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"Urban Design Thinking provides a conceptual toolkit for urban design. Bridging the gap between theory and practice, it shows how the design of our cities and urban spaces can be interpreted and informed through contemporary theories of urbanism, architecture and spatial analysis. Relating abstract ideas to real-world examples, and taking assemblage thinking as its critical framework, the book introduces an array of key theoretical principles and demonstrates how theory is central to urban design critique and practice. Thirty short chapters can be read alone or in sequence, each opening a different kind of conceptual window onto how cities work and how they are transformed through design practice. Chapters range from explorations of urban morphology, typology, meaning and place identity to particular issues such as urban design codes, informal settlements, globalization, transit and creative clusters. This book is essential reading for those engaged with the practice of urban design and planning, as well as for anyone interested in the theoretical side of urbanism, architecture, and related disciplines"--

Fluid City traces the transformation of the urban waterfront of Melbourne, the re-vitalization of the Yarra River waterfront, Melbourne Docklands and Port Philip Bay. As the financial and industrial centre of Australia, in the late nineteenth century, Melbourne developed a new world exuberance. Yet the twentieth century saw Melbourne suffering from a declining industrial and economic base. The city in the 1980s was de-industrialising, and the re-facing of the city to the water was a key urban strategy of the 1980s and 90s and a catalyst for economic transformation. Thi

This paper engages with the ontology and epistemology of urban mapping. While GIS and other digital technologies have long transformed the capacities for representation of urban data here we explore the capacity of mapping to produce new ways of seeing, understanding, planning and designing the city. With a primary focus on urban morphology, distinctions and overlaps between mapping, diagramming, planning and designing are articulated within a framework of assemblage thinking. Through cases drawn from urban design research we analyse the mapping of political conflict, transport flows, functional mix and informal settlement. It is argued that urban mapping is a form of spatial knowledge production that is often diagrammatic, embodying a spatial logic that cannot be reduced to words and numbers. Urban mapping constructs interconnections between the ways the city is perceived, conceived and lived; and it can reveal capacities for urban transformation - the city as a space of possibility.

This paper explores the aesthetics and politics of slum tourism — what are the attractions and what are the dangers of aestheticizing poverty? We first present eleven images of slums and informal urbanism in south and southeast Asia and suggest a complex mix of attractions for Western tourists. On the one hand informal urbanism can be picturesque with elements of nostalgia and a quest for authenticity; on the other is the shock of the real, the spectacle of intensive labyrinthine urbanity and an uneasy voyeurism. We suggest the attraction is more the anxious and awe-filled pleasure of the sublime than any formal beauty. The paper then changes scale to connect such imagery to the political economy and geography of the city where the visibility of slums and urban informality is linked to state and market ideologies. Informal settlements generally have negative symbolic and political capital; the developing state paradoxically needs tourists yet seeks to control the urban image for purposes of branding and to signify law and order. The slum is often hidden from the public gaze in a manner that is complicit with the reproduction of poverty. While the voyeuristic gaze of the Western tourist produces an aestheticization of poverty this does not depoliticize so much as it opens up new connections and potential transformations.