Parklets are innovative, dynamic public spaces that are installed onto on-street car-parking spots. These very small spaces have had a very large and lasting impact on city streets. How Good Are Parklets? is the first book to critically examine the parklet’s purposes, formats and impacts. It traces the parklet’s history, from its invention in 2005 as an experiment that tactically reclaimed street space for broader public use, to its surge in popularity worldwide after the COVID-19...

Activating Urban Waterfronts shows how urban waterfronts can be designed, managed and used in ways that can make them more inclusive, lively and sustainable. The book draws on detailed examination of a diversity of waterfronts from cities across Europe, Australia and Asia, illustrating the challenges of connecting these waterfront precincts to the surrounding city and examining how well they actually provide connection to water. The book challenges conventional large scale, long-term appro...

This international and illustrated work challenges current writings focussing on the problems of urban public space to present a more nuanced and dialectical conception of urban life.Detailed and extensive international urban case studies show how urban open spaces are used for play, which is defined and discussed using Caillois' four-part definition – competition, chance, simulation and vertigo. Stevens explores and analyzes these case studies according to locations where play has...

Wie wäre es, wenn die Geschichte eines Denkmals einmal aus dessen Sicht erzählt wird? Die AutorInnen dieser Anthologie wagen den Perspektivenwechsel und schildern, wie es Denkmälern im Wandel der Zeiten erging, hin- und hergerissen zwischen ursprünglichen Intentionen, Umdeutungen und Instrumentalisierungen. Mit tiefgründigem Humor begeben sie sich in den Kopf der Freiheitsstatue, lassen die Brooklyn Bridge über ihre Rezeption in der Literatur zu Wort kommen, oder enttarnen die Neue Wache i...

Memorials are more diverse in design and subject matter than ever before. No longer limited to statues of heroes placed high on pedestals, contemporary memorials engage visitors in new, often surprising ways, contributing to the liveliness of public space. In Memorials as Spaces of Engagement Quentin Stevens and Karen A. Franck explore how changes in memorial design and use have helped forge closer, richer relationships between commemorative sites and their visitors. The authors c...

Temporary and Tactical Urbanism examines a key set of urban design strategies that have emerged in the twenty-first century. Such projects range from guerrilla gardens and bike lanes to more formalised temporary beaches and swimming pools, parklets, pop-up plazas and buildings and container towns.These practices enable diverse forms of economic, social and artistic life that are usually repressed by the fixities of urban form and its management. This book takes a thematic ...

LE BÊTISIER DU WOKISMEPressons-nous de rire de tout, de peur d'être obligé d'en pleurer. Dans ce double numéro d’été - juillet-août - la Revue des Deux Mondes s’est inspirée de Beaumarchais pour évoquer le wokisme. Nouvelle doxa, caricature de l’antiracisme et du féminisme, ce mouvement est une source intarissable d’injonctions absurdes, de délires égalitaristes et de tyrannies comportementales ou langagières. On s’esclaff...

This book provides a practical and rewarding path for early to mid-career professionals of all disciplines (STEM and non-STEM) to develop the intentional mental practice of Systems Thinking together with Rigorous Methods that improve the way we view, contemplate, approach and deal with complex challenges. It teaches a concise and easy to follow set of practice–derived generic Systems Principles that offer a superior alternative to the linear compartmentalized thi...

The so-called ‘creative industries’ are increasingly being presented as an important tool of urban regeneration and economic development. Until now, research on the clustering of such activities has been limited to economics, geography and urban policy. This book is the first to gather together emerging research in urban design and spatial planning that explores what characteristics of the built form of cities support the distinctive activity patterns of various creative industries, and ho...

Social cohesion is often perceived as being under threat from the increasing cultural and economic differences in contemporary cities and the increasing intensity of urban life. Public space, in its role as the main stage for social interactions between strangers, clearly plays a role in facilitating or limiting opportunities for social cohesion. But what exactly is social cohesion, how is it experienced in the public realm, and what role can the design of city spaces have in supporting or...

This book links two fields of interest which are too seldom considered together: the production and critique of art in public space and social behaviour in the public realm. Whilst most writing about public art has focused on the aesthetic, cultural and political intentions and processes that shape its production, this edited collection examines a variety of public artworks from the perspective of their actual everyday use. Contributors are interested in the rich diversity of peoples’ enga...

In cities around the world people use a variety of public spaces to relax, to protest, to buy and sell, to experiment and to celebrate. Loose Space explores the many ways that urban residents, with creativity and determination, appropriate public space to meet their own needs and desires. Familiar or unexpected, spontaneous or planned, momentary or long-lasting, the activities that make urban space loose continue to give cities life and vitality.The book examines physical spaces an...