Routledge Cities After Crisis: Reinventing Neighborhood Design from the Ground-Up

Cities After Crisis shows how urbanism and urban design is redefining cities after the global health, economic, and environmental crises of the past decades. The book details how these crises have led to a new urban vision―from avantgarde modern design to an artisan aesthetic that calls for simplicity and the everyday, from the sustainable development paradigm to a resilient vision that defends de-growth and the re-wilding of cities, from a homogenizing globalism to a new localism that values what is distinctive and nearby, from the privatization of the public realm to the commoning and self-governance of urban resources, and from top-down to bottom-up processes based on the engagement and empowerment of communities. Through a examples from cities around the world and a detailed look at the London neighbourhood of Dalston, the book shows designers and planners how to incorporate residents into the decision-making process, design inclusive public spaces that can be permanently reconfigured, reimagine obsolete spaces to accommodate radically contemporary uses, and build gardens designed and maintained by the community, among other projects. Review "In the form of an urban replica of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, this book deals with the silent battle between the effects of the high urbanism of modernism and the low urbanism of people’s demands, describing to the last detail how the latter have gradually won the acceptance and acquired the prestige that in the past was enjoyed by grand planning schemes, allowing us to witness a spectacle the protagonists of which―the conflicts that permeate life and politics nowadays―find in the city a privileged setting". - Iñaki Ábalos, Director and Founder of AS+ Abalos+Sentkiewiz, Former Chair Harvard Graduate School of Design.   "Carlos García-Vázquez charts the forces of change and the range of urban policy and urban design responses that may be brought into play to facilitate new ways of living. This book makes an important contribution to the pressing questions of how we may adapt in a world that might be emerging from a pandemic but will still faces fundamental environmental, social and economic challenges". - Peter Bishop, Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Founding Director of Design for London   "Carlos García-Vázquez offers us a brilliant synthesis of the challenges that urban planning and design must address to tackle the three-pronged environmental, economic, and health crisis we are facing. This mature essay crowns several decades dedicated to reviewing visions and proposals revolving around the city. The book constitutes a valuable tool for scholars and professionals thanks to an original dialectic that balances an elegant conceptual approach with the empirical contrast provided by the Dalston (London) case study". - José María Ezquiaga, Professor at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.   "Cities After Crisis reveals the key issues behind what is a real cultural revolution, the one of the modest, local, and community-led urban practices that the neobohemians have been displaying in cool neighborhoods as an expression of their lifestyle but which have proven their efficacy in the face of crises of all kinds (environmental, economic, health). Nowadays, these practices outline a new urban planning and design paradigm". - Estanislau Roca, Full Professor at the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya   "An artisan of theories on the built environment, Carlos García-Vázquez has crafted an overarching conceptual framework to support a much-needed urban reset in times of uncertainty. García-Vázquez convincingly displays his rigour and intuition in a delightfully written piece…the future of cities is culture, and books like Cities After Crisis effectively encourage us to