Originally published in 1977. This book provides the first concise non-technical account of what the main kinds of regional problems are, how they arise, and the kinds of policy which have been used to tackle them in the UK, USA and Western Europe. The book starts with a discussion of why "regional problems" really are situations which call for special action, followed by a short preliminary classification of problem regions (including those in the less developed countries), then on to a more detailed survey of the origins and experience of selected problem regions in the more developed market economies. The authors focus on four broad kinds of problem region; agricultural regions, coal mining regions, old textile regions, and so-called "congested" regions. They conclude with a selective survey of regional policies in these more advanced economies, distinguishing and comparing the main trends and the different national styles.

Originally published in 1978. The question of how best to use our various resources has become one of crucial importance as we face today's many economic problems. In this second edition, the authors are concerned with decisions on rural issues in a climate of financial cut-backs, which emphasise the need for identifying the most efficient public choices. With a refreshing directness they consider immediate problems of rural resources, such as the growth of the public sector, fluctuating commodity prices, dislocation in the land market, pollution, recreation pressure, and modernisation of an outdated settlement structure. In Part one, chapters deal in turn with the economics of public decisions, the application of quantitative models in the development context, the planning system as it applies to rural areas, and the problems of conserving the rural environment. Part two deals with the individual topics: land use and conversion to other uses, recreational use of the countryside, conservation economics, rural population, the labour market and farm policies, rural transport, and rural settlement. The authors conclude with an examination of the Cow Green Reservoir as a case-study of a rural public issue which had to be resolved. This revised and considerably expanded edition focusses specifically on the economic aspects of the subject and provides further illustrations, diagrams and examples.

Based on oral history, fiction, fascinating intellectual gossip, and records of the Coffee Board of India, this study is a multi-sited ethnography of the Indian Coffee House, possibly the world's first coffee house chain. It offers a critical analysis of adda (informal meetings) of the educated middle class in Allahabad, Calcutta and Delhi. The coffee house became the new socio-intellectual nerve centre, replacing the neigbourhood tea shops, and creating an entirely different social space. This book will have line drawings and cartoons as well as archival photographs.

As suburban expansion declines, cities have become essential economic, cultural and social hubs of global connectivity. This book is about urban revitalization across North America, in cities including San Francisco, Toronto, Boston, Vancouver, New York and Seattle. Infrastructure projects including the High Line and Big Dig are explored alongside urban neighborhood creation and regeneration projects such as Hunters Point in San Francisco and Regent Park in Toronto. Today, these urban regeneration projects have evolved in the context of unprecedented neoliberal public policy and soaring real estate prices. Consequently, they make a complex contribution to urban inequality and poverty trends in many of these cities, including the suburbanization of immigrant settlement and rising inequality. (Re)Generating Inclusive Cities wrestles with challenging but important questions of urban planning, including who benefits and who loses with these urban regeneration schemes, and what policy tools can be used to mitigate harm? We propose a new way forward for understanding and promoting better urban design practices in order to build more socially just and inclusive cities and to ultimately improve the quality of urban life for all.

Never before have our cities been as important as they are now. The drivers of innovation and growth, they are essential to the prosperity of nations. But they are also destructive, plunging us into housing crises and deepening inequality. How can we keep the good and break free of the bad?

In this bracingly original work of research and analysis, leading urbanist Richard Florida explores the roots of this new crisis and puts forward a plan to make this the century of the fairer, thriving metropolis.

Explores the unintended consequences of civic activism in a disaster-prone city After Hurricane Katrina, thousands of people swiftly mobilized to rebuild their neighborhoods, often assisted by government organizations, nonprofits, and other major institutions. In Rethinking Community Resilience, Min Hee Go shows that these recovery efforts are not always the panacea they seem to be, and can actually escalate the city's susceptibility to future environmental hazards. Drawing upon interviews, public records, and more, Go explores the hidden costs of community resilience. She shows that-despite good intentions-recovery efforts after Hurricane Katrina exacerbated existing race and class inequalities, putting disadvantaged communities at risk. Ultimately, Go shows that when governments, nonprofits, and communities invest in rebuilding rather than relocating, they inadvertently lay the groundwork for a cycle of vulnerabilities. As cities come to terms with climate change adaptation-rather than prevention-Rethinking Community Resilienceprovides insight into the challenges communities increasingly face in the twenty-first century.

Originally published in 2019, this book provides a comprehensive account of a formative historical period, uniquely describing Renaissance architecture as the physical manifestation of political and economic change. The book illustrates how shifts in architectural style and design were paralleled with Northern and Central Italy's external and internal conflicts, the evolution of urban and regional government, and economic and demographic growth. Covering the full extent of the Renaissance period, Balchin charts the era's medieval roots and its transformation into Mannerist and Baroque tendencies. He demonstrates how developments in architecture and planning were inextricably linked to political and economic power, and how these relationships shifted from city to city over time.

This book pays homage to Neil Smith's ideas, offering a critical approach and rich collection of insights that draw on Smith's work for inspiration and debate. With interdisciplinary and international contributions from leading experts, the book demonstrates the impact of Smith's ideas on understanding the role of urbanisation in general and gentrification, in particular, in contemporary society. The book demonstrates how gentrification varies significantly from city to city, across different cultural and political-economic regimes, and in terms of the timing of urban transformations. This collection provides a forum for debate for those working in urban regeneration and citizenship, and those directly affected by the processes and problems arising from gentrification. It will be of interest to students and scholars in urban geography, urban sociology, cultural studies, and wider social and urban theories.

The Scottish economy is at the heart of contemporary constitutional and public policy debates. This substantial new edited collection, the first comprehensive and authoritative analysis for more than 60 years, is a timely update on the classic volume of the same name edited by Sir Alec Cairncross in 1954. It is data rich, and offers links to updatable data and leading indicators of the Scottish economy including measures of public finances, distributional evidence and growth. Readers will find a series of easy to follow chapters covering the Scottish economy from every angle - oil and gas, health, education, finance, rural Scotland, inequality, climate change, gender and work, housing, infrastructure and cities. Each sector-based chapter explores the main issues, draws out key empirical facts and considers policy challenges that lie ahead. This book includes: an historical account of the development of the Scottish economy; the trajectory of economic policy in Scotland; reviews of the current fiscal position and the wider economic landscape; and also an intriguing insight into the emerging distinctive approach to Scottish public policy. This book brings together evidence and high quality research by experts on the Scottish economy in a politically neutral, accessible and non-technical way. The volume will assist readers in navigating their way through the many political debates about constitutional and economic futures that are underway in modern Scotland and the UK. A website also exists to accompany The Scottish Economy - www.scottisheconomy.scot. In today's inter-connected world, it makes sense to have a book on the Scottish economy supplemented by online access to important data, information and evidence as a means of keeping material current.

The global financial and economic crisis that hit the world since 2008 has affected the lives of many people all over the world and resulted in declining incomes, rising unemployment, foreclosures, forced residential moves, and cut-backs in government expenditure. The extent to which the crisis has affected urban neighborhoods and has led to rising intra-urban inequalities, has not yet received much attention. The implemented budget cuts and austerity programs of national and local governments are likely to have hit some neighborhoods more than others. The authors of this this book, which come from a variety of countries and disciplines, show that the economic crisis has affected poor neighborhoods more severely than more affluent ones. The tendency of the state to retreat from these neighborhoods has negative consequences for their residents and may even nullify the investments that have been made in many poor neighborhoods in the recent past. This book was originally published as a special issue of Urban Geography.

How children experience, negotiate and connect with or resist their surroundings impacts on their health and wellbeing. In cities, various aspects of the physical and social environment can affect children's wellbeing. This edited collection brings together different accounts and experiences of children's health and wellbeing in urban environments from majority and minority world perspectives. Privileging children's expertise, this timely volume explicitly explores the relationships between health, wellbeing and place. To demonstrate the importance of a place-based understanding of urban children's health and wellbeing, the authors unpack the meanings of the physical, social and symbolic environments that constrain or enable children's flourishing in urban environments. Drawing on the expertise of geographers, educationists, anthropologists, psychologists, planners and public health researchers, as well as nurses and social workers, this book, above all, sees children as the experts on their experiences of the issues that affect their wellbeing. Children's Health and Wellbeing in Urban Environments will be fascinating reading for anyone with an interest in cultural geography, urban geography, environmental geography, children's health, youth studies or urban planning.

This book explores how the concept or urban experimentation is being used to reshape practices of knowledge production in urban debates about resilience, climate change governance, and socio-technical transitions. With contributions from leading scholars, and case studies from the Global North and South, from small- to large-scale cities, this book suggests that urban experiments offer novel modes of engagement, governance, and politics that both challenge and complement conventional strategies. The book is organized around three cross-cutting themes. Part I explores the logics of urban experimentation, different approaches, and how and why they are deployed. Part II considers how experiments are being staged within cities, by whom, and with what effects. Part III examines how entire cities or groups of cities are constructed as experiments. This book develops a deeper and more socially and politically nuanced understanding of how urban experiments shape cities and drive wider changes in society, providing a framework to examine the phenomenon of urban experimentation in conceptual and empirical detail.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of current housing practices across Asian cities based on facts and trends in the market. For many countries in Asia, the future of housing is now. This future is closely linked to successful theoretical advancement and policy practice in housing studies. This volume brings together twelve chapters divided across four thematic parts that sum up the concept and conditionality of housing in Asian cities. It studies housing through conceptual perspectives and empirical studies to explore established notions, cultures and practices relevant to the 21st-century post-reform context in Asia. Housing and property have long been economic drivers, leading many individual households towards better lives and associated social and community benefits, while also collectively improving the economic base of a city or country. This book examines the nature of the interplay of both state and market in the housing outcomes of these cities. With its extensive geographic coverage across South East Asia, South Asia, and the Far East and a cross section of different income groups, the book will interest reseachers and scholars in urban studies, architecture, development studies, public policy, political studies, sociology, policymakers in local and central governments, housing and planning professionals and commercial firms engaged in property markets or real estate in Asia. It will also provide ideas, tools and good practices for institutional enablement, stakeholders involved in these interventions, private sector organisations and NGOs.

With In the Skin of the City, Antonio Tomas traces the history and transformation of Luanda, Angola, the nation's capital as well as one of the oldest settlements founded by the European colonial powers in the Southern Hemisphere. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research alongside his own experiences growing up in Luanda, Tomas shows how the city's physical and social boundaries-its skin-constitute porous and shifting interfaces between center and margins, settler and Native, enslaver and enslaved, formal and informal, and the powerful and the powerless. He focuses on Luanda's "asphalt frontier"-the (colonial) line between the planned urban center and the ad hoc shantytowns that surround it-and the ways squatters are central to Luanda's historical urban process. In their relationship with the state and their struggle to gain rights to the city, squatters embody the process of negotiating Luanda's divisions and the sociopolitical forces that shape them. By illustrating how Luanda emerges out of the continual redefinition of its skin, Tomas offers new ways to understand the logic of urbanization in cities across the global South.

Across the nation, the debate over metropolitan sprawl and its impact has become pivotal to urban planning. A decade and a half ago, Smart Growth America and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sought to raise the level of the debate by sponsoring groundbreaking research to quantitatively measure sprawl and its quality-of-life impacts. The resulting measures are widely used in urban research and public health. Costs of Sprawl provides a panoramic guide to urban form in America, measures sprawl for metropolitan areas, urbanized areas, and counties, and studies the relationship between sprawl and quality-of-life outcomes. From this preliminary investigation, it looks like the costs of sprawl are varied and substantial, and the alternative of compact development is far superior. An essential read for researchers, planners, urban designers, policy makers, and smart growth advocates in the U.S. and abroad, this book provides a comprehensive and detailed analysis of one of the most critical issues in planning today.

Urban segregation is one of the main challenges facing urban development around the globe. The usual outcome of many urban development patterns is an unequal social geography, with the urban poor living in large clusters that are remote, isolated, dangerous or unhealthy. The result is inequality in a number of dimensions of urban life, from deficient urban access, services or infrastructure to social isolation, neighbourhood violence, and lack of economic opportunity. This book brings together debates on ethnic and economic segregation, combining theory and practical solutions to create a guide for those trying to understand and address urban segregation in any part of the world, and integrate ameliorating policies to contemporary urban development agendas.

The book explains the basic ideas of economics along with their historical context. It includes the events and traditions of the era of mentors-Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Walras, Keynes-with the economics they developed and controversies around them.

This book focuses on cities, their relationships with each other and the disparities between them. Analysing cities as the places where diversity is especially apparent, where cultural richness is experienced and where conflicts often erupt, it illustrates how cultures and cultural diversity interact with economic growth and development. The contributors provide valuable insight into how diverse cities should best be governed and made sustainable, and explore the concept of diversity in relation to sustainability. Building on segregation, assimilation and integration policies, the book indicates the need to develop policies that can govern diversity in a dynamic, nonlinear and spatio-temporal complex way. Case studies of eight culturally diverse cities (Stockholm, Baroda, Banska Bystrica, Chicago, London, Dortmund, Rome and Antwerp) clearly illustrate the relationship between diversity and development, identifying the conditions under which diversity leads to economic performance. These studies are underpinned by an econometric analysis of the relationship between diversity and development across European regions. This unique book will prove a fascinating read to both academics and policymakers with a specific interest in public policy, regional and urban studies, and more generally in economics, the environment and ecology.

Colleges and universities in urban centers have often leveraged their locales to appeal to students while also taking a more active role in addressing local challenges. They embrace civic engagement, support service-learning, tailor courses to local needs, and even provide university-community collaborations such as lab schools and innovation hubs. Engaging Place, Engaging Practices highlights the significant role the academy, in general, and urban history, in particular, can play in fostering these critical connections. The editors and contributors to this volume address topics ranging from historical injustices and affordable housing and land use to climate change planning and the emergence of digital humanities. These case studies reveal the intricate components of a city's history and how they provide context and promote a sense of cultural belonging. This timely book appreciates and emphasizes the critical role universities must play as intentional-and humble-partners in addressing the past, present, and future challenges facing cities through democratic community engagement.

The New Urbanism is perhaps the most influential movement that has emerged in suburban design, planning, and development in recent decades. It proposes to reform conventional suburban development by "building community." Building the New Urbanism asks "why new urbanism now?" to provide the first in-depth sociological investigation of the emergence of this phenomenon. This volume situates the growth of New Urbanism in the history of urban and suburban policy and development. The book builds an account of the movement's founding and development, linking its progress to the making of new places. The volume also investigates how the movement capitalized upon dynamics within architecture, planning, and the homebuying public to recruit support from among those groups. The book establishes a framework for analyzing the opportunities and constraints that confront any effort to change the way we produce the built environment. Moreover, it reveals how elaborately social the production of the built environment is and how specific the material solutions to social conditions must be to resolve this process. Building the New Urbanism is an accessible volume that encapsulates and engages the dominant history of American suburbia. It draws on interviews with key figures, brings the work of prominent theorists of culture and science into the investigation, and broadens the focus of urban studies to the metropolitan region. It will be of particular interest to scholars and students of urban and suburban development, sociology, geography, and planning.

This volume contributes new insights to the scientific debate on post-Socialist urbanities. Based on ethnographic research in cities of Central Asia, the Caucasus and Russia, its contributions scrutinise the social production of diverse public, parochial and private spaces in conjunction with patterns of everyday encounter, identification, consumption and narration. The analyses extend from the transnational entanglements between a Dushanbe bazaar and hyper-modern Dubai to the micro-level hierarchies in a flat-sharing community in Astana. They explore competing notions of urban belonging and aesthetics in Yerevan, local perception of Central Asian Muslims in Kazan and Saint Petersburg, and more, providing a rich tapestry of academic study. Taken together, the case studies address cities as gateways to 'new worlds' (both local and global), discuss ambitions of states at taming urban landscapes, and illustrate current trends of economic, religious and other lifestyles in urban Central Asia and beyond. This book was originally published as a special issue of Central Asian Survey.

Dan Webb explores an undervalued topic in the formal discipline of Political Theory (and political science, more broadly): the urban as a level of political analysis and political struggles in urban space. Because the city and urban space is so prominent in other critical disciplines, most notably, geography and sociology, a driving question of the book is: what kind of distinct contribution can political theory make to the already existing critical urban literature? The answer is to be found in what Webb calls the "properly political" approach to understanding political conflict as developed in the work of thinkers like Chantal Mouffe, Jodi Dean, and Slavoj Zizek. This "properly political" analysis is contrasted with and a curative to the predominant "ethical" or "post-political" understanding of the urban found in so much of the geographical and sociological critical urban theory literature. In order to illustrate this primary theoretical argument of the book, Webb suggests that "common property" is the most useful category for conceiving the city as a site of the "properly political." When the city and urban space are framed within this theoretical framework, critical urbanists are provided a powerful tool for understanding urban political struggles, in particular, anti-gentrification movements in the inner city.

China's rapid urbanization has restructured the great socialist cities Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou into mega cities that embrace global capitalism. This book focuses on the urban transformations of these three cities: Beijing is the nation's political and cultural capital; Shanghai is the economic and financial powerhouse; and Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong Province and the regional center of south China. All are historical cities with rich imperial, colonial, and regional heritages, and all have been drastically transformed in the last six decades. This book examines the cities' continuous urban legacies since 1949 in relation to state governance, economic reforms, and cultural production. By adopting local historical perspectives, it offers more nuanced accounts of the current urban change than the modernization/globalization paradigm and conceptualizes the change in the context of the cities' socialist, colonial, and imperial legacies. Specifically, Samuel Y. Liang offers an overview of the urban planning and territorial expansion of the great cities since 1949; explores the production and consumption of urban housing, its spatial forms, media representations, and socio-political implications; and examines the state-led redevelopment of old urban cores and residential neighborhoods, and the urban conservation movement. Remaking China's Great Cities will be of great interest to students and scholars working across a range of fields including Chinese studies, Chinese culture and society, urban studies and architecture.

Since the turn of the twenty first century, there has been a trend for urban "mega events" to be awarded to cities and nations in the East and Global South. Such events have been viewed as economic stimulant as well as opportunities to promote national identity, gain greater international recognition and exercise a form of 'soft power.' However, there has also been on-going controversy about the value, impact and legacy of global mega events in these cities and nations. This book provides a critical examination of the ambition for spectacle that has emerged across the East and Global South. The chapters explore the theoretical and conceptual issues associated with mega-events and new forms of globalization, from the critical political economy of mega-events in a changing world order to the contested social and economic legacies of mega-events and the widespread opposition that increasingly accompanies these events. The book also explores questions of urban development and governance, the role of new communications technologies in global economic expansion, the high security State, and the growing global influence of international non-governmental organizations. This book offers a rich collection of original theoretical contributions and global case studies from leading international scholars from the social sciences and humanities. It offers a fresh and unique interdisciplinary perspective that synthesizes cutting edge research on mega-events and urban spectacles while simultaneously contributing to a broader understanding of the dynamics of global capitalism and international political power in the early twenty first century.

(Sub)Urban Sexscapes brings together a collection of theoretically-informed and empirically rich case studies from internationally renowned and emerging scholars highlighting the contemporary and historical geographies and regulation of the commercial sex industry. Contributions in this edited volume examine the spatial and regulatory contours of the sex industry from a range of disciplinary perspectives-urban planning, urban geography, urban sociology, and, cultural and media studies-and geographical contexts-Australia, the UK, US and North Africa. In overall terms, (Sub)urban Sexscapes highlights the mainstreaming of commercial sex premises-sex shops, brothels, strip clubs and queer spaces-and products-sex toys, erotic literature and pornography-now being commonplace in night time economy spaces, the high street, suburban shopping centres and the home. In addition, the aesthetics of commercial and alternative sexual practices-BDSM and pornography-permeate the (sub)urban landscape via billboards, newspapers and magazines, television, music videos and the Internet. The role of sex, sexuality and commercialized sex, in contributing to the general character of our cities cannot be ignored. In short, there is a need for policy-makers to be realistic about the historical, contemporary and future presence of the sex industry. Ultimately, the regulation of the sex industry should be informed by evidence as opposed to moral panics. *** Winner of the Planning Institute of Australia (WA) 2015 Award for Excellence in Cutting Edge Research and Teaching ***