Academic literature on the topic 'American literature City and town life in literature'

By applying a theoretical framework based on different models proposed in border studies literature, this article analyzes the morphological, functional, institutional and identity characteristics that make Point Roberts—an American exclave in the Pacific Northwest—a “cross-border town”. Using an online survey and face-to-face interviews, the author combines both quantitative and qualitative research methods in order to examine the forces that link Point Roberts and the Canadian city of Delta that lies across the Canada–US border. This paper highlights the specificities of this unique geographic configuration as well the challenges that the border represents.

SummaryThe period after Italian Unification saw a marked increase in the volume of publications, magazines and books intended specifically for a female readership which was made up of girls and married women. It also saw the rise of the professional woman writer and journalist. Drawing on two of the most popular genres, the novel (in particular the domestic novel) and conduct literature, this article examines their representations of the city and urban life. It notes that while the physical transformation of major towns and cities was bringing in its wake far-reaching changes to the experience of urban life, the literature for women treats the city as an almost entirely abstract entity with few distinctive characteristics. Instead, the focus of these writings is on the drawing up of rulebooks designed to enable women to negotiate urban life without bringing opprobrium to bear on themselves or their families

Abstract In traditional Greenlandic literature as among the critics of modern civilisation, modernisation and urbanisation correspond to alienation, loneliness, urban misery, and stress. On the other hand, more and more people try to get to the big cities. An urban centre like Nuuk seems to be a success. In contrast, the small remote settlements in Greenland continuously face major problems of social disorders and poverty because of extreme living costs and unemployment. In this article, life in the city is discussed through the eyes of youths from Nuuk and the rural East Greenlandic small town of Ittoqqortoormiit. The data come from three succeeding projects, CAM I-II-III, which included photos and texts from young Greenlanders between 10 and 20 years of age regarding themes such as “my school,” “my friends,” “my media,” and “my city.” An analysis of the material produced reveals that the views of these young people fit urban theories concerning life style and behaviour; rural dwellers submitting to a life with close connections and tranquillity opposite to the hectic city dwellers’ life in an urban area.

John Galt, town-planner and novelist, differed from contemporary writers such as William Wordsworth in his response to nature and to urban life. As agent for the Canada Company, he had the chance in 1827 to put some of his theories about town building into practice. Four years later, his novel Bogel Corbet presented a fictional version of that experiment in urbanism. All Galt's writings about the founding of a town emphasize community rituals and unity. His hope was that his settlement would move through an ascending order from village to town to garrison to city. The actual town of Guelph was of course unable to satisfy his ideal; in Bogle Corbet he adopts an ironic tone at the expense of the little town. But Bogle Corbet has another importance: in its random form as well as in its tone it emphasizes discontinuity. It foreshadows later treatments of small town life as well as has antecedents in English and Scottish literature. Since Galt's time, the ironic sequence sketch has proved a very appropriate literary genre for reflecting the disharmony of small Canadian towns.

Michael Cho’s graphic novel Shoplifter is a fine example of “Asianfail,” where the heroine fails to excel as Asian North Americans are “supposed to.” Narratives of failure are either rare or untold in Asian North American literature because Asians are often stereotyped as the successful model minority. Yet Shoplifter is more than simply a story about a twenty-something woman’s search for identity. With its rich details and striking colours, Cho’s visual language suggests that the graphic novel is also about contemporary urban life: its strange beauty and darkness, its complexities and hollowness. Shoplifter is a narrative about the development of a young Asian North American woman as well as a tribute to—and critique of—big city life.

Abstract Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) has found unusual currency of late. In 2011, the play lent its name to a major funding program launched by the National Endowment for the Arts; in 2017, it appeared in the center of a popular podcast and was revived by a British theater company in the wake of a terrorist attack. These productions recognize what terms like middlebrow obscure: Our Town is a civic mediator, a performance that installs art at the center of community life and community at the center of art. Taking inspiration from Antoine Hennion’s sociology of music, this essay ventures into the archive to trace an unfamiliar origin story for Our Town, involving a turn-of-the-century writers’ colony, a Progressive-Era historical pageant, and Wilder’s self-understanding as both confirmed bachelor and “community man.” Through the trajectory of a single play, civic mediation emerges as a pervasive strategy and ethos of American cultural practice, connecting diverse media through time and space.

AbstractSalafism has become part of a public discourse in Cape Town since the last decade of the 20th century. Drawing on extensive interviews with a number of such Salafis and anti-Salafis, this article examines how this search was manifested and then negotiated within the local religious sphere of the city. This article confirms the view presented in the general literature that Salafism represented the aspiration of individuals who desired to chart an independent approach to Islamic practices. Nevertheless, by focussing attention on a number of individuals and measuring their successes, strategies and life-trajectories, the social dimension of Salafi practices is brought into sharp focus. Salafis were not only effective as lone figures who were prepared to break away from everybody; they were also involved in founding communities for their ideas. And in this regard, they could not escape the social contexts in which they found themselves.

For more than a century, his story has regularly exercised historical and literary imaginations alike. How could it be otherwise? Diplomat, playwright, journalist, politician, and visionary, Mordecai Manuel Noah (1785–1851) was an extraordinary individual. In the course of his life, he wrote and produced successful plays, fought a duel, established himself as a popular newspaper columnist, rescued enslaved American sailors during his tenure as U.S. consul in Tunis, published an important book on his travels in Europe and North Africa, influenced presidential elections through his editorship of major newspapers, and served as judge and port surveyor of New York City. He was easily the most prominent and influential Jew in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, he has been described as the first public figure “to demand continuous recognition as both a devoted American and as a devoted Jew.”

AbstractThe clustering of book culture in rural locales around the world is a growing phenomenon. Creative and cultural activity in these bookish communities enhances social capital, and their book-based economies contribute to sustainability. Maleny, in South-East Queensland's Sunshine Coast hinterland, has long been recognised as a centre for books, readers and writers. It is the home of two writers’ festivals,OutspokenandMaleny Celebration of Books. The community attracts city dwellers, and those who like to escape to the Blackall Ranges for relaxation, as well as people who choose to live a ‘slow’ life in the area. Onyx (2005) identified high levels of social capital. In this article, I consider the potential of Maleny to position itself as a ‘book town’. However, my findings confirm that, despite the community's reputation as a place of cultural consumption, prosperity is a hindrance to book town development.

In the mid-nineteenth century, San Franciscans transformed a muddy cove and trading outpost into an American town and then global port. In their rush to build a port and a city, they created a socially, politically, and materially unstable foundation for their rapidly growing urban waterfront. This article argues that the development and growth of early San Francisco cannot be understood apart from its waterfront in general and its role as a port in particular, contributing to a relatively small literature on the relationship between cities and their ports in urban history. Tracing the legal contests over the tidelands, material construction of piers, rise of a vice district, and clashes with vigilante justice, this article examines the creation of San Francisco as a gateway city. It suggests how historians might recover the dynamic, entangled, and at times violent histories hidden beneath the sediments of time along all urban commercial waterfronts.

Thesis (PhD)-- Stellenbosch University, 2013.<br>ENGLISH ABSTRACT: My thesis is on the literary imagining of the city in Zimbabwean literature that emerges as a re-visioning and contestation of its colonial and postcolonial manifestations. Throughout the seven chapters of the thesis I conduct a close reading of literary texts engaged in literary (re)creations of the city. I focus on texts by selected authors from 1949 to 2009 in order to trace the key aspects of this city imagining and their historical situatedness. In the first chapter, I argue the case for the inclusions and exclusions that are evident. In this historical span, I read the Zimbabwean canon and the city that is figured in it as palimpsests in order to analyse (dis)connections. This theoretical frame brings out wider relationships and connections that emerge in the (re)writing of both the canon and city. I adopt approaches that emphasise how spaces and temporalities ‗overlap and interlace‘ to provoke new ways of thinking about the city and the construction of identity. I argue for the country-city connection as an important dynamic in the various (re)imaginings of the city. Space is politicized along lines of race, ethnicity, gender and class in regimes of politics and aesthetics of inclusion and exclusion that are refuted by the focal texts of the thesis. I analyse the fragmentation of rural and urban space in the literary texts and how country and city house politico-aesthetic regimes of domination, exclusion and marginalisation. Using tropes of the house, music and train, I analyse how connections in the city are imagined. These tropes are connected to the travel motif found in all the chapters of the thesis. Travel is in most of the texts offered as a form of escape from the country represented as a site of essentialism or nativism. Both settlers and nationalists, from different ideological positions, invest the land and the city with symbolic political and cultural values. Both figure the city as alien to the colonised, a figuration that is contested in most of the focal texts of the thesis. Travel from the country to the city through halfway houses is presented as a way of negotiating location in new spaces, finding new identities and contending with the multiple connections found in the city. The relentless (un)housing in Marechera‘s writing expresses a refusal to be bounded by aesthetic, nationalist and racial houses as they are constructed in the city. In Vera‘s fiction, travel – in multifarious directions and in a re-racing of the quest narrative in Lessing – becomes a critical search for a re-scripting of gender and woman‘s demand for a right to the city. The nomadism in Vera‘s fiction is re-configured in the portrayal of the marginalised as the parvenus and pariahs of the city in the fiction of Chinodya and Tagwira. In the chapter on Chikwava and Gappah, in the contexts of spatial displacement and expansion, the nationalist nativist construction of self, city and nation comes under stress. I interrogate how ideologies of space shape politico-aesthetic regimes in both the country and the city throughout the different historical phases of the city. In this regard I adopt theoretical approaches that engage with questions of aesthetic equality as they relate to the contestation of spatial partitioning based on categories of race, gender and class. In city re-imaginings this re-claiming of aesthetic power to imagine the city is invoked and in all the texts it emerges as a reclaiming of the right to the city by the colonised, women, immigrants and all the marginalised. I adopt those approaches that lend themselves to the deconstruction of hegemonic figuration, disempowerment and silencing of the marginalised, especially women, in re-imagining the city and their identities in it.<br>AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: My tesis se onderwerp is die literêre voorstellings van die stad in Zimbabwiese letterkunde wat ontstaan as ‗n herverbeelding van en teenvoeter vir beide koloniale en postkoloniale manifestasies. Regdeur die sewe hoofstukke van die tesis voer ek deurtastende interpretasies van literêre tekste aan, wat die stad op nuwe maniere uitbeeld. My fokus val op tekste deur geselekteerde skrywers van 1949 tot 2009 ten einde die sleutelelemente van hierdie proses van stadverbeelding en die historiese gesitueerdheid daarvan te ondersoek. In die eerste hoofstuk bied ek die argument aan betreffende die voor-die-hand liggende in- en uitsluitings van tekste. Deur hierdie historiese strekking lees ek die Zimbabwiese kanon en die stad wat daarin figureer as palimpseste, ten einde die (dis-)konneksies te kan analiseer. Hierdie teoretiese beraming belig die wyere verhoudings en verbindings wat na vore kom in die (her-) skrywe van beide die kanon en die stad. Ek gebruik benaderings wat benadruk hoe ruimtes en tydelikhede oormekaarvloei en saamvleg om sodoende nuwe maniere om oor die stad en oor identiteitskonstruksie te besin, aanmoedig. Ek argumenteer vir die stad-platteland konneksie as ‗n belangrike dinamika in die verskillende (her-)voorstellings van die stad. Ruimte word só verpolitiseer met betrekking tot ras, etnisiteit, gender en klas binne politieke regimes asook ‗n estetika van in- en uitsluiting wat deur die kern-tekste verwerp word. Ek analiseer verder die fragmentasie van landelike en stedelike ruimtes in die literêre tekste, en hoe die plattelandse en stedelike ruimtes tuistes bied aan polities-estetiese regimes van dominasie, uitsluiting en marginalisering. Die huis, musiek en die trein word gebruik as beelde om verbindings in die stad te ondersoek. Hierdie beelde sluit aan by die motif van die reis wat in al die hoofstukke manifesteer. Die reis word in die meeste tekste gesien as ‗n vorm van ontsnapping uit die platteland, wat voorgestel word as ‗n plek van essensie-voorskrywing en ingeborenheid. Beide intrekkers en nasionaliste, uit verskillende ideologiese vertrekpunte, bekleed die platteland of die stad met simboliese politieke en kulturele waardes. Beide verbeeld die stad as vreemd aan die gekoloniseerdes; ‗n uitbeelding wat verwerp word in die fokale tekste van die studie. Reis van die platteland na die stad deur halfweg-tuistes word aangebied as metodes van onderhandeling om plek te vind in nuwe ruimtes, nuwe identiteite te bekom en om te leer hoe om met die stedelike verbindings om te gaan. Die onverbiddelikke (ont-)tuisting in die werk van Marechera gee uitdrukking aan ‗n weiering om deur estetiese, nasionalistiese en rassiese behuising soos deur die stad omskryf en voorgeskryf, vasgevang te word. In die fiksie van Vera word reis – in telke rigtings en in die her-rassing van die soektog-motif in Lessing – ‗n kritiese soeke na die herskrywing van gender en van die vrou se op-eis van die reg tot die stad. Die nomadisme in Vera se fiksie word ge-herkonfigureer in uitbeelding van gemarginaliseerdes as die parvenus en die uitgeworpenes van die stad in die fiksie van Chinodya en Tagwira. In die hoofstuk oor Chikwava en Gappah word die nasionalistiese ingeborenes se konstruering van die self, stad en nasie onder stremmimg geplaas in kontekste van ruimtelike verplasing en uitbreiding. Ek ondervra hoe ideologieë van spasie vorm gee aan polities-estetiese regimes in beide die platteland en die stad regdeur die verskillende historiese fases van die stad. In hierdie opsig maak ek gebruik van teoretiese benaderings wat betrokke is met vraagstukke van estetiese gelykheid met verwysing na kontestasies oor ruimtelike verdelings gebaseer op kategorieë van ras, gender en klas. In herverbeeldings van die stad word hierdie reklamering van die estetiese mag om die stad te verbeel, bygehaal in al die tekste as herklamering van die reg tot die stad deur gekoloniseerdes, vroue, immigrante en alle gemarginaliseerdes. Ek maak gebruik van benaderings wat hulself leen tot die dekonstruksie van hegemoniese verbeelding, ontmagtiging en die stilmaak van gemarginaliseerdes, veral vroue, in die herverbeelding van die stad en hul plek binne die stadsruimte.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009.<br>Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 190-200). Issued in print and online. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations.

Although the picturesque sketch genre is primarily associated with rural subjects, it was also applied to city life during the mid-nineteenth century, when urban populations were undergoing unprecedented growth. Chapter 2 argues that the newly popular picturesque city sketch helped the emergent middle class to establish its identity as it attained a distinctive position between the wealthy and the working classes. Walking the streets, the middle-class picturesque city sketcher turned the class-divided city into picturesque tableaux that were far less antagonistic to city life than the sensationalist characterizations that were central to the dominant mode of city writing in midcentury. The chapter examines city sketches and fiction derived from the genre, written by Edgar Allan Poe, Lydia Maria Child, George “Gaslight” Foster, Margaret Fuller, Cornelius Mathews, and others. Although city sketchers helped articulate a middle-class identity, the picturesque at times tended to give way to a sublime mode in which the city crowd threatened to absorb the middle class into its undifferentiated mass.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the urban bourgeoisie sought to respond to challenges of city life through the creation of public urban parks in a wide-scale project that has been termed the “park movement.” The park movement involved not only the design and development of parks, but also extensive writings starting in 1840s that depicted the social benefits to be gained by building picturesque rus in urbe (“country in the city”) spaces. The writings of the park movement, dominated by the topic of New York’s Central Park but also encompassing comparisons between European and American public spaces and the broader possibilities of U.S. urban parks, included work by Andrew Jackson Downing, Frederick Law Olmsted, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and even a novel by Sylvester Judd that centered on public park design. This chapter argues that although the park was ostensibly envisioned as an egalitarian instrument of social reform, bringing together the genders and classes in an idealized intimate public sphere, ultimately the literature of the park movement most fully addressed the anxieties of bourgeois men about their authority over female-dominated domestic spaces, as well as seeking to reclaim moral order against working-class men’s domination of the city streets.

The article analyzes works of Byzantine, New Greek and Russian literature of the late XVIIIth — first half of the XXth century, belonging to the common cultural space of the Eastern Christian world: “The Life of St. Basil the Younger”, “Philotheou parerga” by Nikolaos Maurokordatos, “Pure Liza” by N.M. Karamzin, “Eugene Onegin” by Alexander Pushkin, “The Cherry Orchard” by Anton Chekhov, “The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov. It is revealed that in all works the story space is divided into two archetypal loci: “city” (Constantinople / Moscow / Petersburg / Paris) and “garden” (paradise garden / town estate / country estate). It is shown that the locus of “city” correlates with such concepts as “evil”, “lawlessness”, “danger”, “nonfreedom”, “aggression / mutilation / murder”, “sin”, “deception / betrayal / treachery”, and locus “garden” — with concepts of “good”, “legitimacy”, “security”, “freedom”, “love / friendship / benevolence”, “virtue”. It is proved that in each of the works it is possible to distinguish a common set of extremely generalized immutable features, going back to a single archetypal source. It is concluded that a certain number of key characteristics of the Russian estate of the XVIII — early XX century as regards their origin can be correlated with Greek-Byzantine sources.

The robin was twitching, tremoring, convulsing uncontrollably, and peeping occasionally. The student handed the bird to me, and in a few minutes it was dead in my hands. It was April 23, 1963, and I was in my laboratory at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, when the student walked in with the bird. A week earlier the elm trees of Hanover had been sprayed with the insecticide DDT to control the spread of Dutch elm disease by elm bark beetles. In the following weeks 151 dead birds filled my freezer, many of them exhibiting before they died the tremors that we later learned were typical of DDT poisoning. Four of us were conducting a small-scale study of the effects, if any, of the DDT spray program in Hanover. We were shocked by what was happening to the local birds, but we would have expected this reaction to DDT if we had read the scientific literature on earlier DDT spray programs on elm trees. We had not. We soon realized that we had rediscovered what other ornithologists had already reported from DDT spray programs in the American Midwest. We also soon learned that DDT was ineffective in preventing the spread of Dutch elm disease and that another procedure, sanitation without insecticides, effectively protected the elms. This DDT spray procedure was all costs and no benefits. Hundreds of towns were killing thousands or millions of birds while not protecting their elms. The whole thing struck me as absurd and tragic. It became a life-changing event for me. I decided that DDT was a chemical that had to be stopped, although I hadn’t the slightest idea where such a conclusion was going to lead. I was 33 years old and had become what in those days was usually called a conservationist. Now such people have been renamed “environmentalists.” I had a dubious beginning as such a person. When I was about seven and living in a northern suburb of Philadelphia, I came across a couple of snakes.

Editors’ Note: In our second literary selection—excerpts from Charles S. Johnson’s 1923 essay “Illinois: Mecca of the Migrant Mob”—the famed sociologist renders a broad-stroke account of consolidation and growth of the Black Metropolis. This essay, like many pieces of historical, sociological, and journalistic writing emanating from Chicago contributed to a literature of fact that was characteristic of early African American literary work in the city. While Johnson’s assertions about the paucity of black intellectual and cultural life are challenged throughout the current volume, equally important to note is the stylistic strategy with which he presents his analysis of “this Colored Chicago—the dream city—city of the dreadful night!” His elegant, high-keyed prose employs metaphor and other literary devices and arrays facts with novelistic selectivity and pacing. In this manner, Johnson’s essay looks ahead to a mutually beneficial interpenetration of fiction and sociological writing that would mark many of the most notable works of the Black Chicago Renaissance....

The United States produced a number of early utopian visions of suburban dispersal, demonstrating that Americans had inherited some of the anti-urban tendencies of their British forebears. An early feminist science-fiction novel by Mary Griffith insisted that cities could be great, but she was decidedly in the minority. After consuming British science fiction in the 1870s, American authors dominated utopian literature in the 1880s, many providing it with new urgency by engaging head-on with the rise of the industrial corporation. These writers were a heterogeneous bunch—ranging from math teachers to Spiritualist bohemians—but while they were often politically opposed to one another, they were consistent in their concept of utopia: life in large, complex cities such as New York or Boston was maddening, and a new world of glass, metal, synthetic stone, whirring machines, and, most importantly, endless greenery, needed to rise in place of the terrible city.

This chapter recovers the transnational and hemispheric interests and influences of the Catholic priest Félix Varela (1788–1853), who lived for almost thirty years in the US and was nicknamed the “Father of the Irish” during his lifetime. It challenges the fractured reading of Varela’s archive in the scholarly literature, where he is normally studied only as an influential Cuban philosopher, his impact on US history having passed almost without note, and fills this lacuna by illustrating the manner in which Varela played a key role in the Protestant-Catholic debates of the 1830s–1840s and in the secularization of the public school system of New York City. Varela’s religious-ethical works Cartas a Elpidio (1835, 1838) demonstrate how these debates facilitated the emergence of minority politics in the US and the important role of Latina/os to that emergence. Nowhere is this more evident than in Varela’s annotated translation of Thomas Jefferson’s Manual of Parliamentary Practice, which exhibits a hemispheric reach and significance. It was intended for Spanish-speaking residents of the US, for readers in the nascent republics of Latin America and in colonial Cuba. An examination of Varela’s US archive, beyond his supposed authorship of Jicoténcatl (1826), locates Varela, on a Latino Continuum that reveals these early Latina/o writers as cultural actors shaping the very foundation of US history while also engaging broader ideas in Latin American political and cultural life. It thereby fundamentally challenges contemporary scholars to rethink the still existing divides between American, Latin American, Cuban, and Latinx studies.

“Can the oversight of the religion and morals of the young men, long kept up in American Colleges,” President James McCosh asked an international audience of Presbyterian leaders in 1884, “be maintained any longer?” “Three-fourths to nine-tenths” of America’s colleges, McCosh observed, earnestly “continue to profess religion.” But state institutions, he noted, “scarcely profess to keep up any religion” lest they “offend” any religious minority. Some of the nation’s larger colleges also find it “vain” to give religious instruction to students. Yet the absence of religious education in “our secular institutions,” according to McCosh, was not the only problem facing American higher education. To avoid “the Infidelity” now evident in some parts of American higher education, many denominations were establishing their own institutions. Yet, in McCosh’s estimation, the academic quality of their faculties was so low that these institutions actually injured the cause of religion. “The time is over,” the brusque Scotsman insisted, “when men are to be appointed to our College chairs simply because they are pious or loud in their orthodoxy.” Unless Christian institutions have a faculty “equal in ability and scholarship” to the leading colleges and universities, the nation’s best students “will, in spite the efforts of ministers, flock to the Secular Colleges, which will then control them, and may use the intellectual life which they possess to the worst of purposes.” To McCosh, his colleagues at Princeton, and many peers at other institutions, parents and students should not have to choose between scholarship or orthodoxy. When Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard College, accepted an invitation to debate the role of religion in collegiate education two years later before the Nineteenth Century Club in New York City, McCosh welcomed the opportunity to present a case for preserving evangelical religion’s place in the halls of the nation’s leading academic institutions. At Princeton, evangelical ideals and practices helped the institution fulfill its dual purpose of meeting the nation’s need for educated leaders and, as the college’s first president termed it, serving as a “Seminary of vital Piety as of good Literature.”

In the process of globalization, building on the particular spatial scenery of the waterfront, cities tend to refresh their strategies of development to adapt new trends of urban life with huge urban waterfront regeneration projects. These usually focus on a target of maximum marketing and construction of a new image-vision, which aims to represent the city in the global agenda. This aspect is depending on bigger changes in the urban context, the shift in government structures to entrepreneurial forms that involve externalization of state functions (Swyngedouw 2005; p. 1998). The rationale behind the phenomenon of waterfront regeneration and the global embracement of it is now “widely recognized if incompletely understood" (Hoyle 2001 pp. 297), as the relevant literature is based on case studies with focus on the examples of North American and European cities. The goal is to contribute to the more general, theoretical contention of urban waterfront regeneration in developing countries in understanding their dimensions in terms of governance and planning. The research tackles urban waterfront regeneration in Istanbul, Turkey by studying the most recent initiative of urban waterfront regeneration along Halic /The Golden Horn, the Halic Shipyard Conservation Project. The theoretical framework that underpins this study is derived from the discourse on new forms of urban governance including private, public and civic actors (Paquet 2001) that influence planning processes and project outcomes. To evaluate the planning process from a comprehensive governance perspective, indicators include: the legal framework, decision-making process, actors and their relations (Nuissl and Heinrichs 2010) and as normative the perspective of an inclusive planning approach (Healey 1997, 2006) helps to evaluate the planning process of the project. As urban waterfront regeneration literature is mostly based upon case study approaches, a critical overview of international examples is conducted. Both primary and secondary data is collected through: literature review, review of laws, review of official documents and land-use plans, an internship, 31 interviews, 91 questionnaires, participatory observation, a workshops, observation and photographs. The aim is to assess to which extend the top-down governance forms, but also bottom-up grass root empowerment influence the planning process and project outcomes, giving recommendations for an inclusive planning approach. The second aim is to evaluate the urban waterfront regeneration project studying its impact on the neighboring community. Bedrettin Neighborhood is chosen for analysis and its position in the planning process along with its needs are exposed. The thesis argues the modes in which along with clear targets for the improvement of the quality of life for the neighboring community, the urban waterfront regeneration project, Halic Shipyard Conservation Project, will be able to escape the current deadlocks and collisions between government, investors, resistance and local community and might have a chance to actually set an urgently needed precedent of a new planning culture in Istanbul.