Urban Sociology

City, Urbanization, Architecture, Planning

• Amsterdam by Bite
  Sites you don't want to miss when you visit Amsterdam (in English and Dutch). Editor: Albert Benschop. Clearinghouse Guide.

• ARCAM - Architectuur Centrum Amsterdam
  Centre for architecture in Amsterdam.

• ArchiNed
  Information about designers, institutions, education and generally those involved in the field of architecture, urban design and landscape architecture in the Netherlands. This information is supplemented with a range of activities of ArchNed, designed to encourage discussion and increase know-how within the profession. Dutch and English version.

• Architect - American Institute of Architects.

• Architectenwerk
  Information for and on Dutch architects. Includes a list of all Dutch architects on the Internet.

• ArchitectureCafe
  The gateway to the world of international architecture. Architectural information in many countries and languages languages.

• ArchiWeb
  Japanese architectural site. Japanese only.

• Best Practices Database
  Solutions to common urban problems facing the world's cities today.

• Blais, Pamela
  How the Information Revolution is Shaping Our Communities
  Resource guide to examine the impacts that information technology and telecommunications have on our cities, towns and land use patterns. Designed to get you thinking about the impacts that changes in telecommunications and information technology will have on our communities.

• Bond van Nederlandse Architecten (BNA)
  Association of Dutch architects.

• BouwWeb
  A Dutch site on the building and engineering industry.

• Building Online - Canada.

• BuildNET
  Building industry related links.

• Carfree Cities
  A design for a city providing excellent transportation without the use of automobiles.

• Caribbean Urbanization in the Years of the Crisis
  The survey data contained in this archive was gathered as part of the project Urbanisation in the Caribbean Basin during the Years of the Crisis. The project was undertaken between 1991 and 1994 and the survey data was collected in 1993. The goal of this comparative project was twofold: first to examine general propositions about Third World urbanisation in the context of the smaller nations of the Caribbean Basin; second, to gain greater insight into specific developments in each country. The countries selected included Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Haiti and Jamaica.

• Centre for Research in Urban Sociology (CRUS) - Ontario, Canada
  A not-for-profit organization, located in Toronto. It is the first organization of it's kind to bring about research, development and awareness of being urban in Canadian cities. The city is the most diverse place were people call home. Urbanization of social life is at the centre of social inquiry. The most frequent areas of study are urban housing, politics, intergroup relationships, class and stratification patterns, and economic structures and the nature of communities.

• Cities of the Future: Dream or Nightmare?
  An anaylsis of the challenges of urban growth worldwide and discussion of the ways some of these challenges may be met.

• City and Shelter (C&S)
  A project that tries to incorporate gender issues into all aspects of decision making in the fields of town planning, transport, urban safety and habitat. C&S has coordinated three research actions for the Commission of the European Communities (Equal Opportunities Unit). The work of the multinational team involved in the project resulted in the publication of a "European Charter for Women in the City" in 1994 in thirteen different languages (included on the CD-ROM City, Citizenship and Gender).

• CIVITAS
  An attempt to make the issue of urban environment a theme for debate and information, in a non-governmental scope. Contains accounts and information on alternative experiences and new methodologies for urban planning, research reports, articles and comments, with emphasis on informal urban settlements. (Portuguese and English versions).

• Community Plans
  A collection of executive summaries on community housings, development needs, and strategies for selected areas. Presented by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban development.

• Cyburbia
  An urban planning portal, presenting links to sites with urban planning, architecture and landscape architecture related information. Most links have annotated descriptions. The site also contains information about 130 architecture and planning related mailing lists. The index is converted from a set of hard-coded Web pages to a true searchable, categorical database. Maintained on Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning.
  
  
  

• Dieberger, Andreas [1994] (Vienna University of Technology)
  Navigation in Textual Virtual Environments using a City Metaphor - PhD Thesis

• Digital Cities
  A comprehensive listing of all digital cities and villages in the Netherlands.

• Digital City - Region Guide Netherlands
  Editor: Richard van Heugten (Bergen op Zoom, Netherlands).

• Donath, Judith Stefania
  Inhabiting the virtual city: The design of social environments for electronic communities
  An approach to the design of on-line social environments. The thesis is that, in order to foster the development of vibrant and viable online communities, the environment must provide the means to communicate social cues and information: the participants must be able to perceive the social patterns of activity and affiliation and the community must be able to evolve a fluid and subtle cultural vocabulary. She starts with an analysis of the fundamental differences between real and virtual societies: the ways social cues are communicated in the real world, the limits imposed on on-line communities due to their mediated and bodiless nature, and directions that virtual societies can take that are impossible for physical ones. On this basis she develops a design platform for creating sociable virtual environments.

• Downtown Revitalization
  (Urban & Regional Planning Program, Eastern Michgan University)
  Downtowns are under stress. Retail businesses especially are suffering from changing retail patterns and shopping habits. This site analyses the problems of downtowms and informs on what could be done about it.

• European Charter for Women in the City
  Women are absent from, or particularly unobstrusive in, all decision making levels related to cities, housing and town planning. They are doubly excluded as city users and as town and housing planners. If a European town planning policy is to deal effectively with new challenges, a new approach and fundamental structural changes are unavoidable. Here you are informed how this can be done.

• Girardet, Herbert [Moved to..??]
  Sustainable Cities
  Sometime around the turn of the millenium, an urban baby will be born whose birth will tip a crucial balance. That day will change humanity from being a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban species. Can the planet accommodate an urbanised humanity? And can humanity cope with living in concrete high-rise canyons? Girardet, a cultural ecologist, writer and film-maker from the UK, explains how people, planners and architects could create a sustainable life in the new mega-cities.

• Cahill, Nick
  Household and City Organization at Olynthus
  An ebook on Greek city planning and civic architecture. It considers some of the relationships between house and city, between household and community, as they were worked out in practive at Olynthus in northern Greece.

• Homes & Communities
  U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)

• Informatie- en Kenniscentrum voor de Ruimtelijke Ordening (IKC RO)

• Institute for Housing Studies and Urban Development (IHS)
  An international education institute, offering regular 3-months courses, tailor-made courses, Master Degree courses, Ph.D.'s and advisory services in the field of urban management, urban environmental management and housing in developing countries and countries in Central and Eastern Europe.

• Kenniscentrum Grote Steden
  A database with research on the solution of problems in big cities in the Netherlands.

• Latour, Bruno
  Paris the invisible city - a sociological diorama

• Martinotti, Guido
  The new social morphology of the cities

• MegaCities Research Programme
  

• Mitchell, William J.
  City of Bits
  A comprehensive introduction to a new type of city, a largely invisible but increasingly important system of virtual spaces interconnected by the emerging information superhighway. William Mitchell (Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT) makes extensive use of concrete, practical examples and illustrations in a technically well-grounded yet accessible examination of architecture and urbanism in the context of the digital telecommunications revolution, the ongoing miniaturization of electronics, the commodification of bits, and the growing domination of software over materialized form.

• Netherlands Graduate School of Housing and Urban Research (NETHUR)
  It provides a structured educational program for the Ph.D. candidates who participate in the research school. The research school has been designated the task of reinforcing research on the city and urban society. A key element of this task is to enhance the coordination of the research performed by members of the diverse disciplines that participate in NETHUR.

• Novak, Marcos
  Trans Terra Form: Liquid Architectures And The Loss of Inscription

• Online Planners Connections
  Provides urban planners with information about how the technology of electronic communications is changing the form and function of our communities, the practice of planning, the way planners learn about and research issues, and the management of planning.

• Paulos, Eric / Goodman, Elizabeth
  Familiar Stranger Project: Anxiety, Comfort, and Play in Public Places

• Photometropolis
  A visual approach to urban sociology, from the sociology department of the University of Milan, Italy.

• Rivertown Simulation
  Experimental interactive simulation of downtown revitalization in the fictional Rivertown.

• RUDI - The Resource for Urban Design Information at Oxford Brookes University UK
  A multi-media resource site for academics and practitioners developed by Oxford Brookes University Library and the Engineering Research & Development Centre at the University of Hertfordshire. A visually impressive and user friendly interface. One of the best internet sites for urban design information.

• Russian Cities on the Web
  A Clearinghouse Approved Guide, compiled by: Sergey Gorokhov. From this guide to Russian cities on the Web you can get information on your destination. Includes a growing list of links to Web sites dedicated to cities throughout Russia.

• State of the Nation's Cities: A Comprehensive Database on American Cities and Suburbs (Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University).
  Part of a contribution to the United Nations' Habitat II conference in Istanbul in June 1996. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) contracted with the Center for Urban Policy Research to assemble a comprehensive database on 77 American cities and suburbs. The database brings together over 3,000 variables from a wide variety of sources, allowing easy comparability of indicators on employment and economic development, demographic measures, housing and land use, income and poverty, fiscal conditions, and a host of other health, social, and environmental indicators. Data files are available for download in several formats (Tab-delimited ASCII, SPSS portable file, Excel, and SAS).

• Stelter, Gilbert (Canada)
  Reading a Community: Doing Urban History at the Local Level
  An Internet Course Manual - Great stuff.

• United Nations Centre for Human Settlements - Habitat
  Home page of the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) held in Istanbul, Turkey, 3-14 June 1996. Information on the background to the conference, talks given , plenary sessions, photos and much more. If you're interested in global urbanisation, hit this site.

• Urbana [full text]
  A tri-lingual journal for the interchange of ideas about methodology, teaching, practice and decision-making related to the study of urban and regional entities particulaarly in relationship to urbanism in Mexico, United States and Canada.

• Urban Environmental Management
  The Urban Environmental Management Research Initiative (UEMRI) was created to assist communication and information exchange between researchers of urban environments around the world. The site contains information on urban environments and their management. It includes Documents (articles, reports, and books), Insights (short insightful write-ups highlighting the problems and solutions in the urban environmental management processes), Keywords (glossaries, definitions and indicators), Numbers (statistics), How-Tos (links to environmentally friendly technologies), Email Lists, and Networks (an extensive listing of environmental professional associations and links to associations for the life sciences, earth sciences, chemistry, and engineering).

• Urban Growth
  An overview of increases in urban populations worldwide. Presented by the World Resource Institute WRI).

• Urban Morphology Research Group - School of Geography, Univ. of Birmingham, UK.
  Site for a research group with international links. Of interest to planners, urban designers, geographers, architects and others interested in the built-environment. Includes an annotated guide to related web sites.

• Urban Sociology
  A collection of links useful to students in urban sociology. Editor: Douglas Martin (Missouri).

• Urban Studies - Yahoo!

• Usenet - alt.planning.urban

• Virtual Tourist
  A map-based interface to City.Net.

• Weiske, Christine / Hoffmann, Ute
  Die Erlebniswelt als Stadt - Über reale und digitale Städte
  Article on the experiences of real and virtual cities. In: Informationen zur Raumentwicklung, 6:365-75.

• Winkel, Niko
  Webdam - Stadspoort
  A database with all digital cities and villages in the Netherlands.

Maps of cities, countries, continents and the world

General

• Countries

• Exploring Africa
  An exhibit of maps and travel narratives from Leo Africanus to Chinua Achene. The virtual exhibit is organized in into islands of materials. Created by Patrick Scott (selection and text) and Jason Pierce (hypertext development).

• Historical Atlas Resource Library (University of Oregon)
  Atlas resources for Europe, Middle East, North Africa & North America.

• Lycos City Guide

• Map Machine - National Geographic.

• MapQuest
  Limited to North America.

• Outline Maps
  A selection of outline maps for use in the classroom or at home.

• Perry-Castañeda Library - Map Collection - Univ. of Texas in Austin, USA
  Maps of almost all countries, including historical maps. It contains many links to other map-related sites and to city map sites. The PCL map collection is mirrored in Germany.

• Travel Guides

• Useful Sites for MapInfor Users - Marjorie Roswell (Baltimore, USA).

• World City Guide

• A World of Maps

Canada

• National Atlas of Canada

Netherlands

• City Online - Interconnected Dutch cities.

• LokatieNET - Maps of the Netherlands.

United Kingdom

• Historical GIS Program
  A Historical Geographical Information System (GIS) for Great Britain covering the period from the late 1830s, when modern staistical data collection can be said to have started, until the early 1970s, when data starts to become available in digital form. It offers an effective mapping tool to historians and historical geographers. The JTAP (Electronic Historical Atlases Project) contains maps and statistical data that appeal to a wider audience, containing animations and 3D scenes. Open the electronic Altas of Industrialising Britain, and see how is works. (many maps require a Tcl/Tk plug-in).

U.S.A.

• Chicago Imagebase

• CitySearch

• Digital City
  A joint venture of America Online and publisher Tribune.

• MapBlast from Vicinity. For detailed maps of American cities.

• Pacific Bell At Hand - Limited to California, USA.

• Panoramic Maps Cities in the United States and Canada, 1847-1929
  Presented by American Memory (Historical Collections for the National Digital Library).

• U.S. Gazetteer
  The gazetteer is used to identify places to view with the Tiger Map Server and obtain census data from the 1990 Census Lookup server. A project sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. The goal of this service is to provide a public resource for generating high-quality, detailed maps of anywhere in the United States, using public geographic data. Views may be zoomed in or out.

  Search for a Place in the US

  Name: State (optional):
  or a 5-digit zip code:

Housing

• Affordable Comfort
  Energy efficiency, weatherization, home environmental quality, and housing performance.

• alt.housing.nontrad - Usenet newsgroup - Nontraditional housing.

• alt.mobilehome - Usenet newsgroup - Manufactured housing.

• Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI)
  Provides an independent service to government and private sector organizations to develop policy and programs from inception to implementation. The site contains some interesting research project publications.

• Beer, Andrew (Flinders University in South Australia) Private Rental Housing in Europe: The View from Australia
  In: National Housing Action Vo. 13, no. 1, 1997.

• Bravo-Neighbours (Buren met Respect en Aandacht Voor de Omgeving)
  A Belgian social movement which tries to organize neighbours with respect for the environment. Includes some sociociological hypotheses concerning social control and help-structures in modern cities. English, Dutch, French, German and Esperanto versions. Editor: Anna Missinne (Leuven, Belgium).

• Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC)
  The federal housing agency of Canada. Created by Kenneth A. Schwartz.

• Charlottesville Urban Design and Affordable Housing
  A project examining urban design and affordable housing in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA.

• Cohousing information - UC Davis
  Cohousing is the name of a type of collaborative housing that attempts to overcome the alienation of modern subdivisions in which no-one knows their neighbors, and there is no sense of community.

• The Cohousing Company
  An architectural and consulting firm that works with resident groups and developers to create communities that cluster private homes around extensive common facilities. Pioneers of the cohousing movement, Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett draw extensively on their direct experience with European and American CoHousing communities to provide workshops and services in the areas of group formation and facilitation, site search and acquisition, land development, architectural design, project management, and finance. The site provides information on cohousing, the company, services provided for developing cohousing communities and a list of resources available through the cohousing company.

• The Cohousing Network
  A coalition of people working to promote the concept of cohousing and help people start cohousing communities and live joyfully in them. Cohousing is the name of a type of collaborative housing that attempts to overcome the alienation of modern subdivisions in which no-one knows their neighbors, and there is no sense of community. The Resource Guide provides an overview of the process of building a community, and descriptions of many resources (books, magazines, videos, etc).

• Cohousing-L
  The electronic mailing list for discussing cohousing. A great source of information on cohousing.

• Coop
  Information about cooperatives to help people understand how they can use the cooperative model to improve their lives and their communities. Presented by the National Cooperative Business Association (NCBA)

• Federation of Egalitarian Communities - Sharing The Dream
  A network of communal groups spread across North America. They range in size and emphasis from small agricultural homesteads to village-like communities similar to the Israeli kibbutzim.

• GHab - Research on Housing
  Research group at the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil), working on alternative design and materials for contemporary housing.

• Habitat for Humanity International
  An ecumenial Christian housing organization building simple, decent places to live in partnership with people in need. See also Habitat Canada

• Housing (Yahoo!)

• Housingnet
  A social housing resouce site from the UK.

• International Co-operative Alliance (ICA)
  An international non-governmental organisation which unites, represents and serves co-operatives worldwide. It provides d information on the co-operative movement in different economic sectors: agriculture, banking, credit, consumer, energy, fisheries, housing, insurance, workers, tourism and health care, and from all continents. It also includes links to other sites and issues of interest to co-operators.

• Kot-Central
  Information on Social Housing in Belgium.

• Metropolis21 - New Ways of living, new spaces to live
  Research about new possible design for living spaces, consideringthe profile of today's metropolitan society. Author: Marcelo Tramontano (University of Sao Paulo, Brazil).

• Public Housing in Singapore
  A research paper that looks at the main Functions and Roles of the Housing and Development Board (HDB). Its philosophy in design and planning and, the measures taken in estate management. The basic goal of the HDB has been to solve housing shortage by providing basic shelter in a high-rise, high-density environment.

• Spreitzer, Donna [1992]
  Living in my Thesis - Cohousing in Davis, California

Editor	dr. Albert Benschop Social & Behavioral Studies University of Amsterdam
Created	August, 1997
Last modified	19th December, 2005