Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan and the revitalization of the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn offer insights into the intersection of arts and urbanization after World War II. This intra-city comparison shows the aggrandizing pull of the international arena in the shaping of Lincoln Center and the arts it featured in contrast to the local focus and debate that transfor...

"Americans ense that something iswrong with the places where we live and work and go about our daily business." So begins a recent jeremiad by author Howard Kunstler on the "environmental calamity" we call the suburbs [Kunstler, 1996, p. 43]. Critics point to fundamental spects of post-war planning, such as zoning, highway dependence, and decentralization, asthe determinants of our current subu...

The notion of sustainability is widely used from micro to macro scale studies but only few approaches deal with its measurement. Increased global interest in sustainability has triggered attention in indicators as a means of achieving a more sustainable world. Although the search for indicators has led to the development of criteria for good indicators, it has also been dominated by scientific ...

Analysing the urban renewal of Boston’sWest End during the 1950s, we examine how psychiatrists, social scientists and urban planners understood the relationship between the urban environment and mental health. For psychiatrist Erich Lindemann, the West End offered a unique opportunity to study how acute stress and loss affected populations, thus contributing to social psychiatry, which sought t...

Research summary One of the main challenges of European post-industrial cities is to prevent urban sprawl. Hence, increasing the density of inner cities instead of building new constructions in the peripheries has become a priority. However, city centres are already built and occupied by communities. Therefore, urban renewal projects aiming at increasing the density of the urban fabric should t...