Metropolitics

Planning Metropolitan Australia

Margot Abord de Chatillon — 2019-04-09T05:00:00Z

In Planning Metropolitan Australia, Stephen Hamnett and Robert Freestone shed welcome light on the way Australia's rapidly growing metropolitan areas have developed over the last two decades, and the planning issues that have accompanied this growth. Margot Abord de Chatillon reviews this important work, which provides an invaluable, if sometimes disjointed, overview of the state of Australian cities.
A publication central to understanding the evolution of metropolitan Australia
Planning

- Reviews / Australia, urban planning, metropolitan areas, development, urban sprawl

Urban Desires and Lust for Land

Éric Denis (†) & translated by Oliver Waine — 2018-04-20T05:00:00Z

In the Global South, vast swathes of periurban and agricultural land are being sold off and converted into financial windfalls. Éric Denis shows that the working classes also play a role in this commodification of land, giving rise to new means of producing the city. Moreover, this lust for land reveals these populations' desire to see the city expand and reach their doorstep.
---- Series: Land Rights in the Urban Global South. Regularization and Land-Ownership Policies in Low-Income

- From the Field / urban planning, urbanization, urban sprawl, periurban, land, agriculture, farming, Global South, working classes, India, land rights, land titles, land titling, production of the city, land use, commodification

The Triumph of Density and the Agony of Sprawl

Richard E. Ocejo — 2011-11-23T06:00:00Z

The city is more and more often hailed as the paradigmatic form of a new sustainable development, both economic and environmental. Glaeser's book is another significant contribution to this popular awakening. Without contesting the point, Richard Ocejo shows how the arguments put forward in the book may reflect only a partial view of the city, one that misses out on its most important asset: people's actual practices and experiences.
Racial inequality, the regulation of public space, crime

- Reviews / city, sustainable development, urban sprawl, urban development, density

The (mis)measurement of periurbanization

Anne Lambert & translated by Eric Rosencrantz — 2011-05-11T05:10:00Z

(Peri)urban sprawl is unanimously decried as a cause for economic, environmental and social concern. And yet defining the phenomenon itself is a complicated undertaking that significantly affects the measurement thereof.
The “periurban” realm, whose rapid expansion since the 1960s has caused widespread concern, is difficult to grasp owing to its ambiguous nature, somewhere between urban and rural. Incidentally, the term “periurbanization” has only latterly gained currency in the French

- Debates / urban sprawl, statistics, periurban, rural

Suburbanization as a Project

Martin Vanier & translated by Christina Mitrakos — 2011-04-06T06:42:00Z

Experts and policies fail to recognize the contradictions that urban sprawl creates and rarely go beyond directives. Perhaps the right questions aren't being asked. Rather than calling to limit the growth of these territories, thought of as being “without qualities,” Martin Vanier pleads for a suburban project.
For the past forty years, society has become more and more suburbanized. For the past forty years, scientific observers have described and explained the problem of suburbanization.

- Debates / urbanization, urban sprawl, suburbanization, periurban, suburbs