Corporate and public actors have built the physical and financial flows of petroleum into the very landscape. This article identifies different layers of those flows— physical, represented, and everyday practices—that combine into a palimpsestic global petroleumscape. It posits that these layers historically became essential parts of modern society and of citizens’ everyday lives. Resulting path dependencies and an energy culture help maintain the buildings and urban forms needed for physical and financial oil flows and celebrate oil as a heroic cultural agent, in a feedback loop that leads societies to consume more oil. Following a general analysis, the article uses the Rotterdam/The Hague area, part of the North West European petroleum hub, as a case study of this feedback loop. Only in appreciating the power and extent of oil can we engage with the complex emerging challenges of sustainable design, policy making, heritage, and future built environments beyond oil.

From the mid-nineteenth century, Japanese elites experimented with foreign planning concepts and transformed their cities to respond to the demands of modernization. Even though they faced similar situations, knew about established European techniques, and had large open spaces available, they established planning practices that were different from those of their foreign counterparts, building on the country’s own urban history and form, particularities in landownership, development needs, urban planning techniques, and design preferences. This article highlights, first, key issues of landownership, urban form, and urban development in the Edo period (1603—1867) and provides an overview of the urban transformation of Tokyo concentrating on the era from the early Meiji period (1860s) to the reconstruction after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. It then examines the elements set up in the overview more closely through the study of three areas of Tokyo between the 1860s and the 1920s. The article highlights the elite’s pragmatic approach to urban transformation and underlines the importance of land readjustment, a planning technique characterized by a reduction in lot sizes to create public land and to widen and straighten out streets, plots, and blocks. Examined are the transformation of the Ginza townsmen district (with a close look at the Yamashita-chô area), the government-led construction to the east of the palace (notably the Marunouchi area) starting in the 1880s, and the Kanda Misaki-chô area, a smaller daimyo district that had been cleared of all construction. In conclusion, this article argues that Japanese planners developed a practice that departed from European and American design principles but one that was and continues to be appropriate for Japanese needs and one that might even offer lessons to foreign cities and planners.

The twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented increase in the number of capital cities worldwide – in 1900 there were only about forty, but by 2000 there were more than two hundred. And this, surely, is reason enough for a book devoted to the planning and development of capital cities in the twentieth century. However, the focus here is not only on recently created capitals. Indeed, the case studies which make up the core of the book show that, while very different, the development of London or Rome presents as great a challenge to planners and politicians as the design and building of Brasília or Chandigarh. Put simply, this book sets out to explore what makes capital cities different from other cities, why their planning is unique, and why there is such variety from one city to another. Sir Peter Hall’s ‘Seven Types of Capital City’ and Lawrence Vale’s ‘The Urban Design of Twentieth Century Capital Cities’ provide the setting for the fifteen case studies which follow – Paris, Moscow and St Petersburg, Helsinki, London, Tokyo, Washington, Canberra, Ottawa-Hull, Brasília, New Delhi, Berlin, Rome, Chandigarh, Brussels, New York. To bring the book to a close Peter Hall looks to the future of capital cities in the twenty-first century. For anyone with an interest in urban planning and design, architectural, planning and urban history, urban geography, or simply capital cities and why they are what they are, Planning Twentieth Century Capital Cities will be the key source book for a long time to come.

People have redesigned coastlines, creating ports, shaping waterfronts, and building cities to connect water and land. Specialists from many disciplines have explored the function and design of the water–land transition over many centuries. Among them is planning, a discipline that engages both with the functionality of working ports and the design of the waterfront for the urban public. In order to explore the development of working ports and the revitalization of abandoned inner‐city waterfronts since the 1960s, this paper reviews planning and planning history literature in regard to the specific appreciation of water. It first examines the planning of ports and its focus on improving the speed, safety, and logistics, assigning water an industrial role. Second, it reflects on the design of post‐industrial waterfront spaces, which ascribes a more aesthetic and symbolic as well as leisure‐related role to water. Third, it points to the recent reconnection of cruise shipping with inner‐city waterfront redevelopment and the coastline in general. In conclusion, the paper underscores localized perceptions of water in planning literature and the need to recognize how interconnected water systems connect otherwise separated areas along the same coastline. It argues for the integrated planning of port, waterfront, and city in conjunction with a comprehensive study of the environmental and ecological role of water in each of those places, both as a resource they share and, with climate change, a risk to which they must collectively respond. WIREs Water 2016, 3:419–438. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1141This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Planning Water Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented

Looking at the globalization, urban regeneration, arts events and cultural spectacles, this book considers a city not until now included in the global city debate. Divided into five parts, each preceded by an editorial introduction, this book is an interdisciplinary study of an iconic city, a city facing conflicting social, political and cultural pressures in its search for a place in Europe and on the world stage in the twenty-first century.