The Urban Portal

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Black Metropolis Research Consortium

Columbia College, Chicago Public Library, Chicago History Museum, Chicago State University, DePaul University, Dominican University, DuSable Museum of African American History, Illinois Institute of Technology, Kennedy King College, Loyola University, Roosevelt University, Northwestern University, University of Illinois Chicago, University of Chicago
The Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC) is an unincorporated Chicago-based association of libraries, universities, and other archival institutions with major holdings of materials that document African American and African diasporic culture, history, and politics, with a specific focus on materials relating to Chicago. The University of Chicago serves as Host Institution of the BMRC.
The BMRC is dedicated to making broadly accessible its members' holdings of materials that document African American and African diasporic culture, history, and politics, with a specific focus on materials relating to Chicago.

Filed under: Organizations

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Can public art reverse urban decay?

American cities as diverse as Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Cleveland, have made significant investments over the past few decades in community-based art projects. One example is Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Project. Since 1984, the project has created over 3,000 murals, generating a slew of tourist attractions. Such considerable investments by Philadelphia and other cities beg the question of whether arts projects, aside from their aesthetic value, will have lasting effects on the community.

December 01, 2011

Filed under: Issues

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Chicago Imagebase

The Chicago Imagebase is a Web-based project aimed at enhancing knowledge about the built environment of the Chicago region. On this site you will find a wide variety of images and other data along with information on how to use this data to study the city.

Filed under: Data

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Cities and Buildings Database

University of Washington Library
The Cities and Buildings Database is a collection of digitized images of buildings and cities drawn from across time and throughout the world, available to students, researchers and educators on the web.

Begun in 1995, the collection was conceived as a multi-disciplinary resource for students, faculty, and others in the academic community. It has grown steadily since then, with contributions from a wide range of scholars, and contains images ranging from New York to Central Asia, from African villages, to the Parc de la Villette, and conceptual sketches and models of Frank Gehry's Experience Music Project. These have all been scanned from original slides or drawn from documents in the public domain.

Filed under: Links

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Creative City Network of Canada

Municipalities are playing a growing role in the development of arts, culture and heritage in Canada. The Creative City Network of Canada (CCNC) is an organization of municipal staff working in communities across Canada on arts, cultural and heritage policy, planning, development and support.

The CCNC exists to connect and educate the people who do this work and share this working environment so we can be more effective in cultural development in our communities. By sharing experience, expertise, information and best practices, members support each other through dialogue, both in person and online.

Filed under: Organizations

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European Association for Urban History

The European Association for Urban History was established in 1989 with the support of the European Union. The Association organizes conferences every two years. These biannual conferences provide a multidisciplinary forum for historians, sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, art and architectural historians, economists, planners and all others working on different aspects of urban history. Membership in the Association is free of charge, and is demonstrated by repeated active participation at the conferences. The Association supports participation of young scholars by stipends, which cover registration fees, and since 2010 it even offers mobility stipends in a limited number of justified cases. The first conference took place in Amsterdam in 1992.

Filed under: Organizations

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Fourth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies

July 1–July 3, 2013
University of Groningen
Groningen, The Netherlands

Filed under: Events

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Hearing Landscape Critically: Music, Place, and the Spaces of Sound

September 9–September 11, 2013
Stellenbosch University
Stellenbosch, South Africa

Filed under: Events

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Journal of Urban Design

The Journal of Urban Design is a scholarly international journal which advances theory, research and practice in urban design. There is a growing recognition of the need for urban design in shaping, managing and improving the quality of the urban environment. It is now considered one of the core knowledge components of planning education and practice and is equally important for architectural education and practice. Thus, increasing numbers of architects, planners, surveyors, landscape architects and other professions concerned with the quality of urban development are specialising in urban design.

The Journal of Urban Design provides a new forum to bring together those contributing to this re-emerging discipline and enables researchers, scholars, practitioners and students to explore its many dimensions. The Journal publishes original articles in specialised areas such as urban aesthetics and townscape; urban structure and form; sustainable development; urban history, preservation and conservation; urban regeneration; local and regional identity; design control and guidance; property development; practice and implementation.

Filed under: Journals

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LIT CRI ‘13

November 6–November 8, 2013
Eastern Mediterranean Academic Research Center (DAKAM)
Istanbul, Turkey

Filed under: Events

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MetroTrends Data

Urban Institute
MetroTrends is the Urban Institute's report card and toolkit for researchers, students, journalists, elected officials and the public on the state of metropolitan economies. The site provides data for the top 100 cities in the following topic areas: arts and culture, crime, demographics, economic output, employment, food insecurity, health insurance, housing, nonprofits, unemployment, and wages.

Filed under: Data

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Mural Locator

Mural Locator is a simple to use web tool for helping people locate murals around the world to discover the art around us. Our goal is to find locations of amazing public art wall murals to share them with you and to help archive the history and importance of murals. We connect with artists, muralists, and art foundations to expand the knowledge of art. 

Filed under: Links

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Public Art Online

A unique public art information site which provides guidance and examples of public art practice from around the UK and internationally.  

Filed under: Links

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Research Center for Urban Cultural History

University of Massachusetts Boston
The Research Center for Urban Cultural History (RCUCH) premises its work on the multi-disciplinary study of cities as dynamic sites where cultures are generated, renegotiated and transmitted. Housed within an institution of higher learning with a commitment to an urban mission and an exceptionally diverse student body, and located in a city richly endowed with intellectual resources, the RCUCH initiates and facilitates scholarly and teaching projects that explore a wide array of possible links between studies of cities in the U.S. and throughout the world, encompassing both contemporary and historical topics. The Center's educational, scholarly, and outreach activities are directed toward achieving a flexible, comprehensive and innovative approach to urban cultural history in a global context.

The Center's principal focus is on interdisciplinary and collaborative research and teaching in urban cultural history. This field focuses on: the specificity of the urban setting and its environs; spatial definition; demographic and economic shifts; temporal change; cultural exchange and cultural transformation; and discursive and signifying networks created by the production of meaning between groups and populations.

Filed under: Organizations

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Seattle Municipal Archives

City of Seattle
The Seattle Municipal Archives (SMA) holds over 10,000 cubic feet of records documenting the history, development, and activities of the agencies and elected officials of Seattle. Some of the research strengths of the holdings include parks, engineering, legislative activities, and urban planning. 

Filed under: Links

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The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory

Chicago History Museum
The Great Chicago Fire & the Web of Memory consists of two main parts. The first part, titled The Great Chicago Fire, includes five chronologically organized sections that together present a history of the fire.  The sections of the second part, The Web of Memory, examine six ways in which the fire has been remembered:  eyewitness accounts, contemporary journalism and illustrations, imaginative forms such as literature and art, the legend of Mrs. O'Leary and her cow, fire souvenirs of many different kinds, and formal commemorations and exhibitions. Each of the sections has three integrated components: thematic galleries of images, a library of texts, and an interpretive essay.

Filed under: Links

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Travel, Tourism, and Urban Growth in Greater Miami

The growth of cities stems in large part from efforts by local boosters to promote them as ideal locations for work, leisure, and residence. Nowhere is this more essential than in locations whose development depends on tourism. Developers and tourism promoters are key "sellers" of the urban fantasy, and their ideas both animate the public's desires, and express general beliefs, trends, and tendencies in how the city is viewed.

These expressions can be found in promotional material, but also in design and architecture, the planning of new communities, the formation of historic and tourist districts, the use of natural landscapes, the artistic markers of diverse ethnic districts; in short, the visible symbols with which a place presents itself.

Miami embodies many of these trends that have shaped travel, tourism, and urban growth in the last century. Miami was built on promotionalism, on selling the image of paradise through new forms of advertising and media emerging at the turn of the century. Promoters developed fantastic sketches and drawings of tropical fantasylands, places with alluring names like Opa Locka and Coral Gables, whose themed designs represented early models for idealized cities that would be epitomized with the advent of Disney World and, recently, Celebration, Florida.

Filed under: Links

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UCL Urban Laboratory

London's Global University
The UCL Urban Laboratory, established in 2005, is a university wide initiative to bring together the best urban teaching and research at UCL. Our activities build on the full spectrum of work at UCL across the arts and sciences ranging from civil engineering to film studies, from urban history to the latest developments in architectural design.

Urban research at UCL draws on a rich heritage of ideas including the path breaking insights of figures such as Patrick Abercrombie, Peter Hall, Ruth Glass, Peter Cook and Reyner Banham. The engagement between UCL and wider public debates over the future design and planning of cities is a distinctive feature of our research.

Filed under: Organizations

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