1st Edition
A City of One's Own Blurring the Boundaries Between Private and Public
This book highlights the citizens' continuous participation in a wide range of urban affairs, especially outside institutional frameworks. It brings together an interdisciplinary team of French, British and American academics who examine the long and rich history of participation or partnership in British and American urban life (with additional reference to France), showing that both private interests and community groups have long been involved in local policies. Utilizing the concept of governance as the main theoretical framework, the book explores how Western governments and local authorities have negotiated the difficult task of defining the borders between the territories of private and public actors and also in defining the boundaries of state intervention and public interest. Focusing on the blurring of these boundaries, this book presents a re-examination of how cities were developed, both past and present.
Biography
Drs Sophie Body-Gendrot, Jacques Carré and Romain Garbaye, are all at the Université Paris IV-Sorbonne, France.
'Drawing on historical and current perspectives this book provides a fascinating insight into the public and private provision of a range of urban services. Examples are drawn from France, the UK and the US and cover topics such as education, health, security and planning. The book's editors have done a great service in putting this excellent collection together, which should stimulate considerable debate amongst urban historians, political scientists and sociologists.' Mike Goldsmith, University of Salford, UK 'A City of One's Own is a major contribution to the literature about how cities work. The breadth of the contributions in terms ofgeography and policy area coverage is a major plus and the quality of the research and writing is impressive. I have no doubt that this book will be widely read within the field of urban studies.' Evan McKenzie, University of Illinois, Chicago, USA 'The concise articles are very approachable for non academics and even the studies of the privatisation of prisons and the vigilante phenomena in the USA have lessons for urban design solutions of defensible space; similarly health issues such as AIDS prevention, historic feminist claims and for-profit education may have repercussions on future urban design briefs.' Urban Design 'A City of One's Own is an important book that seeks to redress the tendency among contemporary studies of urban governance to portray private actors' interventions in urban affairs as a relatively recent development. The wide range of case studies featured in the collection, that encompasses examples from the 1700s, through to the present day, helps to illustrate this point...' Urban Studies
