'The Complex City: Social and Built Approaches and Methods' explores different ways of understanding the city. The social city approach proceeds from the ground-up, it focuses on human interactions shaped by economic and environmental processes. The built city method looks through a top-down lens, examining policy and planning for buildings and infrastructure, including utilities and energy networks. This volume is different from other city anthologies in that it explores them through their differences, by presenting each chapter in one of the two categories. While there is invariably an overlap between the two areas, they are distinct positions. In doing so the book identifies how, despite their often adversarial approaches, they both belong to the same city. As essential components of the city they should not necessarily be resolved, as it is in this friction where creativity and innovation happens. 'The Complex City: Social and Built Approaches and Methods' is concerned about the ideas and solutions that they both offer. The book's originality stems from this duality, and from its recognition that cities are living, organic, protean places of opportunity, crisis, conflict and challenge. The chapters demonstrate the complexity of cities as a set of ideas concerning what they engender, how they function and why they continue to act as a catalyst for different kinds of human activity. They explore issues of socio-political import and questions of the city as a physically constructed space. The themes are diverse and include the inception of the city as a place of competition to centres of regeneration and urban withdrawal. They cover a range of city and urban regions from Athens to Wellington from site specific singular perspectives to comparative assessments. The questions they raise include how do we inhabit urban areas, how do we make plans for them, and how do we, at times, ignore them entirely.
Caroline Donnellan undertook her B.A. and M.A. in History of Art at University College London. She undertook her PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in Cities through an Arts and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Award. The Cities Programme is part of the Department of Sociology for interdisciplinary graduate research on cities, space and urbanism. Donnellan has previously taught for UCL and Birkbeck, and is presently Lecturer in Architectural History for Boston University Global Programmes, Study Abroad, London, where she teaches courses including "London Architecture and Urbanism." Her interdisciplinary research takes a politically-engaged approach that draws on culture, architecture, urbanism and cities. Related publications include 'Towards Tate Modern: Public Policy, Private Vision' (Routledge, 2018). Donnellan is currently working as editor on an AMPS (Architecture, Media, Politics, Society) Special Issue "Out of the Studio and into the Field" due for publication in 2022 with UCL Press. Her own article "Decolonizing the Curriculum - Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning: London Architecture and Urbanism" reflects her own changing attitude to the ethics of teaching. Future research projects include "Slave in the Museum" where she is presenting "Slave in the Museum: Slave in the City." The research is for the Colonial Slavery in European Museums: Arts and Representations / L'esclavage colonial dans les musées européens: mises en récit et regards d'artistes colloquium in October 2021 in Paris. Donnellan is also involved in other research projects and case studies including a chapter on King's Cross relating to values and uses, regeneration and heritage to be published by Leiden University Press.
