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In the period immediately following World War II, the federal government made tremendous investments in urban renewal and highway infrastructure. Many of the city's largest downtown-based corporations formed a lobbying group--the San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal Association (SPUR)--that succeeded in controlling how and where this money would be spent. The downtown planning regime's priorities were freeways and the eradication of “blight.” The Mission District was slated for three freeways, though officials judged that two of them would cause too much damage to land values and tax revenues. The planning regime also quietly planned two Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) stations for the Mission. Neighborhood groups had little success influencing the process, but planning energies were not moribund. Indeed, the neighborhood planning traditions that dated back to the Progressive Era survived in remarkably similar form.

This chapter examines the 1934 Carte générale de l’aménagement de la Région parisienne (Carte générale), a brightly-coloured, multi-page representation of Paris and its suburbs. Parliament passed ‘la loi du 14 mars 1932’ which officially defined ‘la région parisienne’ geographically as the area within a thirty-five-kilometre radius from the ‘parvis Notre Dame.’ A forty-member commission chose Prost’s Carte générale and named him Urbaniste en chef. Prost’s map, the last officially approved cartographic proposal for the capital under the Third Republic recognized the changing nature of early-twentieth century cities, where the automobile enhanced personal movement and overwhelmed nineteenth-century infrastructure. Reinforcing the desire to both know and control the growing region and address current transportation infrastructure inadequacies, Prost highlights new autoroutes and clearly delineates – geographically – where the region ends. Prost acknowledged the growing presence of the banlieue (suburb). He followed Jaussely’s lead and documented future development and existing green space. Prost also suggests controlling urban growth. This chapter investigates how Henri Prost’s Carte générale demonstrates the government’s desire to move beyond the ideals of urbanism in Jaussely’s 1919 Plan. Prost provides a much more realistic plan to address the region’s needs.

This chapter outlines the rubric of “messy urbanism” in terms of its significance, threats, and theoretical frameworks. Messiness is simultaneously a range of urban conditions and a notion that we attempt to unpack and challenge in this work. Here, messiness denotes urban conditions and processes that do not follow institutionalized or culturally prescribed notions of order. It suggests an alternative structure and hierarchy as well as agency and actions that are often subjugated by the dominant hierarchy, including notions of spatial and visual orders as well as social and political institutions and cultural norms. In this book, by examining a range of cases and contexts that span from Northeast Asia to South Asia, we are interested less in the distinct spatial and formal properties of specific locations and structures per se, but more on the social, spatial, and institutional politics of messiness, and the context in which messiness has been constructed. More precisely, we are interested in the questions that messiness raises with regard to the production of cities, cityscapes, and citizenship.

This chapter discusses the role of the University of California in the Los Angeles Urban Planning (UCLAUP) in Los Angeles and the urban community in the resurgence of labor-community coalition building. Several features distinguish UCLAUP from other urban planning or urban studies departments in the United States, including the philosophical and educational commitment to social movement politics and community activism, combined with an attempt to keep up with the latest advances in social science theory and methods. UCLA prepared students to be innovative change agents wherever they might be employed by participating in a labor-community coalition.

In an effort to bridge the local and state deliberations scholar Harley Etienne pushes academics and national and international leaders within the world of politics and social service to take seriously the “discipline and practice” of urban planning. Urban planners are critical components to the recovery effort because they “coordinate land use, design policy to achieve long-term goals of urban growth, regeneration and economic development.” Etienne asserts that the relationship between the country’s formal institutions (i.e. legal and educational systems) and Haiti’s “social organization [and] capacity for social service provision” are relegated to secondary or tertiary roles in national planning strategies. Hence, in an effort push the boundaries of the field Etienne emphasizes that a broad, interdisciplinary spectrum of professionals—from law and social work to civil engineers to public policy advocates—engage in a comprehensive and unified dialogue to produce durable urban and rural regeneration and offset popular pressures to “rush” the rebuilding process.

This chapter explores a group of large city views, also known as long views, sponsored by local subscribers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, and engraved in London. These prints perfected urban environments by eliminating spaces of unruly commerce and crime and celebrating residents’ architectural accomplishments. They contributed to colonists’ efforts to reduce the wilderness by adapting the prospect view and drawing upon the science of surveying. The views allowed subscribers to articulate their common goals for urban planning and hope for their cities’ growth. Intended for a British imperial audience, the prints also asserted colonial Americans’ civic growth and reminded British viewers of North America’s large size. Whereas English thinkers belittled America’s fauna and her land, colonial city views proclaimed North America’s magnitude.

The multifarious, multi-layered urban structure of Tokyo, building on the historical and geological underpinnings of Edo, challenges western models of orderly urban planning. Rather than following a macrocosmic unified order, the Japanese capital can be seen to be a collage of micro-urban entities. Within this context, architects have increasingly pursued "urbanistic" architectural practices, working from small to large-scale projects. Such projects work within the urban ecological underpinnings of the city to dynamically form its infrastructure. This study analyzes the nodes of Sukiyabashi and Nishi-Shinjuku, as microcosms of the larger metropolis, through their underlying structures of water (moats and water treatment), layers of transportation and circulation networks built above, and the subsequent building designs and typologies. The comparison of Sukiyabashi/Yurakucho and Nishi-Shinjuku districts illustrates the changing planning ideals through the post-war period from central Tokyo to the new center of Shinjuku. This historical analysis ultimately seeks to identify alternative strategies for sustaining the social and ecological livelihood of the city.

This chapter traces the increasingly rapid changes to stadia and sporting practices in France during the last half of the twentieth century, while simultaneously connecting those transformations to parallel developments beyond French frontiers. The new Parc des Princes, rebuilt between 1967 and 1972, reflected the ongoing processes of modernisation and urbanisation in France during the first thirty years after the Second World War. But the changes to sport and its spaces evident in the new Parc also constituted another aspect of postwar modernisation across Europe itself, constituted by efforts to reinvent mass spectatorship and to accommodate television broadcasting. The Stade de France’s completion in advance of the 1998 World Cup also showcased the way that the stadium in France was now optimistically envisioned as an anchor for highly-symbolic international sporting competitions that projected positive messages about French national prestige and sporting identity. At the same time, the changes to sport and sporting spaces in France were part of a process of sporting globalisation that reflected the increasingly common values placed on stadia as urban spaces in France and other countries in Europe, North America, Oceania and Asia.

Airport Urbanism concludes with an autobiographical account of the author's relocation to Singapore. Through observations of daily life and interviews with planning officials, the chapter demonstrates the urban design challenges entailed by the influx of short-term visitors and temporary migrants, who account for 40% of the city-state's population. The author argues that the current discipline of urban planning, as well as scholarly approaches to urban development in Asia, need to be reconceptualized in order to engage with the added demands that temporary inhabitants place on urban housing and transport systems. Ultimately, scholars, designers, and policymakers need to work together in order to explore how cities can productively accommodate a growing number of itinerant inhabitants and harmonize their needs with those of full-time residents.

Mexico’s successful bid to host 1968 Olympics necessitated the management of the country’s holistic and cohesive modern image for the worldwide audiences. Chapter 3 analyses the integration and mobilization of various design disciplines—especially built environment and visual communications—to produce and convey such an image. Focusing on the immersive participatory street environments designed for the Games, the chapter examines work of planner-architect Eduardo Terrazas, head of the urban design for the Mexican Olympic organizing committee—and compares them to the ideas promoted by the neo-avant-garde kinetic artists. It thus shows the seemingly neutral notions such as interdisciplinary collaboration, Gestalt psychology, and cybernetic responsiveness engender also frameworks of hierarchy, management, and the cult of expertise. The analysis demonstrates kinetic environments and technologies to be inherently open-ended and unstable, clearing space for the interventions of 68 Movement.

This chapter examines the massive demographic and spatial changes that reordered Washington’s racial geography in the decades between disfranchisement in 1878 and the election of Woodrow Wilson to the presidency in 1912. As the federal government expanded and real estate boomed, the city burst its bounds and extended far beyond the central core. Driven by real estate developers, urban planners, and congressional leaders who could act without local democratic accountability, the city became a “national show town” featuring a monumental core of federal buildings and monuments. Its residents spread out into surrounding neighborhoods that were increasingly segregated by race and class, as exclusive suburban enclaves put physical and psychological distance between wealthy white Washingtonians and the masses of poor residents, black and white. Without the pull of integrated politics to promote interracial interaction, life in Washington became more segregated than ever before.

Chapter 10 explores what it means to use a ‘capability’ approach to designing an age-friendly city, including its potential for offering new ways of producing and occupying physical and social environments that respond directly to the lived experiences of older people. Drawing on a interdisciplinary community engaged research/urban design project in Manchester, UK, the chapter examines the applicability of AFCC design guidance within a specific urban neighbourhood, and explores how the process of discovering and sharing information about the lived experience of older residents translates into the development and implementation of age-friendly activities focused around urban design.

The third chapter inspects both the automation of city making and the geo-political possibilities of architecture itself by first tracing Walmart’s increasingly technologically sophisticated location strategies. Afterwards, it examines what happens to those strategies in practice.

The fifth chapter returns to Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, to investigate the urban consequences of the region’s transformation because of the concentration of wealth and management expertise generated by the retailer.

Chapter 11 identifies new and creative ways in which architects, artists and designers might be drawn into debates around age-friendly urban practice. The chapter describes the way in which current understandings of age-friendly design are limited and how an emerging field of socially engaged design practice can be harnessed to reinvigorate the terms of age-friendly debate and practice – drawing a new generation of designers into conversation with age-friendly policy. By redefining what we mean by age-friendly design, it becomes possible, this chapter argues, to expand and invigorate the field of age-friendly practice, enabling creative practitioners to engage with and creatively inform age-friendly policymaking.