Life among urban planners : practice, professionalism, and expertise in the making of the city / edited by Jennifer Mack and Michael Herzfeld.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Herzfeld, Michael, 1947- editor.

Mack, Jennifer (Writer on architecture), editor.

Series:

City in the twenty-first century book series.

City in the twenty-first century

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Urban anthropology.

City planners.

City planning--Social aspects.

City planning.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (265 pages).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Examining the issues raised around questions of expertise, participation, and the tension between market and state forces, contributors demonstrate how certain planning practices accentuate their specific relationship to a place while others are represented to a global audience as potentially universal solutions. In presenting detailed and intimate portraits of the everyday lives of planners, the volume offers key insights into how the city interacts with the world.Contributors: Margaret Crawford, Adèle Esposito, Trevor Goldsmith, Mark Graham, Michael Herzfeld, James Holston, Gabriella Körling, Jennifer Mack, Andrew Newman, Lissa Nordin, Bruce O'Neill, Kevin Lewis O'Neill, Federico Pérez, Monika Sznel.

What roles do planners have in shaping the daily practices of urban life? How do they employ, manipulate, and alter their expertise to meet the demands asked of them? The essays in this volume emphasize planners' cultural values and personal assumptions and critically examine what their persistent commitment to thinking about the future means for the ways in which people live in the present and preserve the past.Life Among Urban Planners explores the practices and politics of professional city-making in a wide selection of geographical areas spanning five continents. Cases include but are not limited to Bangkok, Bogotá, Chicago, Naimey, Rome, Siem Reap, Stockholm, and Warsaw. .

A collection of ethnographic case studies of urban planners and their practicesUrban planners project the future of cities. As experts, they draft visions of places and times that do not yet exist, prescribing the tools to be used to achieve those visions. Their choices can determine how a city will merge its public transit and automobile traffic or how it will meet a demand for thousands of new dwelling units as quickly and with as little avoidable damage as possible. Life Among Urban Planners considers planning professionals in relation to the social contexts in which they operate: the planning office, the construction site, and even in the confrontations with thos eaffected by their work. .

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction: Living Life Among Planners

1. Shaping Cultural Space: Reflections on the Politics and Cosmology of Urbanism

2. Why Planners Need Anthropologists

3. Redesigning the Republic? Public Gardens, Participatory Design, and Citizenship in Immigrant Paris

4. Zoning as Default: The Politics of Foreign- Sponsored Urban Planning in Siem Reap, Cambodia

5. An Anatomy of Failure: Planning After the Fact in Contemporary Bogotá, Colombia

6. A “Zoning Tombola”: Informal Planning in Niamey, Niger

7. Breaking the Rules, Making the Ruler: Syriac Homes and the Limits of Swedish Planning

8. The Scales of Justice: Region, Rights, and Responsibility in St. Louis, Missouri

9. Power without the Mustache: Urban Quality as Planning Practice in Post- Industrial Barcelona

10. The Games We Play: What Is Participation in Urban Planning? Insights from Warsaw

11. From the Real to the Virtual: A Swedish Solution for “Universal” Sustainable Development in Hammarby Sjöstad, Stockholm

Afterword: The Problem of the Present in Anthropology and Urban Planning

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780812297164

0812297164

OCLC:

1163552060