BOOKS
London: Routledge 2010
This book is about practices and politics of place and identity formation – the slippery ways in which who we are becomes wrapped up in where we are. Drawing on the social theories of Deleuze and Bourdieu, the book analyses the sense of place as socio-spatial assemblage and as embodied habitus. Case studies include nationalist monuments, new urbanist suburbs, urban laneways and courthouses, informal settlements, Bangkok streetscapes and the works of Rem Koolhaas. Diverse questions are explored. What is urban character? How does informal urbanism work? How does architecture liberate or legitimate? How do rhizomatic practices shape the meanings of public space? How do monuments shape national identity? The thread that ties these together is place identities in states of becoming: closed becomes open, interior becomes landscape, character becomes caricature, illegal becomes legal, public becomes private – and vice versa in each case. Becoming Places is a book about the unfinishedness of place and identity.
London: Bloomsbury 2016
This book explores urban design from an assemblage perspective. Thirty short chapters can be read individually or in sequence, each examining a single theme and each opening a conceptual lens for understanding the city. Subjects range in scale from graffiti to globalisation, and investigate everyday ideas of place, image, economy, power, networks, informality and complexity. Taking the concept of the ‘assemblage’ as its primary critical framework, the book introduces and applies the ideas of a diverse range of theorists from Jacobs and Gehl to Benjamin, Lefebvre, Deleuze and Guattari. With a focus on grounding complex ideas in a discussion of ‘real-world’ examples from over 50 cities worldwide, Urban Design Thinking reveals theories as vital tools to be deployed in the shaping of better urban futures.
2nd Ed. London: Routledge 2008
Architecture and urban design are the most contradictory of practices – torn between a radically optimistic belief in the creation of the new, and a conservative acceptance of the prevailing order. Architects and urban designers engage with the articulation of dreams – imagining and constructing a 'better' future in someone's interest. This optimistic sense of creative innovation largely defines the design professions which are all identified with constant change. Yet architecture is also the most conservative of practices. This conservatism stems from the fundamental inertia of built form as it 'fixes' and 'stabilizes' the world -- space is deployed to stabilize time. It is this antinomous quality – coupling imaginative innovation with a stabilizing conservatism – that makes the interpretation of place so interesting yet problematic.
New York: Routledge 2018
What is the capacity of mapping to reveal the forces at play in shaping urban form and space? How can mapping extend the urban imagination and therefore the possibilities for urban transformation? With a focus on urban scales, Mapping Urbanities explores the potency of mapping as a research method that opens new horizons in our exploration of complex urban environments. A primary focus is on investigating urban morphologies and fl ows within a framework of assemblage thinking – an understanding of cities that is focused on relations between places rather than on places in themselves; on transformations more than fi xed forms; and on multi- scale relations from 10 metres to 100 kilometres.
With cases drawn from 30 cities across the global north and south, Mapping Urbanities analyses the mapping of place identities, political confl ict, transport fl ows, streetlife, functional mix and informal settlements. Mapping is presented as a production of spatial knowledge embodying a diagrammatic logic that cannot be reduced to words and numbers. Urban mapping constructs interconnections between the ways the city is perceived, conceived and lived, revealing capacities for urban transformation – the city as a space of possibility.
Melbourne University Press 2018
The transformation of central Melbourne since the 1980s is a global success story—public space has been incrementally reclaimed from cars and railyards, and street-life volumes have increased dramatically. The decline of central city retailing has been turned around and the formerly negligible residential population is booming. The city has grown greener—literally, environmentally and politically. Laneways that were once filled with garbage are now filled with bars, housing and art. Always an urbane place, Melbourne has re-emerged as a city with a depth of character and urban buzz that is palpable, ineffable and unfinished.
This book documents and critiques the range of urban design transformations over this period, as It seeks to understand the intermeshing of social, economic, political, environmental and aesthetic forces that drove and constrained these largely incremental changes. The book addresses this complex milieu from multiple viewpoints—of politicians, bureaucrats, designers, planners, academics, and other writers—while also using multiple ways of seeing the city and how it works—before-and-after photographs, analytical mapping, essays, descriptive prose and poetry.
London: Routledge 2005
Fluid City traces the transformation of Melbourne’s urban waterfront from 1983-2003 as the city turned its face to the water and the world, re-inventing itself to attract new flows of global capital. The book tells the story of a city becoming ‘unsettled’ as established experiences and practices were swept up in new flows of money, ideas, desires and designs. Images of the urban waterfront became increasingly important to economic strategy as comprehensive rational planning weakened and boundaries dissolved between architecture and planning, culture an commerce and architecture and politics, and - most crucially between public and private interests. Fluid City is a story of opportunities and dangers, with both local and global lessons. It portrays the fluid city in terms of intersecting flows of ‘desire’ – for waterfront amenity, access and views; for identity, power and profit - and asks how we reconcile these ‘desires’ with public ‘interests’.