City-making Space and Spirituality

<p>This book is about the soul of the city embodied in its spaces and people. It traces dynamics in inner city neighbourhoods of South Africa’s post-apartheid capital Pretoria. Viewing the city through its most vulnerable people and places it recognizes that urban space is never neutral and shaped by competing value frameworks.</p><p>The first part of the book invites planners city-makers and ordinary urban citizens to consider a new self-understanding reclaiming their agency in the city-making process. Through the metaphor of becoming like children planning practice is deconstructed and re-imagined. A praxis-based methodology is presented cultivating four distinct moments of entering reading imagining and co-constructing the city. After deconstructing urban spaces and discourses the second part of the book explores a concrete spirituality and ethic of urban space. It argues for a shift from planning as technocracy to planning as immersed participatory artistry: opening up to the genius of space responsive to urban cries and joining to construct new soul-full spaces. Local communities and interconnected movements become embodiments of urban alternatives – through resistance and reconstruction; building on local assets; animating local reclamations; and weaving nets of hope that will span the entire city. </p><p>Providing a concrete methodology for city-making that is rooted in a community-based urban praxis this book will be of interest to urban planning researchers professional planners and designers and also grass-root community developers or activists.</p>