Poland, D; (2016) Urban Resilience - Evolution, Co-Creation, and the Remaking of Space. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Dissatisfied with the large urban bias—the overreliance on large cities, spectacular space, and paradigmatic cases—and equally dissatisfied with our urban vocabularies and understandings of suburbanization and gentrification, I seek to explore how urban theory informs us about change in smaller cities and smaller suburban spaces. I argue that much of our urban understandings juxtapose the city as one kind of space and the suburban as another kind of space even though the distinction has become blurred. As a result, I argue that our understandings suburbanization and gentrification fall short of conceptualizing and understanding the remaking of smaller (sub)urban spaces such as West Hartford Center. Utilizing a case study approach, I explore the space of West Hartford Center and how the Center changed—was remade from a suburban town center to a regional center of middle-class hospitality and sociality—from 1980 to 2012. To accomplish this, I introduce ecological resilience as a metaphor and theoretical framework for thinking about and working though our understandings of urban space, the processes of urban change—suburbanization and gentrification—and how and why (sub)urban space is remade. Through the metaphorical and theoretical lens of ecological resilience, I explore West Hartford Center as a complex adaptive system that has been resilient—having the capacity to absorb shock and disturbance while maintaining its function and structure. In doing so, I explore how the actors and their actions—the business owners, government officials, and consumers—coalesce into a dynamic process of re-creating urban space. Through this approach and my findings, I argue for more contextual geographies of place and geographies what happens; including the need for more and better studies of small city urbanism.

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