Remaking Cities: An introduction to urban metrofitting

✍ Scribed by Tony Fry

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 281
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Unprecedented challenges await the future of the world's cities. Accelerating population pressure, climate change, food insecurity, poverty and geopolitical instability – in the face of such problems our current attempts at producing a sustainable agenda for the world's cities appear fragmented and inadequate. Fresh thinking is needed.
In Remaking Cities, renowned design theorist Tony Fry brings a conceptual design perspective to the challenge of urban sustainability and resilience. In a typically far-sighted and provocative work, Fry presents ideas and actions for ‘metrofitting’ – a new kind of practice in architecture and urban design. Metrofitting expands the technological concept of retrofit up to the city scale, placing social, cultural, political and ethical concerns at its heart. Metrofitting is not about visionary technology, it is about transforming existing cities by combining available resources with human creativity, prompted by new thinking about new and old urban problems. It requires overcoming outmoded Eurocentric assumptions of what constitutes a city, rethinking their forms and structures, and understanding their metabolic processes and social and economic functions. This book provides conceptually strong practical approaches that will ultimately change the whole way we view cities and the way the urban future is designed.
Illustrated with international case studies of metrofitting in action, Remaking Cities will provoke and stimulate debate among architects, urban designers, and anyone concerned with the urban environment and social and cultural change.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover page
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Preface
List of figures
Introduction
Remaking: the project of metrofitting
Repair and metrofitting
Environmental impacts
Contexts: time, space, image
Perspectives
Change and a return to metrofitting
PART ONE Contexts of Change The Limits of How We See Cities Today
1 Cities now
Seeing the city
The fate of cities: seeing dangers
Danger and uncertain futures
City of fear
2 Understanding the city as a designing event
The event
Ungrounding the event of the city
Unsettlement returns
Thinking towards a metabolic event
Metrofitting, metabolism and event
3 What designs a city?
Design in a context of failed foresight
The top ten
So what has really designed the city?
Beyond history: what will now design the city?
Metrofitting: the space is everywhere
Ontological space
Metrofitting spaced
4 The city, humanity and time
In the first place there was Uruk
Colonial cities, the colonial matrix and the future
Space, power and the colonial city
Metrofitting: a reconnecting
5 Urban imperatives in the face of change
Megaregions: the inside and the outside
Megacities
Questions of fear, questions of defence
The megacity battleground in the age of unwinnable wars
The geopolitical drift
6 New imaginaries and the city
There is something wrong out there!
Buildings as image
Where can thinkers of imagination take us now?
Imagination, imaginaries and the city
7 Other worlds are coming
Destruction
Protection in the face of destruction
A conviviality: rediscovery and recreation
8 Post-sustainability
The education of education
The future, the Sustainment, culture
The Sustainment and the future of cities
PART TWO Contexts of Action
9 Metrofitting: Take two
Framings
The ‘hard’ edge: metrofitting and the instrumental perspective
The ‘soft’ edge: metrofitting, culture and perception
10 Metrofitting, thinking otherwise and a new foundation of change
On design
Practice and the agency of the visible invisible
Bourdieu, technology and habitus
Metrofitting, habitus and time
11 Unlearning and learning
Learning in the shadow of teaching
Anthropocentrism: learning for unlearning
Breaking out of striated space and the borderlands
12 Metrofitting and the de-signing of design
Ontological design
Design in time: a developed reiteration
Elimination by design7
Design intelligence8
Convergence
Technological unthinking
13 Metrofitting and urban design fictions
Prospects and possibilities
Against utopias/dystopias
Seeing cities, design and fiction
The city, being and time
Design fiction and the imperatives
Frames of fictions
Fictions, writing and remaking
14 Space, time, dwelling and movement
The re-marking of space and ways it is understood
Reconfigured notions of ‘the event’ of space and the city
Matter in time
Time, city and world
15 Metrofitting and being in the city
Being in the City
PART THREE Introduction to the Case Studies
16 Cincinnati case study
Introducing Cincinnati
Why Cincinnati?
Understanding local contextual complexity
The workshop
Final focus of the event: what is resilience?
On reflection: what was learnt at the workshop?
Appendix
17 New Cairo case study
New Cairo in context
Forces of change
Introducing New Cairo
Of place
Traffic without enforced law, transport and the people
The women, the young and the old
What is broken?
New Cairo and metrofitting
Selected bibliography
Index