Politics of Urban Knowledge

Historical Perspectives on the Shaping and Governing of Cities

Bert De Munck, Jens Lachmund, Bert De Munck, Jens Lachmund

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032320533
• eBook ISBN: 9781000852455
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

This book uses 'politics of urban knowledge' as a lens to understand how professionals, administrations, scholars, and social movements have surveyed, evaluated and theorized the city, identified problems, and shaped and legitimized practical interventions in planning and administration.

Urbanization has been accompanied, and partly shaped by, the formation of the city as a distinct domain of knowledge. This volume uses 'politics of urban knowledge' as a lens to develop a new perspective on urban history and urban planning history. Through case studies of mainly 19th and 20th century examples, the book demonstrates that urban knowledge is not simply a neutral means to represent cities as pre-existing entities, but rather the outcome of historically contingent processes and practices of urban actors addressing urban issues and the power relations in which they are embedded. It shows how urban knowledge-making has reshaped the categories, rationales, and techniques through which urban spaces were produced, governed and contested, and how the knowledge concerned became performative of newly emerging urban orders.

The volume will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of urban history and urban studies, as well as the history of technology, science and knowledge and of science studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: Urban knowledge and the politics of governing cities
• Part I Ways of Urban Knowing
• 2 The emergence of cartographic reasoning in a long-term perspective: Urban knowledge, craft corporations and body politics
• 3 Epistemological fields of urban intervention: Urban reform, surveys and historic centres in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
• 4 From the ‘scientised’ to the ‘sociocratic’ city: The politics of knowledge and norm change in post-war urban planning in the Netherlands
• Part II Trajectories of Urban Knowing
• 5 Urban populations and urban problems in Quetelet's population statistics of the mid-nineteenth century
• 6 Knowledge appropriation in Belo Horizonte: Intertwining the urban, the suburban and the rural
• 7 Decoding zoning: Categorisation and commonality in land-use planning knowledge
• 8 Between straight lines and winding alleys: Streets as boundary objects in the transnational modernisation of urban planning in Iran
• 9 Counting and caring for urban trees: Street tree surveys and citizen protest in twentieth-century West Berlin
• 10 Knowledge-making and the quest for a sustainable city: Promoting community food-growing in London
• 11 Smart cities, knowledge generation and the enduring pursuit of urban innovation
• Index