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Chapter 2 discusses local politics at the municipal government level. It focuses on land battles in the urban core between high‐ranking state units (or “socialist land masters”) and municipal governments. It argues that while the socialist land masters occupy premium land parcels inherited from the planned economy, the municipal government's authority is reinforced by a modernist discourse, Western urban planning doctrines, and recent policies that grant authority over state‐owned urban land to the territorial government. Rather than settling the matter of power in the city, however, municipal leaders' granted authority is tested and defined by their political, regulatory, organizational, and moral authority in negotiations with those above, within, and below them. The municipal government's regulatory capacity is especially challenged by a fragmented real estate industry that includes players from state, non‐state, and hybrid sectors.

Seki Hajime sketched the parameters of urban planning in the mid-1900s to bring sweeping social reform to Osaka. He spoke to a group of economists in Kobe, and noted that Osaka had been fortunate to be the beneficiary of a “grand urban plan” in the seventh century, although Tokugawa leadership had affected a dramatic spatial overhaul of Osaka. While Seki was concerned specifically with the Japanese version of a modern urban dilemma, he understood it as a variation on urban problems that affected all modern nations. He surveyed problems concerning urban planning that had manifested themselves in Europe and United States, and concluded that modern European cities were subject to pressures similar to those which hamstrung Japanese cities. By the early 1920s, Seki had created a sweeping policy proposal that addressed the modern social dilemma of urban sprawl, and urged the central government to empower the municipal authorities of Japan' largest cities to employ urban planning.

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.

Urban planning — the process by which built environments are shaped and managed — aims to balance social, economic, and environmental concerns and needs. Public health was once central to this dynamic. However, in the decades following de-industrialization in developed countries, it became eclipsed by the exigencies of economic regeneration, and renewal and health were considered only in relation to issues such as pollution and contaminated land. Over the past two decades, however, there has been an increasing awareness that urban planning needs to re-engage with broader issues of health. Indeed, there have been suggestions that there is evidence to implicate the built environment as a factor in the obesity epidemic. This chapter explores those aspects of the obesity crisis on which planning and transportation policies may have a direct influence. It examines international research but mainly looks at how planning might respond from a British perspective. It is hoped, however, that the principles and policies discussed can be translated to other planning systems and structures.

This chapter outlines how the Vietnamese state has structured a challenging investment environment for private firms with its control of land ownership, land use planning, and investment approval. Therefore, the cooperation of state bodies is instrumental for firms wishing to capture potential profits through land development projects. However, it is also argued that entry into the market was relatively open in Ho Chi Minh City and firms could develop the political connections and social networks necessary to realize projects. The possession of initial endowment of political capital does not adequately explain who became entrepreneurs nor who succeeded in the new market.

This chapter analyzes a group of comics in which the large-scale machinations of urban planning culture have negatively impacted the life of city dwellers. Norwegian artist Hariton Pushwagner’s Soft City indulges in the social alienation that results from the linear monotony of the metropolis. The tyranny of urban planning is dramatized in Samaris by Belgian creators Benoît Peeters and François Schuiten. Dead Memory by French creator Marc-Antoine Mathieu takes the spontaneous appearance of walls in the city as an impetus to play with themes of spatial form, memory, and language loss. Two final comics juxtapose the top-down method of urban planning with the experience of the city’s built environment at the scale of the individual: Robert Moses: The Master Builder of New York City by French author and illustrator Pierre Christin and Olivier Balez and American Ben Katchor’s collection Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay.

This chapter focuses on the internal constitution of cities, specifically on their urban policy and cultural capitalism. It starts by defining what should be taken into consideration in this kind of investigation. It continues with defining what urban areas are, and what contributions these areas make to defining social life. Urbanization and its impact on economy and society are also discussed. The chapter concentrates on public policy, and how these policies materialize in urban planning and other collective orders. Lastly, it discusses some key issues and other problems faced by implementing such urban policies.

This introductory chapter gives a broad overview of the book. It also lays out a framework for how to understand neighborhoods. They rarely have official status, and are instead cultural constructs whose very existence depends upon the ongoing investments (psychological and material) of residents. Neighborhoods are also constantly in flux. The chapter illustrates this by showing how the borders of the Mission have changed dramatically across the twentieth century. The chapter shows that neighborhood identity has been inextricably bound up with ethnic identity. Finally, the chapter argues that more histories should focus on smaller urban scales, rather than only on the municipal scale.

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.

Since the 1980s, the promotion of heritage values has gradually become a relevant issue for urban planning. The need to turn the historic centres into areas of development for the market, through legislative measures and investments in infrastructure and services, and the re-evaluation of the heritage value of existing buildings, oscillated between policies which, linked to the mechanisms of economic and cultural globalization, promoted tourism as a source of revenue while striving to find alternatives to gentrification.The goal of this chapter is to gain a better understanding of the major challenges of the rehabilitation of inner areas with heritage values within the framework of ‘innovative’ approaches to urban planning, aiming at promoting sustainable living conditions. The reflexion is based on the comparative and transdisciplinary analysis of the decision-making processes of concrete interventions in different cities of the world: Buenos Aires, La Havana, and Bangkok.

Giving reference to some of China's national laws that cover such concerns as urban planning and development and land tenure and administration, to the information derived from conducting interviews with some of the governing bodies and officers in Shenyang, and a wide range of various secondary sources, this chapter attempts to formulate a new approach to how environmental aspects in Shenyang are both planned and managed. After providing information about the urban development dimensions of national governmental structure and the governmental structure of both Shenyang and Liaoning, the chapter attempts to look into how the regulatory system had evolved over time and its trajectory towards the market so that we may be familiarized with some aspects of both local and national law and the local practice of the said system. Also, the chapter examines the challenges that may be encountered within the system, and identifies some measures of improving the system.

This chapter investigates the city-planning of Jerusalem under the British Mandate in light of changes of thinking about the urban in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In particular, it explores how Charles Ashbee, the first civic adviser, could enact his Garden City and Arts and Crafts principles, developed twenty-five years earlier, because of the specific conditions of imperial governance. The privileging of the medieval city, in contrast to the contemporary — a principle deeply indebted to artistic ideals of a previous generation — deeply influenced decisions of what to restore, destroy, or preserve. The chapter discusses how religion, empire, and urban planning interlock in a key site of cultural conflict.

This chapter explores one of the most difficult questions facing citizen participation and deliberative democracy: What is the role of emotion in political deliberation and public policy? The fact that emotional passion is basic to politics is clear, but the question of how to handle it both analytically and procedurally in the deliberative process is not easy to answer. In search of a better understanding of emotion in reason and politics, the chapter examines a range of perspectives, from Aristotle's theory of rhetoric to contributions from modern neuroscience. All show emotion and reason to be tied together in a complex relationship. The insight leads to the consideration of emotional expression in terms borrowed from drama and performativity. Emotion is then explored through experiences drawn from efforts by urban planners to revitalize depressed communities. The chapter concludes by suggesting a two-step process for dealing with ‘passionate reason’.

This chapter examines shifts in the meaning and use of green space in socialist housing blocks in Vinh City, Vietnam, a ‘model’ socialist city rebuilt by East Germany (GDR) after its destruction by US aerial bombing. Unique to the eight-year project was the central role that ecological design played in urban reconstruction owing to financial and material constraints on the one hand, and ideological imperatives on the other. Green technology transfers served to radically transform the landscape with parks and cultivated green spaces that catered to the needs of workers and their families. These ‘eco-socialist’ practices, as I refer to them, constituted a fundamental effort on the part of GDR planners to rationally manage and order urban space that was deemed disorderly and too rural for the city. Yet utopian visions of urban modernity often came up short as they revealed more about East German lifestyles than about the pragmatic possibilities for recovery in postwar Vietnam. Ensuing struggles over the appropriate use of urban nature emerged at the center of the modernizing project and the creation of new socialist persons in Vietnam. 

This chapter examines how planning for mobility, especially automobility, shaped designs for city centers in the USSR and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) during the 1960s. Taking the first All-Union Conference on Urban Planning held in Moscow in 1960, it traces the evolution of urbanist debates in the architectural press and the urban design practice of the two countries. It discusses the general plans for Togliatti in 1968 and Moscow in 1971, both of which represented official approval of a definitive model for the modern Soviet city, and situates the fragmentary realization of these plans within the context of urbanism. The chapter also considers conceptions of space and “utopias of usage” at the root of urban planning and how central urban spaces were engineered and represented as spaces of movement.

This chapter compares transport planning in India with those in other countries. London, for instance, has a noteworthy system as far as good urban planning is concerned. The city follows a unique cascaded model of urban planning that works largely because of a clear mandate and roles assigned to the various organizations involved in London’s urban planning effort. Singapore’s rise from a congested city to a thriving financial centre is attributed to a robust urban planning system which is the responsibility of the urban development authority. Indian cities have not been able to cope with the demand for transport. The main reason for this is the prevailing imbalance in the modal split, besides inadequate transport infrastructure and its sub-optimal use.

This chapter focuses on the colonial context where state engineers planned and constructed a wide range of infrastructure projects. It argues that the notions of “comprehensive technology” or “technologies for developing Asia” (kōa gijutsu) discussed in Chapter 2 actually took shape through specific colonial projects rather than simply in the minds of Japanese engineers imitating prominent Western projects. Instead of focusing on experts and their ideas, this chapter analyzes how their plans were formed in dynamic relation to various tensions and contingencies during construction involving colonized peoples, different business and institutional interests, environmental conditions, and war exigencies. Three different examples of “comprehensive technology” are examined: Liao River basin planning in southern Manchuria, urban planning in Beijing, and regional planning on the Manchuria-Korea border. As a result of the above processes of negotiation, the actual projects embodied certain conceptions of technology over others.

This chapter examines urban design and planning projects and processes in Curitiba, Brazil, which have been taking place since the 1960s. It discusses some political and institutional factors that have facilitated the development of Curitiba's planning process, and some current urban governance and planning problems the city is facing. It argues that the institution of more effective citizen involvement in Curitiba's decision making is the way to relegitimize and continue the processes of urban design and planning that had such a brilliant start in the 1960s and a commendable implementation record from the 1970s to the early 1990s.