It is a widely held belief that cities must change, or they will wither and die. One of the key problems of urbanization is how to cope with these changes while retaining the structures constructed and maintained by previous generations. Conservation and the City is a study of conservation and change throughout the built environment - city centres, suburbs and even tiny villages - and how the activites of conservation interact with the planning system. Using detailed case studies from Britain and the Westernized world, the author examines some of the key social, economic and psychological ideas which support conservation, as well as studying the urban landscape and the agents of change. Conservation and the City seeks to understand urban conservation, and in doing so presents possible solutions for managing change in the built environment of the future.
The book explores how unused and under-used urban spaces – from grass verges, roundabouts, green spaces – have been made more visually interesting and more productive, by informal (and usually illegal) groups known as “guerrilla gardeners”. The book focuses on groups in the English Midlands but the work is set in a broad international context and reveals how and why they undertake this illegal activity. Guerrilla gardening is usually viewed uncritically and promoted as a worthwhile activity: this study provides a more balanced evaluation and focuses on its contribution in terms of local food production.
Triggered in part by contemporary experiences in the Balkans, the Middle East and elsewhere, there has been a rise in interest in the blitz and the subsequent reconstruction of cities, especially as many of the buildings and areas rebuilt after the Second World War are now facing demolition and reconstruction in their turn. Drawing together leading scholars and new researchers from across the fields of planning, history, architecture and geography, this volume presents an historical and cultural commentary on the immediate and longer-term impacts of wartime destruction. The book's contents in 14 chapters cover the spread of themes from experiencing the war to reconstruction and its experiences; and although many chapters draw upon the UK experience, there is deliberate inclusion of some material from mainland Europe and Japan to emphasise that the experiences, processes and products are not London-specific. A comparative book tracing destruction to reconstruction is a relative rarity, and yet of the utmost importance in possessing wider relevance to post-disaster reconstructions. The Blitz and Its Legacy is a fascinating volume which includes war experiences of destruction, architecture, urban design, the political process of planning and reconstruction, and also popular perceptions of rebuilding. Its findings provide very timely lessons which highlight the value of learning from historical precedent.
Set within a wider British and international context of post-war reconstruction, The Everyday Experiences of Reconstruction and Regeneration focuses on such debates and experiences in Birmingham and Coventry as they recovered from Second World War bombings and post-war industrial collapse. Including numerous images, Adams and Larkham explore the initial development of the post-Second World War reconstruction projects, which so substantially changed the face of the cities and provided radical new identities. Exploring these cities throughout the post-war period brings into sharp focus the duality of contemporary approaches to regeneration, which often criticise mid-twentieth century ’poorly-conceived’ planning and architectural projects for producing inhuman and unsympathetic schemes, while proposing exactly the type of large-scale regeneration that may potentially create similar issues in the future. This book would be beneficial for academics and students of planning and urban design, particularly those with an interest in post-catastrophe or large-scale reconstruction projects within cities.
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Conservation and the Changing Urban Landscape deals with several aspects of changing urban form in recognised historical areas. A discussion of the changing social, legal and administrative trends of the past century that have culminated in the present-day high profile of the conservation movement, and which have shaped the nature of that movement, precedes a detailed examination of changes in both selected historical town centres and mature residential areas. The pressure for, and nature of, change in these historical areas is discussed, and the reaction of the planning system to change is examined.
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