The Contemporary City in Four Movements

At the onset of the 21st century, cities are larger, more complex, and less easily designed than ever before. After many modernist proposals to remake the city in the guise of some rational system, postmodern architects, planners, and thinkers have begun to accept (and in some cases, even celebrate) the city for its unreadable and uncontrollable aspects. This paper proposes a discursive approach to the contemporary city. Instead of analysing existing arguments and proposals and then coming up with a new comprehensive and exclusive reading of the city, why not engage the city through the plural and conflictive debates of our era? In what follows, four such urban movements-traditional, marketplace, social, and conceptual-are examined, contrasted, and then juxtaposed with the aim of theorizing a city of difference.

[1]  Elizabeth A. T. Smith.  URBAN REVISIONS: CURRENT PROJECTS FOR THE PUBLIC REALM , 1995, Landscape Journal.

[2]  M. Davis.  ECOLOGY OF FEAR: LOS ANGELES AND THE IMAGINATION OF DISASTER. , 1999 .

[3]  Simon Sheikh.  The Production of Space , 1996 .

[4]  B. Pond,et al.  RURAL/URBAN LAND CONVERSION III: A TECHNICAL NOTE ON LEADING INDICATORS OF URBAN LAND DEVELOPMENT , 1994 .

[5]  Bernard Tschumi,et al.  The Manhattan Transcripts , 1982 .

[6]  P. Katz.  The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community , 1993 .

[7]  J. Jacobs.  The Death and Life of Great American Cities , 1962 .

[8]  N. Smith.  The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City , 1997 .

[9]  S. Knapp.  Paradise Regained , 2001, Science.

[10]  P. Calthorpe.  The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream , 1993 .

[11]  E. Lévinas.  Totality and Infinity , 1961 .

[12]  M. A. Weiss.  The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning , 1987 .

[13]  Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City* , 1988 .

[14]  D. Burton-Christie.  Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster , 2000 .

[15]  Lars Lerup,et al.  Stim & Dross: Rethinking the Metropolis , 1994 .

[16]  M. Davis.  City of Quartz , 1990 .

[17]  Philip Langdon,et al.  A Better Place to Live: Reshaping the American Suburb , 1994 .

[18]  Pierre Macherey.  A Theory of Literary Production , 1980 .

[19]  L. Schäfer.  The Θ-Region , 1999 .

[20]  Robert Fishman,et al.  Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia , 1987 .

[21]  R. Deutsche.  Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics , 1998 .

[22]  S. B. Warner.  Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 , 1962 .

[23]  W. Sharpe,et al.  Bold New City or Built-Up 'Burb? Redefining Contemporary Suburbia , 1994 .

[24]  M. Khanye,et al.  An urban experience. , 1989, Nursing RSA = Verpleging RSA.

[25]  D. Hendrick,et al.  Introduction , 1998, Thorax.

[26]  Joel Garreau.  Edge City: Life on the New Frontier , 1991 .

[27]  A. Duany.  Towns and town-making principles , 1991 .

[28]  Stan Allen.  Points + lines : diagrams and projects for the city , 1999 .