ABSTRACT
Reading 7A Le Corbusier: ‘A contemporary city of three million inhabitants’ 297
Reading 7B Jane Jacobs: ‘The generators of diversity’ 301
Reading 7C Nicholas Howe: ‘Berlin Mitte’ 303
Reading 7D Gerry Stoker: ‘Regime theory and urban politics’ 305
1 Introduction: managing unruly places
As Pile (1999) argues, cities are inherently paradoxical places. The experience of urban life is characterized by a series of individual and collective negotiations over apparently inconsistent practices which nevertheless manage to survive alongside each other. Cities are constituted through movement, fluidity and change, yet also by settlement and the search for security and stability (Allen, 1999a). They encourage mixing, forcing people together, yet they are also characterized by spatial differentiation and segregation (as Jenny Robinson showed in Chapter 4). They are defined by the intensification of social relations, yet, as Steve Pile notes in Chapter 1, the experience of those living in some parts of some cities is the opposite. Cities are shaped by their internal interconnections and disconnections, but they are also the products of complex and overlapping networks of interconnection to other cities and other places.
