Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and ecological rehabilitations, as well as improving the safety and health in cit-
ies and attempting to reduce inequalities. The unique history and morphological
endowment of some urban places has spawned movements to retain, enhance or
re-create the historic ambiance of a place, or even to invent a new one. What is clear
from these examples is that individuals from many walks of life, increasingly ac-
tive city managers and officials, business leaders, as well as international agencies,
are not content to see urban places as only the passive recipients of some received
process of change caused by external economic, social or environmental factors. In
other words urban places are not being regarded only as 'containers' in which vari-
ous processes created by various agents have created particular outcomes. Instead,
creative thinkers, city managers and entrepreneurs have developed, or are trying to
create, alternatives to the urban container perspective, by actively searching for new
sets of policies and creating new degrees of activism to improve the functioning and
character of their cities. Of course this activism is not new, even in the recent past.
The history of post-World War II urbanism, in the developed world in particular,
was replete with interventionist strategies, such as: new towns; urban expansion
containment; and various regional policies to reduce the growth potential of the
biggest places and to improve the prospects of towns and regions that had lost their
economic base—especially those dependent upon mineral extraction or old indus-
trial practices. Many of these post-war policies were forgotten or reduced in scope
after the stagflation of the 1970s and the growth of neo-conservative governments,
creating a neo-liberal phase that has reduced regulation, especially in planning, giv-
en the belief that such rules were inimical to their pro-growth and pro-market poli-
cies. At the same time there has been greater sympathy for new intellectual ideas
such as post modernism, with its stress on difference and individuality, rather than
grand theories and scientific approaches (Harvey
1991
; Davies
1996
), as well as the
realization that the 'top-down' technocratic style of policy should be replaced with
more community and stakeholder consultation.
These trends have led to what amounts to a new phase of urban policy conceptu-
alizations and implementations since the late 1980s—one that has gained momen-
tum in subsequent decades. It is a phase with a much wider scope and integrative
capacity than the ideas generated in the post-war period. Many of these new ideas
and approaches to urban development have been summarised in a short distinctive
word or phrase, providing an adjectival prefix to the words, 'urban, cities or towns',
creating such labels as New Urbanism, Sustainable Cities, Just Cities, Winter Cities
or Safe Cities etc., which summarize critiques of existing situations and provide
alternatives. They can be viewed as creating a new and varied set of urban themes.
The various themes are certainly diverse in nature. Each can be thought of as
focusing upon a new concept, or set of concepts, designed to critique existing prob-
lems and then advocating ways of solving them. Although these themes are descrip-
tive, they have very different functions to the many adjectival descriptors used by
urban students in the past to classify the diversity of urban centres into more man-
ageable categories of understanding. For example, economic classifications created
categories such as port cities, tourist towns, transport centres, or various types of
central places, at first subjectively but later with sophisticated statistical techniques
