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As the cities of the world increasingly come under threat from crisis and disaster, planners are searching for ways to build resilience into the foundations of modern urban centres.This important book provides a comprehensive account of the theory and practice of urban resilience in response to a range of disruptions, including terrorism, climate change and economic crises. It examines how the concepts and principles of resilience exert increasing significant influence over the form and function of planning. Discussing a 'politics of resilience' in which fundamental questions of social and spatial justice are posed, this book examines how urban planners are increasingly tasked with the responsibility of safeguarding the future of urbanised centres and those that live in them. Drawing on international examples and detailed case-studies, this book provides a nuanced account of the uses, and misuses, of resilience and points a way forward for planning activity, from an approach that is too often narrowly technical in focus towards an integrated and adaptable model for coping with risk, crisis and uncertainty. It will make essential reading for students of urban planning and researchers alike.

This book offers the first in-depth analysis of the network of Puerto Rican community activism in the Lower East Side from 1964 to 2001. The community of Loisaida organized itself to fight against postwar urban deindustrialization, housing disinvestment, and gentrification, which threatened to displace an entire generation of Puerto Ricans who migrated to this New York neighborhood and tried to make it their home. Using an amalgam of unprocessed organizational archives, oral histories, ephemera, and neighborhood publications, this book is recreating the history of community action in Loisaida. Focusing on key institutions and community groups that mobilized residents and built a lasting activist network, Loisaida as Urban Laboratory demonstrates how community groups pioneered a methodology for more sustainable community activism. These activists turned Loisaida into their laboratory, constantly experimenting with and adapting new strategies to put up a solid defense against absentee landlords, greedy developers, opportunist politicians, and an era of increased policing of urban space.

Urban Sensographies views the human body as a highly nuanced sensor to explore how various performance-based methods can be implemented to gather usable ‘felt data’ about the environment of the city as the basis for creating embodied mappings. The contributors to this fascinating volume seek to draw conclusions about the constitution, character and morphology of urban space as public, habitable and sustainable by monitoring the reactions of the human body as a form of urban sensor. This co-authored book is centrally concerned, as a symptom of the degree to which cities are evolving in the 21st century, to examine the effects of this change on the practices and behaviours of urban dwellers. This takes into account such factors as: defensible, retail and consumer space; legacies of modernist design in the built environment; the effects of surveillance technologies, motorised traffic and smart phone use; the integration of ‘wild’ as well as ‘domesticated’ nature in urban planning and living; and the effects of urban pollution on the earth’s climate. Drawing on three years of funded practical research carried out by a multi-medial team of researchers and artists, this book analyses the presence and movement of the human body in urban space, which is essential reading for academics and practitioners in the fields of dance, film, visual art, sound technology, digital media and performance studies.

Urban planning and heritage management have often been positioned as opposing powers in the management of historic urban landscapes. To reconcile them, the trend is to recommend a holistic, integrated and multidisciplinary management of resources, by means of a new approach in heritage management: the landscape approach. In this context, landscape is defined as an inclusive and comprehensive platform that cannot be understood or managed except through an approach that embraces all its components. The landscape approach is not about allowing (or disallowing) transformation in itself, but about establishing and guiding the nature of the transformation. It addresses the future quality of the urban landscape and the relationships forming it. It positions heritage as an active change agent in the process of urban management. However, implementation in urban management proves to be a great challenge. The lack of systematic methods for comparative policy research in the field of cultural heritage hinders an understanding of policy transfer on a scale that goes beyond the case study, which then interferes with the feedback loop back into the supranational policies. The main aim of this thesis is to raise understanding of the integration of urban and heritage planning in multilevel governance, and in particular to explore ways to best reveal the relations between supranational and subnational policy. A method of cross-referencing heritage taxonomy is developed and tested. It has successfully been tested with governance stakeholders in Amsterdam. While further research is needed to refine and optimize the taxonomy and its application, it already promises to have applications beyond its initial aims.

This book focusses on the instruments, practices, and materialities produced by various authorities to monitor, regulate, and identify migrants in European cities from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Whereas research on migration regulation typically looks at local policies for the early modern period and at state policies for the contemporary period, this book avoids the stalemate of modernity narratives by exploring a long-term genealogy of migration regulation in which cities played a pivotal role. The case studies range from early modern Venice, Stockholm and Constantinople, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century port towns and capital cities such as London and Vienna.

The purpose of this article is to overturn some key assumptions on the nature of populism in relation to culture and policy. Populism is often defined in terms of a Right-wing appeal to mass culture and uneducated taste, unmediated by political institutions and the reflexive historical discourse of modernity. While the subject of culture and populism is huge, and cannot be fully broached here, this article takes a period of unique policy innovation — New Labour's first terms in government in the UK. It assesses the way culture and policy were articulated and positioned between urban and social policies, creating the conditions for a form of "social instrumentalism" that was as irresistible to the Left as it was acceptable to the Right. This article assesses the apparent paradoxes of social instrumentalism and its implications with regard culture, democracy and the political function of public policies.

This book offers key concepts and practical guidance about the planner’s role in countering terrorist risk. Public safety and security has always been a fundamental premise of successful public spaces, and a material consideration in planning processes, but especially so since the events of 9/11 2001. Recent attacks in Berlin, Nice, Stockholm, London, Melbourne, Barcelona, New York and elsewhere using fast-moving vehicles against crowded places has led to a re-evaluation of security in many public locations. In these uncertain times, planners are increasingly being seen as key stakeholders in national security and counter-terrorism endeavours where the spatial configuration and aesthetic design of protective security interventions will have a crucial impact upon the vibrancy, resilience and safety of urban centres both now and in the future.

The material handled in this chapter is based on a series of repeated durational encounters on foot with selected urban sites in the city centre of Coventry. Methodologically these ‘performed walks’, conducted solo as psycho-geographical ‘drifts’, sought, first, to be self-consciously attentive to impressions triggered for the sensitised body by those locales in terms of the ‘atmospheres’ they conjured. Second, the working process set out to record these initial ‘site soundings’, indulging associative, conjectural flights of fancy arising from them which included integrating them into a developing body of knowledge relating to urban and performance theory as well as the extant culture and history of Coventry as a city. As the chapter shows, the fieldwork focused largely on the four-lane (clockwise and anti-clockwise) inner ring-road that has encircled the city centre since its phased construction in the wake of the devastation wreaked by World War II. The undulating, 2.5-mile-long ring-road proved to be an unwieldy, domineering superstructure, whose sheer scale and presence are disproportionate within the context of a centre that can be crossed in ten minutes on foot. It now stands as a crumbling, propped-up testament to a misconceived 20th-century fantasy of the private car as the solution to mobility in small cities, if not the solution to people’s lives per se.

The modern Uyghurs, caught politically, economically, and culturally between Central Asia and the People’s Republic of China, constitute a fascinating subject for the study of identity formation. A sizeable body of knowledge has now been amassed on relational identities, constructed in an inter-ethnic context, and on intra-ethnic socio-cultural identities among both rural and urban Uyghur. One area that remains relatively unexplored is that of the self-identity of the minkaohan (Uyghurs educated in the Chinese language at Han schools). The minkaohan, popularly known as “Xinjiang’s 14th nationality,” are considered by most actors - minkaohan themselves, other Uyghurs, Han Chinese - to be neither wholly Uyghur (as a Central Asian people) nor wholly Chinese and are thus most susceptible to developing a hybrid, dual identity that situates itself both within and between the two. Borrowing sociological and psychological perspectives from studies of multiple and biracial identity, this paper illustrates the ambiguities of the minkaohan experience - conflicts of loyalty, ‘internalised oppression,’ situational negotiation, and survival through hybridity - through the case study of one individual, her family, friends and colleagues.