"This book documents two complementary urban realities that have played a fundamental role in the imagination, definition and redefinition of the twentieth-century modern city. Shifting away from an understanding of architecture as the construction of monumental masterpieces, the texts collected here assemble the narratives behind the public spaces, housing and social facilities in these two cities, where modern plans have proven unexpectedly resilient and adaptable over time. This perspective is reinforced through visual contributions by Yto Barrada and Takashi Homma--two photographers especially invested in capturing everyday urban life. In a world marked by decolonization and Cold War politics, Casablanca and Chandigarh appear simultaneously as exponents of and countercurrents to modernization and its development perspectives. The book's three chapters set the context for reading Casablanca and Chandigarh as the results of nuanced, dynamic processes of international exchange driven by the engagement and expertise of a new class of design professionals. As a dossier of actors, alignments and agendas, the book contributes to an alternative historiography of post-war urbanism and to recent reflections on the impact of transnational practice."--P. [4] of cover.

This book explores new architectural and design perspectives on the contemporary urban condition. While architects and urban designers have long maintained that their actions, drawings, and buildings are “post-critical,” this book seeks to expand the critical dimension of architecture and urbanism. In a series of historical and theoretical studies, this book examines how the materialities, forms, and practices of architecture and urban design can act as a critique towards the new urban condition. It proposes not only new concepts and theories but also instruments of analysis and reflection to better understand the current counter-hegemonic tendencies in both disciplinary strategies and appropriation tactics. The diversely international selection of chapters, from Brazil, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United States, and the Netherlands, combine different theoretical and empirical perspectives into a new analysis of the city and architecture. Demonstrating the need for new critical urban and architectural thinking that engages with the challenges and processes of the contemporary urban condition, this volume will be a thought-provoking read for academics and students in architecture, urban design, geography, political science, and more.

In the 1960s, socialist and capitalist urban planners, architects, and city officials chose the urban periphery as the site to test out new ideas in modernist architecture and planning: the outskirts of Prague and a bedroom suburb of Toronto would be the sites for experimental urban development. In the Suburbs of History overcomes the divisions between East and West to reassemble the shared histories of modern architecture and urbanism as it shaped and re-shaped the periphery. Drawing on archives, interviews, architectural journals, and site visits to the peripheries of Prague and Toronto, Steven Logan reveals the intertwined histories of capitalist and socialist urban planning. From socialist utopias to the capitalist visions of the edge city, the history of the suburbs is not simply a history of competing urban forms; rather, it is a history of alternatives that advocated collective solutions over the dominant model of single-family home ownership and car-dominated spaces.

The view of modernism as representing an epistemological break between technology and history and tradition has long been challenged. Le Corbusier’s work has proved to be an inexhaustible reference point in this debate. This is due, on the one hand, to the legacy of nineteenth-century historicism, and on the other to his creative process of creation through destruction which, as John Summerson has noted, is comparable to the processes of avant-garde poets and painters. The contributions to this book explore particular episodes which bring to light both the operative role of the past in the creation of a new abstract synthesis, and Le Corbusier’s modernist historical consciousness. They illustrate how the past participated in the modernist creative process of abstract art, from the 1920s machine aesthetics to the late infatuation with myth. They also shed light on the extent to which the operative quality of the history was framed by a comprehensive historical vision that took the form of metanarrative, which neither the analytical studies on his architecture nor the synthetic approaches to his philosophical thinking should dismiss.

Acculturating the Shopping Centre examines whether the shopping centre should be qualified as a global architectural type that effortlessly moves across national and cultural borders in the slipstream of neo-liberal globalization, or should instead be understood as a geographically and temporally bound expression of negotiations between mall developers (representatives of a global logic of capitalist accumulation) on the one hand, and local actors (architects/governments/citizens) on the other. It explores how the shopping centre adapts to new cultural contexts, and questions whether this commercial type has the capacity to disrupt or even amend the conditions that it encounters. Including more than 50 illustrations, this book considers the evolving architecture of shopping centres. It would be beneficial to academics and students across a number of areas such as architecture, urban design, cultural geography and sociology.

An argument that operational urban planning can be improved by the application of the tools of urban economics to the design of regulations and infrastructure. Urban planning is a craft learned through practice. Planners make rapid decisions that have an immediate impact on the ground—the width of streets, the minimum size of land parcels, the heights of buildings. The language they use to describe their objectives is qualitative—“sustainable,” “livable,” “resilient”—often with no link to measurable outcomes. Urban economics, on the other hand, is a quantitative science, based on theories, models, and empirical evidence largely developed in academic settings. In this book, the eminent urban planner Alain Bertaud argues that applying the theories of urban economics to the practice of urban planning would greatly improve both the productivity of cities and the welfare of urban citizens. Bertaud explains that markets provide the indispensable mechanism for cities’ development. He cites the experience of cities without markets for land or labor in pre-reform China and Russia; this “urban planners’ dream” created inefficiencies and waste. Drawing on five decades of urban planning experience in forty cities around the world, Bertaud links cities’ productivity to the size of their labor markets; argues that the design of infrastructure and markets can complement each other; examines the spatial distribution of land prices and densities; stresses the importance of mobility and affordability; and critiques the land use regulations in a number of cities that aim at redesigning existing cities instead of just trying to alleviate clear negative externalities. Bertaud concludes by describing the new role that joint teams of urban planners and economists could play to improve the way cities are managed.