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8 books match the query 'Urbanism'

cover of Ancient Mesoamerican Population History: Urbanism, Social Complexity, and Change

Ancient Mesoamerican Population History

Urbanism, Social Complexity, and Change

Adrian S. Z. Chase, Arlen F. Chase, and Diane Z. Chase

University of Arizona Press, 2024

Establishing ancient population numbers and determining how they were distributed across a landscape over time constitute two of the most pressing problems in archaeology. Accurate population data is crucial for modeling, interpreting, and understanding the past. Now, advances in both archaeology and technology have changed the way that such approximations can be achieved.

Including research from both highland central Mexico and the tropical lowlands of the Maya and Olmec areas, this book reexamines the demography in ancient Mesoamerica. Contributors present methods for determining population estimates, field methods for settlement pattern studies to obtain demographic data, and new technologies such as LiDAR (light detecting and ranging) that have expanded views of the ground in forested areas. Contributions to this book provide a view of ancient landscape use and modification that was not possible in the twentieth century. This important new work provides new understandings of Mesoamerican urbanism, development, and changes over time.

Contributors

Traci Ardren

M. Charlotte Arnauld

Bárbara Arroyo

Luke Auld-Thomas

Marcello A. Canuto

Adrian S. Z. Chase

Arlen F. Chase

Diane Z. Chase

Elyse D. Z. Chase

Javier Estrada

Gary M. Feinman

L. J. Gorenflo

Julien Hiquet

Scott R. Hutson

Gerardo Jiménez Delgado

Eva Lemonnier

Rodrigo Liendo Stuardo

José Lobo

Javier López Mejía

Michael L. Loughlin

Deborah L. Nichols

Christopher A. Pool

Ian G. Robertson

Jeremy A. Sabloff

Travis W. Stanton

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cover of Concrete Colonialism: Architecture, Urbanism, and the US Imperial Project in the Philippines

Concrete Colonialism

Architecture, Urbanism, and the US Imperial Project in the Philippines

Diana Jean S. Martinez

Duke University Press, 2025

During US colonial rule in the Philippines, reinforced concrete was used to the near exclusion of all other building materials. In Concrete Colonialism, Diana Jean S. Martinez examines the motivations for and lasting effects of this forgotten colonial policy. Arguing that the pervasive use of reinforced concrete technologies revolutionized techniques of imperial conquest, Martinez shows how concrete reshaped colonialism as a project that sought durable change through the reformation of environments, colonial society, and racialized biologies. Martinez locates the origins of this material revolution in the development of Chicago, highlighting how building this urban center atop exceptionally challenging geology made it possible to transform diverse global ecologies. She details how the material’s stability, plasticity, strength, and other qualities served the shifting imperatives of the US colonial regime, playing a central role in defending territory, controlling disease, and constructing monuments to nation and empire. By describing a world irreversibly remade, Martinez urges readers to consider how colonialism persists—in concrete forms—despite claims of its conclusion.
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cover of Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age

Global Cities

Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age

Petro, Patrice

Rutgers University Press, 2003

In Global Cities, scholars from an impressive array of disciplines critique the growing body of literature on the process broadly known as "globalization." This interdisciplinary focus enables the authors to explore the complex geographies of modern cities, and offer possible strategies for reclaiming a sense of place and community in these globalized urban settings. While examining major cities including New York, Tokyo, Berlin, Paris, and Hong Kong, contributors insist that the study of urban experiences must remain as attentive to the material effects as to the psychic and social consequences of globalization. Accordingly, essays explore the implications of global culture for architecture, cinema, and communication--but do so in a way that highlights the importance of the spaces between such metropolitan centers. These locations, the authors argue, serve as increasingly important "frontier zones," where a diverse set of actors converge and contend for power and presence. Such a perspective ultimately adds nuance and meaning to our understanding of the heterogeneous urban landscapes of these global cities. Linda Krause is an associate professor in the Department of Architecture at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Patrice Petro is professor of film studies and director of the Center for International Education at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. A volume in the New Directions in International Studies series, edited by Patrice Petro
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cover of Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the Shadow of Data

Grounding the Cloud

Urbanism in the Shadow of Data

Ali Fard

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

A detailed foray into the material and spatial realities of cloud computing

Since the 1990s, technologists have promoted a vision of the “cloud” as a shapeless and intangible entity. Grounding the Cloud peers through this hazy façade to reveal the earthly material foundations of global computing and data extraction. Tracing the historical and technological development of the cloud computing paradigm, Ali Fard exposes an ever-evolving project in which ideologies, economic models, and marketing images collude to shape our shared urban environments.

Demonstrating how technology’s spatial footprint now stretches to nearly every corner of the globe, Grounding the Cloud analyzes the often-hidden infrastructures that facilitate platform capitalism—from the mines extracting rare earth minerals in remote regions to the vast global network of fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the oceans to the nondescript data centers that sit on the peripheries of major urban areas. Meanwhile, with compelling examples of smart-city initiatives and corporate campuses, Fard shows how the future of urbanism is deeply intertwined with the growing economies of data extraction.

Breaking down the myth of a clean and efficient tech urbanism, this book makes visible the complex material geographies and geopolitics that undergird today’s most powerful and omnipresent corporations. A timely critique of the growing agency of tech platforms in determining the future of urban space, Grounding the Cloud offers an essential framework for understanding the shifting relationship between technology and urbanization.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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cover of The City as Campus: Urbanism and Higher Education in Chicago

The City as Campus

Urbanism and Higher Education in Chicago

Sharon Haar

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

We are witnessing an explosion of universities and campuses nationwide, and urban schools play an important role in shaping the cities outside their walls. In The City as Campus, Sharon Haar uses Chicago as a case study to examine how universities interact with their urban contexts, demonstrating how higher education became integrated with ideas of urban growth as schools evolved alongside the city.

The City as Campus shows the strain of this integration, detailing historical accounts of battles over space as campus designers faced the challenge of weaving the social, spatial, and architectural conditions of the urban milieu into new forms to meet the changing needs of academia. Through a close analysis of the history of higher education in Chicago, The City as Campus explores how the university's missions of service, teaching, and research have metamorphosed over time, particularly in response to the unique opportunities-and restraints-the city provides. Illustrating how Chicago serves as a site of pedagogical transformation and a location for the larger purpose of the academic community, The City as Campus presents a social and design history of the urban campus as an architectural idea and form.
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cover of Urbanism and Empire in Roman Sicily

Urbanism and Empire in Roman Sicily

By Laura Pfuntner

University of Texas Press, 2019

Sicily has been the fulcrum of the Mediterranean throughout history. The island’s central geographical position and its status as ancient Rome’s first overseas province make it key to understanding the development of the Roman Empire. Yet Sicily’s crucial role in the empire has been largely overlooked by scholars of classical antiquity, apart from a small number of specialists in its archaeology and material culture.

Urbanism and Empire in Roman Sicily offers the first comprehensive English-language overview of the history and archaeology of Roman Sicily since R. J. A. Wilson’s Sicily under the Roman Empire (1990). Laura Pfuntner traces the development of cities and settlement networks in Sicily in order to understand the island’s political, economic, social, and cultural role in Rome’s evolving Mediterranean hegemony. She identifies and examines three main processes traceable in the archaeological record of settlement in Roman Sicily: urban disintegration, urban adaptation, and the development of alternatives to urban settlement. By expanding the scope of research on Roman Sicily beyond the bounds of the island itself, through comparative analysis of the settlement landscapes of Greece and southern Italy, and by utilizing exciting evidence from recent excavations and surveys, Pfuntner establishes a new empirical foundation for research on Roman Sicily and demonstrates the necessity of including Sicily in broader historical and archaeological studies of the Roman Empire.

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cover of Urbanism in the Preindustrial World: Cross-Cultural Approaches

Urbanism in the Preindustrial World

Cross-Cultural Approaches

Edited by Glenn R. Storey

University of Alabama Press, 2006

A baseline study of the growth of preindustrial cities worldwide.

This work employs a subset of preindustrial cities on many continents to answer questions archaeologists grapple with concerning the populating and growth of cities before industrialization. It further explores how scholars differently conceive and execute their research on the population of cities. The subject cities are in Greece, Mesoamerica, the Andes, Italy, Egypt, Africa, United States, Denmark, and China. This broad sample provides a useful framework for answers to such questions as “Why did people agglomerate into cities?” and “What population size and what age of endurance constitute a city?”

The study covers more than population magnitude and population makeup, the two major frameworks of urban demography. The contributors combine their archaeological and historical expertise to reveal commonalities, as well as theoretical extrapolations and methodological approaches, at work here and outside the sample.

Urbanism in the Preindustrial World is a unique study revealing the variety of factors involved in the coalescing and dispersal of populations in preindustrial times.

 
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cover of Álamos, Sonora: Architecture and Urbanism in the Dry Tropics

Álamos, Sonora

Architecture and Urbanism in the Dry Tropics

John Messina

University of Arizona Press, 2008

The town of Álamos in the state of Sonora, Mexico, a one-day drive from the Arizona border, is one of the most intact colonial-era cities in northern Mexico. Álamos has been declared a National Historic Monument by the Mexican government and is one of only fourteen towns to be designated as Pueblos Mágicos. Founded by Spaniards who discovered silver deposits nearby, Álamos was a prosperous city from its inception. It is situated in a “dry tropical” valley where both desert flora and tropical plants intermingle. The propitious combination of wealth, climate, and New World Hispanic town planning principles led to the development of a remarkable architecture and city plan.

Until now, there has never been a book about the architecture and urban form of Álamos. In this much-needed work, John Messina, who teaches architecture and is a practicing architect, provides a well-informed history and interpretive description of the town. He also examines building materials and construction techniques, as well as issues of building preservation and restoration. At the same time, the author considers what other cities might learn from Álamos. Particularly for cities in the American Southwest that are struggling to reduce sprawl and increase density without compromising their quality of life, Álamos offers a range of possible solutions.

Thoroughly illustrated and designed for lay readers and professionals alike, this engaging book captures the essence and the uniqueness of Álamos while asking what lessons can be drawn by architects and planners who are attempting to reshape our own cities and towns into more livable, viable, and people-friendly environments.
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