Imaging the City: Continuing Struggles and New Directions

by Warner,Jr.

• ISBN13: 9780882851709
• ISBN10: 0882851705
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2001-12-31
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Planners face a controversial task because their professional role requires them to be spokespersons for the public interest. In a welter of conflicting pictures and voices, how might the public interest be discovered? Once identified, how might it be expressed so that competing publics attend to it? There are no easy answers, but the experience of planners today suggests ways of working and innovations of promise. The focus on planning practice prompted the editors to analyze images that are now at work in our cities. For Vale and Warner, all city design and constructions offer material that people should include in images of their environment. The built and building city are part of the experience of all city dwellers; it is theirs to incorporate, interpret, or ignore. Essays included in this text trace the interplay between physical objects of planners and architects and the social experience and outlooks of image makers and their audiences. Imaging the City explores urban image making from civic boosterism of medieval cities to iconic imagery of Times Square. Vale and Warner bring together urban historians, geographers, city planners, architects, and cultural commentators to analyze the creation of urban imagery from the signature skyscrapers of Kuala Lumpur to the re-creation of the South Bronx and the use of city images in film, literature, television, and on the Internet. Urban dwellers, urban planners, architects, municipal officials, sociologists, urban historians-all will perceive their worlds with a heightened sense of awareness after reading this book.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction Cities, Media, and Imaging	xiii
Sam Bass Warner Jr.
Lawrence J. Vale
Part I STRUGGLES OVER CITY IMAGES
Image Construction in Premodern Cities	3	(30)
Julian Beinart
Place Marketing: Using Media to Promote Cities	33	(24)
Briavel Holcomb
From Flames to Flowers: The Role of Planning in Re-Imaging the South Bronx	57	(38)
Eugenie Ladner Birch
Re-Imaging the Rust Belt: Can Cleveland Sustain the Renaissance?	95	(24)
Patricia Burgess
Ruth Durack
Edward W. Hill
Skyscraper Competition in Asia: New City Images and New City Form	119	(26)
Larry R. Ford
The Images of Commonplace Living in Modern City-Regions	145	(34)
Judith A. Martin
Sam Bass Warner Jr.
Part II RESPONSES TO THE OVERWHELMING CITY
Tales of Manhattan: Mapping the Urban Imagination Through Hollywood Film	179	(34)
Henry Jenkins
Image Renewal: Polemic and Presentation in the Urban Theory of Rem Koolhaas and Leon Krier	213	(24)
Sandy Isenstadt
Anti-Urbanist City Images and New Media Culture	237	(20)
Thomas J. Campanella
Part III NEW IMAGES AND NEW IMAGES MAKERS
Narrative Places and the New Practice of Urban Design	257	(26)
Dennis Frenchman
The City in Cyberspace	283	(18)
Anne Beamish
Urban Images on Children's Television	301	(30)
Lawrence J. Vale
Julia R. Dobrow
Urban Counter-Images: Community Activism Meets Public Art	331	(30)
Deborah Karasov
Ephemera, Temporary Urbanism, and Imaging	361	(36)
J. Mark Schuster
Rating Place-Ratings	397	(22)
John de Monchaux
New Public Realms: Re-Imaging the City-Region	419	(20)
Lawrence J. Vale
Appendix City Imaging: A Bibliographic Essay	439	(16)
Lawrence J. Vale
Notes	455	(34)
Credits	489	(6)
Contributors	495	(4)
Index	499