This book is constructed around the work of Manuel Castells on the space of places, the space of flows and the networked city. Following an introduction by Castells, in which he sets out the theoretical and empirical framework to be followed, the book features nine contributions focusing on the transformation of the fabric of the networked city in terms of policies and social practices. The book aims to rethink sociological perspectives on urban phenomena through a dynamic exploration of the links between infrastructural and technological aspects of urban order, power relations and everyday life experiences. This reappraisal is based on contemporary trends in social theory. The proposed perspective also avoids the immaterialisation of post-modern urban analysis and the material determinism of the structural approach to the city. Without elaborating on the artificial dimensions between technology and society; between nature and culture; or between science and politics, the texts eevaluate the role of objects and conventional elements (such as codes and regulations) in the transformation of the city.
The Networked City - The Social Fabric of the Networked City - Skating over Thin Ice - Spatial Patterns and Social Inequality in Switzerland-Modern or Post-modern? - Public Space Management and Public Transport Quality-Vectors of Gentrification: Six Parisian Case Studies - Architechture and Reflexivity - Building Development in the 19th Century: between Planning Procedures and Local Action - Innovation in "Urbanism" Thinking : Spectrum and Limit - Urban planning in France in the 1960s: an affair of state (A state business?) - Planning, power and policy change in the networked city : the politics of a new tramway in the city of Bern - Towards a Regulation of the Space of Flows via Environmental Conflicts: Airports and Airport Areas as Laboratories of Urban Sustainability ? - Conclusions : The Revenge of Places - About the authors.
The book first elaborates on the current ecology of the World Wide Web, where autonomous information sources come and go in dynamic and unpredictable ways.
Leader of the current generation of architects, Rem Koolhaas with his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) is justly considered as the most important protaganist of contemporary architecture.
With a novel, less classical approach to the subject, the authors have written a book with the conviction that signal processing should be taught to be fun.
