mark shepard
Beyond the Smart City:
Everyday Entanglements
of Technology and
Urban Life
“It is obviously, therefore, to the emerging
trends in the communication system and to the
production and distribution technology that has
come into existence with modern civilization
that we must look for the symptoms which will
indicate the probable future development of
urbanism as a mode of social life.”—Louis Wirth1
By now it is commonplace in major metropolitan centers
to find urban life increasingly entangled with a range
of mobile and embedded media, communication, and
information technologies. On any given day, we gain
access to transportation systems using a magnetic strip
card or radio-frequency ID (RFID) tag to pay a fare. We
coordinate meeting times and places through SMS text
messaging on a mobile phone while on the run. We check
in at our favorite venues using social media apps on our
mobile phones, and leave tips for strangers about what
to do there. We cluster in cafes and parks where WiFi
is free to check email on a laptop. We drive cars with
18 Harvard Design Magazine 37
on-board navigation systems that map optimal routes to
a destination, updating in real-time to take into account
current traffic patterns, construction activity, and special
events. We pass through public spaces blanketed by
CCTV surveillance cameras monitored by machine vision
systems running advanced face detection and object
tracking algorithms. These conditions have altered how
we move through and inhabit the city, and influence the
choices we make there.
At the same time, data that these systems collect,
process, transmit, and store enable greater control
over the performance of urban systems and provide
new insights into how the city is inhabited collectively.
Embedded sensors monitor, manage, and regulate
utility services and critical urban infrastructure. Camera
networks monitor street intersections and issue traffic
violations using automatic license plate recognition
software. Social media platforms like Twitter and
Foursquare provide new ways of tracking how we move,
whom we are with, where we go, and what we think of
 Leif Percifield tests a DontFlushMe sensor prototype, Gowanus Canal, a Superfund site, Brooklyn,
New York, September 2012. © Lief Percifield/ DontFlushMe

where we’ve been. Data on trending venues, popular
neighborhoods, peak times, and common frequencies
enable us to map patterns of mobility and activity in a
more dynamic and fine-grained manner. In an age of Big
Data, some suggest, we have the opportunity to connect,
aggregate, analyze, and integrate information about
the urban environment in ways that enable us to better
visualize, model, and predict urban processes; simulate
probable outcomes; and lead to more efficient and
sustainable cities.2
The Smart City and its Citizens
The proliferation of Smart City initiatives in different
parts of the world illustrates the dominant model
for integrating information and communications
technologies (ICT) within urban environments. Massive
urban development projects such as Masdar in the
United Arab Emirates, Songdo City in South Korea, or
PlanIT Valley in Portugal exemplify the push by global ICT
companies in consort with real-estate developers and
government agencies to build cities from scratch outfitted
with so-called smart urban infrastructure. This top-down,
centralized approach nominally promises to optimize the
distribution of services and maximize energy efficiency,
making cities more livable, sustainable, and competitive.
It is also big business. The global market for Smart City
solutions is projected to reach $20 billion by the year
2020,3 and the major ICT players have a lot invested
in promoting this approach. When IBM reorganized
its business model in 2002, it shifted its focus away
from hardware design and manufacturing to enterprise
software development. Within the broader marketing
rubric of a Smarter Planet—encompassing health, energy,
marketing, and financial services markets—its Smarter
Cities program was established to specifically target
municipal governments with an interest in centralizing
the control and management of data feeds from diverse
city agencies within a single location.4

Beyond the Smart City: Everyday Entanglements of Technology and Urban Life 19

Contrasting this model is one that places emphasis
on the Smart Citizen rather than smart technologies.
Shifting the focus from technology and the city to the role
citizens might play in managing the urban environment,
this bottom-up, distributed approach aims to directly
connect people living in cities with information about
their local environment, and solicit their participation
in reporting conditions and taking action to effect
positive change.5 One such initiative involves an ad hoc
system of water-level sensors placed in a local sewer
system by a collective of artists and activists.6 The
project engages local residents in reducing the amount
of pollution from combined sewer overflows (CSOs)
that open when the sewer system is overloaded due to
excessive storm-water runoff. The system alerts residents
when the overflows happen so that they might reduce
their wastewater production during an overflow event.
Other initiatives include a community-led air quality
sensing network that gives people a way to participate
in the conversation about air quality.7 Air quality data
collected by government agencies is sampled at a limited
number of locations and processed to indicate relatively
coarse regional conditions, but it is not very useful
for understanding fine-grained dynamics of pollution
affecting local conditions. The project distributes
inexpensive air quality sensors designed to allow
anyone to collect high-resolution readings of NO2 and CO
concentrations outside their home and share them via an
online open data service.
While these competing models promise compelling
solutions to problems of urban regulation and manage­
ment, each presents differing limitations. That the Smart
City model extends 20th-century urban design strategies
that gave birth to cities such as Chandigarh and Brasília
should be cause for concern. The critiques of top-down
tabula rasa urbanism are well known and do not need
repeating here. Perhaps more disconcerting, however,
20 Harvard Design Magazine 37
is the degree to which the approach exemplified by
Masdar, Songdo City, and the like promote a techno­
cratic view of the city and urban development, the
corporatization of civic governance, and the dependence
on proprietary software, systems, and services leading
to a form of technological lock-in that runs counter to
more traditional concessionary procurement models.
The Smart Citizen model would seem to address these
concerns in its more organic, ad hoc, evolutionary,
and distributed approach. Its focus on people, not
technology, as the primary actors in the system reaffirms
notions of participatory governance, where social and
cultural factors are emphasized over high-tech solutions
with big price tags. Yet problems regarding the need for
some form of centralization inevitably arise when one
attempts to scale local solutions to larger urban systems,
where interoperability between different systems and the
development of open standards for sharing data between
them become paramount.
Moreover, it is perhaps what these models share
in common that is problematic for urban life in Smart
Cities inhabited by Smart Citizens. Both take as their
purview the more functional and mundane aspects of city
governance and management, and fail to address some
of the deeper social, cultural, cognitive, and perceptual
conditions of contemporary urban space. While creating
more efficient and sustainable urban environments is a
worthy and increasingly urgent goal, urban life itself has
never been something circumscribed by concerns for
optimization and efficiency. Forms of urban life found in
cities have always been messier than that, and we have
long known that one of the keys to great cities is their
capacity to sustain the diversity and variety of urban life.
New Sites of Interaction and Exchange
Cities have always been sites of interaction and
exchange —of people, goods, services, information,
ideas—and technology has long been complicit in social
change and transformation of the urban environment.
As German sociologist Georg Simmel noted at the
beginning of the 20th century, before the introduction
of buses, subways, and trains in Berlin, people weren’t
accustomed to staring at each other for the course
of minutes or hours without speaking to each other.8
Today, reading a book and listening to an iPod on the
subway are established spatial practices by which we
manage these awkward social situations. Along with
these new technological transformations come new
social situations, and with them new spatial practices
for negotiating daily urban life.
 Questions concerning attention/distraction and
the influence of new technologies on the perceptual
conditions of urban space and the cognitive states
of those who live in cities are long-standing. Walter
Benjamin’s oft-cited observation that architecture is
primarily received collectively in a state of distraction9
and Simmel’s discussion of the origins of the blasé
attitude remain relevant to an analysis of contemporary
urban environments. More recently, Clive Thompson
has described
a new kind of “ambient awareness”
emerging out of social media such as Twitter and
Facebook status updates.10 Individually, these short
strings of text are relatively meaningless, providing
quotidian updates on the minutia of the daily lives 
of
friends and acquaintances. Yet by skimming these short
bits of information, Thompson suggests, we construct
a peripheral awareness—a co-presence of sorts—with
these absent others. As information is distributed across
physical and virtual environments, our attention becomes
divided not just within our field of vision, as Simmel
noted, but also between two radically different fields of
vision, one human and one nonhuman.
Looking just upstream in the pipeline of current
research and development in urban technologies
provides a glimpse of what is coming. To the extent that
consortiums of business interests, government agencies,
and real-estate developers drive these technological
developments, we can expect to see new forms of
consumption, control, and management emerge. Techno-
evangelists herald a coming age of urban infrastructure
capable of sensing and responding to the events and
activities that transpire within and around it. Able to
remember, correlate, and anticipate, this near-future city
is projected as one that reflexively monitors our behavior
within it and becomes an active agent in the organization
of our daily lives. Most people will support the
introduction of “smart” traffic control systems that more
efficiently manage the flows of traffic on city streets.
Some are likely to become irritated when discount
coupons for their favorite espresso drink (as identified
by their credit card transaction history) suddenly appear
on their mobile phone as they pass by a retail coffee
franchise. Most, however, are likely to protest when
a subway turnstile denies them entry because their
purchasing history, recent mobility patterns, and current
galvanic skin response (GSR) reading (as measured by
sensors embedded in the steel turnstile bar) match the
profile of a terrorist.

Opposite: Kohn Pedersen Fox, Songdo, aerial, Incheon, Korea, to be completed 2020. Photo, GUST/
courtesy, Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF). Above: Air Quality Egg prototype, developed by a community-
led air quality sensing network of designers, technologists, developers, architects, students, and
artists based in Amsterdam, Netherlands and New York City, 2012. Courtesy, Albert Chao

Beyond the Smart City: Everyday Entanglements of Technology and Urban Life 21
 As we move beyond the initial practices and promises
of both the Smart City and the Smart Citizen, we find
information processing capacity approaching
a higher
order of magnitude. Here, your transaction history (what
you’ve bought), mobility patterns (where you’ve been),
and personal profile (sex, age, zip code, and related
demographics)
are mined for patterns that match known
profiles (of a potential customer, or a possible terrorist)
and inferences can be made (what you might buy next,
where you might strike next). These computational
systems operate on metadata, having been trained what
to look for using machine learning techniques, where
performance is measured in terms of the percentage of
false-positives (or false-negatives). Within this context,
urban systems and infrastructures take on a quality of
what might best be described as “sentience.”
The Sentient City
The term “sentient” provides a useful way to foreground
the subjective relations that underlie much of the
technology currently being promoted by corporate
marketing departments as “smart.” Sentience, derived
from the Latin word sentire, refers to the ability to feel or
perceive subjectively, but does not necessarily include
human faculties of reasoning or self-awareness. Which is
to say, the possession of “sapience,” meaning “to know,”
is not required for something to be sentient. Here it is
important to differentiate between the act of sensing and
that of having a sensation. Sensing, the thinking goes,
is something animals, some plants, and some machines
can do. It involves a sensing organ or device that enables
the organic or inorganic system of which it is a part
to actively respond to things happening around it. An
organism or system may sense heat, light, sound, or the
presence of rain, for example. Yet having a sensation or a
feeling is something that goes beyond mere sensing, for
it involves an internal state in which information about
the environment is processed by that organism or system
so that it comes to have a subjective character. “Qualia”
is the philosophical term for this, which Daniel Dennett
defines as “an unfamiliar term for something that could
not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem
to us.”
A Sentient City, then, is one that is able to perceive
things happening within it, yet doesn’t necessarily know
anything in particular about them.11 This is important on
two levels. First, it elides some of the epistemological
quagmires of artificial intelligence (Strong AI) that
continue to plague the development of systems and
infrastructures that exhibit human-level or higher
22 Harvard Design Magazine 37
intelligence. The popular notion of the Smart City is one
that often cedes human agency to these systems and
their algorithms—often downplaying the roles people
play (and the decisions they make) in their development,
operation, and internal functioning. This is usually
cited as a benefit: Reducing human limitations, error,
or prejudice in managing smart urban infrastructures is
generally perceived as a positive design goal, regardless
of how smart a city’s citizens may be. Many modern
forms of automation are based on this idea, and the
technical challenges and social dilemmas are well known.
But perhaps more important is that the notion of what
we might call a “sentient urbanism” affords thinking of
urban systems and infrastructures as complex techno-
social entanglements of people and machines, where
people remain in the loop, so to speak. In this sense, the
city, its systems and infrastructures, cannot be separated
from the citizens by which it is constituted and through
whose spatial practices it is given form.
“sentient urbanism” affords
thinking of urban systems and
infrastructures as complex
techno-social entanglements
of people and machines, where
people remain in the loop,
so to speak.
Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge have suggested that
these kinds of “code/space” need to be understood
ontogenetically—that is, as something continually
brought into being through specific practices that
alter the conditions under which space itself is (re)
produced.12 Building on the work of Adrian Mackenzie,
they differentiate between technicity (the productive
power of technology to make things happen) and the
manifestation of this power through transduction
(the constant making anew of a domain in reiterative
and transformative practices).13 What this means for
questions of autonomy and agency is that both are the
product of a negotiation between people and these
devices, systems, and infrastructures. Neither can claim
sole ownership of these capacities. While technologies
 Foster + Partners, Masdar Development, aerial rendering, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, to be
completed between 2020 and 2025. Courtesy, Foster + Partners

contain affordances—a field of possibilities for action,
let’s say—they often (but not always) require human
agency for them to act in the world. These uses can run
counter to the intentions of a designer. Hacking and
appropriation, for instance, expand the technicity of a
given technology through the creative transductions that
are discovered or invented in the process. If the Sentient
City is understood as an assemblage of code, people, and
space brought into being through specific techno-social
performances or enactments within the course of daily
life, then it is capable not only of developing a “mind of
its own”—of which we are a part—but also of reflecting
(both existing and new) power relations insofar as it
actually becomes constitutive of these very relations. As
we look forward to tomorrow’s cities, we might ask how
these conditions alter how we conceive of urbanism in
this expanded field, and how they might help us identify
what new sites of practice and working methods might
emerge in its wake.

Beyond the Smart City: Everyday Entanglements of Technology and Urban Life 23
 notes
Vanstiphout
1 Michelle Provoost and Wouter
Vanstiphout, “‘Facts on the Ground’:
Urbanism from Mid-Road to Ditch,”
Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 2006/
Winter 2007: 36-42.
2 Neil Young, liner notes to Decade,
recorded 1977, Warner Bros. Records.
3 Provoost and Vanstiphout, “‘Facts on the
Ground,’” 37.
4 William Claiborne, “After All This
Time, Can ‘Facts on the Ground’ be
Overcome?,” Nieman Watchdog,
September 30, 2010, accessed September
10, 2013, http://www.niemanwatchdog.
org/index.cfm?fuseaction=background.
view&backgroundid=492.
5 “As design students and young architects,
landscape architects and urban planners,
we felt that design and designers have
lost a degree of power (their personal
agency, and on behalf of design), at the
same time that design often does little
to advance the interests of those who
have less power (and are less likely to
be clients). We found the concept of
“agency” helpful because it captured the
multiple dimensions of the problem….
This was around the same time that
we read Michelle Provoost and Wouter
Vanstiphout’s article ‘Facts on the
Ground,’…[suggesting] that there is an
emerging ‘ditch urbanism’ model of
designers as proactive problem-solvers.
Based on bottom-up, grassroots effort
from below, design(ers) can identify
problems and then, as part of the design
process, develop creative methods for
realizing built results on the ground. We
asked ourselves how we could learn from
this targeted approach of design married
with vaguely guerrilla tactics. We knew
that design should not be exclusive. And
we knew that traditional client-based
models of practice can have a constrained
power dynamic that renders architects as
prostitutes, turning tricks for commissions
and bigger budgets. In response, we
argued that we could grow the space
within the profession of architecture for
an expanded movement to design greater
equality into the global power structure’s
146
built environment.” “Design, Agency,”
DSGN AGNC, accessed August 5, 2013,
http://dsgnagnc.com/design-agency/.
6 Crimson Architectural Historians and
Felix Rottenberg, WiMBY! Hoogvliet:
Future, Past and Present of a New Town
(Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2007).
7 Rahul Mehrotra, ed., Everyday Urbanism:
Margaret Crawford vs. Michael Speaks,
Vol. 1 of the “Michigan Debates on
Urbanism” series (Ann Arbor: Taubman
College of Architecture and Urban
Planning, University of Michigan, 2005).
8 Wouter Vanstiphout/Crimson, “The
Historian of the Present,” in Future
Practice: Conversations from the Edge of
Architecture, ed. Rory Hyde (New York:
Routledge, 2012), 86–101.
9 Initial research and the brief for the
reform was made by a multidisciplinary
team formed by Boris Kupriyanov and
SVESMI.
10 “We Are Public Housing,” CUP, accessed
September 10, 2013, http://welcometocup.
org/Projects/MakingPolicyPublic/
WeArePublicHousing.
11 US Department of Housing and Urban
Development, “Donovan Launches
Regional Design Competition to
Promote
Resilience for the Sandy-
Affected Region,” news release, June 20,
2013, http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/
HUD?src=/press/press_releases_media_
advisories/2013/HUDNo.13-098.
12 Karissa Rosenfield, “BIG, OMA Shortlisted
by HUD to ‘Rebuild by Design’ Post-
Sandy,” ArchDaily, August 9, 2013,
accessed September 10, 2013, http://
www.archdaily.com/414098/big-oma-
shortlisted-by-hud-to-rebuild-by-design-
post-sandy/.
Graham/Kaker
1 The Sheraton Karachi Hotel Facebook
page, posted on 22 May 2013. Accessed
July 10, 2013, https://www.facebook.com/
SheratonKarachiHotel/wall?filter=1.
2 Based on preliminary census data from
2011, reported by Abdul Sattar Khan, in
a news report titled ‘Sindh population
surges by 81.5 pc, households by 83.9
Harvard Design Magazine 37
pc,’ The News on April 2, 2012 Available
Online at http://www.thenews.com.pk/
Todays-News-13-13637-Sindh-population-
surges-by-81.5-pc,-households-by-83.9-pc.
Accessed 20 November 2011
3 Various news reports suggest that
Sheraton Hotel is exiting Pakistan in
2014, and that the existing hotel will be
rebranded as Movenpick Hotel in 2014.
Faisal Aziz. September 4, 2013 “Sheraton
to say goodbye to Karachi.” The News.
http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-
News-13-25226-Sheraton-to-say-goodbye-
to-Karachi accessed 20 November, 2013;
Farooq Baloch September 7, 2013 “Hotel
chains: Sheraton exits as Karachi loses
its sparkle” The Express Tribune http://
tribune.com.pk/story/600889/hotel-
chains-sheraton-exits-as-karachi-loses-its-
sparkle/ accessed 20 November 2013.
4 Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege: The
New Military Urbanism (London: Verso,
2010).
5 We calculated the murder rate after
compiling statistics on killings (murder
and homicide) issued by the Citizens-
Police Liaison Committee and Sindh
Police.
6 Pak Institute for Peace Studies, accessed
July 10, 2013, http://san-pips.com/index.
php?action=reports&id=tml2.
7 “Video of suide [sic] Attackers Emerges,”
Dawn.com, November 2, 2011, http://
dawn.com/news/670857/video-of-suicde-
attackers-emerges.
Shepard
1 Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,”
The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 44,
No. 1, (Jul., 1938), p. 24.
2 See Hancke, de Carvalho e Silva, and
Hancke Jr, “The role of advanced sensing
in smart cities,” Sensors 13, (2013) 393-
425; Schaffers, Komninos, Pallot, Trousse,
Nilsson, and Oliveira, “Smart Cities and
the Future Internet: Towards Cooperation
Frameworks for Open Innovation,” In
Domingue et al. (Eds) Future Internet
Assembly, LNCS 6656, (2011) pp.
431–446; Batty, Axhausen, Giannotti,
Pozdnoukhov, Bazzani, Wachowicz,
 Ouzounis, and Portugali, “Smart cities of
the future.” European Physical Journal,
Special Topics 214, (2012) 481–518.
3 Navigant Research, “Smart Cities,” 1Q
2013, http://www.navigantresearch.
com/research/smart-cities (last accessed
November 21, 2013)
4 http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/
en/smarter_cities/overview/ (last accessed
November 21, 2013)
5 See Dan Hill, “On the smart city;
Or, a ‘manifesto’ for smart citizens
instead,” http://www.cityofsound.com/
blog/2013/02/on-the-smart-city-a-call-for-
smart-citizens-instead.html (last accessed
November 21, 2013), and Anthony
Townsend, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic
Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2013)
6 http://dontflush.me/ (last accessed
November 21, 2013)
7 http://airqualityegg.com/ (last accessed
November 21, 2013)
8 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and
Mental Life,” Simmel on Culture: Selected
Writings (New York: Sage, 1997).
9 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New
York: Shocken, 1969)
10 Clive Thompson, “Brave New World
of Digital Intimacy,” The New York
Times Magazine, September 5, 2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/
magazine/07awareness-t.html (last
accessed November 21, 2013)
11 Mark Shepard, Sentient City: Ubiquitous
Computing, Architecture and the Future of
Urban Space (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011)
12 Rob Kitchen and Martin Dodge, Code/
Space: Software and Everyday Life
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011)
13 Adrian Mackenzie, Transductions:
Bodies and Machines at Speed (London:
Continuum Press, 2002)
Swyngedouw
1 See Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, and Erik
Swyngedouw, eds., In the Nature of Cities:
Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of
Urban Metabolism (London: Routledge,
2006).
2 I shall use “Nature” to refer to the notion
of an imagined universal nature; I shall
use “nature” to refer to the kaleidoscopic
diversity of things and processes that
make up the physical world
3 See Oliver Feltham, “Live Badiou:
Interview with Alain Badiou, Paris,
December 2007,” in Alain Badiou:
Live Theory (London: Continuum,
2008), 136–39; and Erik Swyngedouw,
“Trouble with Nature: ‘Ecology as the
New Opium for the Masses,’” in The
Ashgate Research Companian to Planning
Theory: Conceptual Challenges for Spatial
Planning, ed. Jean Hillier and Patsy Healey
(Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 299–318.
4 Feltham, “Live Badiou,” 139.
5 Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature:
Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2007), 14.
6 Ibid., 14.
7 See Erik Swyngedouw, “Impossible
‘Sustainability’ and the Postpolitical
Condition,” in The Sustainable
Development Paradox: Urban Political
Economy in the United States and Europe,
ed. Rob Krueger and David Gibbs (New
York: Guilford Press, 2007), 13–40; and
Swyngedouw, “Trouble with Nature,”
299–318.
8 See Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes
(London: Verso, 2008).1
9 See Erik Swyngedouw, “The Antinomies
of the Postpolitical City: In Search of a
Democratic Politics of Environmental
Production,” International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research, September
2009: 601–20; Erik Swyngedouw,
“Depoliticized Environments: The End
of Nature, Climate Change and the Post-
Political Condition,” Royal Institute of
Philosophy Supplement, October 2011: 253–
74; and Erik Swyngedouw, “Interrogating
Post-Democratization: Reclaiming
Egalitarian Political Spaces,” Political
Geography, September 2011: 370–80.
10 See David Marquand, Decline of the
Public: The Hollowing Out of Citizenship
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).
11 See Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).
Klein-Rosenthal
1 Karen Rouse, “Report Warned NJ Transit
Officials of Flood Risk,” NorthJersey.com,
December 26, 2012, accessed September
20, 2013, http://www.northjersey.com/
news/Report_warned_NJ_Transit_
officials_of_flood_risk.html?page=all.
2 Jeff Pillets, “Months Before Sandy, NJ
Transit Dismissed Need for Climate Risk
Study,” NorthJersey.com, December 3,
2012, accessed September 20, 2013, http://
www.northjersey.com/news/state/other_
state_news/ Months_before_Sandy_NJ_
Transit_dismissed_need_for_climate_
risk_study.html?c=y&page=1&mobile=1.
3 For information on the Sandy Regional
Assembly, see http://nyc-eja.org/?page_
id=453
4 See, e.g., The World Bank and the United
Nations, Natural Hazards, UnNatural
Disasters: The Economics of Effective
Prevention (Washington, DC: The World
Bank, 2010).
5 Simin Davoudi, “Resilience: A Bridging
Concept or a Dead End?,” Planning Theory
& Practice, June 2012: 299–333.
6 David E. Booher and Judith E. Innes,
“Governance for Resilience: CALFED
as a Complex Adaptive Network for
Resource Management,” Ecology and
Society 15, no. 3 (2010): 35, http://www.
ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss3/art35/.
7 Joyce Klein-Rosenthal and Dana
Brechwald, “Climate Adaptive Planning
for Preventing Heat-Related Health
Impacts in New York City,” in Climate
Change Governance, ed. Jörg Knieling and
Walter Leal Filho (Berlin: Springer, 2013).
8 Simin Davoudi, “Resilience: A Bridging
Notes
Concept or a Dead End?,” Planning Theory
& Practice, June 2012: 299–333.
9 Brian Walker et al., “Resilience,
Adaptability and Transformability in
Social-Ecological Systems,” Ecology and
Society 9, no. 2 (2004): 1, http://www.
ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5.
10 CARRI Blog; “Defining Community
Resilience,” blog entry by Warren C.
Edwards, February 23, 2009, accessed
July 9, 2013, http://resilientus.blogspot.
com/2009_02_01_archive.html.
11 Bruce Evan Goldstein, ed., Collaborative
Resilience: Moving Through Crisis to
Opportunity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2012).
12 Brian Walker and David Salt, Resilience
Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and
People in a Changing World (Washington,
DC: Island Press, 2006).
13 Davoudi, “Resilience,” 299–333.
14 With thanks to Daniel Schrag, director
of the Harvard University Center for
the Environment, for his emphasis on
the discussion of urban preparedness
for extreme events, rather than climate
adaptation, as a unifying and practical
language.
Oswalt
1 See also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Palace_of_the_Republic_(Berlin)
2 Hidetoshi Ohno, “Fiber City, Tokyo| Ohno
Laboratory,” in Shrinking Cities Volume
2: Interventions, ed. Philipp Oswalt
(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006), 207.
3 See, e.g., Philipp Oswalt, Klaus
Overmeyer, and Philipp Misselwitz, eds.,
Urban Catalyst: The Power of Temporary
Use (Berlin: Dom Publishers, 2013); Klaus
Overmeyer, Urban Pioneers: Temporary
Use and Urban Development in Berlin
(Berlin: Jovis, 2007); and Michael Ziehl et
al., eds., Second Hand Spaces: Recycling
Sites Undergoing Urban Transformation
(Berlin: Jovis, 2012).
4 See Kristien Ring et al., ed., Selfmade
City: Self-Initiated Urban Living and
Architectural Interventions (Berlin: Jovis,
2013).
5 See www.holzmarkt.com.
6 See www.exrotaprint.de.
7 See Luiz Paulo Conde and Sérgio
Magalhães, Favela-Bairro: uma outra
história da cidade do Rio de Janeiro;
1993/2000 uma acão urbanizadora
para o Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro:
ViverCidades, 2004).
8 See Evaniza Rodrigues, Leonardo Pessina,
and Unión de los Movimientos de
Vivienda UMM, “Self-Managed Mutual Aid
Groups: Mutiroes in São Paulo,” accessed
September 10, 2013, http://www.hic-net.
org/document.php?pid=2832.
9 London: Marion Boyars, 1976.
10 New York: Morrow, 1980.
11 The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril
in the Age of Networked Intelligence
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996); and
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration
Changes Everything (New York: Portfolio,
2006). See also George Ritzer and Nathan
147
 Jurgenson,“Production, Consumption,
Prosumption: The Nature of Capitalism in
the Age of the Digital ‘Prosumer,’” Journal
of Consumer Culture, March 2010:13–36.
12 An exception to this is Stewart Brand’s
book How Buildings Learn: What Happens
after They’re Built (New York: Viking
1994), which did not establish itself in the
architecture discourse.
Brenner
1 Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, eds., The
City (1925; Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1967).
2 See, for example, the classic distinctions
between city types (mercantile, industrial,
Fordist-Keynesian / corporate-monopoly,
post-Keynesian) that were developed by
David Gordon, “Capitalist Development
and the History of American Cities,”
in Marxism and the Metropolis: New
Perspectives in Urban Political Economy,
ed. William K. Tabb and Larry Sawers
(New York: Oxford University Press,
1978), 25–63; and David Harvey, “The
Urbanization of Capital,” The Urban
Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1989), 17–58. A similar
analytic emphasis on particular types
of city—global, mega-, post-Fordist,
neoliberal, ordinary, postcolonial,
and so forth—underpins most major
strands of contemporary critical urban
studies. On the latter approaches and
associated debates, see Edward W. Soja,
Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities
and Regions (Cambridge: Blackwell,
2000).
3 For a useful overview of this
terminological proliferation, see Peter J.
Taylor and Robert E. Lang, “The Shock
of the New: 100 Concepts Describing
Recent Urban Change,” Environment and
Planning A 36 (2004): 951–58.
4 Jean Gottmann, Megalopolis: The
Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of
the United States (New York: Twentieth
Century Fund, 1961), 5.
5 Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities:
Reimagining the Urban (London: Polity,
2002), 1.
6 Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution,
trans. Robert Bononno (1970;
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003), 1.
7 See Henri Lefebvre, “The Right to the
City,” Writings on Cities, ed. and trans.
Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas
(1968; Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996),
69–72; Lefebvre, Urban Revolution,
1–23; and Lefebvre, “Reflections on the
Politics of Space” and “The Worldwide
Experience,” State, Space, World: Selected
Essays, ed. Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden,
trans. Gerald Moore, Neil Brenner, and
Stuart Elden (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 2009), 190, 278.
8 Lefebvre, “Right to the City,” 71; Lefebvre,
Urban Revolution, 1–23.
9 Lefebvre, Urban Revolution.
10 Henri Lefebvre, “Dissolving City,
Planetary Metamorphosis,” in Implosions/
148
Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary
Urbanization, ed. Neil Brenner (Berlin:
Jovis, 2013), 566–571.
11 The locus classicus of such arguments
is Melvin Webber, “The Post-City Age,”
Daedalus 94, no. 4 (1968): 1091–1110.
For a critical review of more recent
versions, see Stephen Graham, “The
End of Geography or the Explosion of
Place: Conceptualizing Space, Place and
Information Technology,” Progress in
Human Geography 22, no. 2 (1998): 165–85.
12 Matthew Gandy, “Where Does the
City End?,” in Brenner, Implosions/
Explosions, 86.
13 David Harvey, “Cities or Urbanization?,”
in Brenner, Implosions/Explosions, 61.
14 Kingsley Davis, “The Origins and Growth
of Urbanization in the World,” American
Journal of Sociology 60, no. 5 (1955):
429–37.
15 Kingsley Davis, World Urbanization:
1950–1970, vol. 2, Analysis of Trends,
Relationships and Development,
Population Series 9 (Berkeley: Institute
of International Studies, University
of California, 1972); Davis, World
Urbanization: 1950–1970, vol. 1, Basic
Data for Cities, Countries, and Regions,
Population Monograph Series 4 (Berkeley:
Institute of International Studies,
University of California, 1969).
16 See Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid,
“The ‘Urban Age’ in Question,”
International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research, 2013, forthcoming;
reprinted in Brenner, Implosions/
Explosion, 310–37.
17 Brenner and Schmid, “‘Urban Age’ in
Question.”
18 See Alvaro Sevilla-Buitrago, “Urbs in rure:
Historical Enclosure and the Extended
Urbanization of the Countryside,” in
Brenner, Implosions/Explosions, 236–59;
and Max Ajl, “The Hypertrophic City
versus the Planet of Fields,” in Brenner,
Implosions/Explosions, 533–50.
19 This line of argumentation is developed
in an important strand of the literature
on urban political ecology, especially by
authors such as Matthew Gandy, Maria
Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw, for whom
a Marxian notion of metabolism serves as
a key analytical lens for investigating the
capitalist form of urbanization.
20 This point is argued forcefully by Ajl,
“Hypertrophic City.” For a parallel
account of such operational landscapes
of urbanization, see Timothy W. Luke,
“Global Cities versus ‘Global Cities’:
Rethinking Contemporary Urbanism
as Public Ecology,” Studies in Political
Economy 70 (2003): 11–33.
21 See Ajl, “Hypertrophic City”; Luke,
“Global Cities versus ‘Global Cities.’”
Kayden
1 Bedford, MA: McGraw Hill, Inc., 1974.
2 Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1984.
3 Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Publishers,
1970.
Harvard Design Magazine 37
4 Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural
Press, 1995.
Green Prize
1 José Cardoso Pires
Krieger
1 The essay’s title is a variant on the title
of the last chapter of Jane Jacobs’s
canonical critique of mid-20th-century
American city planning and modern
architecture’s contribution to it, “The
Kind of Problem a City Is.” Her critique
represents for many today, more than a
half century later, the definitive statement
about how to approach urban design
and city planning. Jacobs, The Death and
Life of Great American Cities (New York:
Random House, 1961).
2 Beginning in the 1920s and well past the
mid-20th century, the University of
Chicago’s Sociology Department, under
the leadership of Robert Park and Ernest
Burgess, served as the foremost social
science “laboratory” for the study of the
“nature” of cities in both sociological and
ecological terms. See Robert E. Park and
Ernest W. Burgess, The City: Suggestions
for Investigation of Human Behavior
in the Urban Environment (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1925). Also
see Jennifer S. Light, The Nature of Cities:
Ecological Visions and the American Urban
Professions, 1920–1960 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2009).
3 Nan Ellin, Good Urbanism: Six Steps to
Creating Prosperous Places (Washington,
DC: Island Press, 2013).
4 Jonathan Barnett, somewhat satirically,
identified and categorized 60 such
prefixes in “A Short Guide to 60 of the
Newest Urbanisms,” Planning, April 2011,
19–21.
5 The most useful aspect of the New
Urbanist’s adaptation of this ecological
concept of a transect, promulgated with
particular passion by Andrés Duany, is the
acknowledgment that there is no one best
form of settlement across an urbanized
region. See the Center for Applied
Transect Studies, http://www.transect.
org, and SmartCode Central, http://
smartcodecentral.org.
6 See, e.g., Shlomo Angel, Jason Parent,
Daniel L. Civco, and Alejandro M.
Blei, “The Persistent Decline in Urban
Densities: Global and Historical Evidence
of ‘Sprawl,’”(working paper, Lincoln
Institute of Land Policy, 2010), and Brian
J.L. Berry, James W. Simmons, and Robert
J. Tennant, “Urban Population Densities:
Structure and Change,” Geographical
Review, July 1963: 389-405.
7 See Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A
Compact History (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005).
8 Andrés Duany and Emily Talen, eds.,
Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents:
Dissimulating the Sustainable City
(Gabriola Island, BC: New Society
Publishers, 2013). Not all the essays in
this volume are dismissive of Landscape
 Urbanism. Several authors seek a measure
of common ground with New Urbanism.
The overall tone of the volume, however,
certainly leaves an impression of disdain
and dismissal.
9 Anne Whiston Spirn, The Granite Garden:
Urban Nature and Human Design (New
York: Basic Books, 1984).
10 Among the more bullish recent crop of
books extolling the rediscovered virtues
of the city include Edward L. Glaeser,
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest
Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter,
Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New
York: Penguin Press, 2011); Alan
Ehrenhalt, The Great Inversion and the
Future of the American City (New York:
Knopf, 2012); and Jeff Speck, Walkable
City: How Downtown Can Save America,
One Step at a Time (New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 2012).
11 Robert Fishman, “The Fifth Migration,”
Journal of the American Planning
Association, Autumn 2005: 357-66.
Fishman “updates” Lewis Mumford’s
famous 1925 essay “The Fourth
Migration,” which predicted that for the
3
remainder of the 20th century, central
cities would be loosing populations to
their growing suburban peripheries.
12 Dan Becker and James Gerstenzang,
“Millennials Reject Our Doddering Car
Culture,” USA Today, June 20, 2013; James
Nash, “Fewer Cars in LA Culture Shift,”
Boston Globe, June 21, 2013.
The title for USA was changed to
Millennials Reject Car Culture when
it went online, but kept the original
headline—I liked our doddering; page
number not necessary http://www.
usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/06/19/
millenials-car-culture-column/2435173/
13 Lawrence W. Kennedy, Planning the City
Upon a Hill: Boston since 1630 (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1992).
14 The American awareness of cities needing
to be planned as regions dates back to
the early decades of the 20th century
in the work of Thomas Adams, Lewis
Mumford, Clarence Stein, and their
colleagues, as they sought to create a
planning framework for Greater New York,
and established the still active Regional
Plan Association. For a good survey
of their early activities, see Andrew A.
Meyers, “Invisible Cities: Lewis Mumford,
Thomas Adams, and the Invention of
the Regional City, 1923–1929,” Business
and Economic History, Winter 1998.
The Greek word megalopolis, meaning
“large city,” was “recoined” to describe
the Boston–New York–Washington, DC,
corridor in an influential book by French
geographer Jean Gottmann, Megalopolis:
The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of
the United States (New York: Twentieth
Century Fund, 1961). See also Richard
T.T. Forman, Urban Regions: Ecology and
Planning beyond the City (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).
15 The Economy of Cities (New York: Random
House, 1969) and Cities and the Wealth of
Nations: Principles of Economic Life (New
York: Random House, 1984). With these
two “sequels” to Death and Life, Jacobs
steadily moved from concerns of urban
form and the “sidewalk ballet” to the far
more encompassing matters of urban
economic and societal organization.
16 Warren Weaver, “Science and
Complexity,” American Scientist,
October 1948: 536–44. The essay was
republished in the 1958 annual report of
the Rockefeller Foundation, where Jacobs
encountered it, having recently received
a grant from the foundation toward the
writing of Death and Life. Jacobs writes
that she would “quote from this essay at
some length” (419) and then proceeds
to do so, often without quotations for
several pages. Jonathan Barnett also
discussed Jacobs’s reliance on Weaver’s
influential complexity essay in “Jane
Jacobs and Designing Cities as Organized
Complexity,” in The Urban Wisdom of Jane
Jacobs, ed. Sonia Hirt with Diane Zahm
(New York: Routledge, 2012), 245–56.
17 Jacobs, Death and Life, 440.
18 The phrase often attributed to Jacobs
(ibid., 431, 432) is borrowed directly
from Weaver’s essay (“Science and
Complexity,” 539), as are several
paragraphs that follow in which he cites
examples of organized complexity.
Zhu
1 Dong Jianhong, Zhongguo Gudai
Chengshi Ershi Jiang (Twenty lectures on
ancient cities of China) (Beijing: China
Architecture & Building Press, 2009), 1–10.
2 Jianfei Zhu, Chinese Spatial Strategies:
Imperial Beijing 1420–1911 (London:
RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 61–90, 222–244.
3 Zong Bing (375–443) is a key figure here;
his essay, “On Landscape Painting” (Hua
Shan Shui Xu) is the first treatise on
“landscape” (as an exclusive idea with
representations) in China and in the
world. See Augustin Berque, “Landscape
and the Overcoming of Modernity–Zong
Bing’s Principle,” Universitas–Monthly
Review of Philosophy and Culture, vol. 39,
no. 11 (November 2012): 7–26.
4 For a full explanation, see Jianfei Zhu,
“Ten Thousand Things: Notes on a
Construct of Largeness, Multiplicity, and
Moral Statehood,” in Christopher C. M.
Lee, ed., Common Frameworks: Rethinking
the Developmental City Part 1: Xiamen:
The Megaplot (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard
Graduate School of Design, 2013), 27–41.
5 COLM is more fully explained in Zhu, “Ten
Thousand Things,” 27–41.
6 Theorists have recently begun to
acknowledge China’s singular
contribution to the building of “modern”
statehood at a national scale in and since
the Qin-Han dynasties (221B.C.–220). See
Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing
(London: Verso, 2007), and Francis
Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order
(London: Profile Books, 2012).
7 For the planning and development of
current Chinese cities, see Fulong Wu
Notes
ed., China’s Emerging Cities (London:
Routledge, 2007); Fulong Wu, ed.,
Globalization and the Chinese City
(London: Routledge, 2006); and Xuefei
Ren, Urban China (Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press, 2013).
8 This point is made by Peter Nolan, China
at the Crossroads (Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press, 2004), 174–177, and is implied in
an academic study in Philip C. C. Huang,
“‘Public Sphere’/‘Civil Society’ in China?:
The Third Realm between State and
Society,” Modern China, vol. 19, no. 2
(April 1993): 216–240. A more elaborate
study can be found in Zhang Weiwei, The
China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State
(Hackensack, NJ: World Century, 2012).
Pieterse
1 Isabelle Stengers, “A ‘Cosmo-Politics’—
Risk, Hope, Change,” in Hope: New
Philosophies for Change, ed. Mary
Zournazi (London: Lawrence & Wishart,
2002), 245.
2 United Nations, Department of Economic
and Social Affairs, Population Division,
World Urbanization Prospects: The 2011
Revision (New York: UN-DESA, 2012).
3 Africa Progress Panel, Africa Progress
Report 2012: Jobs, Justice and Equity;
Seizing the Opportunities in Times of
Global Change (Geneva: African Progress
Panel, 2012), 137, 157.
4 African Development Bank (AfDB), Africa
in Fifty Years’ Time: The Road towards
Inclusive Growth (Tunis, Tunisia: AfDB,
2011), 30.
5 McKinsey Global Institute, Africa at Work:
Job Creation and Inclusive Growth (New
York: McKinsey & Co., 2012), 19.
6 UN-HABITAT, State of the World’s Cities
2008/2009: Harmonious Cities (London:
Earthscan, 2008).
7 See, e.g., AfDB, Africa in Fifty Years’ Time;
and Monitor Group, Africa from the
Bottom Up: Cities, Economic Growth,
and Prosperity in Sub-Saharan Africa
(Cambridge, MA: Monitor Group Co.,
2009).
8 See Vivien Foster and Cecilia Briceño-
Garmendia, eds., Africa’s Infrastructure: A
Time for Transformation (Washington, DC:
Agence Française de Développement and
The World Bank, 2010).
9 The vested interests of African political
elites are so tightly tied in with the
dysfunctional system that reproduces
current urban forms that it is almost
impossible to conceive how the requisite
political reorientation toward “the
urban,” and support for the levels of
reprioritization and investment that is
required, could be achieved.
10 See Mamadou Diouf, “Engaging
Postcolonial Cultures: African Youth and
Public Space,” African Studies Review,
September 2003: 1–12; Tim Edensor and
Mark Jayne, eds., Urban Theory beyond
the West: A World of Cities (Abingdon, UK:
Routledge, 2012); Ananya Roy, “Slumdog
Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism,”
International Journal of Urban and
149
 Regional Research, March 2011: 223–38;
and Edgar Pieterse and Abdou Maliq
Simone, eds., Rogue Urbanism: Emergent
African Cities (Johannesburg: Jacana
Media, 2013).
11 The 50% is an estimate based on the
analysis in the McKinsey Global Institute’s
Africa at Work, 19. The report presents a
best-case scenario for stable employment
generation, which means just about
keeping up with growth of the labor force.
It is premised on the fact that at present
only 28% of the labor force is in stable
employment; this figure is likely to grow
modestly with sound policies due to the
number of new entrants into the labor
force.
12 This is obviously a grossly unfair
generalization. However, due to space
constraints I cannot nuance the argument
but would recommend consulting Alcinda
Honwana, The Time of Youth: Work, Social
Change, and Politics in Africa (Boulder,
CO: Kumarian Press, 2012); and McKinsey
Global Institute, Africa at Work, 19.
13 See Ash Amin, ed., The Social Economy:
International Perspectives on Economic
Solidarity (London: Zed Books, 2009).
14 A variety of examples from across the
global South are presented in a related
essay: Edgar Pieterse, “Building New
Worlds: Design and the Second Urban
Transition,” in Design for the Other 90%:
Cities, ed. Cynthia E. Smith (New York:
Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum,
2011).
15 The Presidency, The 2012 Development
Indicators (Pretoria: Department of
Performance Monitoring and Evaluation,
The Presidency, The South African
Government, 2013), 23.
16 Arjun Appadurai, “The Capacity to Aspire:
Culture and the Terms of Recognition,” in
Culture and Public Action, ed. Vijayendra
Rao and Michael Walton (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2004).
17 Mohsen Mostafavi, “Why Ecological
Urbanism? Why Now?,” in Ecological
Urbanism, ed. Mohsen Mostafavi with
Gareth Doherty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Graduate School of Design;
Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2010), 40.
Davis
1 For more on this logic and its limits, see
James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How
Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition have Failed (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998).
2 For a good treatment of these issues see
Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York,
London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1991) and Joseph
Stieglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents
(New York and London: W.W. Norton and
Company, 2002).
3 For discussion of citizen opposition in a
western context, particularly as inspired
by the imposition of modern city planning
principles, see Marshall Berman, All That
Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of
Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1982.
150
4 For a good overview of this literature
see Nezar Al Sayyad and Ananya Roy
(eds), Urban Informality: Transnational
Perspectives from the Middle East
(Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 2004);
Alejandro Portes, Manuel Castells, and
Lauren Benton, The Informal Economy in
Advanced and Less Developed Countries
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1989); and Hernandez, F., Kellett,
P. and L.K. Allen (eds), Rethinking the
Informal City. Critical Perspectives from
Latin America, (Oxford: Berghahn Books,
2009).
5 One of the few who has studied
informality across developmental divides
is Loic Wacquant. See his Urban Outcasts:
A Comparative Study of Advanced
Marginality (Malden, MA and London:
Polity Press, 2008).
6 Part of this owes to the fact that much of
the economic and service provision data
used in US studies is based on national
rather than urban measurements.
For example, a 2006 Brookings study
found that informal economy surveys
of households were rare, resulting in a
dearth of good data to estimate the size
of the informal economy at the level
of the city or neighborhood. See James
Alderslade, John Talmage and Yusef
Freeman, “Measuring the informal
economy–One Neighborhood at a Time.”
The Brookings Institution Metropolitan
Policy Program Discussion Paper
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution,
2006).
7 In recent years, a few bold scholars have
recently started to argue that informality
is not uncommon in US housing markets,
particularly in peri-urban areas that have
recently been settled and that have failed
to capture attention from investors and
politicians alike. Peter Ward and Paul
Peters. “Self-Help Housing and Informal
Homesteading in Peri-Urban America.”
Habitat International 31, (2007):205-218.
8 Justin Webb, Laszlo Tihanyi, R. Duane
Ireland, and David Sirmon, “You say
illegal, I say legitimate: Entrepreneurship
in the informal economy.” Academy of
Management Review 34, 3 (2009): 492-510.
9 Frank Gaffikin and David C. Perry,
“The contemporary Urban Condition:
Understanding the globalizing city as
informal, contested and anchored.” Urban
Affairs Review 48, 5 (2010): 721-73.
10 In 2009 New York pursued raising the
cap on street vending permits to help
ease unemployment and prevent people
from slipping into the informal economy.
Lee, Jennifer. 2009. “Street vending as a
way to ease joblessness.” The New York
Times, City Room, April 29. Accessed June
10, 2013. http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.
com/2009/04/29/street-vending-as-a-way-
to-eae-joblessness/
11 For more on this see Melanie Lombard
and Margo Huxley. 2011. “Self-made cities:
Ordinary informality?” Planning Theory
& Practice (2011) 12, 1 and Porter, Libby.
2011. “Informality, the commons and the
Harvard Design Magazine 37
paradoxes for planning: Concepts and
debates for informality and planning.”
Planning Theory & Practice 12, 1.
12 Colin McFarlane, “Rethinking informality:
Politics, Crisis and the City.” Planning
Theory & Practice 13, 1 (2012): 89-108.
13 This particular outcome in Red Hook
was understood to be the product of
an informal if not tacit agreement
between local authorities and fixed
commercial establishments, built
around decentralized techniques of local
spatial control that allowed the state
and private property interests to manage
street vending without soliciting more
open community deliberation about its
contributions to the quotidian.
Correa
1 Hinterland in this context describes
an under-infrastructuralized and
underpopulated territory in the service of
a denser urban settlement, as defined by
George Chisholm in his 1888 Handbook of
Commercial Geography.
2 For additional information, see the IIRSA
website, www.iirsa.org.
3 IIRSA projects are funded by the sources
that have always been used for physical
infrastructure works in the region—i.e.,
the public and private sectors, multilateral
financial institutions, etc. See http://
www.iirsa.org/admin_iirsa_web/Uploads/
Documents/fid_financiamiento_privado_
de_infraestructuras.pdf, accessed
December 2013.
4 See Enrique Amayo, “Amazonia,
MERCOSUR, and the South American
Regional Integration,” in The Bush
Doctrine and Latin America, ed. Gary
Prevost and Carlos Oliva Campos (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 105–28.
5 See Rolando Terrazas, “Integral Analysis
of the Project Portfolio,” IIRSA web
site, June 24 – 26, 2008, www.iirsa.org/
admin_iirsa_web/Uploads/Documents/
cnr12_baires08_analisis_cartera_eng.pdf,
accessed December 2013.
6 The SAP network was launched at The
South America Project: Hinterland
Urbanisms in October 2011. The think
tank was founded by Felipe Correa and
Ana Maria Duran. See http://www.sap-
network.org/
7 FAUUSP, “Metropolitan Waterway Ring
of São Paulo,” http://www.
metropolefluvial.fau.usp.br/creditos.php,
accessed December 2013.
Vergara
1 Michel Marriott, “New York’s Worst Drug
Sites: Persistent Markets of Death,” New
York Times, June 1, 1989.
Griffin/Reed
1 Detroit Future City: Detroit Strategic
Framework Plan, December 2012, accessed
October 7, 2013, 11.http://detroitworks
project.com/wp-content/uploads/
2013/01/The-DFC-Plan.pdf.
2 Ibid, 99.
3 Ibid, 98.
 4 Data Driven Detroit, Residential Parcel
Survey, February 2010, accessed January
17, 2014. http://www.detroitparcelsurvey.
org/interior.php?nav=reports
5 “Broadacre City: A New Community Plan,”
Architectural Record, April 1935: 243–52.
6 Hilberseimer, Ludwig, The New Regional
Pattern: Industries and Gardens,
Workshops and Farms (Chicago: P.
Theobald, 1949).
7 New York: Reinhold Publishing, 1943.
Arrhenius
1 Mies van der Rohe, quotation used on
front cover, Bauwelt 38, 59 Jahrgang,
Berlin, 16. September 1968. Translation of
quote to English by author.
2 Brandlhuber +, p. 33, Bauwelt 38, 59
Jahrgang, Berlin, März 2011 (translation of
quote to English by Brandlhuber +)
3 Hans Stimmann, “Urban Design and
Architecture After the Wall,” in World
Cities: Berlin, ed. Alan Balfour (London:
Academy Editions,1995), 48–54.
4 See specifically Manfredo Tafuri and
Francesco Dal Co, “The Activity of
the Masters After World War II,” in
Modern Architecture/ 2, History of World
Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1986),
311–14. See also Sven-Olov Wallenstein,
0.2 AKAD–The Silences of Mies
(Stockholm: Axl Books, 2008).
Parolotto
1 New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
2 U.S. Department of Transportation,
Federal Highway Administration, “Per
capita VMT peaked in 2004 and has
declined each year since then for a total
decline of 7.5 percent,” accessed January
17, 2014. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/
policyinformation/travel_monitoring/
tvt.cfm
3 Elisabeth Rosenthal “The End of Car
Culture,” The New York Times, Sunday
Review section, June 29, 2013, accessed
January 17, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com
/2013/06/30/sunday-review/the-end-of-
car-culture.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&
4 A project of San Francisco Municipal
Transportation Authority (SFMTA), http://
sfpark.org/
5 “Area C, bilancio del 2013,” Municipality
of Milan website, January 16, 2014,
accessed January 17, 2014. https://
www.comune.milano.it/portale/wps/
portal/!ut/p/c0/04_
Busquets
1 Joan Busquets, Miguel Corominas,
and Centre de Cultura Contemporània de
Barcelona, Cerdà and the Barcelona of the
Future, Reality versus Project (Barcelona:
Centre de Cultura Contemporània de
Barcelona and Direcció de Comunicació
de la Diputació de Barcelona, 2010).
Christiaanse
1 Based in Rotterdam with branch offices in
Zürich and Shanghai.
Sarkis
1 Punjab Government, Department of Town
& Country Planning, 1979.
2 Author’s translation. In French, it reads:
“En trois termes explicites, seraient fixés
les établissements humains de notre
civilisation machiniste. Il est utile de
connaitre la clef de cette biologie apte
à réaliser les fonctions, apte à assumer
les tâches. L’étude de ces trois sortes
d’établissement nous permettra d’avancer
vers des certitudes. L’occupation du sol
pourra être reconsidérée, ce qui signifie
proprement: ordonner l’espace, faire
de la géographie humaine et de la géo-
architecture, termes qui sont apparus
petit à petit en ces temps, dans de graves
mémoires, dans des rapports et des
études. On réclamait une morphologie
capable d’assurer les classements et des
hierarchies, de conduire les initiatives,
de situer les actes.” ASCORAL, Les Trois
Etablissements Humains (Paris: 1945).
3 Le Corbusier, The Four Routes (London: D.
Dobson, 1947).
4 Le Corbusier, The Athens Charter (New
York: Grossman Publishers, 1973).
5 On this issue of suppressing the aesthetic
in favor of the functional, see Francesco
Passanti, “The Aesthetic Dimension of Le
Corbusier’s Urbanism,” in Josep Lluís Sert:
The Architect of Urban Design, ed. Eric
Mumford and Hashim Sarkis (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2008).
6 The term was seemingly used somewhere
else even if it resonated with many of Le
Corbusier’s neologisms. If Le Corbusier
himself was the forger of this new word,
he did not make much use of it. Neither
did scholars of his urbanism. Somehow
since its appearance at the end of WWII
in this rather hurriedly assembled text
and a rather rough and much delayed
English translation of the second French
edition, the term geo-architecture was
subsequently repeated in some lectures,
including one in Switzerland in 1957 and
another in Brussels in 1958.
Tracing the possible options of the term
reveals how indelible geography was with
urban planning. The term may have been
entered into the atelier at Rue de Sèvres
through one of the interdisciplinary doors
opened by members of ASCORAL. The
correspondence between Le Corbusier
and economist François Perroux, director
of the newly founded Insitut de Science
Economique Appliquée, suggest that the
geographer François Gravier may have
been a possible conduit. According to
Daniel Le Couédic, director of the Center
for Géoarchitecture in Brest, the term
originated in American geomorphology
and was then used to describe the large
New Deal projects such as the TVA that
combined engineering with architecture
and planning and that the American
historian of architecture Carl W. Condit
used in this context as well in 1947. Le
Couédic infers that it is most probably in
this context that Le Corbusier also heard
the term and appropriated it.
Notes
7 Le Corbusier, The Three Human
Establishments, 148.
8 Pierre Saddy, “The Riches of Nature,” in
Casabella, January-February 1987, 118.
9 Jean Brunhes, Human Geography:
An Attempt at a Positive Classification,
Principles, and Examples (Chicago: Rand,
McNally and Co., 1920).
10 Ibid., 149.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 152. This idea of geographic
continuity over time is central to the
work of Gaston Roupnel, a historian/
ethnographer who was highly influential
on the agricultural ideas in the book.
Roupnel’s work was also cited by
Fernand Braudel in his formulation of the
longue durée. The Europe of industrial
codependency is also conjured again in Le
Corbusier’s plans for Vallée de la Meuse
and in Berlin.
14 In a lecture delivered in Brussels on June
26, 1958, Le Corbusier suggests that it was
the geographer, not him, who expanded
the map toward Europe. Fondation Le
Corbusier, Correspondence (U3-8-307), 14.
15 Le Corbusier, Les Trois Etablissements
Humains, 149.
16 Vittorio Gregotti, “Territorial Form,” in
l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, 1966.
17 See Antoine Picon, “What Has Happened
to Territory?,” in “Territory: Architecture
Beyond Environment,” ed. David Gissen,
special issue, Architectural Design,
May-June 2010: 94–99. See also Stuart
Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press,
2013). It is important to note, however,
that the currency of the term during
WWII, at the time of The Three Human
Establishments, had to do with the sudden
dissociation of the physical dimension
of territory from its administrative and
political determinants.
Baan
1 The most recent Kumbh Mela took place
in Allahabad, India from January
14-March 10, 2013.
151