You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A photo-tour through six cities on the Arabian Peninsula Photographer Michele Nastasi (born 1980) pictures the boomtowns of the Arabian Peninsula, including Abu Dhabi, Doha, Dubai, Kuwait City, Manama and Riyadh. Set against rapid urban development, avant-garde architecture and desert landscapes, the cities are also connected by tourism and a transient workforce.
How and why do spectacular buildings get commissioned and procured? What are their visible urban effects? What can urban planners, architects, and policymakers learn in order to engage in more successful citymaking? In recent years, media and critical attention has been lavished on famous architects, and the contributions of their designs to the branding of cities. The post-“Bilbao effect” global landscape is one where cities compete for the highest-profile skyscrapers, cultural projects, and high-profile developments designed by star architects whom even casual readers know by first name: Frank Gehry, Bjarke Ingels, Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas. Far less is known...
Cities across the world have been resorting to star architects to brand their projects, spark urban regeneration and market the city image internationally. This book shifts the attention from star architects to star architecture, arguing that the process of deciding about and implementing relevant architectural and urban projects is not the product of any single actor. Star architecture can, in fact, be better studied and understood as assembled by multiple actors and in its relationship with urban transformation. In its 18 chapters, the book presents a multidisciplinary collection of expert contributions in the fields of urban planning, architecture, media studies, urban economics, geography, and sociology, consistently brought together for the first time to deal with this topic. Through a vast array of case studies and analytical techniques touching over 20 cities in Europe, the book shows the positive and more problematic impacts of star architecture with reference to the preservation of built heritage, tourism and media. The book will be of interest to architects, sociologists, urban planners, and public administrators.
Cities of the Arabian Peninsula reveal contradictions of contemporary urbanization The fast-growing cities of the Persian Gulf are, whatever else they may be, indisputably sensational. The world’s tallest building is in Dubai; the 2022 World Cup in soccer will be played in fantastic Qatar facilities; Saudi Arabia is building five new cities from scratch; the Louvre, the Guggenheim and the Sorbonne, as well as many American and European universities, all have handsome outposts and campuses in the region. Such initiatives bespeak strategies to diversify economies and pursue grand ambitions across the Earth. Shining special light on Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha—where the dynamics of extreme u...
Today is a new metropolitan age and for the first time ever more people live in cities than they do anywhere else. As cities strengthen their international and cultural influence, the global world is acted out most articulately in the world′s urban hubs - through its diverse cultures, broad networks and innovative styles of governance. Looking at the city through its internal dynamics, the book examines how governance and cultural policy play out in a national and international framework. Making a truly global contribution to the literature, the editors bring together a truly international and highly-respected bevy of scholars. In doing so, they skilfully steer debates beyond the city as an economic powerhouse, to cover issues that fully comprehend a city′s cultural dynamics and its impact on policy including alternative economies, creativity, migration, diversity, sustainability, education and urban planning. Innovative in its approach and content, this book is ideal for students, scholars and researchers interested in sociology, urban studies, cultural studies, and public policy.
Transnational Architecture and Urbanism combines urban planning, design, policy, and geography studies to offer place-based and project-oriented insight into relevant case studies of urban transformation in Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East. Since the 1990s, increasingly multinational modes of design have arisen, especially concerning prominent buildings and places. Traditional planning and design disciplines have proven to have limited comprehension of, and little grip on, such transformations. Public and scholarly discussions argue that these projects and transformations derive from socioeconomic, political, cultural trends or conditions of globalization. The author suggests...
This book discusses the economic and political conditions that facilitate megaproject implementation and what are the impacts on urbanity and livability of such costly mode of urban development. It includes contributions from sociologists, planners, geographers and architects making it a truly multidisciplinary project.
This book uses an international perspective and draws on a wide range of new conceptual and empirical material to examine the sources of conflict and cooperation within the different landscapes of knowledge that are driving contemporary urban change. Based on the premise that historically established systems of regulation and control are being subject to unprecedented pressures, scholars critically reflect on the changing role of planning and governance in sustainable urban development, looking at how a shift in power relations between expert and local cultures in western planning processes has blurred the traditional boundaries between public, private and voluntary sectors.
In the last two centuries Britain has experienced a revolution in higher education, with the number of students rising from a few hundred to several million. Yet the institutions that drove - and still drive - this change have been all but ignored by historians. Drawing on a decade's research, and based on work in dozens of archives, many of them used for the very first time, this is the first full-scale study of the civic universities - new institutions in the nineteenth century reflecting the growth of major Victorian cities in Britain, such as Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, York, and Durham - for more than 50 years. Tracing their story from the 1780s until the 2010s, it is an ambitiou...
Part architectural guidebook and part critique, Sky-High documents the pencil-thin, supertall towers that are transforming New York City's skyline as well as its streets. New York City's penchant for building skyward has reached new heights with its crop of supertall towers—those that rise at least 984 feet above the sidewalk. The city that never sleeps is also the city that never stops building ever higher, from the Woolworth and Chrysler buildings of an earlier race to the top to today's super luxury aeries of 57th Street's Billionaires' Row and the towers of the World Trade complex in Lower Manhattan. Bruce Katz's extraordinary photographs capture a dozen of these self-styled odes to wealth and power, alongside Eric P. Nash's incisive critique documenting the evolution of the skyline, past and present, and the supertalls' transformative effects on the contemporary cityscape. Among the twelve buildings featured are One World Trade Center, Three World Trade Center, 30 Hudson Yards, 35 Hudson Yards, One57, 432 Park Avenue, 53West53, Central Park Tower, and One Vanderbilt.