The Experts below are selected from a list of 351 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
James Defilippis - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Learning from Las Vegas: Unions and post-industrial urbanisation
Urban Studies, 2014Co-Authors: Mia Gray, James DefilippisAbstract:Las Vegas is often portrayed as the apogee of Postmodern Urbanism, but we argue that you cannot understand Las Vegas without understanding the role of unions in the City’s political economy. By focusing on the social relations surrounding workplace, class, and gender we highlight alternative versions of Las Vegas’ history. The Culinary Union, a UNITE HERE local, has introduced new institutional forms and played an active role in the local growth coalition. They have set standards around work intensity, training, and job ladders. Highlighting the ability of the union to affect these issues contributes to a counter-narrative about the City which stresses the agency of labour to actively produce Las Vegas’ cultural and economic landscapes. The Postmodern narrative about Las Vegas hides these important lessons. Learning from Las Vegas can transform issues of signs and symbolism to issues of union organising and institutional structures in the post-industrial economy.
Michael Hebbert - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Town Planning Versus Urbanismo
Planning Perspectives, 2006Co-Authors: Michael HebbertAbstract:The point of departure of this article is the contrast drawn by Giorgio Piccinato between ‘Anglo‐Saxon’ town planning and ‘Latin’ Urbanism, one based on rational method and theory of planning as intervention, the other on architecture, urban morphology and project‐based action. Gordon Cherry and Oriol Bohigas represent the two poles of the dichotomy – Cherry because of the emphasis he placed on separation from architecture in the professional emergence of the UK’s Royal Town Planning Institute, Bohigas because of his equally insistent emphasis on reintegrating planning with its mother discipline. The paper sets Bohigas and the regeneration of Barcelona into the wider context of a Postmodern Urbanism troubled by the neighbouring internecine rivalry between modernist and traditionalist architects. It is argued that Barcelona’s most distinctive contribution is less the replacement of ‘plans’ by ‘projects’ than its reconciliation of modernism and contextualism, a lesson duly acknowledged in the Anglo‐Saxon pl...
Luca D'acci - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Mathematize urbes by humanizing them. Cities as isobenefit landscapes: Psycho-economical distances and personal isobenefit lines
Landscape and Urban Planning, 2015Co-Authors: Luca D'acciAbstract:Abstract The city reading proposed is a modern-Postmodern Urbanism approach which quantifies but by passing through subjectivism. The isobenefit lines shown translate cities into benefit landscapes, subjective and continually changeable according to personal moods/needs/preferences and urban transformations. They read attractiveness and how they flow throughout the city. Doing it for each urban point and for each urban attraction, we obtain the isobenefit orography of the city, namely a map of its urban attractions and of their flows. This is a liquid surface rather than solid, as it varies across time and people. It is in this liquidness where resides the complexity of cities, their bottom-up spirit and the dynamicity of equilibriums and networks. People do not necessarily go in the most accessible points, but where they need and want to, and, they flow through paths they need or choose to pass through. It is also introduced the likeability of places and paths: in addition to the usual parameters currently used – which weight distances in terms of physical distance, cost, time or mental easiness representations – psycho-economical distances used in the isobenefit lines proposed here, also consider how a place and a path pleases us. According to the Underground Hedonic Theory, this pleasure to pass through or to stay in agreeable areas has an underground and an inertia effect too which contributes to delight our lives. The final purpose of the science of cities and urban design is to understand cities and make them efficient and attractive to please our lives in them.
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A Modern Postmodern Urbanism The Systemic Retroactive game (SyR) between Bottom-up and Top-down
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2013Co-Authors: Luca D'acciAbstract:These couple of pages discuss upon the retroactive influence (Systemic Retroactive game, or SyR) between people’s behaviour and environment. The latter is intended as physical environment (type of cities, climate, geography…), normative environment (laws), moral environment (religions, families cultures), values and life styles (politics-economics systems, families and neighbourhood habits). Individual behaviours can generate an emergent phenomenon (Autonomous Post-Emergence, or APE) which becomes ‘independent’ from them even if maintained and changeable from them, and which influences (top-down feedback) the individual behaviours, which influence it, which influences them, which influence it... Market-economy, globalization, religions, cities, political-economics systems, are example of APE. The characters of people and societies are built throughout history by an interconnected mix among geography, climate, trades and chance: all together create a specific economic-moral-religious-political system rather than another, therefore the APE is born and starts its SyR dance with its own creators: is Consumerism created by our consumption needs, or are our consumption needs created by Consumerism? Do religions and political-economic systems create our personal values and uses, or vice versa? In a certain way, it is a mix of both: the APE and its agents influence and mutually change each other in their SyR dance-tension: urbs is the physical result of civitas; in turn urbs influences civitas which influences urbs… The discussion ends by defining a Modern Postmodern vision, mixing the positive contributions of both bottom-up (Postmodern) and top-down (Modern) philosophies.
Mia Gray - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Learning from Las Vegas: Unions and post-industrial urbanisation
Urban Studies, 2014Co-Authors: Mia Gray, James DefilippisAbstract:Las Vegas is often portrayed as the apogee of Postmodern Urbanism, but we argue that you cannot understand Las Vegas without understanding the role of unions in the City’s political economy. By focusing on the social relations surrounding workplace, class, and gender we highlight alternative versions of Las Vegas’ history. The Culinary Union, a UNITE HERE local, has introduced new institutional forms and played an active role in the local growth coalition. They have set standards around work intensity, training, and job ladders. Highlighting the ability of the union to affect these issues contributes to a counter-narrative about the City which stresses the agency of labour to actively produce Las Vegas’ cultural and economic landscapes. The Postmodern narrative about Las Vegas hides these important lessons. Learning from Las Vegas can transform issues of signs and symbolism to issues of union organising and institutional structures in the post-industrial economy.
Michael Dear - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Urban Politics and the Los Angeles School of Urbanism
Urban Affairs Review, 2008Co-Authors: Michael Dear, Nicholas DahmannAbstract:This polemical article uses Los Angeles as a template to challenge existing theoretical and empirical research traditions in the study of urban politics. The precepts of the “Los Angeles School” exemplify the shift from a modernist to a Postmodern Urbanism in which altered geographies are redefining the meaning and practice of urban politics. Los Angeles challenges an urban political scholarship that is overly focused on empirical analysis at the expense of theory, too constrained by conventional categories, and divorced from adjacent disciplines with much to contribute to the understanding of contemporary politics, including urban political economy.
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The Iron Lotus: Los Angeles and Postmodern Urbanism
The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1997Co-Authors: Michael Dear, Steven FlustyAbstract:In this article, we examine the landscapes of Los Angeles for evidence of a Postmodern Urbanism. We begin by contrasting the principles of the Chicago school's modernist industrial metropolis with the putatively Postmodern Los Angeles school. We then examine the range of contemporary Southern California Urbanisms and interpret this evidence as defining the problematic of a distinctively Postmodern Urbanism embedded within an emergent global capitalism.
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The Premature Demise of Postmodern Urbanism
Cultural Anthropology, 1991Co-Authors: Michael DearAbstract:The articulations of the global and local have long exercised geographers, anthropologists, and others concerned with the spatial structure of society. This globallocal dialectic has recently been rendered acutely problematic by the burgeoning Postmodern "hyperspace," the coordinates of which are, according to Jameson (1984), so far only "dimly perceived." Thus it is of some consequence that two prominent Marxist geographers have recently published books on Postmodern Urbanism. The appearance of Edward Soja's Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989) and David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1989) provide an opportune template for examining the prospect of a Postmodern urban theory. Marxists have, by and large, been highly critical of the Postmodern turn (see, for example, Callinicos 1990). In keeping with this heritage, Harvey mounts a sustained, hostile attack on Postmodernism and Postmodernists; by contrast, Soja celebrates the cross-fertilization between the two realms. Both authors ultimately devise a thoroughly modernist reconstruction of urban theory. What interests me in this article are the ramifications of their responses. How were these modernist reconstructions achieved? What emasculations of Postmodern thought were necessary to enable the authors to rescue the modernist project? And what are the principal consequences of Soja's and Harvey's encounters with a Postmodern Urbanism? I shall attempt to answer these questions by examining the authors' respective readings of Postmodernity; their representations of contemporary urban process; and, finally, their reconstructions of a modernist Urbanism via Marxian social theory. In concluding, I shall argue that Soja and Harvey have obtained their coherent visions of urban theory by adopting Enlightenment strategies that effectively foreclose on the promise of Postmodern Urbanism.'