Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City

by Dana Cuff, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Todd Presner

Original, action-oriented humanist practices for interpreting and intervening in the city: a new methodology at the intersection of the humanities, design, and urban studies.

Urban humanities is an emerging field at the intersection of the humanities, urban planning, and design. It offers a new approach not only for understanding cities in a global context but for intervening in them, interpreting their histories, engaging with them in the present, and speculating about their futures. This book introduces both the theory and practice of urban humanities, tracing the evolution of the concept, presenting methods and practices with a wide range of research applications, describing changes in teaching and curricula, and offering case studies of urban humanities practices in the field.

Urban humanities views the city through a lens of spatial justice, and its inquiries are centered on the microsettings of everyday life. The book's case studies report on real-world projects in mega-cities in the Pacific Rim—Tokyo, Shanghai, Mexico City, and Los Angeles—with several projects described in detail, including playful spaces for children in car-oriented Mexico City, a commons in a Tokyo neighborhood, and a rolling story-telling box to promote “literary justice” in Los Angeles.

Genres: Urban Design, Urbanism, Urban Planning

336 pages, Paperback

Published April 7, 2020

About the author

Dana Cuff is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA, where she is also Director and Founder of cityLAB. She is a leader of the Urban Humanities Initiative, a UCLA program sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Reviews

[Ernesto Jun]

This is the most academic book I've read in ab while. I learned about "spatial justice". But in general, I just find books from academia too wordy that a lot of sections end up seeming like fluff. For a book that talks about access for diverse groups of people, the book may be inaccessible to many. Anyway, my review sounds more critical than I intended it to be. I did like it.