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London continues to fascinate a vast audience across the world, and an extensive, diverse literature now exists describing and analyzing this metropolis. The central question - what is London? - has produced many answers but none of them, the author argues, uncovers the complex ways in which knowledge is constructed in the diverse attempts to represent places and people. On the contrary: a gulf has opened up between analysis of contemporary London as a global, postcolonial city, on the one hand, and historical accounts of the imperial capital on the other. The author shows how the gap can be bridged by combining an analysis of the representation over time by various experts of London and certain localities with an investigation of the ways in which residents have represented their communities through struggles over symbolic and material resources.
The story recounted here--that of efforts in recent years to plan for Greater London--is both unique and important. It concerns a world metropolis that, faced with an urgent need to rebuild its war-damaged central areas while still at war, prepared a notable set of special plans. And it describes subsequent vigorous efforts to carry these plans into effect. The London record is singularly impressive, unmatched by metropolitan planning efforts elsewhere. It has implications for metropolitan areas in other countries that are seeking solutions to comparable problems--problems reflecting unanticipated growth, technological and functional change, governmental chaos, and the reformulation of socia...
An exploration of the dramatic transformation of London’s financial district after 1945, viewed at four spatial scales: city, street, facade, interior. In The City in the City, Amy Thomas offers the first in-depth architectural and urban history of London’s financial district, the City of London, from the period of rebuilding after World War II to the explosive climax of financial deregulation in the 1980s and its long aftermath. Thomas examines abstract financial ideas, political ideology, and invisible markets as concrete realities; working on four spatial scales—city, street, facade, and interior—the book explores the grand plans, hidden alleys, neo-Georgian elevations, and sweaty...
By 1900 the British had undertaken various types of urban planning in their colonial territories, but the early twentieth century brought new ideas and the birth of the modern planning movement. In India these new planning ideas inspired several specialized reports after 1900, most of which drew explicitly on British, or occasionally German, ideas. The most complete of these studies was the Richards Report on Calcutta, prepared for the Calcutta Improvement Trust and published in 1914. Its major concerns included the building and widening of roads, slum clearance and improvement, legislation, and suburban planning. As background, it included written and visual documentation of living conditio...
This study reassesses modern architecture and town planning in mid-twentieth-century England, highlighting ideas and debates that were in circulation as modernist ideals gradually took root. The book reveals an architectural culture that was serious, active, and visionary, with impact that extended into the postwar years. Through close studies of specific works and writings, the author acknowledges the importance of the international context of modern architecture as it intersected with the variety of narratives that defined English modernism, such as national identity, the New Empiricism, and the picturesque, taking into account the large community of émigré architects who settled in Engl...
This is an insightful study of spatial planning and housing strategy in London, focusing on the period 2000-2008 and the Mayoralty of Ken Livingstone. Duncan Bowie presents a detailed analysis of the development of Livingstone’s policies and their consequences. Examining the theory and practice of spatial planning at a metropolitan level, Bowie examines the relationships between: planning, the residential development market and affordable housing environmental, economic and equity objectives national, regional and local planning agencies and their policies. It places Livingstone’s Mayoralty within its historical context and looks forward to the different challenges faced by Livingstone’s successors in a radically changed political and economic climate. Clear and engaging, this critical analysis provides a valuable resource for academics and their students as well as planning, housing and development professionals. It is essential reading for anyone interested in politics and social change in a leading ‘world city’ and provides a base for parallel studies of other major metropolitan regions.
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