Michael E. Smith is Professor of Anthropology at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA; email: [email protected]. His research interests include Aztec society, the archaeological study of early states and cities, and comparative urbanism. ‘The Urban Revolution’ by V. Gordon Childe (Town Planning Review, 1950) is one of the most heavily ci...

The stretched scope of urbanism, with its large range of inputs drawn from various disciplines, seems to create confusion about the nature and the form of an education in urbanism at university level. We verify the existence of several communities of practice who value practice and theory differently. Assessing the work of students becomes an arduous task, because different communities of pract...

1.1 Different schools of thought: From green city to green building Over the last thirty-five years or so, an international debate on eco-city theory has emerged and has developed as a relevant research field concerning the future of urbanism and the city itself. During that time, a number of architectural schools of thought have been implemented worldwide. One such school is Technical Utopiani...

Participatory urbanism platforms must balance stakeholder needs to both empower citizens and exact change from the local authority. While many platforms can trigger discussion, changes will only be achieved through successful collaborative efforts. This paper outlines the challenges and opportunities of designing for participatory urbanism, drawing on a case study completed with UNICEF and unde...

We introduce the term metacity as a conceptual framework that can be shared by ecologists and designers and applied across the wide variety of urban habitats found around the world. While the term metacity was introduced by UN-HABITAT to designate hyper cities of over twenty million people, for us it is not limited to large urban agglomerations, but rather refers to the proliferation of new for...

Intelligent urban planning and ecological urbanism can be recognized as two of the key solutions to act against sprawl. This process is associated with suburbanization, blurring boundaries between city suburbs, undefined role open green spaces within new structures. It has been identified biggest most common problem worldwide. non-central a huge impact not only on economic aspects, but—most all...

TWO GENERATIONS have passed since Louis Wirth (1938) published his influential and controversial piece, &dquo;Urbanism as a Way of Life,&dquo; which attempted to specify the universal features of urban places. Since then his effort has often been criticized, yet the question of whether there are universals of urbanism continues to fascinate urban sociologists (see, for example, Duncan 1957; Dew...

This article is an intervention in the epistemologies and methodologies of urban studies. It seeks to understand and transform the ways in which the cities of the global South are studied and represented in urban research, and to some extent in popular discourse. As such, the article is primarily concerned with a formation of ideas - "subaltern urbanism" - which undertakes the theorization of t...

This paper examines the recent green turn in China by investigating a large-scale urban greenway project. Using perspective of socio-ecological fix, we demonstrate that multi-scalar states strive to upgrade environmental quality. Specifically, local state seizes opportunity for ‘ecological civilisation’ envisioned central carry out infrastructure development. We reveal complex motivations incor...