Southall The Impact of Cities on the Development and Prosperity of Minority Nationalities in Beijing, Xiong Yu Residential Patterns and their Impact on Han-Tibetan Relations in Lhasa City, the Tibet Autonomous Region, Ma Rong Hui Urban Entrepreneurial in Beijing: State Policy, Ethnoreligious Identity and the Chinese City, Dru C. Gladney Cities, Urbanization and Cultural Change: The Tumote Region of Inner Mongolia, Ma Guoqing Urban Mongols: The Search for Dignity and Gain, William Jankowiak E. CHINESE URBAN CULTURE AND LIFE CYCLE Introduction: Social, economic, and Institutional Life in City Hierarchies and Networks, Aidan Southall Danwei Culture as Urban Culture in Modern China: The Case of Beijingfrom 1949 to 1979, Li Bin Urban Development and Crime in China, Tan Shen and Li Dun Adaption of Rural Family Patterns to Urban Life in Chengdu, Martin King Whyte How Marriage Customs Differ within and without Chongwu town, Huian County, Chen Guoqiang The Family and Economic Life of the Aged in Chinse Cities, Liu Bingfu No Place to Live, no Place to Love: Coping in Shanghai, Deborah Pellow Glossary

Boundaries of the City: The Architecture of Western Urbanism

Abstract: In this study Alan Waterhouse draws on anthropological, social and cultural history, literature, and philosophy to reach an understanding of the roots of Western architecture and city building. He explores the illusion that cities are constructed to impose rational order, an order articulated through urban boundaries. These boundaries, he finds, are shaped around our instinctive fears and insecurities about crime, insurrection, and the violent disruption of everyday life. At the same time, contrary instincts aspire to create a unified domain, to proclaim the interdependence of things through constructed work. Cities are shaped less by rational design than by a recurring dialectic of boundary formation.These impulses underlie the formal vocabulary of architecture and urbanism. Waterhouse follows them through the theories, ideologies, and styles that seem to govern city buildings; he finds their presence in the creation of territorial divisions, and also wherever the cityscape has been shaped by a poetic imagination.Tracing his narrative of urban boundaries from antiquity to the birth of modernism, Waterhouse discovers some stubborn legacies that bind contemporary urban design to the past. Part One explores the boundary dialectic in our regard for deities, for nature, and for one another, and then as a powerful influence on architectural invention and our ways of life. Part Two traces these themes through city building history, to show how architecture and human relatedness are subordinated by boundary formation in the cycles of urbanization."

Urbanism and Kinship Bonds: A Test of Four Generalizations

Abstract: Past research tentatively supports four generalizations: that urbanism (1) retards family completeness, (2) promotes kin dispersion, (3) engenders disregard of kin, and (4) alters functions served by kin. Results of this study's analysis of national survey data provide meager supportfor these generalizations, casting doubt on Wirth's (1938) urban theory as it pertains to kinship bonds. Over fifty years ago Louis Wirth (1938), defining urbanism in terms of community population size, density, and social heterogeneity, described urbanism's mostly negative consequences for personality and social structure. Included among these were weakened bonds of kinship and the declining social significance of the family. Since that time empirical studies, operationalizing urbanism as community population size, have neither persuasively supported nor refuted Wirth's views pertaining to kinship bonds (see the review in Fischer 1984). Only comparative studies can actually test urbanism's effects (Fischer 1972; Guterman 1969), but studies reporting vigorous urban kinship bonds have often made no comparison across various-sized communities (Young & Wilmott 1957 is a well-known example). Results of comparative studies have been mixed. Some support Wirth, showing community size directly related to divorce and inversely related to family size as well as interaction with and proximity to extended kin (Fischer 1982; Goode 1963; Laslett 1973; Plateris 1978; Winch & Greer 1968; Youmans 1977). But others contradict Wirth, showing no adverse impacts of urbanism on interaction with or functions served by kin (Bultena 1969; Glenn & Hill 1977; Kasarda & Janowitz 1974; Key 1968; Palisi & Canning 1983,1986; Palmore, Klein & Marzuki 1970; Reiss 1959; Sampson 1988; Youmans 1977). This murky research record provides little unambiguous evidence of the negative effects of urbanism (Korte 1980), but it does suggest some tentative generalizations consistent with Wirth's assumptions and useful as guidelines for additional research (Fischer 1984). These include (1) urbanism retards the * Direct correspondence to Thomas C Wilson, Department of Sociology, Gannon University, Universitu Sauare, Erie PA 16541. i) The University of North Carolina Press Social Forces, March 1993, 71(3):703-712 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.231 on Wed, 05 Oct 2016 04:14:19 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 704 / Social Forces 71:3, March 1993 completeness of the nuclear family; (2) urbanism promotes the geographic dispersal of kin; (3) urbanism promotes disregard of kin; and (4) urbanism alters and reduces the functions served by kin. Testing the Generalizations NORC's 1986 General Social Survey data (Davis & Smith 1989) along with procedures incorporating some improvements over past studies will be used to test the four generalizations. First, kinship bonds have been narrowly operationalized in the past, often including only face-to-face contact with relatives (Bultena 1969; Glenn & Hill 1977; Palisi & Canning 1983, 1986; Reiss 1959; Youmans 1977; cf. Kasarda & Janowitz 1974 & Palmore, Klein & Marzuki 1970, who address proximity). Other interaction such as phone calls and letters have rarely been considered (an exception is Winch & Greer 1968; the importance of such contact for primary ties is discussed in Litwak & Szelenyi 1969). Only occasionally have immediate and extended kin been distinguished (Fischer 1982; Key 1968; Winch & Greer 1968). And, interaction quality (as opposed to frequency) has been largely ignored, though Wirth viewed quality as particularly likely to decline with urbanism (Guterman 1969; studies addressing quality include Fischer 1982; Winch & Greer 1968). NORC indicators afford a particularly inclusive and detailed operationalization of kinship bonds. Table 1 presents four blocks of indicators corresponding to the four generalizations to be tested. Block one taps nuclear family completeness; block two reflects geographic dispersion of four categories of kin (parents, adult children, adult siblings, and extended kin). Block three taps disregard of kin, what Wirth called "emancipation from kin," and includes frequency of both face-to-face and other contact with the four kin categories. Block four addresses reliance on kin in situations ranging from highly personal or expressive (problems with spouse or partner) to instrumental (advice about a job), reflecting what Winch and Greer (1968) called 'functionality ... the number of categories of service ... received from kinsmen," which they found to decline with urbanism (Cf. Litwak & Szelenyi 1969).1 A second improvement pertains to personal characteristics that must be controlled when testing Wirth's theory (Fischer 1972; Gans 1962). These characteristics, particularly social status, life-cycle stage, and race and ethnicity may be correlated both with urbanism and with urbanism's supposed effects, so their impacts can easily be mistaken for those of urbanism (Tittle 1989). Several studies have lacked controls (Glenn & Hill 1977; Key 1968; Youmans 1977; see also that portion of Fischer's 1982 analysis pertaining to reliance on kin). Others have failed to control for race or life-cycle stage (Kasarda & Janowitz 1974; Palisi & Canning 1983; Reiss 1959; Sampson 1988; Winch & Greer 1968). Still others have included inappropriate controls for variables that may mediate urbanism's impact but do not render it spurious (e.g., respondent's fear of crime, dwelling type, length of residence, and cooperativeness, see Fischer 1982; Kasarda & Janowitz 1974; Palisi & Canning 1983; Sampson 1988). In this study six indicators of respondents' personal characteristics will be controlled. Corresponding to dimensions suggested by Gans (1962), these are This content downloaded from 157.55.39.231 on Wed, 05 Oct 2016 04:14:19 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Urbanism and Kinship Bonds / 705 TABLE 1: Indicators of Kinship Bonds, 1986 NORC Data Completeness of Nuclear Family Presently married (yes/no) Presently divorced/separated (yes/no) Lives with minor children (yes/no) Geographic Dispersion of Kin Parent/adult child/adult sibling/extended kin livesa in household (yes/no) less than 15 minutes away (yes/no) over 1 hour away (yes/no)

Type of Place, Urbanism, and Delinquency: Further Testing the Determinist Theory:

Abstract: This research examines the relationship between type of place and juvenile delinquency in an effort to extend knowledge about the “determinist” theory. This theory predicts a positive relationship between type of place and delinquency, and that relationship will be mediated by “urbanism,” the negative consequences of exposure to urban environments. The theory is tested using two measures of type of place, six measures of urbanism, and three delinquency indexes. The results provide little support for the determinist theory. Delinquency does not predict urbanness, and urbanness does not predict urbanism. Urbanism does, however, prove to be a significant predictor of delinquency.

The New Urbanism: Celebrating the City

Abstract: The New U r b a n i s m : Celebrating the City PaulM. Bray Healthy cities have an ego, a sense and pride of place, and an awareness of where they came from and where they are going. Unfortunately, it is increasingly hard to find these attributes in cities today, and the failures of urban planning to foster them are both many and well documented. As M . Christine Boyer declares i n Dreaming the Rational City, Our modern cityscapes show little awareness of their historical past. New architectural structures, spaghetti highway interchanges, and his­ toric preservation projects are seldom integrated with the existing texture. Instead the historical centers of the city are dangerous to city life; they had to be com­ pletely removed or reduced to museum pieces. Our physically and socially fragmented cities suffer from what sociologist Richard Sennett called a surfeit of sameness, which has deterred individuals and groups from engaging their cities as unique communi­ ties and precipitated the decline of shared institutions like parks, libraries, and schools. But Lowell, Mass., and places like it are the van­ guard of a new urbanism that offers meaningful answers for reweaving the fabric of social life in cities and making urban life a more enjoyable and civilizing

The Pre-Industrial City in Roman Britain

Abstract: By detailed examination of the location of different types of building within a range of urban sites, the functions of Roman towns are considered. This paper rejects the suggestion that the form of the Roman town can be explained solely as the imposition of an alien culture. Indigenous social forces must be considered primarily responsible for the maintenance and adaptation of an institution which suroived for over three hundred years within the province. Various theoretical models of the pre-industrial city are considered. With these in mind possible explanations are sought for the variations in the form of RomanrrBritish urban topography. The differences in size and amenities offered between early civitas capitals and small towns are considered the product of radically different social conditions in each. This is quite contrary to the still frequently expressed opinion that small towns simply represent a later version of urbanism which had discarded as unnecessary the trappings of classical civilisation. The possibility that general principles exist which may extend throughout all Periods is suggested by parallels in the medieval period.

Ethnicity, Urbanism, and the Labour Aristocracy: Rethinking Vancouver Trade Unionism, 1889–1909

Abstract: movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How should the competing ideologies of this period be categorized, and how may they be explained? These questions have framed the writing of the region's labour history. Recent work has debunked the earlier claims of western exceptionalism by showing that the West was less radical than has been commonly thought. But it still remains to explain why unionists held the views they did. Two arguments have been advanced. One, still popular, maintains that a more radical ideology was imported to British Columbia by migrants from Great Britain. But as R.A.J. McDonald has shown, the claims of western exceptionalism do not adequately represent the labour movement of Vancouver. This paper will examine the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council (xrI'LC) to demonstrate that the alleged British influence had no discernible ffect on the labour movement in the province's most important city. The second explanation for the particular ideology of Vancouver labour, advanced by McDonald, holds that urbanism put a moderam, labourist stamp on the city's labour movement between 1886 and 1914. While agreeing with McDonald's description of the VTLC's politics, I will argue that a revised theory of the labour

El urbanismo frances en venezuela de 1936 a 1950 (rotival y lambert en una historia de gestiones diplomaticas, contratos y zancadillas)

Abstract: This study makes use of documentary sources from the archives of the French diplomatic corp and Venezuelan municipal agencies to reconstruct the process by which French urban development ideas were introduced and disseminated in Venezuela from 1936 through the decade of the 1950's. The story is traced through the activities of urban planners Maurice Rotival and Jacques Lambert and the role they played in the institutional organization of urban planning in Venezuela.Their influence, which took hold at the municipal level beginning with the creation of the Department of Urban Development and the Caracas Global Plan completed in 1939, would be consolidated after World War II - in spite of Rotival's increasingly favorable disposition toward currents developing in the United States - with the creation of the National Urbanism Commission as the first national planning agency.The impact of the two planners was also felt through their development of human resources.

The Defeat of Imperial Urbanism in Québec City, 1840–1855

Abstract: In 1840, the City of Quebec regained formal corporate status under an ordinance of the Special Council of Lower Canada. This article argues that the ordinance expressed a particular concept or urbanism. Based on concept of the role of cities developed in Great Britain during the Age of Reform, it sought to create non-partisan municipal structures that would encourage local development and 'improvement' while at the same time ensuring the dominance of the anglophone commercial elites. In this, the ordinance expressed in local terms the grand objectives of Governor Charles Poulett Thomson (Lord Sydenham) for the entire colony. Ultimately, this imperial urbanism was a failure. While the essential structure of municipal governance remained intact until 1855, local issues became immediately entangled in provincial party politics. Major business leaders were replaced by professional and small retailers as the dominant group on the City Council. The very ethos of improvement ensured that the under-financed city government became dwarfed by other agencies, such as the banks, the Gas Company and of course railroads. The case of Quebec City in the first years of the Union illustrates the failure of attempts to transplant Utilitarian approaches to state formation into a colonial context.

Immaterial Views? Science, Intransigence and the Female Spectator of Modern French Art in 1879

Abstract: Paris in the later nineteenth century was the modern city of Europe. A city of spectacular sights, its boulevards, parks and places of entertainment were a parade-ground for bourgeois luxury and conspicuous consumption. The rapid modernisation of Paris during the Second Empire did not depend solely upon its architectural reconstruction under Baron Haussmann, Louis Napoleon’s Prefect of the Seine: the idea of urban modernity upon which the physical transformation of the city was premised lay in the cultivation, from the 1820s on, of a self-conscious urbanism in Parisian society. In part this new urban view depended upon notions of the city itself as a spectacle to be consumed by the newly leisured bourgeois — the privileged individuals who, like Haussmann himself, were both the producers of the new city and the consumers of its sights and delights. The metropolitan gaze — as Nicholas Green argued — was ‘positioned primarily in relation to the priorities and pleasures of men’; sight was gender-specific, and women, ‘disenfranchised … as a public presence and voice’.2 were themselves, like fine art, decorative objects of this consuming male gaze.