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W.E.B. DuBois immortalized Philadelphia's Black Seventh Ward neighborhood, one of America's oldest urban black communities, in his 1899 sociological study The Philadelphia Negro. In the century after DuBois's study, however, the district has been transformed into a largely white upper middle class neighborhood. Black Citymakers revisits the Black Seventh Ward, documenting a century of banking and tenement collapses, housing activism, black-led anti-urban renewal mobilization, and post-Civil Rights political change from the perspective of the Black Seventh Warders. Drawing on historical, political, and sociological research, Marcus Hunter argues that black Philadelphians were by no means mere casualties of the large scale social and political changes that altered urban dynamics across the nation after World War II. Instead, Hunter shows that black Americans framed their own understandings of urban social change, forging dynamic inter- and intra-racial alliances that allowed them to shape their own migration from the old Black Seventh Ward to emergent black urban enclaves throughout Philadelphia. These Philadelphians were not victims forced from their homes - they were citymakers and agents of urban change. Black Citymakers explores a century of socioeconomic, cultural, and political history in the Black Seventh Ward, creating a new understanding of the political agency of black residents, leaders and activists in twentieth century urban change.
Cities are where solutions to the twenty-first century’s key challenges—addressing inequality, fostering political participation, responding to climate change—will be tested. And as cities adapt to new developments in technology, infrastructure, public space, transportation, and housing, so too must urban practices and our understanding of how to effect positive change evolve. In Citymakers, Cassim Shepard—2019 Guggenheim Fellow for Architecture, Planning, and Design—offers a vivid survey of how urbanism today is no longer the domain of just planners, politicians, and power brokers removed from the effects of their decisions, but an array of citizens working at the vanguard of increasingly diverse practices, from community gardeners to architects to housing advocates. Drawing on six years as the editor of Urban Omnibus, one of the leading publications charting innovations in urban practice (launched in 2009 by The Architectural League of New York), Shepard explores a broad variety of projects in New York, a city at the forefront of experimental and practical research: a constructed wetland in Staten Island, a workforce development and technology program in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a public art installation in a Bronx housing project, a housing advocacy initiative in Jackson Heights, Queens. These and a wide variety of other examples in Citymakers comprise a cross-disciplinary, from-the-ground-up approach that encourage better choices for cities of the future. By blending intimate portraits of individuals and projects with incisive social analysis, Citymakers reports from the front lines of urban practice with up-to-the-minute examples and arguments that reframe our understanding of urbanism. With original photography by Alex Fradkin, the book fuses the rich visual and graphic sensibility of architectural publishing with the informative readability of sophisticated, long-format journalism. Revising traditional notions of urban intervention and providing new directions for the next generation of citizen-practitioners, Citymakers is a lasting document of the perspectives driving cities today, and tomorrow.
The City Makers of Nairobi re-examines the history of the urban development of Nairobi in the colonial period. Although Nairobi was a colonial construct with lasting negative repercussions, the African population’s impact on its history and development is often overlooked. This book shows how Africans took an active part in making use of the city and creating it, and how they were far from being subjects in the development of a European colonial city. This re-interpretation of Nairobi’s history suggests that the post-colonial city is the result of more than unjust and segregative colonial planning. Merging historical documentation with extensive contemporary urban theory, this book provides in-depth knowledge of the key historical roles played by locals in the development of their city. It argues that the idea of agency, a popular inroad to urban development today, is not a current phenomenon but one that has always existed with its many social, spatial, and physical ramifications. This is an ideal read for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students studying the history of urban development and theories, providing an in-depth case study for reference. The City Makers of Nairobi broaches interdisciplinary themes important to urban planners, social scientists, historians, and those working with popular settlements in cities across the world.
CItyMaker presents a method and a set of tools to generate alternative solutions for an urban context. The method proposes the use of a combined set of design patterns encoding typical design moves used by urban designers. The combination of patterns generates different layouts which can be adjusted by manipulating several parameters in relation to updated urban indicators. The patterns were developed from observation of typical urban design procedures, first encoded as discursive grammars and later translated into parametric design patterns. The CItyMaker method and tools allows the designer to compose a design solution from a set of programmatic premises and fine-tune it by pulling parameters whilst checking the changes in urban indicators. These tools improve the designer's awareness of the consequences of their design moves.
Global City Makers provides an in-depth account of the role of powerful economic actors in making and un-making global cities. Engaging critically and constructively with global urban studies from a relational economic geography perspective, the book outlines a renewed agenda for global cities research. Focusing on financial services, management consultancy, real estate, commodity trading and maritime industries, the detailed studies in this volume are located across the globe to incorporate major world cities such as London, New York and Tokyo as well as globalizing cities including Mexico City, Hamburg and Mumbai.
When you think of a map of the United States, what do you see? Now think of the Seattle that begot Jimi Hendrix. The Dallas that shaped Erykah Badu. The Holly Springs, Mississippi, that compelled Ida B. Wells to activism against lynching. The Birmingham where Martin Luther King, Jr., penned his most famous missive. Now how do you see the United States? Chocolate Cities offers a new cartography of the United States—a “Black Map” that more accurately reflects the lived experiences and the future of Black life in America. Drawing on cultural sources such as film, music, fiction, and plays, and on traditional resources like Census data, oral histories, ethnographies, and health and wealth data, the book offers a new perspective for analyzing, mapping, and understanding the ebbs and flows of the Black American experience—all in the cities, towns, neighborhoods, and communities that Black Americans have created and defended. Black maps are consequentially different from our current geographical understanding of race and place in America. And as the United States moves toward a majority minority society, Chocolate Cities provides a broad and necessary assessment of how racial and ethnic minorities make and change America’s social, economic, and political landscape.
‘We are from different settlements but we belong to one city.’ – Rekha, Vikasini from Ahmedabad Living on the margins of India’s urban sprawls, the poor women of the nation’s slums bear the manifold burdens of housework, childcare and earning a livelihood. The Mahila Housing SEWA Trust (MHT) was established in 1994 with the aim of mobilizing and empowering these urban poor women, and supporting their access to adequate housing. Twenty-five years on, the MHT has changed the lives of over 1.7 million individuals, reaching more than 3,30,000 households and skilling over 17,000 women. The City-Makers tells the story of this incredible journey – a journey of transformation that has the potential to one day change the cities in which we live. The accounts of the innumerable courageous women workers who have taken steps – individually and collectively – to bring about change at the personal and community levels speak of the struggles, the sense of solidarity and the triumph they experience as they build their homes with their own hands; bargain with government and private agencies for access to water, sanitation, affordable energy and land rights; find solutions to make their homes climate-resilient; and participate in city-level planning and decision-making processes. Together, the success stories of Meena, Mumtaz, Parul, and others like them, reflect the central message of the MHT’s mission: that women living in urban informal settlements must be taken along if India wishes to make its cities participatory, inclusive and sustainable.
Imagine waking up to the gentle noises of the city, and moving through your day with complete confidence that you will get where you need to go quickly and efficiently. Soft City is about ease and comfort, where density has a human dimension, adapting to our ever-changing needs, nurturing relationships, and accommodating the pleasures of everyday life. How do we move from the current reality in most cites—separated uses and lengthy commutes in single-occupancy vehicles that drain human, environmental, and community resources—to support a soft city approach? In Soft City David Sim, partner and creative director at Gehl, shows how this is possible, presenting ideas and graphic examples from around the globe. He draws from his vast design experience to make a case for a dense and diverse built environment at a human scale, which he presents through a series of observations of older and newer places, and a range of simple built phenomena, some traditional and some totally new inventions. Sim shows that increasing density is not enough. The soft city must consider the organization and layout of the built environment for more fluid movement and comfort, a diversity of building types, and thoughtful design to ensure a sustainable urban environment and society. Soft City begins with the big ideas of happiness and quality of life, and then shows how they are tied to the way we live. The heart of the book is highly visual and shows the building blocks for neighborhoods: building types and their organization and orientation; how we can get along as we get around a city; and living with the weather. As every citizen deals with the reality of a changing climate, Soft City explores how the built environment can adapt and respond. Soft City offers inspiration, ideas, and guidance for anyone interested in city building. Sim shows how to make any city more efficient, more livable, and better connected to the environment.