How do trees help reduce violence? What do roads have to do with chronic disease? Prevention Diaries examines the unexpected yet empirically predictable relationships that shape our health, providing the keys to realizing vitality and health across our society. With passion, wisdom, and humor, internationally recognized prevention expert Larry Cohen draws on his three decades of experience to make a case for building health into the everyday fabric of our lives-from health care to workplaces, urban planning to agriculture. Prevention Diaries envisions an alternate model of American health care, one less predicated on treating sickness and more focused on preventing it. Doing so requires a shift in how our society perceives and approaches health - first recognizing our overreliance on individual solutions, then building an environment conducive to preventing problems before they occur. Through first-person vignettes and scientific data, Cohen shows that prevention is the cure what ails us. By creating greater opportunities for health and safety - things like safe access to parks and healthful housing - the US sets a foundation for a healthier country. Prevention Diaries makes it clear that as the US works to ensure everyone can access medical services, we also must make health, not just health care, the ultimate goal.

In this book, Yelena Bailey examines the creation of ""the streets"" not just as a physical, racialized space produced by segregationist policies but also as a sociocultural entity that has influenced our understanding of blackness in America for decades. Drawing from fields such as media studies, literary studies, history, sociology, film studies, and music studies, this book engages in an interdisciplinary analysis of the how the streets have shaped contemporary perceptions of black identity, community, violence, spending habits, and belonging. Where historical and sociological research has examined these realities regarding economic and social disparities, this book analyzes the streets through the lens of marketing campaigns, literature, hip-hop, film, and television in order to better understand the cultural meanings associated with the streets. Because these media represent a terrain of cultural contestation, they illustrate the way the meaning of the streets has been shaped by both the white and black imaginaries as well as how they have served as a site of self-assertion and determination for black communities.

The statesman and reformer James Oglethorpe was a significant figure in the philosophical and political landscape of eighteenth-century British America. His social contributions--all informed by Enlightenment ideals--included prison reform, the founding of the Georgia colony on behalf of the "worthy poor," and stirring the founders of the abolitionist movement. He also developed the famous ward design for the city of Savannah, a design that became one of the most important planning innovations in American history. Multilayered and connecting the urban core to peripheral garden and farm lots, the Oglethorpe Plan was intended by its author to both exhibit and foster his utopian ideas of agrarian equality.

In his new book, the professional planner Thomas D. Wilson reconsiders the Oglethorpe Plan, revealing that Oglethorpe was a more dynamic force in urban planning than has generally been supposed. In essence, claims Wilson, the Oglethorpe Plan offers a portrait of the Enlightenment, and embodies all of the major themes of that era, including science, humanism, and secularism. The vibrancy of the ideas behind its conception invites an exploration of the plan's enduring qualities. In addition to surveying historical context and intellectual origins, this book aims to rescue Oglethorpe's work from its relegation to the status of a living museum in a revered historic district, and to demonstrate instead how modern-day town planners might employ its principles. Unique in its exclusive focus on the topic and written in a clear and readable style, "The Oglethorpe Plan "explores this design as a bridge between New Urbanism and other more naturally evolving and socially engaged modes of urban development.

Consisting of presented papers from the 15th International Conference on Urban Regeneration and Sustainability, the included works address various aspects of the urban environment and provide solutions leading towards sustainability. Urban areas result in a series of environmental challenges varying from the consumption of natural resources and the subsequent generation of waste and pollution, contributing to the development of social and economic imbalances. As cities continue to grow all over the world, these problems tend to become more acute and require the development of new solutions. The challenge of planning sustainable contemporary cities lies in considering the dynamics of urban systems, exchange of energy and matter, and the function and maintenance of ordered structures directly or indirectly supplied and maintained by natural systems. The task of researchers is to improve the capacity to manage human activities, pursuing welfare and prosperity in the urban environment. Any investigation or planning on a city ought to consider the relationships between the parts and their connections with the living world. The dynamics of its networks (flows of energy matter, people, goods, information and other resources) are fundamental for an understanding of the evolving nature of today’s cities. Large cities represent a fertile ground for architects, engineers, city planners, social and political scientists, and other professionals able to conceive new ideas and time them according to technological advances and human requirements. Coastal areas and coastal cities are an important area covered in this volume as they have some specific features. Their strategic location facilitates transportation and the development of related activities, but this requires the existence of large ports, with the corresponding increase in maritime and road traffic and all its inherent negative effects. This requires the development of well-planned and managed urban environments, not only for reasons of efficiency and economics but also to avoid inflicting environmental degradation that causes the deterioration of natural resources, quality of life and human health. These research papers put a focus on sustainability across the multidisciplinary components of urban planning, the challenges presented by the increasing size of cities, the number of resources required and the complexity of modern society.

City logistics is one of the most popular fields of transportation sciences, dealing with sustainably supplying cities and at the same time reducing congestion and pollution related to goods transport in urban areas. Recently, humanitarian, emergency, and crises logistics has been a subject of increasing interest, often seen from an international viewpoint. However, some of the recent natural crises have shown the importance of resilience and reliability of the current urban logistics systems. The Handbook of Research on Urban and Humanitarian Logistics is a critical scholarly publication that addresses urban logistics and resilience, sustainable urban logistics, humanitarian logistics in urban areas both for crisis or long-term, and planning for resilient urban development. Featuring a broad range of topics that discuss the new and future trends in urban logistics and resilient cities, this publication is ideal for public planners; urban planners; company managers in logistics and transport; consulting agencies; regional, national, and international institutions and organizations; researchers; academicians; and students.

Sustainable development helps undo the havoc that has been created by human beings in the last few years in the name of development and growth. It helps to promote a more social, environmental, and economical way of living. There are many ways in which we all can practice sustainable development in our daily lives and further study is required. Multidisciplinary Approaches to Sustainable Human Development focuses on all agendas of sustainable development goals and offers approaches to develop a transdisciplinary perspective that encompasses the natural, social, and human sciences in the search for a sustainable society. Covering topics such as green economy, social innovation, and climate change, this premier reference work is ideal for environmentalists, government officials, policymakers, researchers, scholars, academicians, practitioners, instructors, and students.

Containing papers presented at the 13th International Conference on Urban Regeneration and Sustainability, this volume includes latest research providing solutions that lead towards sustainability. The series maintains its strong reputation and contributions have been made from a diverse range of delegates, resulting in a variety of topics and experiences. Urban areas face a number of challenges related to reducing pollution, improving main transportation and infrastructure systems and these challenges can contribute to the development of social and economic imbalances and require the development of new solutions. The challenge is to manage human activities, pursuing welfare and prosperity in the urban environment, whilst considering the relationships between the parts and their connections with the living world. The dynamics of its networks (flows of energy matter, people, goods, information and other resources) are fundamental for an understanding of the evolving nature of today's cities. Large cities represent a productive ground for architects, engineers, city planners, social and political scientists able to conceive new ideas and time them according to technological advances and human requirements. The multidisciplinary components of urban planning, the challenges presented by the increasing size of cities, the amount of resources required and the complexity of modern society are all addressed. The published papers cover the following fields: Urban strategies; Planning, development and management; The community and the city; Infrastructure and society; Eco-town planning; Spatial conflicts in the city; Urban transportation and planning; Conservation and regeneration; Architectural issues; Sustainable energy and the city; Environmental management; Flood risk; Waste management; Urban air pollution; Health issues; Water resources; Landscape planning and design; Intelligent environment; Planning for risk and natural hazards; Waterfront development; Case studies.

Age-Friendly Neighbourhood Planning and Design Guidelines: A Singapore Case Study provides evidence-based research and examples of existing good practices on health-enabling, age-friendly neighbourhood provision. These relate to the planning and design of outdoor spaces and enabling opportunities for active, healthy ageing. Importantly, our research prioritises the need to engage with older people when creating neighbourhood environments that contribute to healthy ageing in place.The book and its supplementary toolkits touches on 3 main stages of age-friendly neighbourhood project - planning (environmental audit), implementation (planning and design guidelines) and evaluation of progress made (post-implementation review). We hope that these materials will contribute to the ongoing discourse of how to (re)envision urban neighbourhoods to enhance health and quality of life as people age. Needless to say, they do not supersede but support existing guidelines or regulations to improve everyday neighbourhood environment for healthy ageing in place.Co-creation with older people is a central tenet of our research on ageing urbanism at the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities. The Lee Li Ming Programme in Ageing Urbanism conducts applied research on built environment and health of ageing population, arguing for a more integrated environmental, social and spatial approach to identify the connection between the built environment, health and quality of life that can inform the design for age-friendly neighbourhoods and communities.

Every city and every state needs a Richard Ravitch. In sixty years on the job, whether working in business or government, he was the man willing to tackle some of the most complex challenges facing New York. Trained as a lawyer, he worked briefly for the House of Representatives, then began his career in his family's construction business. He built high-profile projects like the Whitney Museum and Citicorp Center but his primary energy was devoted to building over 40,000 units of affordable housing including the first racially integrated apartment complex in Washington, D.C. He dealt with architects, engineers, lawyers, bureaucrats, politicians, union leaders, construction workers, bankers, and tenants--virtually all of the people who make cities and states work.
It was no surprise that those endeavors ultimately led to a life of public service. In 1975, Ravitch was asked by then New York Governor Hugh Carey to arrange a rescue of the New York State Urban Development Corporation, a public entity that had issued bonds to finance over 30,000 affordable housing units but was on the verge of bankruptcy. That same year, Ravitch was at Carey's side when New York City's biggest banks said they would no longer underwrite its debt and he became instrumental to averting the city's bankruptcy.
Throughout his career, Ravitch divided his time between public service and private enterprise. He was chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority from 1979 to 1983 and is generally credited with rebuilding the system. He turned around the Bowery Savings Bank, chaired a commission that rewrote the Charter of the City of New York, served on two Presidential Commissions, and became chief labor negotiator for Major League Baseball.
Then, in 2008, after Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned in a prostitution scandal and New York State was in a post-financial-crisis meltdown, Spitzer's successor, David Paterson, appointed Ravitch Lieutenant Governor and asked him to make recommendations regarding the state's budgeting plan. What Ravitch found was the result of not just the economic downturn but years of fiscal denial. And the closer he looked, the clearer it became that the same thing was happening in most states. Budgetary pressures from Medicaid, pension promises to public employees, and deceptive budgeting and borrowing practices are crippling our states' ability to do what only they can do--invest in the physical and human infrastructure the country needs to thrive. Making this case is Ravitch's current public endeavor and it deserves immediate attention from both public officials and private citizens.

A history of Black urban placemaking and politics in Philadelphia from the Great Migration to the era of Black Power In this book, author J.T. Roane shows how working-class Black communities cultivated two interdependent modes of insurgent assembly-dark agoras-in twentieth century Philadelphia. He investigates the ways they transposed rural imaginaries about and practices of place as part of their spatial resistances and efforts to contour industrial neighborhoods. In acts that ranged from the mundane acts of refashioning intimate spaces to expressly confrontational and liberatory efforts to transform the city's social and ecological arrangement, these communities challenged the imposition of Progressive and post-Progressive visions for urban order seeking to enclose or displace them. Under the rubric of dark agoras Roane brings together two formulations of collectivity and belonging associated with working-class Black life. While on their surface diametrically opposed, the city's underground-its illicit markets, taverns, pool halls, unlicensed bars, as well as spaces housing illicit sex and informal sites like corners associated with the economically and socially disreputable--constituted a spatial and experiential continuum with the city's set apart-its house meetings, storefronts, temples, and masjid, as well as the extensive spiritually appropriated architectures of the interwar mass movements that included rural land experiments as well as urban housing, hotels, and recreational facilities. Together these sites incubated Black queer urbanism, or dissident visions for urban life challenging dominant urban reform efforts and their modes of producing race, gender, and ultimately the city itself. Roane shows how Black communities built a significant if underappreciated terrain of geographic struggle shaping Philadelphia between the Great Migration and Black Power. This fascinating book will help readers appreciate the importance of Black spatial imaginaries and worldmaking in shaping matters of urban place and politics.

In Reframing the Reclaiming of Urban Space: A Feminist Exploration into Do-It-Yourself Urbanism in Chicago, Megan E. Heim LaFrombois explores the concept of do-it-yourself (DIY) urbanism from an intersectional, feminist, analytical framework. Interventions based on DIY urbanism are small-scale and place-specific and focus on urban spaces which can be reclaimed and repurposed, often outside of formal urban planning institutions. Heim LaFrombois examines the discourses and processes surrounding the institutionalized and embedded nature of DIY urbanism. She weaves together sites and sources to reveal the ways in which DIY urbanists make sense of their participation and experiences with DIY urbanism and with the broader political, social, and economic contexts and spaces in which these activities take place. Her research findings contribute to and build on current research that illustrates the importance of gender, race, class, and sexuality to cities, local politics, urban planning initiatives, and the development of communities.

Global warming and the resulting climate change affect our cities the most. In the recent years, migration to cities from the rural areas has increased. With this, an orderly structuring occurred in the cities, and as a result, the quality of the urban environment started to decrease. For this reason, planners and designers have started to introduce different approaches to make cities more sustainable and livable. This book contains new theories, approaches and practices that scientists deal with regarding physical planning and design.

In Europe and other developed countries, much of the population live in small and medium sized towns. For many such places the pursuit of growth is no longer a viable strategic option. As the ability of small towns to compete with larger cities for private investment and government support diminishes, the number trapped in a spiral of long-term decline grows. Beginning with a brief overview of the global context, highlighting that urban shrinkage and decline is a widespread problem, Schlappa and Nishino illustrate how small towns can generate sustainable forward strategies in contrasting institutional contexts by fostering co-production, adjusting public facilities and right sizing the urban area. The analytical tools and practical examples provided by Schlappa and Nishino are relevant for political and administrative decisionmakers, leaders of civil society and business organisations in developing locally appropriate, creative and robust strategies to shrink smart and re-grow smaller.

Homelessness in America's cities remains a growing problem. The homeless today face the same challenges as in years past: poverty, tenuous or no ties to family and friends, physical and mental health issues, and substance abuse. Compared to the 1950s to 1970s, more homeless are now sleeping on city streets versus in shelters or single room hotels. Homelessness rates are affected by economic trends, lack of equitable and inclusive healthcare and housing, decline in public assistance programs, and natural and man-made disasters. This collection of essays covers case studies, innovations, practices and policies of municipalities coping with homelessness in the 21st century.

Gentrification is reshaping cities worldwide, resulting in seductive spaces and exclusive communities that aspire to innovation, creativity, sustainability, and technological sophistication. Gentrification is also contributing to growing social-spatial division and urban inequality and precarity. In a time of escalating housing crisis, unaffordable cities, and racial tension, scholars speak of eco-gentrification, techno-gentrification, super-gentrification, and planetary gentrification to describe the different forms and scales of involuntary displacement occurring in vulnerable communities in response to current patterns of development and the hype-driven discourses of the creative city, smart city, millennial city, and sustainable city. In this context, how do contemporary creative practices in art, architecture, and related fields help to produce or resist gentrification? What does gentrification look and feel like in specific sites and communities around the globe, and how is that appearance or feeling implicated in promoting stylized renewal to a privileged public? In what ways do the aesthetics of gentrification express contested conditions of migration and mobility? Addressing these questions, this book examines the relationship between aesthetics and gentrification in contemporary cities from multiple, comparative, global, and transnational perspectives.

Temporary urbanism has become a distinctive feature of urban life after the 2008 global financial crisis. This book offers a critical exploration of its emergence and establishment as a seductive discourse and as an entangled field of practice encompassing architecture, visual and performative arts, urban regeneration policies and planning. Drawing on seven years of semi-ethnographic research, it explores the politics of temporariness from a situated analysis of neighbourhood transformation, media representations and wider political and cultural shifts in austerity London. Through a longitudinal engagement with projects and practitioners, the book tests the power of aesthetic and cultural interventions and highlights tensions between the promise of vacant space re-appropriation and its commodification. Against the normalisation of ephemerality, it presents a critique of the permanence of temporary urbanism as a glamorisation of the anticipatory politics of precarity which are transforming cities, subjectivities and imaginaries of urban action.

The term "urban ecology" has become a buzzword in various disciplines, including the social and natural sciences as well as urban planning and architecture. The environmental humanities have been slow to adapt to current theoretical debates, often excluding human-built environments from their respective frameworks. This book closes this gap both in theory and in practice, bringing together "urban ecology" with ecocritical and cultural ecological approaches by conceptualizing the city as an integral part of the environment and as a space in which ecological problems manifest concretely. Arguing that culture has to be seen as an active component and integral factor within urban ecologies, it makes use of a metaphorical use of the term, perceiving cities as spatial phenomena that do not only have manifold and complex material interrelations with their respective (natural) environments, but that are intrinsically connected to the ideas, imaginations, and interpretations that make up the cultural symbolic and discursive side of our urban lives and that are stored and constantly renegotiated in their cultural and artistic representations. The city is, within this framework, both seen as an ecosystemically organized space as well as a cultural artifact. Thus, the urban ecology outlined in this study takes its main impetus from an analysis of examples taken from contemporary culture that deal with urban life and the complex interrelations between urban communities and their (natural and built) environments.