Urban History Books

New and Published Books

1. Dubai: Behind an Urban Spectacle

   By Yasser Elsheshtawy

   Series: Planning, History and Environment Series

   Yasser Elsheshtawy explores Dubai’s history from its beginnings as a small fishing village to its place on the world stage today, using historical narratives, travel descriptions, novels and fictional accounts by local writers to bring colour to his history of the city’s urban development. With...

   Published March 28th 2013 by Routledge
2. Of Planting and Planning

   The making of British colonial cities, 2nd Edition

   By Robert Home

   Series: Planning, History and Environment Series

   ‘At the centre of the world-economy, one always finds an exceptional state, strong, aggressive and privileged, dynamic, simultaneously feared and admired.’ - Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries This, surely, is an apt description of the British Empire at its...

   Published January 17th 2013 by Routledge
3. Latin American Modern Architectures

   Ambiguous Territories

   Edited by Patricio del Real, Helen Gyger

   Latin American Modern Architectures: Ambiguous Territories has thirteen new essays from a range of distinguished architectural historians to help you understand the region’s rich and varied architecture. It will also introduce you to major projects that have not been written about in English. A...

   Published August 23rd 2012 by Routledge
4. Living in the City

   Urban Institutions in the Low Countries, 1200–2010

   Edited by L.A.C.J. (Leo) Lucassen, W.H. (Wim) Willems

   Series: Routledge Studies in Cultural History

   The city is a place to find shelter, a market place, and an elevator for social mobility and success. But the city is also a place that frightens people and that can marginalize newcomers. Living in the City tries to understand what pulls people to the city since the High Middle Ages, focusing on...

   Published December 21st 2011 by Routledge
5. Staging the New Berlin

   Place Marketing and the Politics of Urban Reinvention Post-1989

   By Claire Colomb

   Series: Planning, History and Environment Series

   This book explores the politics of place marketing and the process of ‘urban reinvention’ in Berlin between 1989 and 2011. In the context of the dramatic socio-economic restructuring processes, changes in urban governance and physical transformation of the city following the Fall of the Wall, the ‘...

   Published November 20th 2011 by Routledge
6. Rights of Passage

   Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow

   By Nicholas Blomley

   Series: Social Justice

   Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow documents a powerful and under-researched form of urban governance that focuses on pedestrian flow. This logic, which Nicholas Blomley terms 'pedestrianism', values public space not in terms of its aesthetic merits, or its success in...

   Published October 5th 2011 by Routledge
7. City and Soul in Divided Societies

   By Scott Bollens

   Series: Planning, History and Environment Series

   In this unique book Scott A. Bollens combines personal narrative with academic analysis in telling the story of inflammatory nationalistic and ethnic conflict in nine cities – Jerusalem, Beirut, Belfast, Johannesburg, Nicosia, Sarajevo, Mostar, Bilbao, and Barcelona. Reporting on seventeen...

   Published September 6th 2011 by Routledge
8. Tower and Slab

   Histories of Global Mass Housing

   By Florian Urban

   Tower and Slab looks at the contradictory history of the modernist mass housing block - home to millions of city dwellers around the world. Few urban forms have roused as much controversy. While in the United States decades-long criticism caused the demolition of most mass housing projects for the...

   Published August 31st 2011 by Routledge
9. renovatio urbis

   Architecture, Urbanism and Ceremony in the Rome of Julius II

   By Nicholas Temple

   Series: The Classical Tradition in Architecture

   Examining the urban and architectural developments in Rome during the Pontificate of Julius II (1503–13) this book focuses on the political, religious and artistic motives behind the changes. Each chapter focuses on a particular project, from the Palazzo dei Tribunali to the Stanza della...

   Published April 20th 2011 by Routledge
10. Planning the Megacity

    Jakarta in the Twentieth Century

    By Christopher Silver

    Series: Planning, History and Environment Series

    Planning the Megacity examines the dramatic transformation of Jakarta over the past century. In 1900, the colonial capital of the Netherland Indies, then known as Batavia, was a compact city of approximately 150,000 inhabitants. During the next hundred years, but especially after 1950, it was...

    Published April 5th 2011 by Routledge