Planning and liberalism

Applied to city planning, Foucauldian "governmentality" implies local governance, the close involvement of civil society, and low taxation. This approach is ambiguous, both creating and closing off open space. [more]

Vienna noir

Austrian film in the postwar era

In postwar Austrian cinema, bombed-out Vienna provided the backdrop for films portraying returning soldiers as victims. International productions such as "The Third Man" and "The Red Danube" upset this myth and made Vienna the location for a new drama: the Cold War. [more]

The demolition of Star Ferry Pier

Urban reclamation versus cultural heritage in Hong Kong

Hong Kong has branded itself as "Asia's World City", yet by demolishing historical features to make way for shopping malls and tourist kitsch, it is becoming just another Asian megalopolis. [more]

Urban landscape planning

The question of sustainability

Contemporary European urban "planning" is an oxymoron. All too often, residential needs come second to the profit-based interests of a deregulated property sector. But deregulation didn't come from nowhere... [more]

Sofia, fluid city

New social inequalities brought by the transition to a free-market economy are taking shape in the traditionally privileged Sofia. In a privatized city, affluence levels are all too easily read in the urban fabric. But appropriations at the neighbourhood level are mere irritations compared to larger incursions into the city space. [more]

Sounds of globalization

Observations from Zurich

If the globe is an acoustic space, then globalization is an audible process. Listening for truth of the "World is Flat" theory. [more]

Network-based urban policy

National and transnational networks between cities are expanding in response to regional and international competition. But these are not the solution to real problems of employment policy so much as "superstructural hocus-pocus". [more]

The erratic state of reality

Yona Friedman in interview

The author of Architecture mobile and La ville spatiale talks about the ideal inhabitant of his flexible city and the universality of the concepts of participation, choice, and openness. [more]

Entrepreneurial urban politics and urban social movements in Los Angeles

The struggle for urban farmland in South Central

While ostensibly dealing with the local consequences of wider structural transformation, so-called "entrepreneurial urban policy" plays a major role in reproducing the conditions it seeks to redress. The community garden campaign in South Central L.A. is a local movement that resists the vested interests behind local planning. [more]

Editorial

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