European city

The port of Le Havre was redeveloped by Auguste Perret with a central Arts Centre by Oscar Niemeyer. The urban design blends ideas from the modern movement with more traditional axes and framing devices and a strong pedestrian scale. The scale is predominantly European with a variety of accent landmark and taller buildings. An illustrated discussion follows.

The grouping of public buildings into civic centers and cultural centers became an obsession of American city planners at the turn of the twentieth century. Following European and ancient models, and inspired by the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and the McMillan Commission plan for the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in 1901, architects sought to create impressive horizontal ensembles of monumental buildings in urban open spaces such as downtown plazas and quasi-suburban parks in direct opposition to the vertical thrust of commercial skyscrapers. Hitherto viewed largely through narrow the stylistic prism of the City Beautiful vs. the city practical movements, the monumental center (as Jane Jacobs termed it) continued to persist beyond the passing of neoclassicism and the rise of high modernism, thriving as an indispensable motif of futurist aspiration in the era of comprehensive and regional planning, as municipalities sought to counteract the decentralizing pull of the automobile, freeway, air travel and suburban sprawl in postwar America. The administrative civic center and arts and educational cultural center (bolstered by that icon of late urban modernity, the medical center) in turn spawned a new hybrid, the center for the performing arts, exemplified by Lincoln Center and the National Cultural Center (the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), as cities sought to integrate convention, sports, and live performance venues into inner-city urban renewal projects. Through the key case studies of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit, one-time juggernauts of heavy industry and twenty-first century regions of rust-belt collapse, this study examines the emergence of the ideology of grouping public buildings in urban planning as well as the nineteenth century philology of the keywords civic center and cultural center, terms once actively employed in discourses as diverse as Swiss geography, American anthropology, Social Christianity, the schoolhouse social center movement, and cultural Zionism. It also positions these developments in relation to modern anxieties about the center and its loss, charted by such thinkers as Hans Sedlmayr, Jacques Derrida, and Henri Lefevbre, and considers the contested utopian aspirations of the monumental center as New Jerusalem, Celestial City, and Shining City on a Hill.

The research focuses mainly on the European cities’ urban form and social characteristics by analyzing the element of the urban block in five historical periods. The aim is not to analyze the whole history, but to focus on specific periods and case studies that show the metamorphosis of the urban block. European cities are diverse in several scales but meanwhile they are linked in a common urban development. By studying examples from the Greek Polis, where the urban blocks are created by organized city planning focused on the grid, to the urban block of the medieval city, where different built structures can be seen, to the compact blocks of the industrial Berlin, to the large blocks of Transvaalbuurt in  Amsterdam, where the traditional urban block opens up as well as Le Corbusier’s modern city and the refusal to the traditional closed block, the reader will be able to understand the significant vital role of the urban block in the urban tissue. These case studies are examined, analyzed and, in the end, illustrated in diagrams based on indicators that show spatial and social characteristics of the blocks. Thus, one can observe urban transformations and social changes of the European cities always in comparison with the historical framework.
The research is being funded by IKY Fellowship of Excellence for Postgraduate Studies in Greece - Siemens Program.

In contemporary public discourse a European city is a common rhetorical figure, which everybody seems to understand, yet nobody can precisely define. Neither is there much agreement in the academic literature on what a European city is, or what its essential features should be. It could be thus argued that it is like a Yeti: it is known to exist, but its existence is hard to prove. For this reason, it is worth examining this concept and its various meanings. This module looks at different urban setting across the European continent during the 19th and 20th century and considers what does it tell us not only about the notion of a European city but also about Europe itself.

"RESUMEN – ABSTRACT

Se indaga en torno a la intoxicación voluntaria, dentro de un programa general encaminado a la experimentación con el propio cuerpo, método que encuentra sus fundamentos en la idea de la medicina romántica donde, según Sloterdijk, los efectos de las dosis en el hombre sano y el enfermo se reflejaban de manera especular. Es aquí donde se origina una ambiciosa semiótica de la medicación farmacológica, no sólo del endomorfinismo de la especulación, sino también de mecanismos endocrinos o quimioéticos.
Sloterdijk se refiere a un proceso de intoxicación voluntaria en referencia al creador de la homeopatía, Samuel Hahnemann, como inventor de una micropolítica de la subjetividad. De la misma manera que el homeópata, según Hahnemann, debe intoxicarse a sí mismo antes de poder dar consejo alguno, el teórico político debe estar dispuesto a arriesgar su identidad en la práctica.
Sloterdijk al referirse a este tipo de “experimentos con uno mismo”, no piensa en un experimento de vivisección en las propias carnes, ni tampoco en la psicosis romántica del psicoanálisis, sino que más bien hace referencia, a un fenómeno perteneciente a la historia de la medicina moderna, el movimiento homeopático, que se remonta a hace más de doscientos años y cuya eficacia se verifica en tratamientos terapéuticos -con propuestas médicas adecuadas- capaces de tratar la neurosis moderna. Se examina y discute la convicción heterodoxa de que el médico estaría obligado a intoxicarse a sí mismo con todo lo que él más tarde iba a prescribir a los enfermos. De esta reflexión procede el concepto de experimento con uno mismo: quien quiera ser médico necesita previamente ser cobaya, esto es ser su propio conejillos de Indias.
El autor valioso y útil es el que se contamina él mismo con las materias con las que trabaja, sustancias de alto contenido tóxico, este planteamiento no ha cambiado. Kafka, Musil, Broch, Burroughs todos los grandes del siglo XX, también han sido maestros del pensamiento peligroso."

Going beyond race-blind approaches to spatial segregation in Europe, Racial Cities argues that race is the logic through which stigmatized and segregated "Gypsy urban areas" have emerged and persisted after World War II. Building on nearly a decade of ethnographic and historical research in Romania, Italy, France and the UK, Giovanni Picker casts a series of case studies into the historical framework of circulations and borrowings between colony and metropole since the late nineteenth century.

By focusing on socio-economic transformations and social dynamics in contemporary Cluj-Napoca, Pescara, Montreuil, Florence and Salford, Picker detects four local segregating mechanisms, and comparatively investigates resemblances between each of them and segregation in French Rabat, Italian Addis Ababa, and British New Delhi. These multiple global associations across space and time serve as an empirical basis for establishing a solid bridge between race critical theories and urban studies.

Racial Cities is the first comprehensive analysis of the segregation of Romani people in Europe, providing a fine-tuned and in-depth explanation of this phenomenon. While inequalities increase globally and poverty is ever more concentrated, this book is a key contribution to debates and actions addressing social marginality, inequalities, racist exclusions, and governance. Thanks to its dense yet thoroughly accessible narration, the book will appeal to scholars, undergraduate and postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and equally to activists and policy makers, who are interested in areas including: Race and Racism, Urban Studies, Governance, Inequalities, Colonialism and Postcolonialism, and European Studies.

This article was derived from my dissertation chapter on Cleveland and the planning of University Circle in the 1920s. Far from the moribund period historians tend to assume, it was an intense moment of contemplating the interaction of cultural and educational institutions in the city, beyond the planning of monumental buildings and groupings.

Sculpted into a cliff, the stunning city of Matera, located almost in the heel of Italy’s boot in the region of Basilicata, was long depicted as a ‘national shame’ of postwar Italy. Such a perception of the city’s identity comes from the poor living conditions of their inhabitants at that time, especially in the city's most ancient cave habitations of the Sassi (literally “the stones”). Nevertheless, what was then considered to be Italy’s national disgrace is now known as the European Capital of Culture 2019 which was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993. What is striking in Matera’s history is the rapidity in which Matera emerged from being a  ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’ city to becoming one of Italy’s finest tourist destinations known for its stark beauty. The purpose of the present contribution is to try and analyze the factors that lead to a major shift in Matera’s status.

This article investigates how the policy capacity of urban governments in Europe to deal with the social challenges caused by the 2008-2009 financial crisis, has been strongly shaped by the institutional multi-level governance (MLG) settings in which cities were embedded. We consider the financial crisis as an important 'stress test' for urban policy. Urban governments faced a highly complex, trilemmatic situation: they faced not only growing social and economic problems at the local level, but also a process of devolution of institutional responsibility from central to local governments, and important cuts in central funding. Our analysis is based on an empirical investigation carried out between 2009 and 2016 in six major European cities: Barcelona, Copenhagen, Lyon, Manchester, Milan, and Munich. What clearly emerges from the research is that European cities may still show a certain capacity to innovate and govern economic changes and social challenges only if supported by an enabling MLG system.

Peri-urban agriculture has preserved around central cities a land-use mosaic and contributes to the sustainable growth of metropolitan regions constituting green infrastructures, supplying urban markets, and improving social inclusion. The present study provides a quali-quantitative overview of peri-urban agriculture vis à vis urban expansion investigating the recent evolution of peri-urban farms (1988–2010) in Toulouse, the fourth largest metropolitan region in France. Socioeconomic dynamics in the study area, are representative of latent spatial and functional relationships between urban growth and peri-urban agriculture in contemporary European cities. Two complementary approaches were developed (i) identifying and analysing socioeconomic and environmental indicators that characterize changes over time in peri-urban agriculture by linking urban expansion with the evolution of fringe land-use; and (ii) carrying out a qualitative survey on a sample of farmers with the aim to relate farms' evolution strategies and land-use dynamics. Results of the present study indicate that urban expansion affects the characteristics of peri-urban farms, altering economic size, crop productions and social characteristics of farmers, and widening the spatial divide between large enterprises located in the peri-urban periphery and smaller farms in the immediate surroundings of urban areas. The qualitative survey investigates farmers' strategies to maintain their business in peri-urban areas. By recognizing that structural and functional characteristics of urban growth are interpretative keys to identify sustainable land management strategies, the role of peri-urban agriculture is finally outlined according to the empirical evidence from different socioeconomic contexts in the study area.

The issue of diverse identities imprinted on the urban landscape as the result of political changes and the struggle for power between different social and ethnic groups is analysed here using the example of Katowice, the capital and largest urban centre in Upper Silesia, Poland. Basing their conclusions on systematic investigation of the most important changes and features in the cityscape in five clearly distinct historical periods, the authors explore the conditions and mechanisms of the creation of the city’s symbolic landscape and its links with urban identity. They argue that Katowice represents a peculiar model of urban identity formation in Central and Eastern Europe that has to date not been researched in any depth, in which each successive historical period represents a rupture with the foregoing values and ideas and an attempt to make a new, lasting imprint on the material outlook of the city. The development of such a model of identity is the result of the complex interplay between the city’s changing geopolitical context and its economic and functional development path.

The issue of diverse identities imprinted on the urban landscape as the result of political changes and the struggle for power between different social and ethnic groups is analysed here using the example of Katowice, the capital and largest urban centre in Upper Silesia, Poland. Basing their conclusions on systematic investigation of the most important changes and features in the cityscape in five clearly distinct historical periods, the authors explore the conditions and mechanisms of the creation of the city's symbolic landscape and its links with urban identity. They argue that Katowice represents a peculiar model of urban identity formation in Central and Eastern Europe that has to date not been researched in any depth, in which each successive historical period represents a rupture with the foregoing values and ideas and an attempt to make a new, lasting imprint on the material outlook of the city. The development of such a model of identity is the result of the complex interplay between the city's changing geopolitical context and its economic and functional development path.

This paper analyses the evolution of the concept of public space in the European city in a diachronic framework, from its historical and foundational functions to the opportunity it provides to trigger regenerative strategies in socially and environmentally degraded urban contexts. The specificity of ‘potentially public’ spaces resides in their peripheral position inside metropolitan areas and in their episodic and fragmented character. This autonomy with respect to other typologies of free spaces appears to require the elaboration of specific analytical approaches and design models that move from the explicit recognition of the reticular structure of the territory. Examples of urban regeneration promoted in the last decade, in general supported by the European Union, open new perspectives on urban governance that are implicitly based upon the role of social inclusion in welfare and sustainability policies.

Keywords Public Space, Urbanism, Participation, Urban Governance, Enclaves

This paper analyses the evolution of the concept of public space in the European city in a diachronic framework, from its historical and foundational functions to the opportunity it provides to trigger regenerative strategies in socially and environmentally degraded urban contexts. The specificity of ‘potentially public’ spaces resides in their peripheral position inside metropolitan areas and in their episodic and fragmented character. This autonomy with respect to other typologies of free spaces appears to require the elaboration of specific analytical approaches and design models that move from the explicit recognition of the reticular structure of the territory. Examples of urban regeneration promoted in the last decade, in general supported by the European Union, open new perspectives on urban governance that are implicitly based upon the role of social inclusion in welfare and sustainability policies.

Karl Gruber is a central figure in the German architectural debate of the first half of 20th century. This paper highlights the importance of his contribution in the study of the shape and the character of the European city.
Erwin Karl Gruber (Konstanz, 1885 - Darmstadt, 1966) is a German architect trained at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe under the leadership of Friedrich Ostendorf (1871-1915). In 1924 he is appointed professor of “mittelalterliche Baukunst und Entwerfen” (medieval construction and design) at Technische Hochschule in Danzig; he is appointed chair of “Städtebau und Altertümer” (Urban design and antiquities) at Technische Hochschule Darmstadt in 1933.
His many studies are dedicated to urban morphology, from ancient to the modern city. His most important work is Die Gestalt der deutschen Stadt (The form of the German town). In this study on the development of the city, he asserts city changes according to the spiritual order of the era. Gruber's approach to the study of the city aims to show the relationship between the shapes of cities and their political, religious and economic organization. He describes the shape of the city as the construction of a hierarchical space based on the opposition between sacred and profane, public and private. His attention mainly focuses on the Middle Ages, recognized as the heyday of German cities. His analysis is not only an urban one: it also involves the building types that create the city, from basic buildings to specialized architecture in their local variations.