Sky Deck City, Empty Ground: Inward-Facing Towers, Anti-Human Design, and the Unmaking of the Street as Commons
Oakland’s skyline, viewed from the lake or from the low-rise flats of West and East, reads as a vertical script of intent. Glass and steel lean out over streets where the asphalt still remembers redlining, redevelopment, and the long work of Black and Brown neighborhoods making culture against the grain of extraction. The newest towers arrive almost hermetically sealed: amenity stacks marketed as complete worlds, with gyms and rooftop pools and coworking floors and pet spas, announcing themselves as solutions to vacancy and engines of “revitalization” while quietly redirecting daily life inward, away from the blocks that surround them.
Seen from the sidewalk, these buildings do not simply add height, they reorganize circulation. Elevators and lobbies collect residents into vertical circuits where fitness, leisure, and casual sociality happen behind glass, in rooms reserved for key holders, while the street at the base is left thin: a strip of concrete, a controlled entry, sometimes a long run of “future retail” that never quite arrives. The same years that have filled Oakland’s skyline with inward facing, high amenity towers have also seen a proliferation of anti-human details in the shared spaces below, from segmented benches and leaning rails at bus stops to planters and boulders that quietly block off alcoves and underpasses where people once rested or slept.
The language that circulates around these projects, words like community, connection, public, neighborhood, rides alongside this spatial transformation, not at its center but as its echo. Terms that once gathered force in tenant meetings and street marches and mutual aid kitchens are repurposed to describe clusters of renters bound more by lease terms than by shared struggle, rooftop lounges that require key fobs, neighborhoods whose radius is measured from a lobby door. This essay moves first through the architectures themselves, the inward facing ecosystems of the towers and the hostile furniture at their feet, and only then turns to the way these built forms thin out the meanings of the words attached to them, loosening “community” and “public” from the streets that gave those words their power in the first place.
In Oakland, this vertical turn lands on ground already worked over by earlier waves of planning confidence. Downtown redevelopment zones carved through Black business corridors, BART construction cut trenches and erected concrete mezzanines that were never fully knit back into the surrounding neighborhoods, and auto-oriented arterials widened the distance between West Oakland homes and the waterfront. Jack London’s warehouses became lofts, auto rows became “up and coming” districts, and each cycle promised that this time investment would flow outward as well as in. The new towers represent the latest consolidation in that sequence, concentrating value in parcels that touch Broadway and the lake while many of the side streets and long-time residential blocks continue to navigate disinvestment, speculation, and the steady pressure of rising land costs.
Towers as inward facing ecosystems
In the official stories, the new towers of Downtown, Uptown, Jack London, and Pill Hill arrive as complex, self-contained organisms. They are drawn, rendered, and leased as ecosystems that promise to satisfy a wide spectrum of everyday needs without demanding much engagement with the surrounding city, complete worlds where waking up, working, exercising, socializing, drinking, even walking the dog can unfold within a single, access-controlled shell. Amenity lists read like speculative inventories: rooftop pools with cabanas and city views, skyline lounges with fireplaces, gaming rooms, indoor and outdoor coworking hubs, podcast booths, pet spas, private screening rooms, bike repair stations, demonstration kitchens, meditation suites, app-based car fleets in underground garages. In this diagram, the ground is less a shared surface than the point where the elevator begins and ends.
Henri Lefebvre’s description of abstract space, space reorganized around the imperatives of exchange and control, finds a compact expression in this vertical assemblage. What might once have been scattered across many sites, under different forms of ownership and governance, is gathered into a single infrastructure that is legally private and tightly managed. The coffee that might have been bought at a corner cafe becomes a feature of a residents’ bar, folded into rent or convenience fees; the table that might have anchored a public library or independent coworking room appears as a “creative zone” on level twelve, accessible only to key holders; the courtyard that might have belonged to anyone willing to walk into a small park is reincarnated as a secured terrace, visible from the street but reached only through the lobby and its fob readers.
David Harvey’s reading of Lefebvre emphasizes enclosure, the way capital continually converts shared urban textures into controlled assets. The towers operate as enclosures on multiple registers at once: legal, spatial, economic, affective, wrapping not just space but also particular moods and forms of belonging into a rentable package. They promise, and often deliver, a curated intimacy that does not grow out of long term place making or intergenerational ties, but out of design decisions and service contracts, hospitality training and event calendars. Richard Sennett’s critique of purified environments, spaces in which ambiguity and friction are minimized, also sits close here: the interior of the tower presents itself as a relief from the unpredictability and unruliness of the surrounding city, an edited urbanism where the rough edges have been filed away.
The language that accompanies this spatial form is familiar and soothing: “spaces for connection,” “a community that gathers above the city,” “neighbors meet on the sky deck,” “your urban sanctuary in the heart of it all.” In these formulations, community is quietly resized to match the building envelope, and the building itself becomes the primary unit of urban life, with its own calendar, its own internal geography, its own sense of who “we” are. The streets that run past appear less as pre existing sites of social life and more as scenic advantages, things to be near: theaters, a BART station, a lake, a restaurant row, all described as extensions of the building’s amenity field rather than as independent grounds of attachment. The tower’s interior steps into the role of protagonist, while the city, with its older infrastructures of gathering and survival, is relegated to a backdrop.
To attend to the tower as an ecosystem in this context is to notice how it rearranges circulation: of bodies, money, time, and attention. Residents are invited to loop within a vertical circuit of work, leisure, and maintenance, moving from unit to elevator to cowork floor to gym to lounge and back again, with fewer reasons to pass through public institutions or small, street-level businesses. The building generates its own micro economy and micro culture, and in doing so, it captures streams that would otherwise feed the surrounding blocks: coffee orders that might have gone to a local cafe, hours that might have been spent in a park, chance meetings that might have unfolded at a bus stop or in a laundromat. The harm is not only in what is directly taken, but in what is gradually weakened: a sense of community that extends beyond the parcel line, a habitual use of the street as a commons rather than a corridor, a practice of city life that understands the ground, not the amenity deck, as the primary place where people come together.
Design philosophies behind the vertical ecosystem
The towers that now rise over Broadway and the lake are not only financial instruments, they are also built arguments about what good urban life is supposed to feel like. Their amenity stacks and internal “neighborhoods” do not appear out of nowhere. They descend, in part, from a modernist belief that verticality could rationalize the messy city, compressing housing, services, and recreation into a single, carefully ordered object. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, completed in 1952, is one canonical version of this imaginary, a “vertical garden city” for roughly sixteen hundred residents, with apartments, a mid-building shopping street, and a roof deck that holds a running track, pool, and kindergarten, all meant to allow people to “shop, play, and live” inside a single volume. The promise was not just efficiency but a new, elevated form of communal life, a neighborhood folded into a slab.
Today’s amenity towers borrow that template while translating it into the idiom of lifestyle branding and asset management. Design press and developer literature describe “vertical master planning,” a process in which the tower is treated as a mini-city with functional zones, residential, wellness, co-working, retail, childcare, stacked and separated to maximize privacy, security, and frictionless circulation. Mixed-use is no longer just a matter of a corner store under apartments, it becomes an internalized diagram in which the elevator replaces the sidewalk as the main street of daily life, with each floorplate programmed like a district in a master-planned community. The stated goals are legible: efficient land use, walkability without having to encounter much beyond the parcel line, reduced dependence on cars because everything “essential” is already within the shell.
Within that diagram, amenities are framed not as extras but as infrastructure. Industry pieces talk about them as “essential” to the functioning of the building’s ecosystem, calibrated to “resident patterns” and conceived as the backbone of a holistic, wellness-centered life, gyms with biophilic finishes, quiet coworking rooms, spa suites, children’s play zones, pet care floors, cinema rooms, and “cultural lounges,” all wired with smart systems that promise seamless control over light, air, sound, and access. The design philosophy here is not only to fit many bodies into a small footprint, but to deliver a feeling of curated autonomy, “everything at your fingertips,” as one hospitality-oriented architecture firm puts it, where the frictions of the wider city are absorbed and neutralized by service.
If the early modernist vertical projects were explicit utopias, directed toward a generalized “inhabitant,” the contemporary amenity tower is a targeted product. Its architects and interior designers write about “calm, high-performing experiences across every touchpoint,” about lobbies that feel like boutique hotels, about acoustic insulation that keeps the noise of the city out while preserving the buzz of internal common areas. Gensler and other large firms speak of integrating “social value” into residential design, reducing vacancies, encouraging retention, and “organically” forming cohesive communities through shared amenities and programmed events, yet the community imagined is already pre-sorted by income and screening. The building’s success, in these terms, is measured less by its relation to the surrounding streets than by resident satisfaction scores and the stability of cash flows.
Seen from this angle, the Oakland towers are not simply cramming as many people as possible into a tight downtown grid. They are implementing a coherent, if narrow, vision of the good life, privacy plus proximity, density without unpredictability, community without conflict, nature simulated via roof decks and potted trees, public life curated into members-only lounges and residents’ clubs. They apply the language of mixed-use urbanism and “vibrant neighborhoods” inward, treating the tower itself as the proper scale of the city and relegating the actual street to a view, a gateway, or an external threat to be filtered. In that sense, the problem is not a lack of philosophy, but the specific philosophy at work, a belief that the city’s contradictions can be solved by refining the envelope, perfecting internal circulation, and keeping everything important on the keycard side of the glass.
Empty sidewalks, full amenity decks
Step outside many of these buildings and the alignment between rhetoric and concrete begins to fray. The phrases on the leasing sites conjure images of lively sidewalks and energetic street corners, but the podium façades that meet the ground often offer long pan stretches of glass with few entries, or blank walls interrupted only by secure doors and garage access. “Future retail” posters can remain for years, an endless imminence of activation that repeatedly fails to arrive.
Jan Gehl’s close observation of streets leads him to insist on the importance of small-scale variation: frequent doors, short façades, multiple types of seating, narrow storefronts that create visual interest at walking speed. Jane Jacobs sets “eyes on the street” at the center of urban vitality, emphasizing how quotidian watching and being watched supports safety and sociability. Where tower podiums present long, sealed surfaces with single points of entry, the conditions for these forms of life are thin. People move along quickly. There is little to pause for. The sidewalk becomes a corridor between secure interior and secure transit, not a room in which to linger.
Don Mitchell’s work on public space under neoliberalism notes that even when plazas and promenades are added as part of development packages, they often arrive with extensive rule sets, posted or implied. “No loitering,” “no lying down,” “no vending,” “no amplified sound,” “no political activity.” The gap between the promise of new public space and its actual availability is wide. In Oakland’s tower zones, the gap is sometimes filled not with formal plazas at all but with a minimalist approach to the sidewalk: enough room to meet code, a few trees, perhaps a sculptural object or two, but little in the way of truly public, programmable, furnished space that invites a broad range of uses.
Economically, the amenity deck absorbs many of the functions that street-level businesses might otherwise meet. Coworking floors reduce demand for independent cowork spaces. Private screening rooms compete with small cinemas. Indoor pet areas lessen visits to local parks or dog runs. When residents do go out, they may leapfrog their immediate surroundings, traveling by car or train to destinations elsewhere in the Bay. The blocks at the base of the towers become territories of passage, not hubs of daily exchange.
The language of “revitalization” associated with these projects rests on an assumption that vertical density will naturally translate into horizontal vibrancy. Without deliberate commitments to public investment and small scale, street facing uses, that translation falters. The vitality that appears in marketing renderings, people strolling under string lights past animated storefronts, gives way in practice to intermittent flows of commuters and delivery couriers. The towers are full, their amenity decks busy, but the sidewalks that bind them to the city can feel oddly vacant.
Hostile architecture as negative amenity
Across the same districts where towers consolidate life indoors, the surfaces of the shared city are quietly adjusted to repel lingering. Benches that once allowed a person to lie down now sprout additional armrests at careful intervals. Some are replaced by narrow ledges or angled rails that support only a brief lean. Planters and boulders are arranged in alcoves and under overpasses where tents once clustered. Under certain awnings, metal studs bloom along ledges and thresholds: too small to be noticed at a distance, large enough to make resting painful.
The vocabulary for these interventions is technical and neutral: “crime prevention through environmental design,” “site hardening,” “vandal resistant,” “maintenance friendly.” Yet the experiential translation is straightforward. A person who might once have been able to spend a few hours on a bench, sharing food, talking, or sleeping, finds that the bench now insists on a particular posture and a limited time frame. A person who once sheltered under a bridge against rain finds the ground newly crowded with rocks, planters, or in some instances completely fenced off. The city that was barely enough becomes, incrementally, less.
Hostile architecture, or defensive design, works in concert with law and policing. Where sleeping on a bench is prohibited, benches are reshaped to make sleeping impossible. Where loitering is discouraged, surfaces are tilted, handles added, gaps opened, so that the only comfortable position is passing through. Transit agencies reconfigure station entrances with new gates and fences; the architecture of payment and control doubles as a barrier to informal use of stations as rare, illuminated shelters.
The result is a kind of negative amenity that mirrors the positive amenities upstairs. Rest is possible, but only in private; sitting without paying is increasingly rare; shade and cover exist, but their forms are inhospitable to those whose need for them is greatest. The tower and the bench participate in a single rearrangement: comfort is pulled upward and inward, while discomfort, or at least difficulty, is layered into the street.
The partitioned city and managed visibility
Ethnographic work with unhoused residents in California cities often returns to the idea of constant motion: cannot stay in one place, always being moved along. Law, design, and enforcement combine to produce a geography of short permissions and long exclusions. Some corners are safe for a day, some for an hour, some only until the next patrol. Public space, in this experience, is not a stable commons but a moving target, a set of temporarily usable patches that can be revoked with little warning.
Don Mitchell’s phrase “annihilation of space by law” captures how this works at the level of ordinance: sleeping, sitting, camping, sharing food, urinating, all can become grounds for removal when they occur outside prescribed times and places. Setha Low and Neil Smith’s work on the politics of public space documents how these regulations are unevenly enforced, falling hardest on Black, Brown, poor, and unhoused people whose presence is framed as disorder. Doreen Massey’s insistence that space is made through relations, conflicts, and co presence clarifies what is at stake when some presences are repeatedly pushed away: the relational fabric of the city is being sorted and thinned, with certain encounters systematically prevented.
Hostile architecture is one instrument in this sorting process. A bench that cannot support sleep ensures that particular forms of dwelling are impossible; planters that occupy a flat, sheltered area send those who had used that area into motion; a sloped wall denies seating to anyone unwilling or unable to sit on the ground. The design of transit spaces, especially when combined with enforcement campaigns, defines who can wait and how: fare gates, glass barriers, and fence extensions restrict access not only to trains but to the limited shelter stations provide, converting what might have been informal refuges into tightly policed corridors.
On a weekday morning, one resident might wake up on an upper floor, ride the elevator down to a gym with floor to ceiling windows, shower, grab a coffee from the resident bar, open a laptop in a coworking nook, and later drift to the sky deck for a drink as the sun drops behind the hills. The entire arc from first light to late evening can take place inside a single controlled volume, with the street appearing mainly as view, as distant soundtrack, as something passed over on the way to a garage or a train.
In the same hours, someone sleeping outside near the 12th Street or 19th Street stations might be woken by a security guard or a cleaning crew, asked to move along from under an awning newly lined with metal studs, walk to a bus stop that now has only a leaning rail instead of a bench, and later search for an overpass that has not yet been filled with boulders or raised planters. Each pause is temporary, each patch of relative shelter potentially foreclosed by the next round of hostile design, and the path through the city is traced less by choice than by a series of small expulsions.
At the same time, the towers cultivate a differently managed visibility. Their residents are watched by cameras and greeted by staff in ways meant to convey care; their presence in lobbies and amenity spaces is expected, even celebrated, as evidence that the building is functioning as intended. Where one group is maintained in motion, the other is invited to dwell inside branded rooms, to occupy lounges and decks as a sign of success. The city’s claim to be “for everyone” stretches thin along this divide in who can be at rest where, as some bodies are welcomed into stillness and others are continually nudged along.
In policy and planning documents, words like “public realm,” “complete streets,” and “inclusive design” circulate with increasing frequency. These terms often coexist, on the page, with renderings that quietly include hostile furniture, fenced off plazas, and podium bases that offer little more than a widened sidewalk and a few trees in metal grates. The tension between language and drawing is not trivial: when “public realm improvements” can signify either a tree-shaded plaza with welcoming benches or a single tree beside a bench that forbids reclining, the phrase itself begins to lose clarity, and with it, some of the leverage communities once had when they demanded a genuinely shared city.
Anti-human design and the erosion of “life between”
Anti-human design can be described, in part, as design that narrows the range of acceptable ways to inhabit space. It is evident in the hostile details already discussed, but it also appears in the smoothing of surfaces, the elimination of niches, the drive toward continuous, easily monitored environments. Wherever edges that might have once sheltered informal gathering are replaced by sheer walls or glass, wherever steps that used to double as seats are eliminated in favor of graded slopes, the possibilities for sitting together, improvising, or simply being present are reduced.
Jan Gehl’s call for fine-grained, human-scaled streets is not nostalgic so much as physiological and political. Bodies need places to rest. Relationships benefit from repeated, low stakes encounters in semi-public environments. Children learn cities by exploring edges that are not entirely choreographed. Anti-human design pushes against these needs. It assumes a constant flow of upright movement, a subject who is always passing through, never claiming the space as their own except through payment.
Inside the towers, anti-human tendencies sometimes arrive dressed in comfort. Lounges are carefully furnished with sofas and chairs, but the rules of behavior are written by management rather than negotiated among users. Surveillance cameras watch for misuse. Access can be rescinded for those who violate codes of conduct that are rarely co created. The furniture may be soft, yet the environment is still one in which a narrow band of activities is sanctioned. The full range of human mess, grief, protest, or informal organizing is rarely welcome.
Georg Simmel noted the emotional distance that money introduced into metropolitan life, as interactions became mediated by exchange rather than personal ties. In amenity towers, architecture joins money as a mediator. The places where one might encounter difference are replaced by curated common areas where residents share demographic profiles and lease terms. Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, wandering through arcades and streets, learning the city through drifting, is translated into a resident circulating between gym, lounge, elevator, and unit. The city as a shared project becomes the building as a service.
As the range of bodily postures, uses, and interactions allowed in both public and private quasi-public spaces shrinks, language follows. “Activation” comes to mean programming that keeps people moving and consuming. “Community” can refer to an email list curated by a landlord. “Public” can describe a plaza whose users can be banned. The words still refer to human realities elsewhere, in union halls, churches, mutual aid networks, street corners, but their use in development contexts blunts their edge.
Community, public, neighborhood: words lifted from the street
The vocabulary that saturates tower marketing and planning literature is not new. Community, public, neighborhood, safety, revitalization, inclusion, all have histories anchored in movements that pushed back against displacement, exploitation, and neglect, from tenant unions and neighborhood councils to civil rights organizations, Indigenous land defenders, Black liberation groups, disability justice advocates, and queer collectives naming solidarities forged under pressure.
When a tower brochure declares that “our community gathers on the sky terrace,” it borrows that lineage. The sentence is grammatically correct but contextually strained: the gathering is real in the narrow sense that people do congregate there, yet the community being invoked is bounded by rent payments, screening processes, and management rules, and when a project narrative promises “public realm improvements” but delivers a lobby facing plaza with seating accessible only to badge holders and their guests, the phrase “public realm” stretches to cover a semi-privatized space that lacks the accountability associated with genuinely public ground.
Iris Marion Young’s work on the politics of difference emphasizes that justice in the city requires not homogeneity but a practiced openness to those who do not resemble one another, and community in this sense is not an enclave of similars but a contested, negotiated coexistence. Leonie Sandercock’s mongrel city is likewise one in which mixtures, overlaps, and frictions are central rather than accidental, and in both frameworks the street is not only a place of danger or inconvenience, it is a primary site where political subjects recognize each other and experiment with forms of living together.
Lifted out of this street-bound practice and installed as decorative language in project narratives, these terms begin to lose that texture. “Neighborhood” appears as a list of nearby amenities rather than a set of relationships; “public” is redefined as “visible from the street” rather than “open to all without condition”; “safety” is measured in property values and crime statistics rather than in freedom from harassment by police or security. The harm is not only semantic, but semantic harm matters: when words that once named demands are normalized as product descriptors, it becomes harder to use them to articulate those demands again with the same clarity and force.
There is, however, a way back through usage. When residents, organizers, and designers insist on reconnecting these words to the streets they came from, the gap becomes visible again: community returns to mean people holding each other through crisis and conflict, not just sharing a branded lounge; public refers to places one can enter without permission or purchase; neighborhood refers to the stories and struggles that predate the tower and will outlast it. The potency of these terms depends on their being re anchored in the ground, in the literal ground of sidewalks, bus stops, parks, small storefronts, and informal gathering spots where people remain exposed to one another and to the unfinished work of the city.
Toward counter designs and reparative streets
To move toward a more human-centered city in Oakland is not to reject vertical housing outright, nor to imagine a return to some pure, uncommodified urban past. It is to refuse the arrangement in which comfort is increasingly privatized upward while discomfort is designed into the surfaces below, and to treat benches, planters, podiums, and amenity decks as contested sites rather than foregone conclusions.
Architects and organizations working at the intersection of homelessness and design demonstrate that another approach is possible. Architecture Sans Frontières Québec, for example, frames architecture and homelessness as a question of inclusion, asking what happens when public spaces are planned with people who live outside as primary interlocutors rather than as problems to be managed. That shift leads to benches without hostile modifications, to shelters and canopies that do not push people away with subtle deterrents, and to restrooms that are actually open and maintained, while Jan Gehl’s people first guidelines, if treated as more than aesthetic flourish, would push city agencies and developers to prioritize seating, shade, and ground level permeability as basic infrastructure rather than afterthoughts.
Policy tools exist as well. Community benefits agreements can require that new projects include genuinely public ground floor spaces, not only resident-only amenities, and that hostile design elements be avoided or removed; design standards can prohibit spikes, unnecessary armrest segmentation, and leaning only furniture in city controlled projects; zoning and funding can be directed toward small-scale, locally owned retail that opens directly onto sidewalks, supporting third places not owned by large corporations, while reparative investments can be guided by those who have borne the brunt of displacement rather than by the speculative needs of future tenants.
The role of language in these shifts should not be underestimated. When plans and brochures use words like community, public, and neighborhood, those writing and reading them can ask: where, exactly, does this community gather, who exactly is included in this public, what history and present does this neighborhood name. Retethering these terms to the street, insisting that they refer to conditions and relationships that extend beyond the lobby threshold and into the shared ground of sidewalks, bus stops, plazas, and parks, is part of the work.
The towers will continue to rise for a time; their amenity decks will continue to host carefully curated events, and their lobbies will continue to promise a particular version of city life to those who can afford it. The unsettled question is whether the streets they overlook will be allowed to wither into corridors of compliance, stripped of places to rest and of words that mean what they say, or whether they will be reclaimed as the places where the most powerful terms in the urban vocabulary still derive their force: from bodies in public, from shared risk, and from the refusal to let concrete and copywriting decide who belongs.
references for ADDITIONAL READING
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002.
Gehl, Jan. Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2011.
Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso, 2019.
Harvey, David. Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2001.
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Urban Revolution. Translated by Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Lefebvre, Henri. Writings on Cities. Edited and translated by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
Low, Setha. On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture. Texas: University of Texas Press, 2000.
Mitchell, Don. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: Guilford Press, 2003.
Rosenberger, Robert. Callous Objects: Designs Against the Homeless. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Sandercock, Leonie. Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century. London: Continuum, 2003.
Sandercock, Leonie. Making the Invisible Visible: A Multicultural Planning History Volume 2. California: University of California Press, 1998.
Sennett, Richard. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.
Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. New York: W. W. Norton, 2017.
Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022.
Zukin, Sharon. Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
