Disrupted Urbanism

The ‘smart city’ is often promoted as a technology-driven solution to complex urban issues. While commentators are increasingly critical of techno-optimistic narratives, the political imagination is dominated by claims that technical solutions can be uniformly applied to intractable problems. This book provides a much-needed alternative view, exploring how ‘home-grown’ digital disruption, driven and initiated by local actors, upends the mainstream corporate narrative. Drawing on original research conducted in a range of urban African settings, Odendaal shows how these initiatives can lead to meaningful change. This is a valuable resource for scholars working in the intersection of science and technology studies, urban and economic geography and sociology.

Disruptive Urbanism examines how different forms and modes of the so called "sharing economy" are manifesting in cities and regions throughout the world, and how policy makers are responding to these disruptions. The emergence of the so called "sharing economy" and the "disruptive technologies" have profound implications for urban policy and governance. Initial expectations that "sharing" of homes, offices or vehicles could solve urban problems such as congestion or housing affordability have given way to concerns over job precarity, neighbourhood transformation, and the growing power of platforms in disrupting urban governance and regulation. Contributors to this volume canvas these issues, examining how the "sharing economy" is manifesting in urban areas, the implications of this for urban living, and how policy makers are responding to these changes. Implications for urban research, policy, and practice are highlighted through chapters which address forms of urban "sharing" across housing, transport, work, and food and wider processes of globalisation and neoliberalism as they disrupt cities and urban policy making. Disruptive Urbanism will be of great interest to scholars of urban planning, urban governance, the sharing economy, and housing studies. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Urban Policy and Research.

Bringing together leading researchers from geography, political science, sociology, public policy and technology studies, Disrupted Cities exposes the politics of well-known disruptions such as devastation of New Orleans in 2005, the global SARS outbreak in 2002-3, and the great power collapse in the North Eastern US in 2003. But the book also excavates the politics of more hidden disruptions: the clogging of city sewers with fat; the day-to-day infrastructural collapses which dominate urban life in much of the global south; the deliberate devastation of urban infrastructure by state militaries; and the ways in which alleged threats of infrastructural disruption have been used to radically reorganize cities as part of the ‘war on terror’. Accessible, topical and state-of-the art, Disrupted Cities will be required reading for anyone interested in the intersections of technology, security and urban life as we plunge headlong into this quintessentially urban century. The book’s blend of cutting-edge theory with visceral events means that it will be particularly useful for illuminating urban courses within geography, sociology, planning, anthropology, political science, public policy, architecture and technology studies.

Introducing Human Geographies is a ‘travel guide’ into the academic subject of human geography and the things that it studies. The coverage of the new edition has been thoroughly refreshed to reflect and engage with the contemporary nature and direction of human geography. This updated and much extended fourth edition includes a diverse range of authors and topics from across the globe, with a completely revised set of contributions reflecting contemporary concerns in human geography. Presented in four parts with a streamlined structure, it includes over 70 contributions written by expert international researchers addressing the central ideas through which human geographers understand and shape their subject. It maps out the big, foundational ideas that have shaped the discipline past and present; explores key research themes being pursued in human geography’s various sub-disciplines; and identifies emerging collaborations between human geography and other disciplines in the areas of technology, justice and environment. This comprehensive, stimulating and cutting-edge introduction to the field is richly illustrated throughout with full colour figures, maps and photos. The book is designed especially for students new to university degree courses in human geography across the world, and is an essential reference for undergraduate students on courses related to society, place, culture and space.

This book tackles the emerging smart urbanism to advance a new way of urban thinking and to explore a new design approach. It unravels several urban transformations in dualities: economic relationality and centrality, technological flattening and polarisation, and spatial division and fusion. These dualities are interdependent; concurrent, coexisting, and contradictory, they are jointly disrupting and reshaping many aspects of contemporary cities and spaces. The book draws on a suite of international studies, experiences, and observations, including case studies in Beijing, Singapore, and Boston, to reveal how these processes are impacting urban design, development, and policy approaches. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated many changes already in motion, and provides an extreme circumstance for reflecting on and imagining urban spaces. These analyses, thoughts, and visions inform an urban imaginary of smart design that incorporates change, flexibility, collaboration, and experimentation, which together forge a paradigm of urban thinking. This paradigm builds upon the modernist and postmodernist urban design traditions and extends them in new directions, responding to and anticipating a changing urban environment. The book proposes a smart design manifesto to stimulate thought, trigger debate, and, hopefully, influence a new generation of urban thinkers and smart designers. It will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners in the fields of urban design, planning, architecture, urban development, and urban studies.

Cities Interrupted explores the potential of visual culture – in the form of photography, film, performance, architecture, urban design, and mixed media – to strategically interrupt processes of globalization in contemporary urban spaces. Looking at cities such as Amsterdam, Beijing, Doha, London, New York, and Paris, the book brings together original essays to reveal how the concept of 'interruption' in global cities enables new understanding of the forms of space, experience, and community that are emerging in today's rapidly transforming urban environments. The idea of 'interruption' addressed in this book refers to deliberate interventions in the spaces and communities of contemporary cities – interventions that seek to disrupt or destabilize the experience of everyday urban life through creative practice. Interruption is used as an analytic and conceptual tool to challenge – and explore alternatives to – the narratives of speed, hyper-mobility, rapid growth, and incessant exchange and flow that have dominated critical thinking on global cities. Bringing art and creative practice into the centre of discussions about the future of cities, alongside discussions of development, design, justice, health, sustainability, technology, and citizenship, this book is essential reading for anyone working at the intersections of a range of urban, cultural and visual fields, including urban studies, urban design and architecture, visual studies, cultural studies, media studies, art history, and social and cultural geography.

This book explores the opportunities and challenges of the sharing economy and innovative transportation technologies with regard to urban mobility. Written by government experts, social scientists, technologists and city planners from North America, Europe and Australia, the papers in this book address the impacts of demographic, societal and economic trends and the fundamental changes arising from the increasing automation and connectivity of vehicles, smart communication technologies, multimodal transit services, and urban design. The book is based on the Disrupting Mobility Summit held in Cambridge, MA (USA) in November 2015, organized by the City Science Initiative at MIT Media Lab, the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley, the LSE Cities at the London School of Economics and Politics and the Innovation Center for Mobility and Societal Change in Berlin.

Cities are the new battleground of our increasingly urban world. From the slums of the global South to the wealthy financial centers of the West, Cities Under Siege traces the spread of political violence through the sites, spaces, infrastructure and symbols of the world's rapidly expanding metropolitan areas. Drawing on a wealth of original research, Stephen Graham shows how Western militaries and security forces now perceive all urban terrain as a conflict zone inhabited by lurking shadow enemies. Urban inhabitants have become targets that need to be continually tracked, scanned and controlled. Graham examines the transformation of Western armies into high-tech urban counter-insurgency forces. He looks at the militarization and surveillance of international borders, the use of 'security' concerns to suppress democratic dissent, and the enacting of legislation to suspend civilian law. In doing so, he reveals how the New Military Urbanism permeates the entire fabric of urban life, from subway and transport networks hardwired with high-tech 'command and control' systems to the insidious militarization of a popular culture corrupted by the all-pervasive discourse of 'terrorism.'

POST-TRAUMATIC URBANISM Urban trauma describes a condition where conflict or catastrophe has disrupted and damaged not only the physical environment and infrastructure of a city, but also the social and cultural networks. Cities experiencing trauma dominate the daily news. Images of blasted buildings or events such as Hurricane Katrina exemplify the sense of 'immediate impact'. But how is this trauma to be understood in its aftermath, and in urban terms? What is the response of the discipline to the post-traumatic condition? On the one hand, one can try to restore and recover everything that has passed, or otherwise see the post-traumatic city as a resilient space poised on the cusp of new potentialities. While repair and reconstruction are automatic reflexes, the knowledge and practices of the disciplines need to be imbued with a deeper understanding of the effect of trauma on cities and their contingent realities. This issue will pursue this latter approach, using examples of post-traumatic urban conditions to rethink the agency of architecture and urbanism in the contemporary world. Post-traumatic urbanism demands of architects the mobilisation of skills, criticality and creativity in contexts in which they are not familiar. The post-traumatic is no longer the exception; it is the global condition.

This book offers a timely exploration of how climate change manifests in the global workplace. It draws together accounts of workers, their work, and the politics of resistance in order to enable us to better understand how the impacts of climate change are structured by the economic and social processes of labour. Focusing on nine empirically grounded cases of labour under climate change, this volume links the tools and methods of critical labour studies to key debates over climate change adaptation and mitigation in order to highlight the active nature of struggles in the climate-impacted workplace. Spanning cases including commercial agriculture in Turkey, labour unions in the UK, and brick kilns in Cambodia, this collection offers a novel lens on the changing climate, showing how both the impacts of climate change and adaptations to it emerge through the prism of working lives. Drawing together scholars from anthropology, political economy, geography, and development studies, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change adaptation, labour studies, and environmental justice. More generally, it will be of interest to anybody seeking to understand how the changing climate is changing the terms, conditions, and politics of the global workplace.