Circulation and Urbanization

Adams, Ross Exo

doi:10.4135/9781529714425

Cited by 32 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…According to Ross Exo Adams (2019), the urban character of any locality can be defined in terms of circulatory flows that are at once territorializing and spatially disruptive. What connects the different physical localities is a distributed form of speculative experimentation, where city-making is imagined as a set of modular practices that may have been developed initially in specific sites but that gain impetus by their circulatory capacity (Brenner 2013).…”

Section: The Circulation Of Urban Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modelling the city: bedroom drawer blueprints as urban planning in Maputo, Mozambique

Nielsen

2023

Africa

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

It has become a well-rehearsed truism that the growth of sub-Saharan African cities is the result of an amassing of persons, things and knowledge that takes place in the absence of centrally planned development initiatives and without any tightly orchestrated coordination of social life. Under such conditions, the argument goes, urbanites make do with whatever resources are available while increasingly chaotic cities expand beyond their social and material capacities. The question is, however, whether weak – and even absent – systems of urban management can be taken to signify a lack of coordination and planning of urban development. Might it not be, for instance, that cities organize and model themselves through means other than those afforded by formal urban planning schemes? Based on ethnographic data from Maputo, Mozambique, this article explores the shifting material forms of what are locally described as ‘bedroom drawer blueprints’ as an acutely potent type of urban modelling. Current and prospective house builders in Maputo exchange and share blueprints and physical and virtual models of houses that they plan to eventually build. Considered by residents as valuable social and material assets, such blueprints and models also offer an opportunity for experimenting with new forms of aesthetic organization of the city. Comparing the ongoing transactions and sharing of bedroom drawer blueprints with the increasing global circulation of middle-class architectural urban models, in this article I argue that it is the capacity of the former to move between different material forms and modalities that gives them their particular aesthetic potency and drive.

show abstract

Section: The Circulation Of Urban Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modelling the city: bedroom drawer blueprints as urban planning in Maputo, Mozambique

Nielsen

2023

Africa

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Notably in this vein, ISF draws on Gustafson’s ongoing work with EcoTech Visions Foundation, a Miami-based ‘disruption’, ‘ecopreneurship’, non-profit focused on democratic, free dissemination of green manufacturing and tech skills to marginalised communities via maker and incubator spaces (EcoTech Visions Foundation [ETVF], 2018). Considering that urbanisation’s interlinking of commodity and infrastructural flows into a single, continuous web – the ‘metropolis’ (Gordillo, 2019) – is also a technology of proletarianisation (Brenner, 2014) and control (Adams, 2019), could an islandised territory delinked from global networks also be democratic or emancipatory, a utopian attempt to escape manufactured vulnerability and build community autonomy via local production, sustainable energy and water-based lifeways?…”

Section: Anthropocene Islandisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Critical urban theory in the Anthropocene

Wakefield

2021

Urban Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Critical urban thinkers often imagine urbanisation and the Anthropocene as inevitably being companion processes. But is planetary urbanisation the necessary telos and spatial limit of life in the Anthropocene? Is urban resilience the final form of urban responses to climate change? Will (or should) the urban (as either spatial form or process) survive the upending impacts of climate change or adaptation? Or, if the Anthropocene is a time of deep environmental and epistemological upheaval without historical precedent, might even more recently created spatial concepts of the planetary urban condition themselves soon be out of date? This article raises these questions for urban scholars via critical engagement with a proposal to retire Miami – considered climate change ‘ground zero’ in the US and doomed by rising seas – and repurpose it as fill for ‘The Islands of South Florida’: a self-sufficient territory of artificial high-rises delinked from global infrastructural networks. This vision of an ‘urbicidal Anthropocene’, the article argues, suggests that the injunction subtending planetary urbanisation work – to relentlessly question inherited spatial frameworks – has not been taken far enough. Still needed is Anthropocene critical urban theory, to consider urban forms and processes emerging via climate change and adaptation, but also how such mutations may point beyond the theoretical and spatial bounds of the contemporary urban condition itself.

show abstract

“…Under these conditions, there is an environment that is auspicious to creativity and more sensitive to unfamiliar situations. Regardless of whether the factors' magnitude can explain the circulation and appropriation of ideas, it is worth noting what they are in order to develop an understanding of our ideas, selves, and coincidences 1 Adams (2019) is an important reference for further discussion this point. His book not only depicts the importance of the 19th-century European urbanistic ideas as a global reference but also proves the history of urban processes and the history of the circulation of ideas to be indistinguishable.…”

Section: Circulation Of Ideasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Latin American Cities: From Subservient Reproductions to Intercontinental Dialogues

2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper investigates the circulation of ideas regarding the city among selected countries in Latin America. It discusses convergences between academic and scientific institutions and investigative weakness in partnerships between Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. It identifies two historical moments: one of vertical dialogues between Latin America and central countries in the elaboration of urban plans (20th century) and another of contemporary academic exchange signalling a horizontal dialogue that is fragile and sporadic but distinct from those observed in the past. Empirical reference is obtained from the analysis of scientific events and papers published by distinguished post-graduate programs concerning urban topics in selected countries, during the time frame of 2000–2015. The methodological approach is based on a bibliographic review and content analysis. Results indicate that the old “one-way” of transfer of urban planning ideas from central countries to Latin America is changing; slowly, the continent has been growing more independent in terms of knowledge creation and circulation.

show abstract

Circulation and Urbanization

Cited by 32 publications

References 0 publications

Modelling the city: bedroom drawer blueprints as urban planning in Maputo, Mozambique

Modelling the city: bedroom drawer blueprints as urban planning in Maputo, Mozambique

Critical urban theory in the Anthropocene

Latin American Cities: From Subservient Reproductions to Intercontinental Dialogues

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About