Review
"Anique Hommels provides a fascinating analysis of three efforts to alter the face and shape of Dutch cities that draws on insights from STS and urban studies. She opens up some of the many black boxes which characterize cities and demonstrates how cities are not only built but also re- and unbuilt. It is to be hoped that others will take up the many leads that Hommels offers for thinking about and analyzing the exciting spaces and places in which many of us live and work." --Sally Wyatt, University of Amsterdam
Product Description
Applying the tools of STS to explore why the "unbuilding of cities" - the reconfiguration and redesign of existing urban structures - becomes a contested and time-consuming process. City planning initiatives and redesign of urban structures often become mired in debate and delay. Despite the fact that cities are considered to be dynamic and flexible spaces - never finished but always under construction - it is very difficult to change existing urban structures; they become fixed, obdurate, securely anchored in their own histories as well as in the histories of their surroundings. In Unbuilding Cities, Anique Hommels looks at the tension between the malleability of urban space and its obduracy, focusing on sites and structures that have been subjected to "unbuilding" - redesign or reconfiguration. She brings the concepts of science and technology studies (STS) to bear on the study of cities. Viewing the city as a large sociotechnological artefact, she demonstrates the usefulness of STS tools that were developed to analyse other technological artefacts and explores in detail the role of obduracy in sociotechnical change. Her analysis distinguishes three concepts of obduracy: interactionist, in which actors with diverging views are constrained by fixed ways of thinking and interacting; relational, in which change is difficult because of technology's embeddedness in sociotechnical networks; and enduring, in which persistent traditions influence the development of technology over time. Hommels examines the tensions between obduracy and change in three urban redesign projects in the Netherlands: a city centre facelift that fell into drabness and disrepair; a highway system that runs through a densely populated urban area; and a high-rise housing project, designed according to modernist precepts and built for middle-class families, that became a haven for unemployment and crime. Unbuilding Cities contributes to a productive fusion of STS and urban studies.
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