Global Downtowns

Global Downtowns reconsiders one of the defining features of urban life—the energy and exuberance that characterize downtown areas—within a framework of contemporary globalization and change. It analyzes the iconic centers of global cities through individual case studies from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the United States, considering issues of function, population, imagery, and growth. Contributors to the volume use ethnographic and cultural analysis to identify downtowns as products of the activities of planners, power elites, and consumers and as zones of conflict and competition. Whether claiming space on a world stage through architecture, media events, or historical tourism or facing the claims of different social groups for a place at the center, downtowns embody the heritage of the modern city and its future. Essays draw on extensive fieldwork and archival study in Beijing, Barcelona, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dar es Salaam, Dubai, Nashville, Lima, Philadelphia, Mumbai, Havana, Beirut, and Paris, among other cities. They examine the visions of planners and developers, cultural producers, governments, theoreticians, immigrants, and outcasts. Through these perspectives, the book explores questions of space and place, consumption, mediation, and images as well as the processes by which urban elites learn from each other as well as contest local hegemony. Global Downtowns raises important questions for those who work with issues of urban centrality in governance, planning, investment, preservation, and social reform. The volume insists that however important the narratives of individual spaces—theories of American downtowns, images of global souks, or diasporic formations of ethnic enclaves as interconnected nodes—they also must be situated within a larger, dynamic framework of downtowns as centers of modern urban imagination.

Examines how cities of various sizes on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean are making walkability improvements a part of their overall urban revitalization strategy. Walkable precincts have become an important component of urban revitalization on both sides of the Atlantic. In Walkable Cities, Carlos J. L. Balsas examines a range of city scales and geographic settings on three continents, focusing on the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), Latin America (Brazil and Mexico), and the United States (Phoenix and New York City). He explains how this “pedestrianization of Main Street” approach to central locations (downtowns and midtowns) has contributed to strengthening various urban functions, such as urban vitality, pedestrian and bicyclist safety, tourism, and more. However, it has also put pressure on less affluent, peripheral, and fragile areas due to higher levels of consumption and waste generation. Balsas calls attention to the need to base urban revitalization interventions on more spatially and socially just interventions coupled with sustainable consumption practices that do not necessarily entail high growth levels, but instead aim to improve the quality of city life. “The notion of commercial urbanism is both novel and engaging, since much of the vibrancy of cities comes from commerce, consumption, and entertainment. The idea itself is a major contribution of the book.” — Tridib Kumar Banerjee, University of Southern California

Downtowns are more than economic engines: they are repositories of knowledge and culture and generators of new ideas, technology, and ventures. They are the heart of the city that drives its future. If we are to have healthy downtowns, we need to understand what downtown is all about; how and why some American downtowns never stopped thriving (such as San Jose and Houston), some have been in decline for half a century (including Detroit and St. Louis), and still others are resurging after temporary decline (many, including Lower Manhattan and Los Angeles). The downtowns that are prospering are those that more easily adapt to changing needs and lifestyles. In The Heart of the City, distinguished urban planner Alexander Garvin shares lessons on how to plan for a mix of housing, businesses, and attractions; enhance the public realm; improve mobility; and successfully manage downtown services. Garvin opens the book with diagnoses of downtowns across the United States, including the people, businesses, institutions, and public agencies implementing changes. In a review of prescriptions and treatments for any downtown, Garvin shares brief accounts--of both successes and failures--of what individuals with very different objectives have done to change their downtowns. The final chapters look at what is possible for downtowns in the future, closing with suggested national, state, and local legislation to create standard downtown business improvement districts to better manage downtowns. This book will help public officials, civic organizations, downtown business property owners, and people who care about cities learn from successful recent actions in downtowns across the country, and expand opportunities facing their downtown. Garvin provides recommendations for continuing actions to help any downtown thrive, ensuring a prosperous and thrilling future for the 21st-century American city.

This book challenges the conventional (modernist-inspired) understanding of urbanization as a universal process tied to the ideal-typical model of the modern metropolis with its origins in the grand Western experience of city-building. At the start of the twenty-first century, the familiar idea of the 'city' - or 'urbanism' as we know it - has experienced such profound mutations in both structure and form that the customary epistemological categories and prevailing conceptual frameworks that predominate in conventional urban theory are no longer capable of explaining the evolving patterns of city-making. Global urbanism has increasingly taken shape as vast, distended city-regions, where urbanizing landscapes are increasingly fragmented into discontinuous assemblages of enclosed enclaves characterized by global connectivity and concentrated wealth, on the one side, and distressed zones of neglect and impoverishment, on the other. These emergent patterns of what might be called enclave urbanism have gone hand-in-hand with the new modes of urban governance, where the crystallization of privatized regulatory regimes has effectively shielded wealthy enclaves from public oversight and interference.

The Caribbean “market woman” is ingrained in the popular imagination as the archetype of black womanhood in countries throughout the region. Challenging this stereotype and other outdated images of black women, Downtown Ladies offers a more complex picture by documenting the history of independent international traders—known as informal commercial importers, or ICIs—who travel abroad to import and export a vast array of consumer goods sold in the public markets of Kingston, Jamaica. Both by-products of and participants in globalization, ICIs operate on multiple levels and, since their emergence in the 1970s, have made significant contributions to the regional, national, and global economies. Gina Ulysse carefully explores how ICIs, determined to be self-employed, struggle with government regulation and other social tensions to negotiate their autonomy. Informing this story of self-fashioning with reflections on her own experience as a young Haitian anthropologist, Ulysse combines the study of political economy with the study of individual and collective identity to reveal the uneven consequences of disrupting traditional class, color, and gender codes in individual societies and around the world.

• New York Times bestseller • The 100 most substantive solutions to reverse global warming, based on meticulous research by leading scientists and policymakers around the world “At this point in time, the Drawdown book is exactly what is needed; a credible, conservative solution-by-solution narrative that we can do it. Reading it is an effective inoculation against the widespread perception of doom that humanity cannot and will not solve the climate crisis. Reported by-effects include increased determination and a sense of grounded hope.” —Per Espen Stoknes, Author, What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming “There’s been no real way for ordinary people to get an understanding of what they can do and what impact it can have. There remains no single, comprehensive, reliable compendium of carbon-reduction solutions across sectors. At least until now. . . . The public is hungry for this kind of practical wisdom.” —David Roberts, Vox “This is the ideal environmental sciences textbook—only it is too interesting and inspiring to be called a textbook.” —Peter Kareiva, Director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, UCLA In the face of widespread fear and apathy, an international coalition of researchers, professionals, and scientists have come together to offer a set of realistic and bold solutions to climate change. One hundred techniques and practices are described here—some are well known; some you may have never heard of. They range from clean energy to educating girls in lower-income countries to land use practices that pull carbon out of the air. The solutions exist, are economically viable, and communities throughout the world are currently enacting them with skill and determination. If deployed collectively on a global scale over the next thirty years, they represent a credible path forward, not just to slow the earth’s warming but to reach drawdown, that point in time when greenhouse gases in the atmosphere peak and begin to decline. These measures promise cascading benefits to human health, security, prosperity, and well-being—giving us every reason to see this planetary crisis as an opportunity to create a just and livable world.

Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape brings together various disciplinary perspectives and diverse theories on art’s dialectical and evolving relationship with urban regeneration processes. It engages in the accumulated discussions on art’s role in gentrification, yet changes the focus to the growing phenomenon of artistic protests and resistance in the gentrified neighborhoods. Since the 1980s, art and artists’ role​s in gentrification ha​ve been at the forefront of urban geography research in the subjects of housing, regeneration, displacement and new urban planning. In these accounts the artists have been noted to contribute at all stages of gentrification, from triggering it to eventually being displaced by it themselves. The current presence of art in our neoliberal urban space​s illustrates the constant negotiation between power and resistance​. And there is a growing need to recognize art’s shifting and conflicting relationship with gentrification. The chapters presented here share a common thesis that the aesthetic reconfiguration of the neoliberal city does not only allow uneven and exclusionary urban redevelopment strategies but also facilitates the growth of anti-gentrification resistance. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, urban cultures, cultural geography and urban studies as well as contemporary art practitioners and policymakers.

This work studies aspects of the symbolic construction of public spaces by means of linguistic resources (i.e. linguistic landscapes or LLs) in a number of world-cities. The sociology of language leads us to this field and to study the intermingling impacts of globalization, the national principle and multiculturalism – each one conveying its own distinct linguistic markers: international codes, national languages and ethnic vernaculars. Eliezer and Miriam Ben-Rafael study the configurations of these influences, which they conceptualize as multiple globalization, in the LLs of downtowns, residential quarters, and marginal neighborhoods of a number of world-cities. They ask how far worldwide codes of communication gain preeminence, national languages are marginalized and ethnic vernaculars impactful. They conclude by suggesting a paradigm of multiple globalizations.

This book will change the way Americans think about their cities. It provides a comprehensive economic and social history of urban America since 1950, covering the 29 largest urban areas of that period. Specifically, the book covers 17 cities in the Northeast, 6 in the South, and 6 in the West, decade by decade, with extensive data and historical narrative. The author divides his analysis into three periods - urban growth (1950 to 1970), urban crisis (late 1960s to 1990), and urban rebirth (since 1990). He draws on the concepts of the vicious circle and the virtuous circle to offer the first in-depth explanation for the transition from urban crisis to urban rebirth that took place in the early 1990s. "Urban America" is both a message of hope and a call to action for students and professionals in urban studies. It will inspire readers to concentrate on finding ways and means to ensure that the urban rebirth will continue.