ABSTRACT
For many urban designers, the final readings in Part Three allude to contemporary development problems in city-making. The existential phenomena of postmodern urbanism, everyday urbanism, or post urbanism each present a different set of dissatisfactions and problems in approaching the future of the city. The arguments embedded within these urbanisms imply direct critiques of contemporary urban development practices. Within postmodern urbanism, the development industry is primarily concerned with the economic development realities of consumer comfort, nostalgia, place-making, private control, and popular marketing – largely at the expense of socio-economic problems facing cities. For everyday urbanism, the contemporary city is the result of incremental development processes that are less about the creation of engineered and coherent urbanism, and more about the uncoordinated patchwork of ordinary places produced by atomistic and budget conscious developers. And within post urbanism, developers treat the city as a series of separate internalized projects with little concern for holding the larger urban fabric together. Each of these urbanisms responds directly to localized issues, but may be approaching irrelevancy when addressing larger temporal urban concerns we face with respect to sustainability, climate change, public health, resource availability, the growing wealth gap, or even local livability.
