Emancipating Space: Geography, Architecture, and Urban Design

A sweeping historical analysis of the complex relationship between social criticism and built form, EMANCIPATING SPACE argues that those concerned with urban design and social change should make their contribution to bringing about a better world by designing spaces based in utopian or emancipatory theories. Author Ross King examines significant political, economic and social changes from the Enlightenment to the present day, tracing accompanying shifts in the ways that space, time, nature and difference have been experienced and represented in architectural discourse. Integrating architecture, urban design, geography, and social criticism to elucidate new questions facing concerned planners and architects, this richly illustrated volume provides an innovative framework from which to explore the meanings and the possibilities of urban space in the postmodern era.

Booknews

King (architecture, building, and planning, U. of Melbourne) provides an overview of the history of urban design, examining political, economic, and social changes from the Englightenment to the present day with an eye toward developing new urban design ideas for the post modern era. His writing<-->abstract and philosophical<-->is not easy going. In the preface, he states that the book is "intended for students of the disciplines under attack<-->geography, social theory, urban planning and urban design, and architecture." Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Ross King is Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Building, and Planning at the University of Melbourne, and was educated as an architect and urban planner at the University of Sydney. He was also a graduate student under Louis Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also sat at the feet of such modernist luminaries as Le Corbusier, Lewis Mumford, and Arnold Toynbee. He has practiced as an architect, planner, and policy analyst, taught at the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne, and researched (among other things) the complexities of urban housing markets, the cultural contexts and economic effects of urban and landscape design, and theories of design.