Rebuilding Urban Complexity

This is a book about urban complexity – how it evolves and how it gets destroyed. It explores the structures of interdependency which underpin cities, where the many different “parts” (people, streets, industry sectors) interact to form an evolving “whole”.

The book explores the evolution and destruction of complexity in one city – Greater Manchester – but also other post-industrial cities, including Sheffield and Newcastle, Detroit and New Haven. The focus is on the networked qualities of public urban space, and how street networks work as multiscale systems. The book also explores economic networks, and the evolving sets of interconnecting economic capabilities which help to shape urban economies. It demonstrates how cities evolve through processes of self-organisation – and concludes by considering how policy makers can best harness such processes as they rebuild urban complexity following insensitive planning interventions in the 1960s and 1970s.

The book will appeal to anybody with an interest in cities, and how they work. It is interdisciplinary in scope, weaving in strands from architecture, economics, history, anthropology and ecology. It is written for academics but also non-academics, including urban planners, architects, local economic development actors and other policy makers.

Francesca Froy is Lecturer on Sustainable Urban Development at the University of Oxford and is a Fellow of Kellogg College. She has honorary positions at the Bartlett Schools of Planning and Architecture where she previously researched and taught urban morphology and local economic development. She is also an associate working on the spatial dimensions of sustainable economies at the consultancy firm Space Syntax. Francesca was a senior policy analyst at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) from 2005 to 2015, where she coordinated international reviews of policies to support local economic development. Before that, while based in Brussels, she evaluated urban and regional European policies. Her articles can be found in peer-reviewed academic journals including the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society; Local Economy; the Oxford Review of Economic Policy; European Planning Studies; the Journal of Urban Design; and Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space.