Small Cities: Urban Experience Beyond the Metropolis

by Bell; David

• ISBN13: 9780415366571
• ISBN10: 0415366577
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-08-24
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Until now, much research in the field of urban planning and change has focused on the economic, political, social, cultural and spatial transformations of global cities and larger metropolitan areas - this topical new volume seeks to redress this balance, focusing on urban change within small cities around the world. Drawing together research from a strong international team of contributors this book is structured in four distinct parts. The first part discusses how political and economic decision making comes together in the fabric of particular cities. Part two elaborates on this focus and looks in more detail at how such strategies of urban economic development seek to secure competitive advantage for cities. Part three addresses how cultural infrastructure and planning are almost ubiquitously being utilized in the regeneration of small cities. The fourth and final part addresses the mix of identities, lifestyles and ways in which different groups interact in small cities. With case studiesfrom around the world, focusing principally on urban change rather than pure ethnographic description, there is a distinct focus on informed empirical research, which raises important conceptual issues surrounding urban change.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	vii
List of contributors	ix
Acknowledgements	xiv
1 Conceptualizing small cities	1	(18)
DAVID BELL AND MARK JAYNE
PART 1 The political economy of small cities	19	(56)
2 On the dynamics of ambivalent urbanization and urban productivity in Port Louis, Mauritius	21	(12)
ABDOUMALIQ SIMONE
3 Temp Town: temporality as a place promotion niche in the world's furniture capital	33	(12)
JOHN JOE SCHLICHTMAN
4 Jumping scale: from small town politics to a 'regional presence'? Re-doing economic governance in Canada's technology triangle	45	(14)
JOSEPH LEIBOVITZ
5 Tourism in a reluctantly small city-island-nation: insights from Singapore	59	(18)
T.C. CHANG
PART 2 The urban hierarchy and competitive advantage	75	(58)
6 The festival phenomenon: festivals, events and the promotion of small urban areas	77	(14)
ANDREW BRADLEY AND TIM HALL
7 Gentrifying down the urban hierarchy: 'the cascade effect' in Portland, Maine	91	(14)
LORETTA LEES
8 The re-construction of a small Scottish city: re-discovering Dundee	105	(16)
GREG LLOYD, JOHN MCCARTHY AND DEBORAH PEEL
9 Urban myth: the symbolic sizing of Weimar, Germany	121	(12)
FRANK ECKARDT
PART 3 The cultural economy of small cities	133	(70)
10 Garden Cities and city gardens	135	(16)
MALCOLM MILES
11 Small cities for a small country: sustaining the cultural renaissance?	151	(18)
GRAEME EVANS AND JO FOORD
12 Creative small cities: cityscapes, power and the, arts	169	(16)
GORDON WAITT
13 Rethinking small places - urban and cultural creativity: examples from Sweden, the USA and Bosnia-Herzegovina	185	(20)
TOM FLEMING, LIA GHILARDI AND NANCY K. NAPIER
PART 4 Identity, lifestyle and forms of sociability	203	(46)
14 Caudan: domesticating the global waterfront	205	(12)
TIM EDENSOR
15 De-centring metropolitan youth identities: boundaries, difference and sense of place	217	(16)
GORDON WAITT, TIM HEWITT AND ELLEN KRALY
16 Small city – big ideas: culture-led regeneration and the consumption of place	233	(12)
STEVEN MILES
17 Afterword - sizing up small cities	245	(4)
DAVID BELL AND MARK JAYNE
References	249	(26)
Index	275