The problem of "lost space," or the inadequate use of space, afflicts most urban centers today. The automobile, the effects of the Modern Movement in architectural design, urban-renewal and zoning policies, the dominance of private over public interests, as well as changes in land use in the inner city have resulted in the loss of values and meanings that were traditionally associated with urban open space. This text offers a comprehensive and systematic examination of the crisis of the contemporary city and the means by which this crisis can be addressed. Finding Lost Space traces leading urban spatial design theories that have emerged over the past eighty years: the principles of Sitte and Howard; the impact of and reactions to the Functionalist movement; and designs developed by Team 10, Robert Venturi, the Krier brothers, and Fumihiko Maki, to name a few. In addition to discussions of historic precedents, contemporary approaches to urban spatial design are explored. Detailed case studies of Boston, Massachusetts; Washington, D.C.; Goteborg, Sweden; and the Byker area of Newcastle, England demonstrate the need for an integrated design approach--one that considers figure-ground, linkage, and place theories of urban spatial design. These theories and their individual strengths and weaknesses are defined and applied in the case studies, demonstrating how well they operate in different contexts. This text will prove invaluable for students and professionals in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and city planning. Finding Lost Space is going to be a primary text for the urban designers of the next generation. It is the first book in the field to absorb the lessons of the postmodern reaction, including the work of the Krier brothers and many others, and to integrate these into a coherent theory and set of design guidelines. Without polemics, Roger Trancik addresses the biggest issue in architecture and urbanism today: how can we regain in our shattered cities a public realm that is made of firmly shaped, coherently linked, humanly meaningful urban spaces? Robert Campbell, AIA Architect and architecture critic Boston Globe

Space, the City and Social Theory offers a clear and critical account of key approaches to cities and urban space within social theory and analysis. It explores the relation of the social and the spatial in the context of critical urban themes: community and anonymity; social difference and spatial divisions; politics and public space; gentrification and urban renewal; gender and sexuality; subjectivity and space; experience and everyday practice in the city. The text adopts an international and interdisciplinary approach, drawing on a range of debates on cities and urban life. It brings together classic perspectives in urban sociology and social theory with the analysis of contemporary urban problems and issues. Rather than viewing the urban simply as a backdrop for more general social processes, the discussion looks at how social and spatial relations shape different versions of the city: as a place of social interaction and of solitude; as a site of difference and segregation; as a space of politics and power; as a landscape of economic and cultural distinction; as a realm of everyday experience and freedom. Similarly, it examines how core social categories - such as class, culture, gender, sexuality and community - are shaped and reproduced in urban contexts. Linking debates in urban studies to wider concerns within social theory and analysis, this accessible text will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students in urban sociology, social and cultural geography, urban and cultural studies.

Openings: the urban question as a scale question? -- Between fixity and motion: scaling the urban fabric -- Restructuring, rescaling and the urban question -- Global city formation and the rescaling of urbanization -- Cities and the political geographies of the "new" economy -- Competitive city-regionalism and the politics of scale -- Urban growth machines : but at what scale? -- A thousand layers: geographies of uneven development -- Planetary urbanization: mutations of the urban question -- Afterword: new spaces of urbanization

When designing, planning and building urban spaces, many contradictory and conflicting actors, practices and agendas coexist. This book propounds that, at present, this process is conducted in an artificial reality, 'Concept City', characterized by a simplified and outdated conception of space. It provides a constructive critique of the concepts, underlying the practices of planning and architecture and, in order to facilitate more dynamic, inclusive and subtle practices, it formulates a new theory about space in general and public urban space in particular. The central notions in this theory are temporality, experiment and conflict, which are grounded on empirical observations in Helsinki, Manchester and Berlin. While the book contextualizes Lefebvre's ideas on urban planning and architecture, it is in no way limited to Lefebvrean discourse, but allows insights to new theoretical work, including that of Finnish and Swedish authors. In doing so, it suggests and develops exciting new approaches and tools leading to 'experiential urbanism'.

Time has become an increasingly important topic in urban studies and urban planning. The spatial-temporal interplay is not only of relevance for the theory of urban development and urban politics, but also for urban planning and governance. The space-time approach focuses on the human being with its various habits and routines in the city. Understanding and taking those habits into account in urban planning and public policies offers a new way to improve the quality of life in our cities. Adapting the supply and accessibility of public spaces and services to the inhabitants’ space-time needs calls for an integrated approach to the physical design of urban space and to the organization of cities. In the last two decades the body of practical and theoretical work on urban space-time topics has grown substantially. The book offers a state of the art overview of the theoretical reasoning, the development of new analytical tools, and practical experience of the space-time design of public cities in major European countries. The contributions were written by academics and practitioners from various fields exploring space-time research and planning.

This edited collection critically discusses the relevance of, and the potential for identifying conceptual common ground between dominant urban theory projects – namely Neo-Marxian accounts on planetary urbanization and alternative ‘Southern’ post-colonial and post-structuralist projects. Its main objective is to combine different urban knowledge to support and inspire an integrative research approach and a conceptual vocabulary which allows understanding the complex characteristics of diverse emerging urban spaces. Drawing on in-depth case study material from across the world, the different chapters in this volume disentangle planetary urbanization and apply it as a research framework to the context-specific challenges faced by many `ordinary' urban settings. In addition, through their focus on both Northern- and Southern urban spaces, this edited collection creates a truly global perspective on crucial practice-relevant topics such as the co-production of urban spaces, the ‘right to diversity’ and the ‘right to the urban’ in particular local settings.