TWO GENERATIONS have passed since Louis Wirth (1938) published his influential and controversial piece, &dquo;Urbanism as a Way of Life,&dquo; which attempted to specify the universal features of urban places. Since then his effort has often been criticized, yet the question of whether there are universals of urbanism continues to fascinate urban sociologists (see, for example, Duncan 1957; Dew...

This article is an intervention in the epistemologies and methodologies of urban studies. It seeks to understand and transform the ways in which the cities of the global South are studied and represented in urban research, and to some extent in popular discourse. As such, the article is primarily concerned with a formation of ideas - "subaltern urbanism" - which undertakes the theorization of t...

Urban Environment planning can prevent abnormal behaviors, crime and felony in urban places by identifying effective local features and environmental conditions, along with other actions, so that the felon would have much less opportunities for committing criminal and unlawful acts in urban areas. This article is part of the outcomes of a study project called “formulation of environmental crite...

Human consumption patterns exceed planetary boundaries and stress on the biosphere can be expected to worsen. The recent “Paris Agreement” (COP21) represents a major international attempt to address risk associated with climate change through rapid decarbonisation. The mechanisms for implementation are yet to be determined and, while various large-scale geoengineering projects have been propose...

New Urbanism refers to a form of development that integrates shopping and housing in a pedestrian friendly environment that reduces the need for automobile usage and arguably impacts individual choices regarding commuting and other daily travel. New Urbanism is an increasingly “hot topic” in heavily congested regions, such as Los Angeles, where the wider, often meandering, tree-lined walkways N...

The paper uses an introduction to the comparative study of Japanese and Chinese cities to make a case for a regional approach to thinking about cities in East Asia. In so doing it argues for contextually sensitive comparative urbanism as a platform for a broader understanding of trends towards global convergence. It outlines three different types of comparative urbanism and sets out a basic fra...

Successful urban configurations are the result of a complex sequence of implicit computations that transform unorganized input into organized output. Although that is exactly what they do, few urbanists discuss their work in these terms. I propose a fundamental distinction between the principal methods of urban computation. One algorithmic process for urbanism leads to formal planning, which la...

Parametric Urbanism, pioneered by Zaha Hadid & Patrik Schumacher Architects with support coming from advanced computational technology, has been the interest of architects and urban designers in recent years. This new design thinking has been used in projects ranging from large scale urban development to building façade/surface design. However, the integration of demographics, cultural, and hum...