Aseem Inam
Aseem Inam is Professor and Chair in Urban Design at Cardiff University in the UK, and Director of TRULAB: Laboratory for Designing Urban Transformation, a pioneering research-based practice. He is an urbanist and activist-scholar-practitioner who is designing urban transformation at the exciting intersection of urban theory and design practice. Urban transformation has three implications. First and foremost, it is fundamental change that leads to significant improvement in people’s lives. Second, it is a series of radical shifts in urbanism, which consists of city-design-and-building processes and their spatial products. Third, it is revolutionizing the field of urbanism itself to become transformative design practice.
He developed this unique approach through “research as practice,” in which a profound understanding of how cities work actually leads to new modes of urban practice.
Aseem has published this in-depth research in three books, Co-Designing Publics [Los Angeles: ORO Editions, 2023], Designing Urban Transformation [New York and London: Routledge 2014] and Planning for the Unplanned: Recovering from Crises in Megacities [New York and London: Routledge 2005]. He has also been invited to contribute chapters in other books, including Extending Place: The Global South and Informal Urbanisms [in Place and Placelessness Revisited, Routledge 2016], Tensions Manifested: Reading the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi [in The Emerging Asian City, Routledge 2013], Smart Growth: A Critical Review of the State of the Art [in Companion to Urban Design, Routledge 2011], and Meaningful Urban Design: Teleological / Catalytic / Relevant [in Writing Urbanism, Routledge 2008].
His professional work focuses on developing new and more effective modes of urban practice, in which design is critical, interdisciplinary and engaged.
As the Director of TRULAB, Aseem has led several initiatives in urban transformation. For example, un Toronto, he developed a community-based partnership with the Thorncliffe Park Women’s Committee to nurture local entrepreneurship and informal economies, introducing new public spaces, knit together a network of open spaces, and use place-based strategies to empower communities. In Brazil, he worked with a micro-business support non-profit [SEBRAE] and mayors to develop asset-based transformative strategies that are unique to each city. In New York, he helped design a new interactive and collaborative strategy to nurture the relationship between street vendors, public space and public policy in the Union Square area. He has also served as an Elected Member of the Board of the Stokes Community Land Trust in Bristol, UK.
In addition to research and practice, he has also dedicated part of his life to teaching in order to generate new knowledge and create generational shifts in critical thinking and urban practice.
Aseem was appointed the John Bousfield Distinguished Visitor in urban planning at the University of Toronto and prior to that, he was the founding Director of the highly innovative Graduate Program in Urban Practice at the Parsons School of Design in New York. He has also been an award-winning professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT], University of Michigan and the University of Southern California. He was invited by UCLA to create and teach a new course for mid-career Chinese architects and planners to evaluate the effectiveness of projects in urbanism. He has given invited talks at several universities, including University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, University of British Columbia [UBC] in Vancouver, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
For more information, please see: https://independent.academia.edu/AseemInam/CurriculumVitae
He developed this unique approach through “research as practice,” in which a profound understanding of how cities work actually leads to new modes of urban practice.
Aseem has published this in-depth research in three books, Co-Designing Publics [Los Angeles: ORO Editions, 2023], Designing Urban Transformation [New York and London: Routledge 2014] and Planning for the Unplanned: Recovering from Crises in Megacities [New York and London: Routledge 2005]. He has also been invited to contribute chapters in other books, including Extending Place: The Global South and Informal Urbanisms [in Place and Placelessness Revisited, Routledge 2016], Tensions Manifested: Reading the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi [in The Emerging Asian City, Routledge 2013], Smart Growth: A Critical Review of the State of the Art [in Companion to Urban Design, Routledge 2011], and Meaningful Urban Design: Teleological / Catalytic / Relevant [in Writing Urbanism, Routledge 2008].
His professional work focuses on developing new and more effective modes of urban practice, in which design is critical, interdisciplinary and engaged.
As the Director of TRULAB, Aseem has led several initiatives in urban transformation. For example, un Toronto, he developed a community-based partnership with the Thorncliffe Park Women’s Committee to nurture local entrepreneurship and informal economies, introducing new public spaces, knit together a network of open spaces, and use place-based strategies to empower communities. In Brazil, he worked with a micro-business support non-profit [SEBRAE] and mayors to develop asset-based transformative strategies that are unique to each city. In New York, he helped design a new interactive and collaborative strategy to nurture the relationship between street vendors, public space and public policy in the Union Square area. He has also served as an Elected Member of the Board of the Stokes Community Land Trust in Bristol, UK.
In addition to research and practice, he has also dedicated part of his life to teaching in order to generate new knowledge and create generational shifts in critical thinking and urban practice.
Aseem was appointed the John Bousfield Distinguished Visitor in urban planning at the University of Toronto and prior to that, he was the founding Director of the highly innovative Graduate Program in Urban Practice at the Parsons School of Design in New York. He has also been an award-winning professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT], University of Michigan and the University of Southern California. He was invited by UCLA to create and teach a new course for mid-career Chinese architects and planners to evaluate the effectiveness of projects in urbanism. He has given invited talks at several universities, including University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, University of British Columbia [UBC] in Vancouver, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
For more information, please see: https://independent.academia.edu/AseemInam/CurriculumVitae
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Books and Book Chapters by Aseem Inam
Drawing inspiration from the philosophical movement known as Pragmatism, the book proposes three conceptual shifts for transformative urban practice: beyond material objects: city as flux; beyond intentions: consequences of design; and beyond practice: urbanism as creative political act. Pragmatism encourages us to consider how we can make deeper and more systemic changes and how urbanism itself can be a design strategy for such transformations.
Analyses of transformative urban initiatives and projects in Barcelona, Belo Horizonte, Boston, Cairo, Karachi, Los Angeles, New Delhi, and Paris illuminate how these conceptual shifts operate in vastly different contexts. The book is a rare integration of theory and practice that proposes essential ways of rethinking city‐design‐and-building processes, while drawing critical lessons from actual examples of such processes.
To find out more about the book, see the following website: https://www.routledge.com/Designing-Urban-Transformation/Inam/p/book/9780415837705
Interactions between Asian cities and European nations from around the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century are best captured by a series of tensions. The most evident was outright colonization by European countries such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France, but other forms of cultural and economic colonization also occurred through the travel of ideas and the ubiquity of trade. At the same time, the peoples of Asia were far from passive recipients of European ideas, often appropriating them to their own needs and contexts, infecting them with their own intentions, languages, and consequences and exporting them back in subtle ways to the colonial powers. The tensions between this European colonial dominance and Asian urban resistance are found in language, literature, music, attire, and architecture of the time: Hindi words found their way into the English language and Indian cotton was used to manufacture English clothing. The many efforts of the British Empire to supposedly civilize its Asian colonies revealed as much about their vanity and codification as the concrete manifestation of Asian-European tensions. One such manifestation is the Viceroy’s House (now known as Rashtrapati Bhavan or President’s House) in New Delhi, designed by the British architect Edwin Lutyens and built between 1912 and 1931.
Further information about the book can be found here: https://www.routledge.com/The-Emerging-Asian-City-Concomitant-Urbanities--Urbanisms/Bharne/p/book/9780415525985
The chapter discusses the complex picture of smart growth practices and point to successful efforts but also to continuing challenges in its implementation. About a dozen years after the introduction of smart growth into the lexicon of planning
and design practices, we can observe the following. First, the most effective smart growth measures tend to be regional in scale (such as at the county or even state
level), and certain states (such as Oregon, Maryland, and Florida) are much more
active in this regard then others. Second, policies labeled as smart growth have different types of effects and different degrees of effectiveness. Third, smart growth has its share of critics, such as libertarian think tanks (e.g. Cato Institute, Reason
Foundation), who claim that its policies increase the cost of land and development
and hinder the operation of a free market at the local level. Fourth, in order for smart
growth to become more than a vacuous platitude, there remains much critical analysis and on-the-ground implementation to be done. Effective implementation of
smart growth includes deployment as an effective tool for mobilizing communities,
creating political capital for elected officials, suggesting creative partnerships between developers and planners, and offering concrete design guidelines. Only then could smart growth become, over time, an effective strategy for the design of cities.
More information about the book can be found here: https://www.routledge.com/Companion-to-Urban-Design/Banerjee-Loukaitou-Sideris/p/book/9781138776548
This book chapter is an edited and abridged version of a longer and more detailed journal article with the same title. To view the original version, please see: https://www.academia.edu/279902/Meaningful_Urban_Design_Teleological_Catalytic_Relevant
The author argues that planning programs institutions were successful because they were bureaucratic, and relied on standardized routines, rigorous sets of established regimes, familiar programs, and institutionalized hierarchies. Also contrary to popular perception, neither the leaders at the top of the institutions nor those workers at the grassroots level were the most important in the implementation of such routines. The key actors were middle managers, because they knew the institutional structures inside out, what the routines were and how to use them, and were successful go-betweens between national governments and grassroots community groups.
Case studies from Mexico City, Los Angeles and New York provide a deeper understanding of urban planning processes. The case studies reveal that systematic institutional analysis helps us understand what works in planning, and why. They also demonstrate the manner in which institutional routines serve as powerful and effective tools for addressing novel situations.
More information about the book can be found here: http://bit.ly/2byytV6
Papers by Aseem Inam
examining what lies at the potent intersection of the public realm and
informal urbanisms, within the specific contexts of the cities of the
global south. I define the public realm as interconnected spatial
networks of public spaces intertwined with political structures that
weave a city together, while informal urbanisms are the transactional
conditions of ambiguity that exist between what is acceptable and
what is unacceptable in cities. At their intersection are publics, who
never simply exist because they are always created on an ongoing
basis. In fact, publics are co-designed [i.e. co-created in inventive and
multifarious ways] around common concerns or desire through
volitional inquiry and action. I contextualise these discussions by paying
particular attention to the cities of the global south, because place
matters in shaping urban thinking and practice. There is an increasing
interest in thinking and practicing from cities of the global south rather
than just about them. The viewpoint then describes how these ideas
were further investigated through grounded examples in different cities
and articulated through interactive and collaborative events in the Co-
Designing Publics international research network, funded through a
grant awarded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. I then
conclude with some thoughts on the implications of this work for urban
theory and practice, which are applicable to cities in the global south as
well as in the global north.
Marcuse makes an excellent point about how current trends in mainstream planning – use of new technologies or promoting live-work spaces – in fact conceal deeper and more critical societal challenges . . . [read more at: http://www.progressivecity.net/single-post/2016/12/08/GOOD-PLANNING-PROGRESSIVE-PLANNING-AND-URBAN-TRANSFORMATION-REFLECTING-ON-PETER-MARCUSE]
Please see the following link for the full issue of the Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability [volume 9, issue 3, 2016]: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjou20/9/3?nav=tocList
Drawing inspiration from the philosophical movement known as Pragmatism, the book proposes three conceptual shifts for transformative urban practice: beyond material objects: city as flux; beyond intentions: consequences of design; and beyond practice: urbanism as creative political act. Pragmatism encourages us to consider how we can make deeper and more systemic changes and how urbanism itself can be a design strategy for such transformations.
Analyses of transformative urban initiatives and projects in Barcelona, Belo Horizonte, Boston, Cairo, Karachi, Los Angeles, New Delhi, and Paris illuminate how these conceptual shifts operate in vastly different contexts. The book is a rare integration of theory and practice that proposes essential ways of rethinking city‐design‐and-building processes, while drawing critical lessons from actual examples of such processes.
To find out more about the book, see the following website: https://www.routledge.com/Designing-Urban-Transformation/Inam/p/book/9780415837705
Interactions between Asian cities and European nations from around the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century are best captured by a series of tensions. The most evident was outright colonization by European countries such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France, but other forms of cultural and economic colonization also occurred through the travel of ideas and the ubiquity of trade. At the same time, the peoples of Asia were far from passive recipients of European ideas, often appropriating them to their own needs and contexts, infecting them with their own intentions, languages, and consequences and exporting them back in subtle ways to the colonial powers. The tensions between this European colonial dominance and Asian urban resistance are found in language, literature, music, attire, and architecture of the time: Hindi words found their way into the English language and Indian cotton was used to manufacture English clothing. The many efforts of the British Empire to supposedly civilize its Asian colonies revealed as much about their vanity and codification as the concrete manifestation of Asian-European tensions. One such manifestation is the Viceroy’s House (now known as Rashtrapati Bhavan or President’s House) in New Delhi, designed by the British architect Edwin Lutyens and built between 1912 and 1931.
Further information about the book can be found here: https://www.routledge.com/The-Emerging-Asian-City-Concomitant-Urbanities--Urbanisms/Bharne/p/book/9780415525985
The chapter discusses the complex picture of smart growth practices and point to successful efforts but also to continuing challenges in its implementation. About a dozen years after the introduction of smart growth into the lexicon of planning
and design practices, we can observe the following. First, the most effective smart growth measures tend to be regional in scale (such as at the county or even state
level), and certain states (such as Oregon, Maryland, and Florida) are much more
active in this regard then others. Second, policies labeled as smart growth have different types of effects and different degrees of effectiveness. Third, smart growth has its share of critics, such as libertarian think tanks (e.g. Cato Institute, Reason
Foundation), who claim that its policies increase the cost of land and development
and hinder the operation of a free market at the local level. Fourth, in order for smart
growth to become more than a vacuous platitude, there remains much critical analysis and on-the-ground implementation to be done. Effective implementation of
smart growth includes deployment as an effective tool for mobilizing communities,
creating political capital for elected officials, suggesting creative partnerships between developers and planners, and offering concrete design guidelines. Only then could smart growth become, over time, an effective strategy for the design of cities.
More information about the book can be found here: https://www.routledge.com/Companion-to-Urban-Design/Banerjee-Loukaitou-Sideris/p/book/9781138776548
This book chapter is an edited and abridged version of a longer and more detailed journal article with the same title. To view the original version, please see: https://www.academia.edu/279902/Meaningful_Urban_Design_Teleological_Catalytic_Relevant
The author argues that planning programs institutions were successful because they were bureaucratic, and relied on standardized routines, rigorous sets of established regimes, familiar programs, and institutionalized hierarchies. Also contrary to popular perception, neither the leaders at the top of the institutions nor those workers at the grassroots level were the most important in the implementation of such routines. The key actors were middle managers, because they knew the institutional structures inside out, what the routines were and how to use them, and were successful go-betweens between national governments and grassroots community groups.
Case studies from Mexico City, Los Angeles and New York provide a deeper understanding of urban planning processes. The case studies reveal that systematic institutional analysis helps us understand what works in planning, and why. They also demonstrate the manner in which institutional routines serve as powerful and effective tools for addressing novel situations.
More information about the book can be found here: http://bit.ly/2byytV6
examining what lies at the potent intersection of the public realm and
informal urbanisms, within the specific contexts of the cities of the
global south. I define the public realm as interconnected spatial
networks of public spaces intertwined with political structures that
weave a city together, while informal urbanisms are the transactional
conditions of ambiguity that exist between what is acceptable and
what is unacceptable in cities. At their intersection are publics, who
never simply exist because they are always created on an ongoing
basis. In fact, publics are co-designed [i.e. co-created in inventive and
multifarious ways] around common concerns or desire through
volitional inquiry and action. I contextualise these discussions by paying
particular attention to the cities of the global south, because place
matters in shaping urban thinking and practice. There is an increasing
interest in thinking and practicing from cities of the global south rather
than just about them. The viewpoint then describes how these ideas
were further investigated through grounded examples in different cities
and articulated through interactive and collaborative events in the Co-
Designing Publics international research network, funded through a
grant awarded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. I then
conclude with some thoughts on the implications of this work for urban
theory and practice, which are applicable to cities in the global south as
well as in the global north.
Marcuse makes an excellent point about how current trends in mainstream planning – use of new technologies or promoting live-work spaces – in fact conceal deeper and more critical societal challenges . . . [read more at: http://www.progressivecity.net/single-post/2016/12/08/GOOD-PLANNING-PROGRESSIVE-PLANNING-AND-URBAN-TRANSFORMATION-REFLECTING-ON-PETER-MARCUSE]
Please see the following link for the full issue of the Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability [volume 9, issue 3, 2016]: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjou20/9/3?nav=tocList
The article highlights the benefits of comedy improvisation such as creative collaboration, fostering innovation, supporting spontaneity, and learning through error; and describes the studio experience of building skills and testing ideas through pedagogical practice. The article concludes with useful insights from comedy improvisation for urban design practice, including building effective design teams as horizontal networks, developing highly creative design processes that are sensitive to constant change, and ways in which design innovation emerges out of specific types of group dynamics. Urban designers require such skills in a field marked by long-term non-linear design processes, interdisciplinary teams and multiple stakeholders with different viewpoints, and considerable ambiguity in decision making.
Keywords: Urban Design, Studio Pedagogy, Comedy Improvisation"
smart growth, transit villages, and jobs housing balance is frequently assessed
based on the capacity of these innovations to reduce auto use. This study, in contrast, argues that regulatory barriers to these approaches underpin their relative scarcity and that removal of these barriers demands no justification in proof of travel behavior modification. Rather, such reform can improve the fit between people’s
transportation–land use preferences and actual neighborhood choices. This fit is
compared here between two distinct U.S. metropolitan areas: Boston and Atlanta.
In providing a greater range of neighborhood types, Boston allowed a closer fit between household transportation–land use preference and actual neighborhood
choice than did Atlanta. This suggests the potential gains in household choice from
removal of barriers to alternative development forms.
We selected case studies of alternative development projects in two states, California and Michigan. In California, we selected one successful project (Rio Vista West in San Diego), and an unsuccessful one (Whisman Station in Mountain View). In Michigan, we selected one successful project (West Village in Dearborn), and an unsuccessful one {Pembrooke Park in West Bloomfield), A successful project was one in which a private developer completed an unconventional suburban development. An unsuccessful project was one in which such developments were proposed but significantly modified as pan of the planning process, in a fashion that reduced considerably their alternative character. Due to limitations of space, this report on our research focuses only on the two California case studies. These cases illustrate some of the key developer-planner dynamics in alternative development."
In 1986-1987, I designed the Rural Habitat Development Programme for the Aga Khan Planning and Building Service India, which is a non-profit member of the Aga Khan Development Network, a group of private, international, non-denominational agencies working to improve living conditions and opportunities for people in specific regions of the developing world. I was tasked with conceiving and implementing a brand new program to design and build rural housing in the state of Gujarat, about 250 miles (400 kilometers) northwest of Mumbai. The villages were small, remote, and faced many challenges, including cycles of flooding and drought, as well as a lack of access to financial and material resources.
By designing and developing an overall approach and framework—and not just on specific projects—the program resulted in several highly effective sub-programs that have benefited thousands of community members over the last two decades. The program developed in a constantly evolving, flexible and collaborative fashion that emerged from specific circumstances and produced stronger projects that gained the trust of villagers. Such a multifaceted, grounded, and interdisciplinary approach to design applies as well to the complex and challenging realities of cities.
The video of the talk can be found on You Tube at this website: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PmwHN-TMvk""
Highlights of talk at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7Lid6DUUPE
The September 21 lecture is “Designing the Lower Italian Market Revitalization Project, Philadelphia,” with speakers Scott Page, principal of Interface Studio, and Karin Morris, member of the board of directors of the Passyunk Square Civic Association. The two discuss the project, which won a National Planning Excellence Award for a Grassroots Initiative.
Meeting in New York City, panelists explored leading edge design strategies of citizen design, smart growth, and ethnoscapes in cities all over the world. These design strategies are resulting in cities that are more interesting, engaging, and richer than a purely technologically-driven vision.
The panelists in the video are Jeff Hou of the University of Washington, Aseem Inam of Parsons the New School for Design, Clara Irazabal of Columbia University, and Miguel Robles-Duran of Parsons the New School for Design. The panel concluded with a lively and insightful discussion about the future city and the roles of designers and urbanists in shaping them.
The "Making Cities" symposium was organized by the School of Design Strategies at Parsons: http://sds.parsons.edu and their new interdisciplinary graduate programs in urbanism: http://bit.ly/TL0Pr8 Please see the web link below for the online video of this lively panel.
Video of final panel discuss:
"New Directions: The Future of the City"
-Jeffrey Hou, Chair of Landscape Architecture, University of Washington: "Citizen Design: Participation and Beyond"
-Aseem Inam, Director of Theories of Urban Practice Program and Associate Professor of Urbanism at Parsons the New School for Design, and Fellow, Center for Ethics, MIT: "Smart Growth: A Critical Review of the State of Art"
-Clara Irazabal, Assistant Professor of International Urban Planning , Columbia University: "Ethnoscapes"
-Discussant: Miguel Robles-Duran, Director of Design and Urban Ecologies Program and Assistant Professor of Urbanism, Parsons the New School for Design, and Co-Founder, Cohabitation Strategies, Rotterdam and New York
See entire set of presentations and discussions at: https://vimeo.com/54868902
theory has been a thin field because it has a long history of drawing from other fields such as art history, cultural studies and French schools of philosophy, and then focusing largely on theories of aesthetics.
Rarely, if ever, does theory analyze the actual production of buildings, especially critical issues of political economy, including the power structures and economic processes that yield the forms of buildings and cities. Lesser still is an understanding of the art of the daily practice of architecture. The singular obsession with the intentions of design—commonly seen in the books and courses on the history of architecture—results in a lack of deep understanding of the consequences of design, including the impacts of particular modes of practice and of books such as the 1972 seminal Learning from Las Vegas (referred to as LFLV in the rest of this review).
That was the creative challenge for designing the cover of my book, Designing Urban Transformation. Does one go with the common techniques of either showing a city skyline, or a public space, or an abstract design? Since my argument in the book is uncommon [i.e. more critical and much deeper and than most approaches], I wanted to embody urban transformation with the same multifaceted complexity that cities themselves represent. Urban transformation in fact occurs in many different ways and takes multiple guises, including unexpected ones.
I worked with an excellent team . . . [read more at http://trulab.org/blog/2015/4/4/embodying-the-transformative-potential-of-urbanism]
The blog post, "Should We Love or Hate the High Line?," highlights five major narratives. These include the High Line as an example of historic preservation and adaptive reuse of urban infrastructure, as exemplary design in terms of landscape urbanism, as a best practice for local governments around the world to emulate, as an example of the lack of community participation, and as embodying processes of gentrification.
The post briefly describes each of these narratives, coming to the conclusion that in some ways all of them are incomplete. It highlights crucial missing elements and proposes a more critical yet humanist framework for engaging with projects like the High Line.
Read more at: http://trulab.org/blog/2014/9/26/should-we-love-or-hate-the-high-line
There is a popular perception of cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America as being “chaotic.” This is not only true of visitors from Western Europe and North America, but also the western-educated elite from these regions. What this popular perception embraces is the dictionary definition of chaos as “a state of utter confusion or disorder; a total lack of organization or order.” This seems to imply that things like housing, transportation, markets, electricity, water and the material city [i.e. urban fabric] of the cities of Africa, Asia and Latin America are abitrary, haphazard and will presumably lead to increasing entropy.
Such a perception can have serious consequences. First and foremost is . . . [read more at http://trulab.org/blog/2014/8/18/chaos-is-an-order-we-dont-understand]
Most societies choose to symbolize the institutions of democracy [e.g. city hall, legislative bodies, law courts, educational institutions] through urban forms that impress and even awe, which has more in common with authoritarian ways of thinking. Of course, the most critical aspects of the urbanisms of democracy is how those urbanisms are produced in the first place; that is, whether the city-design-and-building processes themselves are truly inclusive and democratic.
Still, the form of the material city matters since that is how people navigate their everyday worlds--through visceral interactions with the built environment. The form also matters for what it symbolizes, not just overtly but also in more implicit and subliminal ways. A form that exudes overpowering authority through its oversized scale or refers to some sort of mythical golden age [e.g. with references to Greek architecture] conveys a very different messages than forms that are more human scale and accessible.
In this spirit, the Town Hall by Alvar Aalto at Saynatsalo in Finland offers some welcome clues about the urbanisms of democracy . . . read more at: http://trulab.org/blog/2014/6/16/urbanism-of-democracy
Fellow attendees included Ricky Burdett, Diane Davis, Susan Fainstein, Gerald Frug, Edward Glaeser, David Harvey, Robert Sampson, Richard Sennett, Michael Sorkin, Thomas Sugrue, Lawrence Vale, and others. Several of them are . . . [read more at http://trulab.org/blog/2014/5/23/the-decent-city including embedded links to other resources]
The cross-section was remarkable: politicians [e.g. ministers, mayors], policy makers [e.g. international, national and local bureaucrats], corporations [e.g. businesses capitalizing on the rapidly urbanizing world], academics [e.g. researchers, professors, students], non-profits [e.g. activists and advocacy organizations], and citizens [e.g. local residents and school children from Medellin]. It was quite an experience to give a talk or be part of a panel that included this rich cross-section, which led to truly fascinating dialogues.
There were three principal highlights for me . . . [read more at http://trulab.org/blog/2014/4/19/what-is-the-point-of-the-world-urban-forum The blog includes embedded links and images].
New York City is filled with amazing activist and advocacy organizations that have made remarkable strides in affordable housing, alternative modes of transportation, public spaces, and policy advocacy. Common Ground, Transportation Alternatives, Friends of the High Line, and Center for Urban Pedagogy have already . . . [read more at http://trulab.org/blog/2014/3/5/the-place-to-be and be sure to click on the highlighted links embedded in the blog post]
I knew the situation in the rural areas would be complex . . . [read more at http://fellows.thecenter.mit.edu/2013/10/21/the-pleasure-of-figuring-things-out/]
Q. The new master of arts program you’ve developed has an unusual name—Theories of Urban Practice. Have you developed your elevator pitch for it?
A. First of all, we call it “theories” because it reflects multiple ways of thinking about urban practice, by which we mean how cities are developed, structured, and restructured. Second, the complexity of the city sometimes gets lost in the one-liners. To put it simply, the kinds of questions we’ll be investigating through the program are who actually designs cities, how, and why . . . [read more at the link below]
Conventional narratives regarding spatial production of the city in the 21st century rely heavily on accounts of the influential role played by public policy, market mechanisms, city planning and urban design. Beyond the narrowly defined confines of formal policy and planning are a host of narratives that describe spatial production in terms of a rich mix of state and non-state actors, market and non-market mechanisms, city planning and grassroots movements, and a wide range of urban practices beyond the mainstream. The goal of this special issue is to encourage comparative and theoretical insights into new ways of thinking about spatial production via the lens of equity. Taken together, the peer-reviewed and carefully selected articles will contribute to the literature on new modes of spatial production and their implications for new types of transformative spatial practices.
Sustainability is an open-access journal with publishing fees that can be mitigated through available discounts, institutional support and various sources of funding. The deadline for submission of manuscripts is November 15, 2020. The guest editor is Professor Aseem Inam of Cardiff University.
For further details, including procedures for submission, please see the website of the special issue: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/special_issues/equitable_city_spatial