This book examines Warren, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, as a shrinking city facing a crisis of economic downturn, automotive restructuring, high unemployment, and real estate foreclosures. The author explores Warren's attempt to develop planning strategies, culturally-based initiatives, community design projects, and creative partnerships in the region in order to address the challenges of shrinkage and foreclosures at multiple scales. Global urban development is currently characterized by varied combination of metropolitan growth and urban core shrinkage. While much of the shrinkage is concentrated in central cities, first suburbs are now facing the same problem. The Warren case illustrates opportunities for flexible policies combining rightsizing, shared maintenance, and incremental development in struggling first suburban communities, which are less studied and often ignored.

1. Clarity. The book makes fairly complex ideas accessible to a first-year university architectural design student or first year graduate urban design student. These ideas just happen to be the ones that are at the core of all design processes and are often never explained or introduced to students. 2. Currency. The book's content is part of a cultural shift in education that moves design pedagogy to understanding cognitive processes connected to shape-making rather than formal design centred on object creation (addresses causes rather than symptoms). 3. Persistence. At the same time, the information in the book does not have an expiration date - this is persistence and foundational knowledge that sits at the base of all educational instruction in formal design. 4. Integration. The book makes no distinction between meaning and interpretation. The same skills that humans use to understand our environment are those that are used to design the environment. This book introduces persistent ways that humans interpret the environment

Sustainability and the City: Urban Poetics and Politics contributes to third-generation discourse on sustainable development by considering, through a humanistic lens, theories and practices of sustainability in a wide range of urban cultures. It demonstrates cities' inextricability from discussions on sustainability because not only is the world urbanizing at an unprecedented rate but also cities are primary locations of the circulation of excess capital, socioeconomic divisions and hierarchies, political resistance, friction between human and non-human worlds, and the confluence of art, policy, and identity formation in placemaking. With essays by scholars working in a variety of fields-from architecture to literature to music to sociology-this collection maintains that any hope for achieving urban sustainability will require taking seriously the ways in which cities are imagined. Efforts to make cities sustainable must fully incorporate the humanities because critical endeavors and creative expressions that fall within the purview of the humanities are vital to closing the conceptual gulf, as well as the practical gap, between human and non-human conservation. Even if the environmental humanities embrace cities, critics must ask whether coalescing the terms 'sustainability' and 'city' may actually obstruct human action to combat climate change-which, from some angles, seems impending, self-imposed apocalypse. To examine the urban turn, Sustainability and the City attends to culture. Essays in the first part of the collection approach urban sustainability from various disciplinary vantage points to emphasize history, ideology, pedagogy, and critical theory. The second part of the collection analyzes urban commons on four different continents. Finally, the collection moves from a diverse set of interpretations of on-the-ground urban phenomena to a compilation of readings of sustainability in different media and genres-sound art, drama, fiction, and film-set in, or evocative of, cities. The collection carves out a place for artists and critics to help realize social justice in cities, which generate remarkable power, but power that is too often and too easily used destructively, unfairly, and wastefully despite cities' unique capacities to inspire and sustain humanity.

1. Clarity. The book makes fairly complex ideas accessible to a first-year university architectural design student or first year graduate urban design student. These ideas just happen to be the ones that are at the core of all design processes and are often never explained or introduced to students. 2. Currency. The book's content is part of a cultural shift in education that moves design pedagogy to understanding cognitive processes connected to shape-making rather than formal design centred on object creation (addresses causes rather than symptoms). 3. Persistence. At the same time, the information in the book does not have an expiration date - this is persistence and foundational knowledge that sits at the base of all educational instruction in formal design. 4. Integration. The book makes no distinction between meaning and interpretation. The same skills that humans use to understand our environment are those that are used to design the environment. This book introduces persistent ways that humans interpret the environment

This book examines Warren, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, as a shrinking city facing a crisis of economic downturn, automotive restructuring, high unemployment, and real estate foreclosures. The author explores Warren's attempt to develop planning strategies, culturally-based initiatives, community design projects, and creative partnerships in the region in order to address the challenges of shrinkage and foreclosures at multiple scales. Global urban development is currently characterized by varied combination of metropolitan growth and urban core shrinkage. While much of the shrinkage is concentrated in central cities, first suburbs are now facing the same problem. The Warren case illustrates opportunities for flexible policies combining rightsizing, shared maintenance, and incremental development in struggling first suburban communities, which are less studied and often ignored.