Re-shaping Cities - How Global Mobility Transforms Architecture and Urban Form

This original collection examines how architectural ideas, social models and building forms circulate round the world and become mediated and adapted to local conditions. The book shows how types such as skyscrapers, mosques or living history museums are imported, adapted and contested in different societies and how urban landscapes are reshaped by the global circulation of models drawn from elsewhere.

Written by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds –architecture, anthropology, geography, linguistics, science studies and sociology – the book draws its inspiration from a series of different approaches and offers both original theoretical reflection and carefully crafted case-studies.

Content

Part 1: Travelling Cities  

1. Introduction: Mobility and the Transformation of Built Form Ola Söderström and Michael Guggenheim  

2. Notes Towards a Global Historical Sociology of Building Types Anthony King  

Part 2: Mediations and Mediators  

3. Travelling Types and the Law: Minarets, Caravans and Suicide Hospices Michael Guggenheim  

4. The High-Rise Office Tower as a Global 'Type': Exploring the Architectural World of Getty Images Monika Grubbauer  

Part 3: Circulating Types  

6. Factories, Office Suites, Defunct and Marginal Spaces: Mosques in Stuttgart, Germany Petra Kuppinger  

6. DakshinaChitra: Translating the Open-Air Museum in Southern India Mary Hancock  

7. Tropicalising Technologies of Environment and Government: The Singapore General Hospital and the Circulation of the Pavilion Plan Hospital in the British Empire, 1860-1930 Jiat-Hwee Chang  

8. International Models, Regional Politics and the Architecture of Psychiatric Institutions in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy Leslie Topp  

Part 4: Shaping Places  

9. Trajectories of Language: Orders of Indexical Meaning in Washington, DC’s Chinatown Jennifer Leeman & Gabriela Modan  

10. Forms and Flows in the Contemporary Transformations of Palermo's City Centre Ola Söderström  

11. Building Stone in Manchester: Networks of Materiality, Circulating Matter and the Ongoing Constitution of the City Tim Edensor  

12. Conclusion: Seeing Through: Types and the Making and Unmaking of the World Lynda Schneekloth

About the editors

Michael Guggenheim is Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Zürich. He has done research on environmental experts and is currently completing a research project on the history of the concept of change in the use of buildings and conversion practices.

Ola Söderström is Professor of Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. He has published widely on social and cultural dimensions of urban change and more specifically on visuality in urban planning, gentrification and urban globalisation.