Cities, Allan B. Jacobs contends, ought to be magnificent, beautiful places to live. They should be places where people can be fulfilled, where they can be what they can be, where there is freedom, love, ideas, excitement, quiet and joy. Cities ought to be the ultimate manifestation of society 's collective achievements.

Allan B. Jacobs is one of the world 's best known planners and urban design practitioners, with a long and distinguished international career. Drawing on his professional experience of almost sixty years, Jacobs guides the reader through the lessons he 's learnt as a planner and lover of cities. Cities from Brazil, Italy, India, Japan, China and the US are featured.

Written with a wonderfully engaging, humorous tone and Jacobs own drawings, The Good City transfers lessons on city design, building and urban change to all those willing to help cities become the magnificent, beautiful places they should be - and encourages all inhabitants to learn to appreciate and explore their own cities.

Sport is seen as an increasingly important aspect of urban and regional planning. Related programmes have moved to the forefront of agendas for cities of the present and future. This has occurred as the barriers between so-called 'high' and 'popular' culture continue to disintegrate. Sport is now a key component within strategies for the cultural regeneration of cities and regions, a tendency with mixed outcomes - at times fostering genuinely democratic arrangements, at others pseudo-democratic arrangements, whereby political, business and cultural elites manipulate a sense of sameness and unity among their fellow citizens to smooth the path for the pursuit of what are actually vested interests. Almost any active enactment of a 'sports city of culture' risks divisiveness. Recognizing controversies, with both potentially positive and negative outcomes, this book examines sport within contexts of urban and regional regeneration, via a number of rather different case studies. Within these studies, the role of sport stadium development, franchise expansion and sports-fan (and anti-sport) activism is addressed and articulated with issues concerning, inter alia, public funding, environmental impact, urban infrastructure and citizen identity. The 'sport in the city' project commenced as a research symposium held at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand and number of the essays originate from this occasion. This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

* One of the first critiques of participatory design processes that are currently the fashion in design and business * highlights political, social and methodological obstacles when designers turn to design thinking, participation and "living labs" * uses global examples to introduce a more critical and post-colonial perspective on participation and social innovation throughout the book

The urgent need for a sustainable environment has resulted in the increased recognition of the field of landscape ecology amongst policy makers working in the area of nature conservation, restoration and territorial planning. Nonetheless, the question of what is precisely meant by the term 'landscape ecology' is still unresolved. Is it, for example, an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the environment at a landscape scale? Or perhaps at the level of biological organisation? Still further, has the inseparability of landscape and culture affected the scope of 'landscape ecology'? No doubt, a proper foundation of the discipline must first be cemented. This book then develops such a foundation. In doing so it provides all the diverse applications of the discipline with a solid framework and proposes an effective diagnostic methodology to investigate the ecological state and the pathologies of the landscape.

Interest in the sustainable city is growing around the world and with it come important questions about governing sustainable urban development. Why are there blockages to achieving the goal of a sustainable city? How is it possible to overcome the practical difficulties that initiatives often face? And how can an increasingly technocratic focus be rebalanced with more of a public perspective? In this wide-ranging text, Simon Joss examines mainstream policy and practice and looks at the approaches that can overcome some of their drawbacks. The author examines the core elements of sustainable planning, and how processes of innovation, governance and policy-making work together to achieve sustainable urban change. He assesses the various challenges faced at both the domestic and international level, and across a range of urban scales. These challenges include how to resolve environmentally problematic ways of city-living at the same time as providing for urban social and economic development, and how to adapt the idea and reality of the sustainable city to different geopolitical contexts. The author recognizes that there is no 'one-size-fits-all' solution and examines the range of methods available. In an era where entirely new eco-cities are being built and established ones being retro-fitted in response to environmental pressures, this text looks at the varying successes of the urban sustainability movement and its relationship to the planners, policy-makers and citizens who are inseparable from it. Providing an accessible account of the latest developments in research and policy as well as examples from around the world, this is indispensable reading for students, researchers and practitioners alike.

This book focuses on the practice and experience of urban delicacy governance in Xuhui District, Shanghai. As we know, urbanization is the inevitable course for agricultural civilization to move towards industrial civilization. Over the past forty years, the urbanization of China has developed rapidly and has become an important push for economic development and social progress. At the same time, the rapid expansion of city scale, the shortage of public services, environmental pollution, traffic congestion, housing tension, as well as other urban pain points have emerged, and these have brought about serious challenges to urban governance. Delicacy management is the concentrated expression of modern scientific management theory and the inherent requirement to realize the modernization of national governance systems and governance capability. From delicacy management to delicacy governance, urban governance needs the transformation of logic. Shanghai has been identified as the only super city in the Yangtze River Delta and East China. It is of great significance to understand the theory and practice of urban governance in Shanghai. Meanwhile, Xuhui District is one of the seven central urban areas in Shanghai with a profound historical background, important institutions, advanced science and education.

This book offers a broad range of scholarly interpretations of the evolving forms, the changing dynamics, and the unexpected surprises that characterize contemporary African cities. It wrestles with important questions concerning how large numbers of people without regular work nevertheless find ways to survive and even prosper. It balances investigations of particular cities in sub-Saharan Africa with considerations of a diversity of topics, themes and multi-city comparisons, including themes in: culture, imagination, place and space; political economy and work livelihoods; and urban planning and governance. The collection is both theoretically informed and empirically grounded. Aimed at mid-level undergraduate students, these essays, taken as a whole, provide an understanding of what is happening in African cities today, and why.

Urban development cooperation needs innovative solutions. Despite many efforts, international assistance has failed to address the challenges faced by cities in developing countries. This book seeks to raise awareness about the value of corporate social responsibility as a tool in urban development assistance.

First published in 1985, this book reconsiders the whole question of urbanisation and planning in the Third World. It argues that public involvement, which is now an accepted part of Western planning, should be used more in Third World cities. It shows that many inhabitants of Third World cities are migrants from rural areas and have very definite ideas about what the function of the city should be and what it ought to offer; and it goes on to argue that therefore a planning process which involves more public participation would better serve local needs and would do much more to solve problems than the contemporary approach.

"Based on empirical research from 15 European cities, covering 29 major postwar housing estates, the contributors to this volume explore the idea that mass housing experiments represent an important example of policy transfer. Mass Housing in Europe charts the development of estates examining the problems that have emerged over time, the policy responses and residents' experiences of day-to-day life in the context of change and regeneration. Students, researchers and academics alike will find that this research provides a significant insight into the topic"--Provided by publisher.

Looking at the globalization, urban regeneration, arts events and cultural spectacles, this book considers a city not until now included in the global city debate. Divided into five parts, each preceded by an editorial introduction, this book is an interdisciplinary study of an iconic city, a city facing conflicting social, political and cultural pressures in its search for a place in Europe and on the world stage in the twenty-first century.

In port cities around the world, waterfront development projects have been hailed both as spaces of promise and as crucial territorial wedges in twenty-first century competitive growth strategies. Frequently, these mega-projects have been intended to transform derelict docklands into communities of hope with sustainable urban economies-economies intended to both compete in and support globally-networked hierarchies of cities. This collection engages with major theoretical debates and empirical findings on the ways waterfronts transform and have been transformed in port-cities in North and South America, Europe, the Caribbean. It is organized around the themes of fixities (built environments, institutional and regulatory structures, and cultural practices) and flows (information, labor, capital, energy, and knowledge), which are key categories for understanding processes of change. By focusing on these fixities and flows, the contributors to this volume develop new insights for understanding both historical and current cases of change on urban waterfronts, those special areas of cities where land and water meet. As such, it will be a valuable resource for teaching faculty, students, and any audience interested in a broad scope of issues within the field of urban studies.

Time has become an increasingly important topic in urban studies and urban planning. The spatial-temporal interplay is not only of relevance for the theory of urban development and urban politics, but also for urban planning and governance. The space-time approach focuses on the human being with its various habits and routines in the city. Understanding and taking those habits into account in urban planning and public policies offers a new way to improve the quality of life in our cities. Adapting the supply and accessibility of public spaces and services to the inhabitants' space-time needs calls for an integrated approach to the physical design of urban space and to the organization of cities.

In the last two decades the body of practical and theoretical work on urban space-time topics has grown substantially. The book offers a state of the art overview of the theoretical reasoning, the development of new analytical tools, and practical experience of the space-time design of public cities in major European countries. The contributions were written by academics and practitioners from various fields exploring space-time research and planning.

In this sweeping appraisal of the urban condition, David Wadley argues that anything less that high-level resolution in modelling the well-being of inhabitants is wasting precious time. Humanity is encountering rising entropy, caused by unsustainable economic and demographic expansion. Supported by a strong interdisciplinary backdrop featuring systems and crisis theories, The City of Grace tackles these obstacles by picturing gracious function and graceful form in a human-scale settlement. In an attempt to salvage things lost in the teleology of urban development over the last 100 years, the outlook is both heterodox and contrarian. How long can we all go on in the present way? In addressing grace, a more elevated concept than those focusing previous urban analyses, this manifesto aims not to placate or please but, instead, to get humanity to face the encompassing realities it tries so hard to forget.

Presenting social innovation initiatives that emerged from organized citizenry in Southern European cities, this book explores the response to austerity policies implemented after the 2008 economic crisis. Chapters look at the common aim of these initiatives in responding to social needs and challenging social exclusion. Social Innovation and Urban Governance offers an empirically informed theoretical discussion on the scope of citizen action when members of civil society or emancipator social movements organise to contribute to local democratic governance and to enlarge the reach of social welfare. Contributions highlight how, starting from innovative actions in individual urban neighbourhoods, social actors created opportunities for participation in society and organised from below to collaborate with local institutions in 'bottom-linked' forms of governance. A timely exploration of the importance of social innovation in urban settings, this is a useful book for scholars of urban studies as well as sociology and human geography. It will also be an insightful read for urban policy-makers. Contributors include: A.B. Cano Hila, F. Diaz Orueta, S. Eizaguirre Anglada, M. Garcia Cabeza, L. Garcia Ferrando, M.L. Loures Seoane, M. Pradel I Miquel, R. Ruiz Sola

The pursuit of regeneration and renewal has played an important role in the history and development of the world 's cities, and the theoretical and applied issues around these critical concepts are of increasing importance to governments and local populations, as well as to urban professionals and scholars. Particularly in postwar North America and Western Europe, this growing concern has often resulted from the decay and deterioration of cities associated with the decline in traditional industries and the associated loss of employment, and populations, to the suburbs and beyond.

This new title in the Routledge series, Critical Concepts in Urban Studies, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of the explosion in research output on regeneration and renewal as a significant historical and contemporary urban process of economic, social, cultural, and political importance. Edited by a leading scholar, this Routledge Major Work brings together in four volumes the canonical and the best cutting-edge scholarship on the topic.

The collection is divided into three principal parts. Part 1 ( Cities in Transition ) covers the wider social, economic, political, and urban geographical context for urban regeneration and renewal, and documents the nature of changing cities. These processes and changes are inextricably linked with urban regeneration and renewal initiatives, and an understanding of these transitions is essential to place Parts 2 and 3 in perspective. Part 2 ( Responses to Urban Change from National Governments ) brings together the best overviews and critiques of urban policy initiatives implemented by central governments in developed countries during the postwar period. The materials gathered here span experiences and city examples from advanced economies across the world.

The final part ( City Responses to Urban Change ) draws on the approaches taken by cities themselves in response to urban problems, particularly those designed to improve economic competitiveness and to combat social exclusion. Key research on the wide array of thematic approaches that have been followed is assembled in this part. Within the wider urban processes explored in Part 1, this part examines particular policy responses that have arisen in many cities, and considers a number of case-study cities from the UK, North America, continental Europe, and Australasia.

With a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Urban Regeneration and Renewal is an essential work of reference. It is destined to be valued by scholars, students, and researchers as a vital research resource.

This original collection examines how architectural ideas, social models and building forms circulate round the world and become mediated and adapted to local conditions. The book shows how types such as skyscrapers, mosques or living history museums are imported, adapted and contested in different societies and how urban landscapes are reshaped by the global circulation of models drawn from elsewhere.

Written by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds -architecture, anthropology, geography, linguistics, science studies and sociology - the book draws its inspiration from a series of different approaches and offers both original theoretical reflection and carefully crafted case-studies.

This contributed volume contains the conference proceedings of the Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) conference 2015, Berlin. The included papers cover a wide range of topics in traffic planning and simulation, including intermodal simulation, intermodal transport, vehicular communication, modeling urban mobility, open data as well as autonomous driving. The target audience primarily comprises researchers and experts in the field of mobility research, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

The world's urban population now exceeds the world's rural population. What does this mean for the state of our cities, given the strain this global demographic shift is placing upon current urban infrastructures? Following on from previous State of the World's Cities reports, this edition uses the framework of 'The Urban Divide' to analyze the complex social, political, economic and cultural dynamics of urban environments. In particular, the book focuses on the concept of the 'right to the city' and ways in which many urban dwellers are excluded from the advantages of city life, using the framework to explore links among poverty, inequality, slum formation and economic growth. The volume will be essential reading for all professionals and policymakers in the field, as well as a valuable resource for researchers and students in all aspects of urban development. Published with UN-Habitat.

Most of us live in cities. These are becoming increasingly complex and removed from broad-scale agriculture. Yet within cities there are many examples of greenspaces and local food production that bring multiple benefits that often go unnoticed. This book presents a collection of the latest thinking on the multiple dimensions of sustainable greenspace and food production within cities. It describes the diversity of 'urban agriculture' and seeks a balanced representation between the biophysical and the social. It deals with urban agriculture across scales - from indoor plants to farm-scale filtration of greywater. A range of examples and initiatives from both developed and developing countries is described and evaluated.

In the globalizing world, knowledge and information (and the social and technological settings for their production and communication) are now seen as keys to economic prosperity. The economy of a knowledge city creates value-added products using research, technology, and brainpower. The social benefit of knowledge-based urban development (KBUD); however, extends beyond aggregate economic growth. ""Knowledge-Based Urban Development"" covers the theoretical, thematic, and country-specific issues of knowledge cities to underline the growing importance of KBUD all around the world, providing academics, researchers, and practitioners with substantive research on the decisive lineaments of urban development for knowledge-based production (drawing attention to new planning processes to foster such development), and worldwide best practices and case studies in the field of urban development.

Illuminating the importance of culture in community planning, this book reveals why previous planning practices have failed and suggests that improvements can be made by taking into consideration the diverse needs of a multicultural society. For community planning to be effective, planners must first recognize and acknowledge that community culture influences how people live in, use, and organize space. They must then base their designs on the respective community culture and avoid the trap of planning based on their own values and cultural background. Thus urban planning must take on a futuristic, multi-dimensional vision for the 21st century.

The contributions in this book address these issues and suggest ways in which the planner can incorporate the cultural differences and avoid conflict. The book examines the inadequacy of current theoretical and philosophical paradigms in planning in a multicultural society, how planners can increase planning's effectiveness with ethnic and cultural communities, and how we might reshape institutions to better address the needs of a diverse, global, and multicultural society. This book will be of interest to both academic and professional audiences in multicultural studies and urban planning.

From fuelwood in developing countries to the disposal of nuclear waste, energy issues have long been at the heart of the sustainability debate. Also taking in cities and transport, the Energy and Infrastructure set of volumes tackles a diverse array of questions with enduring relevance for current policy and technology. In the last two decades, environmental threats and the challenge of sustainability have moved to the very centre of political, business and, increasingly, personal agendas. The Earthscan Library Collection has been created to bring back into print the seminal texts in sustainability from the past 25 years. The Collection offers a unique opportunity to gain broad, archival coverage of all aspects of sustainability. It allows the individual as well as institutional purchaser the ability to acquire volumes by many of the most well-respected thinkers and authors across the subject.

Must the strip mall and the eight-lane highway define 21st century American life? That is a central question posed by critics of suburban and exurban living in America. Yet despite the ubiquity of the critique, it never sticks-Americans by the scores of millions have willingly moved into sprawling developments over the past few decades. Americans find many of the more substantial criticisms of sprawl easy to ignore because they often come across as snobbish in tone. Yet as Thad Williamson explains, sprawl does create real, measurable social problems. Williamson's work is unique in two important ways. First, while he highlights the deleterious effects of sprawl on civic life in America, he is also evenhanded. He does not dismiss the pastoral, homeowning ideal that is at the root of sprawl, and is sympathetic to the vast numbers of Americans who very clearly prefer it. Secondly, his critique is neither aesthetic nor moralistic in tone, but based on social science. Utilizing a landmark 30,000-person survey, he shows that sprawl fosters civic disengagement, diminishes social trust, accentuates inequality, and negatively impacts the environment. Sprawl, Justice, and Citizenship will not only be the most comprehensive work in print on the subject, it will be the first to offer a empirically rigorous critique of the most popular form of living in America today.