Spatial agency : other ways of doing architecture by
Thisnbsp;booknbsp;offers the first comprehensive overview of alternative approaches to architectural practice. At a time when many commentators are noting that alternative and richer approaches to architectural practice are required if the profession is to flourish, this book provides multiple examples from across the globe of how this has been achieved and how it might be achieved in the future. Particularly pertinent in the current economic climate, this book offers the reader new approaches to architectural practice in a changing world. It makes essential reading for any architect, aspiring or practicing.
Spatial Practices : Modes of Action and Engagement with the City by
This book explores 'spatial practices', a loose and expandable set of approaches that embrace the political and the activist, the performative and the curatorial, the architectural and the urban. Acting upon and engaging with the public realm, the field of spatial practices allows people to reconnect with their own sense of agency through engagement in space and place, exploring and prototyping alternative futures in the here and now. The 24 chapters contain essays, visual essays and interviews, featuring contributions from an international set of experimental practitioners including Jeanne van Heeswijk (Netherlands), Teddy Cruz (Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, San Diego), Hector (USA), The Decorators (London) and OOZE (Netherlands). Beautifully designed with full colour illustrations, Spatial Practices advances dialogue and collaboration between academics and practitioners and is essential reading for students, researchers and professionals in architecture, urban planning and urban policy.
Transforming Cities by
This book presents 47 examples from the Urban Intervention Award Berlin, including permanent and provisional attempts to effect various kinds of urban intervention. These interventions bring together experts from fields such as culture, architecture and economics.
Cities for People by
For more than forty years Jan Gehl has helped to transform urbanenvironments around the world based on his research into the wayspeople actually use - or could use - the spaces where theylive and work. In this revolutionary book, Gehl presents his latestwork creating (or recreating) cityscapes on a human scale. He clearlyexplains the methods and tools he uses to reconfigure unworkablecityscapes into the landscapes he believes they should be: cities forpeople. Taking into account changing demographics and changinglifestyles, Gehl explains how to develop cities that are lively, safe,sustainable, and healthy.
Climax City : Masterplanning and the Complexity of Urban Growth by
Human settlements are the result of a mix of self-organisation and planning. Planners are fighting a losing battle to impose order on chaotic systems. Connections between the process of urban growth and the fields of complexity theory are of increasing importance to planners and urbanists alike; the idea that cities are emergent structures created not by design but from the interplay of relatively simple rules and forces over time. From the the small Tuscan hill town to the megacities of Asia: the struggle between the planned and the unplanned is universal. Based on years of international research, Climax City is a critical exploration of the growth of cities and masterplanning. Challenging the idea that the city can be entirely planned on paper, this book implores you to work with chaos when planning cities. Beautifully illustrated with striking hand-drawn plans of global cities, this is a vital and accessible contribution to urban theory and planning. It's the perfect title for practitioners and academics across planning and urban design looking to make sense out of chaos.
A Glossary of Urban Voids by
An annotated collection of over 200 terms used to name voids in cities, from the "terrain vague" to the "buffer zone This innovative book names the unnamable urban zones that usually remain invisible. As the landscape architect James Corner has pointed out, a void cannot be labeled because "to name it is to claim it in some way." By compiling and enumerating existing terms, A Glossary of Urban Voids is a fascinating and compelling attempt to name the unnamable, to define that which should have no precise definition. It records terms, names and labels used to designate leftover spaces resulting from processes of urban abandonment that originate from some kind of obsolescence or loss. These processes of abandonment open up the space, liberating it from existing ideological frameworks (financial, capital, cultural), allowing for divergent spatialities to emerge and ultimately offering opportunities to imagine alternative types of public space.
Key Concepts in Planning by
Key Concepts in Planning forms part of an innovative set of companion texts for the Human Geography sub-disciplines. Organized around 20 short essays, Key Concepts in Planning provides a cutting edge introduction to the central concepts that define contemporary research in Planning. Involving detailed and expansive discussions, the book includes:An introductory chapter providing a succinct overview of the recent developments in the fieldOver 20 key concept entries with comprehensive explanations, definitions and evolutions of the subjectExtensive pedagogic features that enhance understanding including a glossary, figures, diagrams and further readingKey Concepts in Planning is an ideal companion text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in Planning and covers the expected staples of the sub-discipline in an accessible style. Written by an internationally recognized set of authors, Key Concepts in Planning is an essential addition to any geography student's library.
Cities by
This book develops a fresh and challenging perspective on the city. Drawing on a wide and diverse range of material and texts, it argues that too much contemporary urban theory is based on nostalgia for a humane, face-to-face and bounded city. Amin and Thrift maintain that the traditional divide between the city and the rest of the world has been perforated through urban encroachment, the thickening of the links between the two, and urbanization as a way of life. They outline an innovative sociology of the city that scatters urban life along a series of sites and circulations, reinstating previously suppressed areas of contemporary urban life: from the presence of non-human activity to the centrality of distant connections. The implications of this viewpoint are traced through a series of chapters on power, economy and democracy. This concise and accessible book will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, geography, urban studies, cultural studies and politics. .
Interrupting the City by
Interrupting the City explores the ways in which artistic practices and interventions intersect with the public sphere. The tactics by which an intervention is achieved may vary, ranging from a media offensive to a riot in the streets, but each time these activities affect the flow or circulation of urban public space, they also reconstitute it. Interrupting the City, edited by Sander Bax, Pascal Gielen and Bram Ieven, proposes the public sphere as a network of social, political and economic forces in constant flux, and attempts to chart the conditions under which art can contribute to or interrupt this process of the construction of public space. This volume brings together a range of internationally renowned theorists and artists to consider the relations between artistic activity and public space, and proposes how artists can develop their voices in the public sphere.
Paint Your Town Red: How Preston Took Back Control and Your Town Can Too. by
Paint Your Town Red tells the story of how one city in the north of England decided to level up without waiting for Whitehall. Across the world, there is a growing recognition that a new kind of economy is needed: more democratic, less exploitative, less destructive of society and the planet. Paint Your Town Red looks at how wealth can be generated and shared at a local level through the experience of one of the main advocates of the new Democratic Economy, Matthew Brown, the driving-force behind the world-recognized Preston Model. Using analysis, interviews and case studies to explain what Matthew and Preston City Council have done over the last decade in order to earn Preston the title of Most Improved City, the book shows how the model can be adapted to fit different local circumstances, as well as demonstrating how Preston itself adapted economic and democratic experiments in 'community wealth-building' from elsewhere in the US and Europe. Preston's success shows that the ideas of community wealth-building work in practice and have the capacity to achieve a meaningful transfer of wealth and power back to local communities. A lot of recent coverage and references have tended to oversimplify the Preston Model, which is not just about 'buying local' but a comprehensive project, which envisions local and regional discussions and collaboration adding up to a wholesale transformation of our currently failing economic systems.
Across Theory and Practice by
This treatise explores the intersection of theoretical and practical approaches to urban design, featuring contributions by internationally renowned young scholars who reflect on their personal experiences in research, policy and design practice in a global context.
Demo polis : the right to public space by
After nearly two decades of appropriating the Internet's virtual public space, people are once again taking to the real public space of streets and squares to voice their opinions. Recent political movements like the Arab Spring and Occupy have led to a revaluation of public space by citizens and institutions alike. It has become a contested commodity for different interest groups, from protesters fighting for equality to sports and music events, art shows, and commercial advertising. The questions of who owns public space and how we negotiate its use are therefore at the heart of great political and public interest and debate. DEMO:POLIS draws on architecture, sociology, and urban studies to offer a dynamic interdisciplinary exploration of the contemporary meaning of public space. Featuring exemplary projects--such as the High Line and Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York, Alexanderplatz and Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin, Trafalgar Square in London, the Le Ventana de Mar park in Puerto Rico, and Madrid's Campo de Cebada--as well as a range of recent, at times controversial, artistic and urban design interventions that reflect criticisms of the status quo, the book delves into various approaches to the design--and redesign--of public space. As its political, social, and cultural value rises, citizens increasingly demand to have a voice in the discussion on how to design and use public space. Innovative tools and approaches facilitate these participatory processes, constituting a new dimension of democratic stake holding--urban design for, with, and by the public.
Superpowers of Scale by
The objects of architecture are not simply inert assemblies of material--they are complex entities that unfold their potential agencies (whether political, social, or environmental) in equally complex ways. Exploring these forms of architectural agency has in recent years been a central aspect of the work of Andrés Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation, who, in addition to their built works, pursue a research practice through the many other media of architectural production. Their projects are reactive, intervening on what already exists to demonstrate how design, politics, and criticality operate across different scales and at the intersection of multiple realities. Jaque's performances, videos, and installations--and this book, which collects a range of recent research projects--bring new subjects into the fold of architecture, focusing on alternative actors, distributions of power and representation, and the sociocultural effects of architecture. These episodes address ideas like genetic manipulation, the necessary requeering of dequeered spaces of online interaction, and the selling of modern architectural comforts in order to subvert the field from within and to contest capitalism's flattening-out of public life. Rather than propose alternative-from-scratch futuristic or idealized realities, Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation claim that reality is produced at the intersection of things like porn, interior design, maintenance, and the territorial distribution of toxicity. Documenting a series of performances, research projects, installations, films, characters, and exhibitions, Superpowers of Scale demonstrates the breadth of architectural knowledge and its possible representations.
Feminist city : claiming space in a man-made world by 
City of Permanent Temporality by
Taking as its examples the Luchtsingel and Schieblock projects, for which ZUS received the Berlin Urban Intervention Award and the Rotterdam Architecture Award, this book describes the firm's 15 years of work in Rotterdam.
Ethics of the urban : the city and the spaces of the political by
Is democracy spatial? How are the physical aspects of our cities, houses, streets, and public spaces--the borders, the neighbourhoods, the monuments--bearers of our values? In a world of intensifying geo-economic integration, extreme financial and geopolitical volatility, deepening environmental crises, and a dramatic new wave of popular protest against both authoritarian government and capitalist speculation, cities have become leading sites for new claims on state power and new formations of political subjectivity. This volume brings together perspectives from history, sociology, art, political theory, planning, law, and design practice to explore the urban spaces of the political. A selection of contemporary photography from around the world offers a visual refl ection of this timely investigation. Contributors include: Michael Arad, Diane Davis, Keller Easterling, Gerald Frug, Mohsen Mostafavi, Chantal Mouffe, Erika Naginski, Saskia Sassen, Richard Sennett, Loïc Wacquant, Krzysztof Wodiczko. AUTHOR: Mohsen Mostafavi, an architect and educator, is the Dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design. 200 illustrations
Masterplanning for change : designing the resilient city by
Cities are under increased pressure to be resilient and resistant to the effects of climate change and rapid urbanisation. However, this idea has still not been fully integrated in to practice. This book presents a practical approach to masterplanning the city and its areas (existing and new) as urban environments for the 21st century, addressing the design of cities as complex adaptive systems.
Discursive design : critical, speculative, and alternative things by
Exploring how design can be used for good-prompting self-reflection, igniting the imagination, and affecting positive social change.Good design provides solutions to problems. It improves our buildings, medical equipment, clothing, and kitchen utensils, among other objects. But what if design could also improve societal problems by prompting positive ideological change? In this book, Bruce and Stephanie Tharp survey recent critical design practices and propose a new, more inclusive field of socially minded practice- discursive design. While many consider good design to be unobtrusive, intuitive, invisible, and undemanding intellectually, discursive design instead targets the intellect, prompting self-reflection and igniting the imagination. Discursive design (derived from "discourse") expands the boundaries of how we can use design-how objects are, in effect, good(s) for thinking. Discursive Design invites us to see objects in a new light, to understand more than their basic form and utility. Beyond the different foci of critical design, speculative design, design fiction, interrogative design, and adversarial design, Bruce and Stephanie Tharp establish a more comprehensive, unifying vision as well as innovative methods. They not only offer social criticism but also explore how objects can, for example, be used by counselors in therapy sessions, by town councils to facilitate a pre-vote discussions, by activists seeking engagement, and by institutions and industry to better understand the values, beliefs, and attitudes of those whom they serve. Discursive design sparks new ways of thinking, and it is only through new thinking that our sociocultural futures can change.
Why Cities Look the Way They Do by
We tend to think cities look the way they do because of the conscious work of architects, planners and builders. But what if the look of cities had less to do with design, and more to do with social, cultural, financial and political processes, and the way ordinary citizens interact with them? What if the city is a process as much as a design? Richard J. Williams takes the moment construction is finished as a beginning, tracing the myriad processes that produce the look of the contemporary global city. This book is the story of dramatic but unforeseen urban sights: how financial capital spawns empty towering skyscrapers and hollowed-out ghettoes; how the zoning of once-illicit sexual practices in marginal areas of the city results in the reinvention of culturally vibrant gay villages; how abandoned factories have been repurposed as creative hubs in a precarious postindustrial economy. It is also the story of how popular urban clichés and the fictional portrayal of cities powerfully shape the way we read and see the bricks, concrete and glass that surround us. Thought-provoking and original, Why Cities Look the Way They Do will appeal to anyone who wants to understand the contemporary city, shedding new light on humanity's greatest collective invention.
Porous City : From Metaphor to Urban Agenda by
Some time ago, Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis used the term "porosity" with reference to Naples' urban characteristics - spaces merging into each other and providing the backdrop for the unforeseen - improvisation as a way of life. Today, the term "porosity" in this context is increasingly used conceptually. Well-known authors from the worlds of architecture, town planning, and landscape design embark on a search for new concepts for a life-enhancing, user-friendly city - with reference to this enigmatic term. The term refers to the overlaying and interweaving of spaces and structures, to urban textures and their architectural properties and qualities - to cities with radically mixed urban functions.
Using geodata & geolocation in the social sciences : mapping our connected world by
"Abernathy provides a truly accessible and interdisciplinary introduction to geodata and geolocation covering both the conceptual and the practical. It is a must read for students or researchers looking to make the most of the spatial elements of their data" - Luke Sloan, Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Methods, Cardiff University Using Geodata and Geolocation in the Social Sciences: Mapping our Connected World provides an engaging and accessible introduction to the Geoweb with clear, step-by-step guides for: Capturing Geodata from sources including GPS, sensor networks and Twitter Visualizing Geodata using programmes including QGIS, GRASS and R Featuring colour images, practical exercises walking you through using data sources, and a companion website packed with resources, this book is the perfect guide for students and teachers looking to incorporate location-based data into their social science research.
Restless Cities by
The metropolis is a site of endless making and unmaking. From the attempt to imagine a 'city-symphony' to the cinematic tradition that runs from Walter Ruttmann to Terence Davies, Restless Cities traces the idiosyncratic character of the metropolitan city from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first-century megalopolis. With explorations of phenomena including nightwalking, urbicide, property, commuting and recycling, this wide-ranging new book identifies and traces the patterns that have defined everyday life in the modern city and its effect on us as individuals. Bringing together some of the most significant cultural writers of our time, Restless Cities is an illuminating, revelatory journey to the heart of our metropolitan world.
The Participatory City by
Participation has been a focus for urban studies since the 1960s, and in the last decade new research aspects and critical debates on the subject have emerged across a wide range of disciplines. The changing role of planners and the rejection of traditional decision-making processes, as well as the emergence of grassroots initiatives, increasing social inequality and pressing ecological challenges have all redefined the field in recent years. The Participatory City is the first international and interdisciplinary collection of texts encompassing the whole spectrum of the debate within a wide geographical framework. Offering international perspectives on the question of urban participation, the contributors to this volume examine participatory dimensions of social housing, land-use policies, migrant rights, environmental problems and health issues through the exploration of case studies from Chicago, Detroit, London, Mexico City and Bangalore.
Here, there, elsewhere : dialogues on location and mobility by
Introduction : Somewhere else / David Blamey -- Location envy / Barry Curtis & Claire Pajaczkowska -- Blackest pool / Tim Brennan -- Travelling the distance: encountering the other / Jane Rendell -- World political / Layla Curtis -- The tactics of faux migration / Doina Petrescu -- The street museum / Colectivo Cambalache -- Airports: a personal memoir / Johnny Spencer -- Travel as home: an anthropological inquiry into the Goa trance scene / Roger Begrich & Andrea Mühlebach -- Another day / Mariele Neudecker -- Prisoners of the Californian dream: panic suburbs in Hong Kong / Laura Ruggeri -- The other side of the world / Terris Nguyen Temple -- Safe way / David Blamey -- As the crow doesn't fly / Fiona Banner -- Bird Island / Janice Kerbel -- Flight times / Ian Whittlesea -- Elsewhere, perhaps / Lesley Naa Norle Lokko -- Notes / Markus Vater -- Further reading / Paul O'Neill -- Information -- Biographies.
Mixed communities : gentrification by stealth? by
Encouraging social and class diversity in neighborhoods has been a major goal of urban policy and planning in a number of different countries. Mixed Communities draws together case studies by a range of international experts to assess the impacts of social mix policies and the degree to which they might represent stealth gentrification, as well as their relationship to wider social, economic, and urban change. From the perspectives of researchers, policy makers and planners, and the residents of the communities themselves, this volume draws on lessons from international comparisons.
Urban Geography by
This revised fifth edition not only examines the new geographical patterns forming within and between cities, but also investigates the way geographers have sought to make sense of this urban transformation. It is structured into three sections: 'contexts', 'themes' and 'issues' that move students from a foundation in urban geography through its major themes to contemporary and pressing issues. The text critically synthesizes key literatures in the following areas: the urban world changing approaches to urban geography urban form and structure economy and the city urban politics planning, regeneration and urban policy cities and culture architecture and urban landscapes images of the city experiencing the city housing and residential segregation transport and mobility in cities sustainability and the city. This edition builds on the success of the comprehensively revised fourth edition and provides revised chapters on transport/mobility and urban futures, with additional updating of readings and some case studies. The book synthesises a wide range of literature on each subject and presents the material in a lively engaging way, supported by an expanded range of student friendly features, including exercises and suggestions for further study.
Selling places : the city as cultural capital, past and present by
Places, particularly cities, often strive to sell themselves to encourage inward investment. In doing so, the managers of these places seek to manipulate the interwoven cultural and historical attributes of their localities to create attractive images, ambiences and lifestyles. This is a contentious process involving a fierce battle between alternative cultural sensibilities and historical visions. Much of the existing literature on place marketing either provides a practical handbook of how-to-do-it, or an economic analysis of this new facet of urban capitalism. Selling Places focuses more explicitly on the cultural-historical context of what is being sold. Thus it enriches the economic picture whilst drawing upon newer arguments about the complex politics of cultural and historical representation.
The city shaped : urban patterns and meanings through history by 
Ways of knowing cities by
Technology mediates how we know and experience cities, and the nature of this mediation has always been deeply political. Today, the production and deployment of data is at the forefront of projects to grasp and reshape urban life. Ways of Knowing Cities considers the role of technology in generating, materializing, and contesting urban epistemologies--tracing an arc from ubiquitous sites of "smart" urbanism, to discrete struggles over infrastructural governance, to forgotten histories of segregation now naturalized in urban algorithms, to exceptional territories of border policing. Bringing together architects, urbanists, artists, and scholars of critical migration studies, media theory, geography, anthropology, and literature, the essays stage a deeply interdisciplinary conversation, interrogating the ways in which certain ways of knowing are predicated on the erasure of others. In this opening, the book engages the information systems that structure urban space and social life in it, historically and in the present moment, to imagine alternative practices and generate new critical perspectives on spatial research. Ways of Knowing Cities includes texts by Eve Blau, Simone Browne, Maribel Casas-Cortes, Wendy Chun, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Beth Coleman, V. Mitch McEwen, Orit Halpern, Charles Heller, Shannon Mattern, Leah Meisterlin, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Dietmar Offenhuber, Lorenzo Pezzani, Anita Say Chan, and Matthew W. Wilson.
Radical Cities : Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture by
“A colorful journey through Latin America—a crucible of architectural and urban innovation What makes the city of the future? How do you heal a divided city? In Radical Cities, Justin McGuirk travels across Latin America in search of the activist architects, maverick politicians and alternative communities already answering these questions. From Brazil to Venezuela, and from Mexico to Argentina, McGuirk discovers the people and ideas shaping the way cities are evolving. Ever since the mid twentieth century, when the dream of modernist utopia went to Latin America to die, the continent has been a testing ground for exciting new conceptions of the city. An architect in Chile has designed a form of social housing where only half of the house is built, allowing the owners to adapt the rest; Medellín, formerly the world's murder capital, has been transformed with innovative public architecture; squatters in Caracas have taken over the forty-five-storey Torre David skyscraper; and Rio is on a mission to incorporate its favelas into the rest of the city. Here, in the most urbanised continent on the planet, extreme cities have bred extreme conditions, from vast housing estates to sprawling slums. But after decades of social and political failure, a new generation has revitalised architecture and urban design in order to address persistent poverty and inequality. Together, these activists, pragmatists and social idealists are performing bold experiments that the rest of the world may learn from.
Situational urbanism : directing postwar urbanity by
Situational Urbanism combines urban spatial theory with a comprehensive toolkit of flexible design methods for transforming modernist urban areas, ranging in scale from the individual house to the block to the neighborhood.
Handmade urbanism by
With urban expansion in almost global overdrive, opportunities for citizens to improve their own urban environment are growing steadily. Handmade Urbanism examines the possibilities of urban transformation that stem from community initiatives. It showcases projects that focus on the provision of social infrastructure, aiming to improve the living conditions of residents in the more impoverished areas of five major cities across the world: Mumbai, São Paulo, Istanbul, Mexico City and Cape Town. The publication includes interviews with experts and community leaders that help to clarify approaches to local struggles, as well as the DVD documentary Urban Future, which provides the reader with further information from the ground.
Designing Disorder Experiments and Disruptions in the City by
In 1970, Richard Sennett published the groundbreaking The Uses of Disorder, arguing that the ideal of a planned and ordered city was flawed. Fifty years later, Sennett returns to these still fertile ideas and, alongside campaigner and architect Pablo Sendra, sets out an agenda for the design and ethics of the Open City. The public spaces of our cities are under siege from planners, privatisation and increased surveillance. Our streets are becoming ever more lifeless and ordered. What is to be done? Can disorder be designed? In this provocative essay Sendra and Sennett propose a reorganisation of how we think and plan the social life of our cities. 'Infrastructures of disorder' combine architecture, politics, urban planning and activism in order to develop places that nurture rather than stifle, bring together rather than divide up, remain open to change rather than closed off.
Boom cities : architect-planners and the politics of radical urban renewal in 1960s Britain by
Boom Cities is the first published history of the profound transformations of British city centres in the 1960s. It has often been said that urban planners did more damage to Britain's cities than even the Luftwaffe had managed, and this study details the rise and fall of modernist urbanplanning, revealing its origins and the dissolution of the cross-party consensus, before the ideological smearing that has ever since characterized the high-rise towers, dizzying ring roads, and concrete precincts that were left behind.The rebuilding of British city centres during the 1960s drastically affected the built form of urban Britain, including places ranging from traditional cathedral cities through to the decaying towns of the industrial revolution. Boom Cities uncovers both the planning philosophy, and the political,cultural, and legislative background that created the conditions for these processes to occur across the country.Boom Cities reveals the role of architect-planners in these transformations. The book also provides an unconventional account of the end of modernist approaches to the built environment, showing it from the perspective of planning and policy elites, rather than through the emergence of publicopposition to planning.
The Spontaneous City by
The era of large-scale urban planning is over. Urhahn Urban Design heralds another practice. Small-scale make-ability" combined with Dutch entrepreneurial skill: that is the basic principle. The authors argue in favor of local resourcefulness, flexibility, and openness. It's all about the user: the spontaneous city is the result of supply and demand. "
Performative urbanism : generating and designing urban space by
This volume examines the relationship between architectural design and its realization in an urban environment. It proposes an interplay between architectonic material and urban usage and action, and interprets our interaction with architecture as a performative activity.
Naked city : the death and life of authentic urban places by
As cities have gentrified, educated urbanites have come to prize what they regard as "authentic" urban life: aging buildings, art galleries, small boutiques, upscale food markets, neighborhood old-timers, funky ethnic restaurants, and old, family-owned shops. These signify a place'sauthenticity, in contrast to the bland standardization of the suburbs and exurbs.But as Sharon Zukin shows in Naked City, the rapid and pervasive demand for authenticity - evident in escalating real estate prices, expensive stores, and closely monitored urban streetscapes - has helped drive out the very people who first lent a neighborhood its authentic aura: immigrants, theworking class, and artists. Zukin traces this economic and social evolution in six archetypal New York areas - Williamsburg, Harlem, the East Village, Union Square, Red Hook, and the city's community gardens - and travels to both the city's first IKEA store and the World Trade Center site. She showsthat for followers of Jane Jacobs, this transformation is a perversion of what was supposed to happen. Indeed, Naked City is a sobering update of Jacobs' legendary 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Like Jacobs, Zukin looks at what gives neighborhoods a sense of place, butargues that over time, the emphasis on neighborhood distinctiveness has become a tool of economic elites to drive up real estate values and effectively force out the neighborhood "characters" that Jacobs so evocatively idealized.