Frictions in the Urban Fabric

Abstract

Chapter 1 begins with the space and at the level of the city, examining how industrial and modernist developments have served to compile an urban tapestry that is fraught and contested. It then discusses two contradictory movements in contemporary urban development: new urbanist trends that emphasise human-scale development, creativity, participation, sustainability and cosmopolitanism, and the continuation of modernist impulses in sites of rapid urban growth that privilege monumental architecture, surveillance instruments and opaque planning processes.