Sassen, 2005, The Global City - Introducing a ConceptFile

The global city: Introducing a concept:

Each phase in the history of the world economy raises specific questions about the particular conditions that make it possible

Elements in new conceptual Architecture:

The globalisation of economic activity entails a new type of organisational structure. To capture this a new type of Architecture has been founded. In todays world most of the major global cities are world cities.

The global city model: Organising hypothesis

there are 7 hypothesis of the theory of global city model:

1. geographical dispersal of economic activity
2. Central function becomes complex that the head quarters for large global firms out source them
3. specialised services service firms engagement in most complex and globalised markets are subjected to agglomeration economies
4. Head quarters outsource their most complex, unstandardized functions, particularly those subject to uncertain changing markets
5. need to provide a global service which has meant a global network of affiliates or some other form of partnership
6. growing numbers of high level professionals and high profit making specialised services firms have effect of raising the degree of spatial and socio-economic
7. One result of the dynamics describes in hypothesis six, is the growing information of a range of economic activities which find their effective demand in these cities

World wide networks and central command functions:

The massive trends towards the spatial dispersal of economic activities at the metropolitan, national, global level which associate with globalisation have contributed to a demand of new forms of territorial centralisation of top-level management and central functions.

Impacts of new communication technologies of centrality:

cities have historically provided a national economies, policies, and societies, with something we can think as a centrality. Cities provide agglomeration economies. As earlier sections have indicated, centrality remains a key feature of today's global economy.     

Freestone, 2014, Progress in Australian planning history traditions themes and transformationsFile

Planning history is the historical study of all aspects of Urban and Regional planning. The growing body of work in this field since the 1980's has been reviewed by various authors. planning history has been portrayed as a regrettable fragmentation of historical interests in the city.

Why Planning History?

History can be useful, but can also be abused. Macmillion argues that we should distrust these who abuse history to justify unreasonable claims and unconscionable positions. At the same time an historical perspective can deliver more positive outcomes of scepticism.

An Australian planning history:

The drivers for Australian planning were the problems accompanying an accelerated scale of unplanned urbanisation from the late 19th century. In the first half of the 20th century, idealistic social reforms comprising progressive practitioners drawn mainly from Architecture, Engineering and surveying professionals.
The second half of the 20th century saw a return to the propaganda investment made in the first few decades. The major dividend came in the 1940's when planning was widely accepted as a legitimate activity of the state. Post war planning systems grew accretion in each jurisdiction.

Innovative discourse:

Throughout this section of the reading Freestone talks about how disciplinary concerns and methods have emerged as sources of innovation research in Australian planning history.

Canvassing the future of the past:

Over decades as electric cast of researches has filled in gaps of planning history, and injected new understandings and generated yet more avenues for arguing. Considerable evidence has been assembled to convey a small culturally specific paradigm.  

Freestone, 2004, The Americanisation of Australian Planning

America has been central to world power in the forms of military, diplomats, and cultural power. American planning is very well evident in Australian society with civic, retail, freeway and many other areas resembling American planning

The Australian-American Nexus:

America was the showcase for new technology, an inspiration for can do progress, and an influencing culture in the 20th century. Australia and America have been formed alliances since 1908 when the arrival of the American fleet in Sydney harbour took place. Therefore Australia as a young country looked towards America for inspiration instead of England as they had new and exciting ideas unlike England at that time.

Diffusion of planning Ideas:

Three recent texts synthesis the central concern of much architectural design, and planning history

• The first is Stephen Ward who had a central idea of innovation diffusion
• Jeff Cody and Joe Nasr also explore this same theme

A narrative of American influences:

Identifying a succession of American planning ideas throughout Australia in the 20th century is very evident. With the influx of inspiration from American planning really taking off during this period.

The Aesthetic City:

Australia looked to America to transform its uninteresting colonial cities into new and exciting ones. these encounters with the ideas of a city as a work of art set the scene for the 1911-1912 competition to design Australia's new capital city, Canberra. Walter Burley Griffin ultimately winning, creating an American design concept in Australia's capital. Griffin was born and grew up in Chicago. This further influenced the Americanisation of Australian planning.

The city functional:

After World War 1 an organised planning movement began assembling itself in Australia. America remained a source of inspiration throughout the Griffin experience. From the 1930's onward, a mix of planning ideas, models and experiments and prototypes became known in Australia from the American influence.

Post World War 11:

First set of post war plans for Australia reflected a growing Americanisation. The future of urban traffic planning lay from learning form the lake Chicago design in America.

Throughout Australia's history of planning we have looked to America for innovation and exciting ideas as we are a relatively new country. Australia is a lot different to America so it has been hard to make these ideas and plans be successful in Australia.     

  

"Anglo-American Town Panning Theory since 1945: three significant development but no paradigm shifts" - Nigel Taylor (1999)

Over fifty years there has been a number of important shifts in town planning theory. Throughout this paper Taylor offers a retrospective overview of the evolution of planning.

Two significant shifts in the way Town Planners have been conceived:

1. From the planner as a creative designer to the planner as a scientific analyst and rational decision-maker.

• Aster the second world war, Town Planning theory was considered essentially as an exercise of design.
• This continued until the 1960's as demonstrated because most Town Planners were architects
• shift from art to science 

     2. From the planner as a technical expert to the planner as a manager and communicator:

• 1960's Planners shifted to a rational decision maker, but the public had raised some question about these planners and if they were the right people to make these decisions.

Throughout history the role of a planner has been ever changing. as technology gets better and easier to access to role of a planner will continue on this path of evolution, however the paradigms will not be as large as the ones experienced on the past.  

The communicative turn in planning theory and it's implications for spatial strategy formation: P Healy

The context:
widespread consciousness these days that economic and political orders have changed substantially. According to Healy places have now seen to have fragmented into an amalgam of bits and pieces, niches and nodes. It reflects the disintegration of the economic and governance relations relied on past war.

Public policy making as commutative argumentation:
There are always new theories and interpretations, new policy provides and management tricks, but as Kuhn has shown us mainly small contributions add up to a change in our thinking. Producing what he called the paradigm shift. As he discusses a new wave of ideas focusses on how we get to discuss issues in the pubic realm.

A communicative approach to spatial strategy formation:
most of the spatial and environmental planning activity is focussed on managing the smaller finer grain of change in local environments. this presents some problems in certain projects as it may lock the flow of planning. they may also serve to enrich the power and interests of powerful groups making it harder for certain individuals. The planning literature already referred to is beginning to provide us with interesting ways of thinking. they are ordered in 5 headings:

1. Where is discussion to take place?
2. in what style should it take place?
3. how can ideas and arguments be sorted out?
4. how can a new strategy be sorted out?
5. how to get them to agree on a strategy?

Arenas for argumentation:
Traditional way of discussing where policy making takes place is to consider all arenas and allocate rights to be represented and heard in the arenas.

Scope and style of discourse:
Another set of considerations concerns what gets discussed and how. In planning we used to call this stage the survey stage. It involves opening out issues, explore what they mean to different people. This is a critical and delicate operation.

Creating a new discourse:
broadly based discussion takes place in defined stages, before or after strategies have been created.

Agreement and critique:
objective of strategic inclusionary argumentation on urban features is a rich policy discourse. But there will always be some people that will be unhappy.   

'Contested cities: Social Processes and Spatial form'. By Nick Jewson and Susanne MacGregor

Early this century there was no more than a dozen cities that would post a population of 1 Million or more people with just 7 per cent classified as urban. As time has past in 2000 there were more then 500 cities that posted a population of more than 1 Million people. If these trends continue soon nearly half the worlds population will be classified as urban.  

With this rapid increase in Urbanisation it posts some fundamental questions that need to be addressed.  

- why is it that the urban so frequently disappears from our discussions of broader political-economic processes and social trends?

- what has happened to the category ‘urban’?

These are just  few of the questions that have been created through this rapid increase of Urbanisation.

 

Some commentators are predicting that if this current trend continues we will be producing Marginalisation, Disempowerment, Alienation, pollution and finally degradation. In the past he capital has regarded cities as important places, we now find that they are no longer concerned about cities.

 

Throughout this reading Jewson and MacGregor make some very interesting points. These include:

• Re-conceptualise the urban as a production of space and spatio-temporality to a dialectical relationship between process and time
• Assumption that the 'community will save current city's mess
•  No mention of cities in ecological literature - therefore failure to account for over 50% of the world's population

 

 

We have to move the urban, and the urbanizing process, into a more central position in our debates and discussions about ecological, social, political and economic change

 

 

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