Urbanizing: Call for Papers

2016

Editorial for the First issue of Urbanization - Coauthored with the Editorial collective.

Many urban environments designed according to "New Urbanist" principles end up being criticized as "Anachronistic", "artificial", "Lifeless", "disney - like" etc. This essay attempts to analyze why and suggest what might be done to avoid such response.

A new concept is animating debates on the urban question: planetary urbanization. What was only a few years ago no more than a preliminary hypothesis, significantly inspired by Henri ) conception of a worldwide 'urban revolution,' has now become a vibrant theoretical approach that is being applied across divergent terrains of urban research around the world. It is also provoking some intense, sometimes polemical debates on the appropriate conceptualization, methodology, site, scale and focal point for urban research today..

Two decades into the 21st century, and the City, one of the most complex human artefacts, continues its transformation. Urbanization processes carry on in different ways and pace across the globe. Along with it, the complexity of urban problems increases and the public debate for their solutions intensifies, while the key urban questions remain classical: How do we imagine cities and urban development in the decades to come? And how do we make it happen?

2006

Cities are immense and extremely difficult to conceptualize, let alone model, and previous digitally based efforts have often failed to capture the complexity and indeterminacy of urban organizations. Architects and designers have had trouble conceiving of techniques for examining these systems due to their large number of interacting micro-parts that evolve over time.

Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2018

Green Ethics and Philosophy, 2011

This article explores the alternative meanings of the concept of urbanization, describes the processes that facilitate it and the different forms it takes, the problems that are associated with it, and concludes with a brief overview of recent philosophies of urbanization.

The world is urbanizing rapidly, with cities today concentrating more people than it is used to be prior to urbanization. It is extensively accepted that development and urbanization go hand in hand as the expansion of cities has resulted to both opportunities and challenges. Today it is estimated that more than half of the world's population resides in towns and cities. This population explosion has affected the development in urban areas. Between 2000 and 2015 it is stated that approximately one billion will be added in urban areas in contrast to 125 million who reside in rural areas. Such uncontrolled growth often results in the destruction of arable land vital food production, congestion, pollution, slums and shanty towns. This perspective brings a pressing reality to the necessity to build tomorrow's world on sustainable principles.

22nd International Scientific Conference Engineering for Rural Development Proceedings

The lack of a universally accepted definition of the term “urban” has led to inconsistencies and challenges in the fields of research, policy, and practice. This paper addresses this problem by conducting a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis of the concept of “urban”. By understanding the significance of a clear definition of “urban”, this study aims to facilitate better communication and comprehension among practitioners, policymakers, and researchers working in the field. The paper begins by tracing the historical origins of the urban concept and the factors contributing to the development of urban areas. It then examines the traditional, functional, social, and cultural approaches used to define urban areas, while also discussing the challenges and limitations of these definitions. The analysis reveals that a place can be identified as “urban” if it has a diverse and complex social structure, a vibrant economy, and a high concentration of facilities and cultur...

2020

'appearances' have, for Aristotle, a "fundamental character" he terms μεταβολἠ (metabolism): "Every instance of movedness is a change from something into something" (191). We cannot discuss this fully at the moment, though recognize in the urbanizing paradigms we outline below the extent to which Aristotle's understanding of φὐσις as ὰρχή χινἠσως (originary movedness) holds sway. Though, as Heidegger emphasises, Aristotelian understandings of 'change of place' have no relation to modernity's understanding of space as infinite and homogeneous (190). What, for Aristotle, is potentiality and actuality, likewise, require us to rethink our common notions. For discussion on dynamis and energia, see especially 218ff. 5 Again, we emphasise, with Heidegger, the Cartesian break with Aristotelian understanding of movement. See, for example, Heidegger's "Age of the World Picture" (Heidegger, 2002, 57-85), discussed further below. In Chapter Eight, in a discussion of Giorgio Agamben's notion of 'inoperativity', we return to this Aristotelian understanding of potential and actuality, in what, for Agamben, is a paradigmatic break with its legacy (see Agamben, 1999, 2017, 1077-1288). 6 We can especially point to Neil Brenner's 2019 New urban spaces: Urban theory and the scale question. Brenner's coverage of literature in the field is encyclopaedic.