The Lure of the City: From Slums to Suburbs

by Austin Williams, Alastair Donald (Editor)

Cities, by their very nature, are a mass of contradictions. They can be at once visually stunning, culturally rich, exploitative, and unforgiving. In The Lure of the City, Austin Williams and Alastair Donald explore the potential of cities to meet the economic, social, and political challenges of the current age.

 

This book seeks to examine the dynamics of urban life, showing that new opportunities can be maximized and social advances realized in existing and emerging urban centers. The book explores both the planned and organic nature of urban developments and the impacts and aspirations of the people who live and work in them. It argues convincingly that the metropolitan mindset is essential to the struggle for human liberation.

 

The short, accessibly written essays are guaranteed to spark debate across the media and academia about the place of cities and urban life in our ever-changing world.

Genres: Architecture, Urban Planning

216 pages, Paperback

First published November 8, 2011

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Austin Williams is director of the Future Cities Project. An architect and project manager by profession, he was the technical editor at the Architects’ Journal; architecture critic on BBC London; and transport commentator with The Daily Telegraph. He is now the architectural producer of NBS Learning Channels and author and illustrator of “Shortcuts”.

Reviews

[jw]

There are 8 essays in this collection, half of which are authored or co-authored by Austin Williams, which gives you a sense of the slant/point of view that this book takes. I've been doing a fair bit of reading on urban issues recently, mainly liberal, left-leaning works on the right to the city, spacial and social justice, etc so it was - dare I say it? - refreshing to read a challenge to the Jane Jacobs, small is beautiful camp. Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed the writings of Jacobs, Soja, Harvey etc and I do appreciate the arguments they make. But I think it's important to understand the neoliberal view as well and the challenge that this collection throws out to the left-leaning camp has its own seductive logic.

The essays are of mixed quality and the standouts for me, in descending order, were The Historic City: False Urban Memory Syndrome (Steve Nash and Austin Williams); The Planned City: Make No Little Plans (Michael Owens); The Visionary City: Things Will Endure Less than Us (Austin Williams and Karl Sharro); and The Sanitised City: If You've Done Nothing Wrong (Tony Pierce and Austin Williams). I found these four essays to be thought provoking reads, challenging what appears to be the growing consensus and accepted wisdom that small is beautiful, that limits must be placed on development in the name of sustainability and that cities should be designed bottom up rather than top down. I can see how this book would piss quite a lot of people off and it would be easy to dismiss the questions it poses and the challenges it issues as the writings of neoliberal, capitalist, stone-hearted megalomaniacs. But it just might be worthwhile to take a step back to think about what kind of a conversation would result if one decided to engage with the arguments instead.

[Sharayu Gangurde]

A wonderful introduction and overview of the multiple urban movements envisaged by architects and planners for cities across the world. Each chapter is aptly titled after the specifics of the movement for eg, The Eco City which highlights chinese cities that were envisioned as massive greening projects across housing and other buildings. The writers have been fair enough in their assessments for the urban social experiments conducted by various governments and individuals as well.

Although it's from 2011 and already 15 years older with its wisdom about cities, this book does lay bare utopian concepts that were given some thought and then discarded in favour of the general well-being of people. Some of the theories expressed are nevertheless a predecessor to some dire environmental problems that arose due to bizarre urban policies.

[Daniel]

Williams understands that cities are good for people, that they offer unparalleled economic and social opportunities, that they help the poor become more wealthy , and that we should celebrate these facts.
A wonderful antidote to the sour anti-development woe-is-me urban planning brigade.