Emergent Urbanism Urban Planning & Design in Times of Structural and Systemic Change

In the last few decades, many European and American cities and towns experienced economic, social and spatial structural change. Strategies for urban regeneration include investments in infrastructures for production, consumption and communication, as well as marketing and branding measures, and urban design schemes. Bringing together leading academics from across a range of disciplines, including Douglas Kelbaugh, Ali Madanipour, Saskia Sassen, Gregory Ashworth, Nan Elin, Emily Talen, and many others, Emergent Urbanism identifies the specific issues dominating today’s urban planning and urban design discourse, arguing that urban planning and design not only results from deliberate planning and design measures, but how these combine with infrastructure planning, and derive from economic, social and spatial processes of structural change. Combining explorations from urban planning, urban theory, human geography, sociology, urban design and architecture, the volume provides a comprehensive and state-of-the-art overview, highlighting the complexities of these interactions in space and place, process and design.

Contents: Introduction: emergent urbanism and beyond, Krister Olsson and Tigran Haas. Part I The New Urban Context: Alphaville and Masdar: the future of urban space and form?, Alexander R. Cuthbert; Imagining biophilic cities, Timothy Beatley; A long view at high speed, Andrew Ballantyne; Creativity, diversity and interaction: urban space and place-making, Ali Madanipour; Incremental urbanism: the emergence of informal settlements, Kim Dovey; The city seen: strategies of coherence, evocation and simulation in urban representation, William Uricchio. Part II Processes of Planning and Urban Change: Social capital in the age of megacities and the knowledge economy, Hans Westlund; Cities of culture and culture in cities: the emerging uses of culture in city branding, Gregory Ashworth and Mihalis Kavaratzis; The field of urban composition, Mark C. Childs; The subject of place: staying with the trouble, Jonathan Metzger; What is good urbanism?, Nan Ellin; The challenge of social sustainability: revisiting the unfinished job of defining and measuring social sustainability in an urban context, Andrea Colantonio. Part III The Urban Product: Emergent urbanism as the transformative force in saving the planet, Peter Newman; Does the city have speech?, Saskia Sassen; Planning the emergent and dealing with uncertainty: regulations and urban form, Emily Talen; The responsive city: the city of the future re-imagined from the bottom up, Sarah Williams; The environmental paradox of the city, landscape urbanism and new urbanism, Douglas Kelbaugh. Index.

Tigran Haas is an Associate Professor at KTH - The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden and Krister Olsson is an Associate Professor at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.