How do we sense a city? Is it a matter of directing our gaze from building to street to traffic to neon signs and back to the building again, accumulating impressions of line, scale, enclosure, mass, and spectacle, just as we do when viewing a painting of a landscape? No, the immediacy of our body’s movement through the city requires a different kind of gaze, one that filters and edits our impressions according to preestablished systems of knowledge. For those cities where we consider ourselves at home, the knowledge is different from what it is for cities where we are...

On August 7, 2008, one day before the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, Qianmen Avenue reopened to the public and tourists after several months of extensive renovation. Qianmen (meaning “front gate” in Chinese) is adjacent to Tiananmen Square, the geographic and symbolic center of Beijing, and it was once the major marketplace in the late Qing period. The area declined after the demise of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and was replaced by newer marketplaces that emerged in other parts of the city. By the early 2000s, it had become a dilapidated inner-city neighborhood crowded with lower-income households, migrants,...

The large port zone close to central Barcelona has witnessed, in a brief period of time, an important series of urban reforms. This area has been transformed into a new civic space without losing its older condition of zona franca (a distinct port authority). The space also now houses new commercial buildings, offices, and cultural centers in the form of museums, an aquarium, and a 3-D IMAX cinema. Thus, it has been labeled by the city as a new area of centrality, in a sense, a new “downtown” near but not connected to either the ritual and political center of...

Along with China, the contemporary Arabian Gulf is undergoing an urbanization of massive proportions. Possessing 40 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves and flush with profits from recent spikes in global oil prices, the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council were devoting trillions of dollars to construction projects before the 2008 economic crisis (Brown 2008).¹ Architects view the Gulf, whose member states are run by tiny elites disposing of immense wealth and nearly nonexistent labor and environmental regulation, as a liberating place in which to work. (There are parallels here to architects’ views of China). No Gulf country...

So Nashville developer Tony Giarratana told the New York Times in 2006 (Chamberlain 2006), referring to the proposed Signature Tower, a residential high-rise projected to radically transform Nashville’s skyline. Given that Giarratana had opted to eschew public subsidy on the project and was still seeking the necessary private financing to realize his grandiose ambitions, the claim that the building was not “about making money” is a stunning and perhaps ill-considered admission. Nevertheless, “build it and they will come” had become a mantra for globally financed, impossibly extravagant architectural projects colonizing unlikely locales, with spectacular if short-lived models of success in...

On October 1, 2009, officials of the Lebanese Company for the Development and Reconstruction of the Beirut Central District (BCD), or Solidere, as it is popularly known, offered journalists a guided tour of the company’s flagship development: the new Beirut Souks.¹ Slated to open to the public the following day, the new Souks embody what the company and its supporters argue is the primary virtue of private sector-led urban redevelopment: the ability to reconcile the imperatives of market-driven globalization with respect for and preservation of historically generated urban form and memory.

The product of an international design competition, developed with...

Urban sites have long served as concentrated nodes where cultural life, communications, capital, and communities all come together to attain a certain density and power, exercising influence far beyond city limits. The image of downtown certainly testifies to the iconic reach and centralizing force that cities possess, attracting people to the core even as images of downtown radiate outward, broadcasting its allure into a far-flung sphere. Over a century ago, Georg Simmel (1950 [1903]: 419) argued, “It is in the decisive nature of the metropolis that its inner life overflows by waves into a far-flung national or international arena,” and...

In the summer of 1996, demolition crews arrived in the Plaza Vieja—a 500-year-old plaza in Havana’s historic center, Habana Vieja—equipped with explosive charges. Carrying out orders issued by the city historian, they planned to eliminate every trace of a republican-era park and an underground parking structure, which was built to accommodate the “bulky American autos” that blocked the sidewalks of Habana Vieja’s narrow streets and entrances to residential courtyards (Scarpaci 2000: 733). In addition to the parking structure, which raised the original height of the square a meter off the ground, the “modernist” Havana Park (constructed in 1952)...

The day began and ended with the LAPD. A morning interview with the captain of the Central City Division of the Los Angeles Police Department extended into the afternoon as I was introduced to one and then another police officer, the last the head of the beat patrol for the Skid Row area, on a mission to defend policing tactics against what he described as attacks by “activists.” An interview moved into a walk around Skid Row during which, he assured me, I could ask people anything I wanted. On the street, however, he would approach homeless people he knew...

In late 2004, the municipal government of Mumbai,¹ carrying out orders from the state’s chief minister, undertook a massive demolition campaign to clear the city’s unregulated slums and squatter settlements. During the four-month campaign, government bulldozers dismantled hutments built along roads and railways and on “open” plots of land throughout the city. In the process, they demolished an estimated 90,000 homes and displaced upward of 400,000 people (Mahadevia and Narayanan 2008b; Weinstein and Ren 2009). Responding to criticism, state officials defended the campaign as necessary to improve the city’s quality of life and bolster its competitive position. “The proliferation of...

On Monday, July 6, 2005, the New York Public Authority Control Board (PACB) took a fateful vote. This obscure governmental body, its members appointed by the governor and the leaders of the two houses of the state legislature, held the power to approve—or deny—the public borrowing necessary to fund the New York Sports and Convention Center, or as it was better known in the city, the west side stadium. The stadium, to be built over rail yards owned by a public authority, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), would occupy three large blocks on Manhattan’s Hudson River waterfront. It...

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth century, in Barcelona’s barrio chino/barri xino, decaying tenements and crowded streets housed thousands of immigrant workers slaving in aging factories or seeking day-to-day opportunities at the nearby port. Only the broad, tree-lined Rambles, a promenade beloved of flâneurs, separated the middling classes and elites of the historic city center from this “Chinatown” (this boulevard, in fact, had replaced an earlier urban wall). After dark, however, exotic nocturnal amusements including prostitution, drugs, and gambling lured adventurous bourgeois men, bohemian artists, journalists, and even transnational revolutionaries into the barrio chino. In the twenty-first century, nonetheless,...