The city is often depicted as a sort of self-organizing chaos. This collection of essays, edited by Pier Vittorio Aureli, makes the case for the opposite hypothesis: The city is always the result of political intention, often in the form of specific architectural projects. Cities are shaped not only by material forces, but also by cultural and didactic visions. This thesis is substantiated by eight thoroughly researched essays scrutinizing a fascinating line-up of urban conditions across more than two thousands years of history: from the political theology of the Islamic city to the political economy of Renaissance architecture; from the rise of public architecture in 17th-century France to the laissez-faire development of the contemporary Greek city; from the exemplary teachings of Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand to the collaborative work of Hannes Meyer; and from the plan of the Mesoamerican metropolis to that of the Fordist factory floor. In challenging the split between theory and practice, The City as a Project reveals the powerful ways in which the city arises from the constant interaction between ideas and spatial conditions.

The book aims at nurturing theoretic reflection on the city and the territory and working out and applying methods and techniques for improving our physical and social landscapes. The main issue is developed around the projectual dimension, with the objective of visualising both the city and the territory from a particular viewpoint, which singles out the territorial dimension as the city’s space of communication and negotiation. Issues that characterise the dynamics of city development will be faced, such as the new, fresh relations between urban societies and physical space, the right to the city, urban equity, the project for the physical city as a means to reveal civitas, signs of new social cohesiveness, the sense of contemporary public space and the sustainability of urban development. Authors have been invited to explore topics that feature a pluralism of disciplinary contributions studying formal and informal practices on the project for the city and seeking conceptual and operative categories capable of understanding and facing the problems inherent in the profound transformations of contemporary urban landscapes.

Harvard Design School's Project on the City is a graduate thesis program that examines the effects of modernization on the urban condition. Each year the Project on the City studies a specific region or phenomena, & develops a conceptual framework & vocabulary for urban environments that can not be described within the traditional categories of architecture, landscape, or urbanism. In order to understand new forms of urbanization, thesis advisor Rem Koolhaas & students from the fields of architecture, landscape, & urbanism, document & analyze areas of study through a combination of field research, statistical analysis, historical developments, & anecdotal situations. The result of each project is an intensive, specialized study of the effects of modernization on the contemporary city. During the 1996-1997 period, Harvard's graduate students studied China's Pearl River Delta (PRD), a cluster of five cities with a population of twelve million destined to reach thirty-six million by the year 2020. The establishment in the PRD of Special Economic Zones--"laboratories for the contained unleashing of capitalism"--hastened an unprecedented experiment in urbanization on an astonishingly large scale. Great Leap Forward contains essays which explore, in a theoretical & statistical context, the results of this rapid modernization that has produced an entirely new urban substance.

Abandoned lots and litter-strewn pathways, or rows of green beans and pockets of wildflowers? Graffiti-marked walls and desolate bus stops, or shady refuges and comfortable seating? What transforms a dingy, inhospitable area into a dynamic gathering place? How do individuals take back their neighborhood? Neighborhoods decline when the people who live there lose their connection and no longer feel part of their community. Recapturing that sense of belonging and pride of place can be as simple as planting a civic garden or placing some benches in a park. The Great Neighborhood Book explains how most struggling communities can be revived, not by vast infusions of cash, not by government, but by the people who live there. The author addresses such challenges as traffic control, crime, comfort and safety, and developing economic vitality. Using a technique called "placemaking"-- the process of transforming public space -- this exciting guide offers inspiring real-life examples that show the magic that happens when individuals take small steps, and motivate others to make change. This book will motivate not only neighborhood activists and concerned citizens but also urban planners, developers and policy-makers.

This book is a critical reappraisal of contemporary theories of urban planning and design and of the role of the architect-planner in an urban context. The authors, rejecting the grand utopian visions of "total planning" and "total design," propose instead a "collage city" which can accommodate a whole range of utopias in miniature.

Project Cinema City is an anthology of text and image essays, documentation transcripts, maps, graphics, annotated artworks, and films on various configurations of the cinema and the city of Bombay/Mumbai. This volume has evolved out of and is the culmination, in a sense, of Project Cinema City: Research Art and Documentary Practices - an expansive project initiated by Majlis, a center for multidisciplinary art initiatives in Mumbai, and developed over five years, from 2008 to 2012. The contributors to the book include filmmakers, visual artists, designers, architects, photographers, historians and other social scientists. Project Cinema City is primarily a set of inquiries into the labor, imagination, desire, access, spaces, locations, iconization, materiality, languages, moving peoples, viewing conventions, and hidden processes that inform the cinemas the city makes, and also the cities its cinema produces. The inquiries are based on the hypothesis that cinema in the terrain of cinema city is as much everyday practice as it is a part of a speculative desirescape. Hence this volume presents cinema as a manufacturing enterprise that alters through shifts in materials, technologies, labor inflow, distribution territories, demographic patterns and development policies, and the city as a phenomenon that continuously evolves through the interface between lived reality and the reality perceived in cinema. The main aim of this volume is to convey the richness of documentation made through the parent project - a richness that, hopefully, will also convey to the reader the scale and diversity, and the crisis and creativity of the relationship between cinema and city in Bombay. In its free mixing of images, graphics, field notes, information and commentary, the book, quite like the parent project, maintains a work-in-progress status. The book is divided into three sections. The first, Mapping Imaginations: Terrains, Locations, deals with the spatiality, materiality and habitability of the cinema city. The second section, Performing Labour: Bodies, Network, is about the act of producing and the labor that produces - skill, work, character, aspiration, dissent, transgression, duplication, ancillaries - and the myriad ways in which they populate the cinema city. With the death of manufacturing industries in Bombay, the service and entertainment sectors have become the mainstay of aspiration-induced migration to the city. The third section, titled Viewing Limits: Narratives, Technologies, deals with the multiple niches and varied strategies through which cinema is arranged and rearranged in the everyday life of the city and its citizens.

Sociopolis is a project for the building of a city neighbourhood of public housing in the 21st century. Under the direction of Vicente Guallart, thirteen international architects (Toyo Ito, MVRDV, FOA, François Roche, etc.) propose schemes for the construction of a neighborhood in the city of Valencia, schemes in which a new relationship is posited with the farming and natural environment, thus creating the conditions for a new shared habitat.