The Urban Reinventors Online Urban Journal

In this paper, Gustavo Rivera Jr. (Ph. D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago) evaluates the economic and sociocultural impact of recently developed public housing estates within the favelas of Belo Horizonte.

Dongtan Eco City was planned for completion for the Shanghai World Expo in 2010. By that time, 5,000 people should be living there. However, the planned housing, water taxis, sewage‐recycling plant and energy park all failed to materialize.

Peer Smets (VU University Amsterdam) investigates the socio-cultural impacts of specific patterns of urban segregation (gated communities) on local urban politics and urban governance.

Harald Bodenschatz calls for a radical shift in the urban planning discourse when he claims for a revitalization not only of the downtown, but of the district centers and of suburbia itself, which should be made denser and more valuable.

The machine-city envisioned by Le Corbusier, and made into practice in decades of modernist bureaucracy, has ultimately produced, according to Simon Richards' essay, an antisocial environment, against which urban planning seems to be now reacting.

According to an increasing number of theorists, modernist planning and urban renewal practices have produced nothing but an overly simplified, paternalistic urbanism that has in time proved unable to mirror the complexity of urban life.

Thomas Wüst’s semiotic work on urbanity reviews literary contributions on the topic of urbanity, coming to the harsh conclusion that urbanity is, after all, nothing but a myth, and therefore likely to be instrumentalized by "symbolic politics".

This paper shows how urban development may be considered in terms of musical categories, and associates spontaneous and informal urban actions with their analog in musical discourse: improvisation.