In the form of an urban replica of Stendhal's The Red and the Black, this book deals with the silent battle between the effects of the high urbanism of modernism and the low urbanism of people's demands, describing to the last detail how the latter have gradually won the acceptance and acquired the prestige that in the past was enjoyed by grand planning schemes, allowing us to witness a spectacle the protagonists of which-the conflicts that permeate life and politics nowadays-find in the city a privileged setting.
-Inaki Abalos, Director and Founder of AS+ Abalos+Sentkiewiz, Former Chair Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Carlos Garcia Vazquez charts the forces of change and the range of urban policy and urban design responses that may be brought into play to facilitate new ways of living. This book makes an important contribution to the pressing questions of how we may adapt in a world that might be emerging from a pandemic but will still faces fundamental environmental, social and economic challenges.
-Peter Bishop, Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Founding Director of Design for London.
Carlos Garcia Vazquez offers us a brilliant synthesis of the challenges that urban planning and design must address to tackle the three-pronged environmental, economic, and health crisis we are facing. This mature essay crowns several decades dedicated to reviewing visions and proposals revolving around the city. The book constitutes a valuable tool for scholars and professionals thanks to an original dialectic that balances an elegant conceptual approach with the empirical contrast provided by the Dalston (London) case study.
-Jose Maria Ezquiaga, Professor at the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid.
Cities After Crisis reveals the key issues behind what is a real cultural revolution, the one of the modest, local, and community-led urban practices that the neobohemians have been displaying in cool neighborhoods as an expression of their lifestyle but which have proven their efficacy in the face of crises of all kinds (environmental, economic, health). Nowadays, these practices outline a new urban planning and design paradigm.
-Estanislau Roca, Full Professor at the Escola Tecnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya.
An artisan of theories on the built environment, Carlos Garcia Vazquez has crafted an overarching conceptual framework to support a much-needed urban reset in times of uncertainty. Garcia Vazquez convincingly displays his rigour and intuition in a delightfully written piece...the future of cities is culture, and books like Cities After Crisis effectively encourage us to explore the way.
-Placido Gonzalez, Professor at College of Architecture and Urban Planning of Tongji University (Shanghai). Executive Editor, Built Heritage Journal.
The situation we are living during the pandemic is pushing for a different point of view on contemporary cities which is posing urgent questions to the architecture culture. City After Crisis is a brilliant research which connects the environmentalist debate with urban studies, pointing out the quality of life and a sustainable approach to micro-urbanism as a way to improve the quality of our built environment and its future planning. The case study of Dalston (London) enlightens the centrality of cool neighbourhoods where the relationship between community, design, and good living represents one of the best tool to improve quality of every-day life and the metamorphism of the contemporary urban environment.
-Luca Molinari, Full Professor Department of Architecture and Design Luigi Vanvitelli, Universita della Campania (Naples).
Often it takes someone from elsewhere to investigate the changes taking place in one's city, which Carlos Garcia Vazquez does in his fascinating analysis of gentrification in the Dalston neighbourhood in east London. Arguing instead for a bottom-up mode of urban transformation based upon shared 'commons', this book is of clear relevance to cities everywhere.
-Murray Fraser, Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.
