This book brings together key essays that seek to make visible and expand our understanding of the role of government (policies, programs, and investments) in shaping cities and metropolitan regions; the costs and consequences of uneven urban and regional growth patterns; suburban sprawl and public health, transportation, and economic development; and the enduring connection of place, space, and race in the era of increased globalization. Whether intended or unintended, many government policies (housing, transportation, land use, environmental, economic development, education, etc.) have aided and in some cases subsidized suburban sprawl, job flight, and spatial mismatch; concentrated urban poverty; and heightened racial and economic disparities. Written mostly by African American scholars, the book captures the dynamism of these meetings, describing the challenges facing cities, suburbs, and metropolitan regions as they seek to address continuing and emerging patterns of racial polarization in the twenty-first century. The book clearly shows that the United States entered the new millennium as one of the wealthiest and the most powerful nations on earth. Yet amid this prosperity, our nation is faced with some of the same challenges that confronted it at the beginning of the twentieth century, including rising inequality in income, wealth, and opportunity; economic restructuring; immigration pressures and ethnic tension; and a widening gap between "haves" and "have-nots." Clearly, race matters. Place also matters. Where we live impacts the quality of our lives and chances for the "good life."

This book integrates planning, policy, economics, and urban design into an approach to crafting innovative places. Exploring new paradigms of innovative places under the framework of globalisation, urbanisation, and new technology, it argues against state-centric policies to innovation and focuses on how a globalized approach can shape innovative capacity and competitiveness. It notably situates the innovative place making paradigm in a broader context of globalisation, urbanisation, the knowledge economy and technological advancement, and employs an international perspective that includes a wide range of case studies from America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Developing a co-design and co-creation paradigm that integrates governments, the private sector and the community into shared understanding and collaborative action in crafting innovative places, it discusses place-based innovation in Australian context to inform policy making and planning, and to contribute to policy debates on programs of smart cities and communities.

Edward J. Blakely has been called upon to help rebuild after some of the worst disasters in recent American history, from the San Francisco Bay Area's 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake to the September 11 attacks in New York. Yet none of these jobs compared to the challenges he faced in his appointment by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin as Director of the Office of Recovery and Development Administration following Hurricane Katrina. In Katrina's wake, New Orleans and the Gulf Coast suffered a disaster of enormous proportions. Millions of pounds of water crushed the basic infrastructure of the city. A land area six times the size of Manhattan was flooded, destroying 200,000 homes and leaving most of New Orleans under water for 57 days. No American city had sustained that amount of destruction since the Civil War. But beneath the statistics lies a deeper truth: New Orleans had been in trouble well before the first levee broke, plagued with a declining population, crumbling infrastructure, ineffective government, and a failed school system. Katrina only made these existing problems worse. To Blakely, the challenge was not only to repair physical damage but also to reshape a city with a broken economy and a racially divided, socially fractured community. My Storm is a firsthand account of a critical sixteen months in the post-Katrina recovery process. It tells the story of Blakely's endeavor to transform the shell of a cherished American city into a city that could not only survive but thrive. He considers the recovery effort's successes and failures, candidly assessing the challenges at hand and the work done-admitting that he sometimes stumbled, especially in managing press relations. For Blakely, the story of the post-Katrina recovery contains lessons for all current and would-be planners and policy makers. It is, perhaps, a cautionary tale.

Book for Emergency Services and Post Disaster Managers

In an age when the buzzword is 'sustainability', why do we continue to build unsustainable cities and regions? Are there alternatives to car-clogged streets, sterile suburban McMansions and a degraded natural environment? This book brings planners back to the centre of the debate. It shows that sustainability can no longer just apply to the sub-field of planning called 'environmental planning' but has to permeate all aspects: housing, economic development, transport, regional coordination and urban design. Showcasing cutting-edge research from academics and doctoral research candidates at the University of Sydney, this latest edition of the Dialogues in Urban Planning series is recommended reading for professional planners, students and policy makers. We need to find a way to make our regions sustainable for this generation and for generations to come.

This book brings together key essays that seek to make visible and expand our understanding of the role of government (policies, programs, and investments) in shaping cities and metropolitan regions; the costs and consequences of uneven urban and regional growth patterns; suburban sprawl and public health, transportation, and economic development; and the enduring connection of place, space, and race in the era of increased globalization. Whether intended or unintended, many government policies (housing, transportation, land use, environmental, economic development, education, etc.) have aided and in some cases subsidized suburban sprawl, job flight, and spatial mismatch; concentrated urban poverty; and heightened racial and economic disparities. Written mostly by African American scholars, the book captures the dynamism of these meetings, describing the challenges facing cities, suburbs, and metropolitan regions as they seek to address continuing and emerging patterns of racial polarization in the twenty-first century. The book clearly shows that the United States entered the new millennium as one of the wealthiest and the most powerful nations on earth. Yet amid this prosperity, our nation is faced with some of the same challenges that confronted it at the beginning of the twentieth century, including rising inequality in income, wealth, and opportunity; economic restructuring; immigration pressures and ethnic tension; and a widening gap between 'haves' and 'have-nots.' Clearly, race matters. Place also matters. Where we live impacts the quality of our lives and chances for the 'good life.'

All across the nation, Americans are forting up - retreating from their neighbors by locking themselves behind security-controlled walls, gates, and barriers. An estimated 8 million Americans live in gated communities today. These communities are most popular in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Chicago, Houston, New York, and Miami. This trend has become popular in both new suburban developments and older inner-city areas as residents seek refuge from the problems of urbanization. But what does it mean for the nation? Fortress America is the first sweeping study of the development and social impact of this rapidly growing phenomenon. While early gated communities were restricted to retirement villages and the compounds of the super-rich, today the majority are for the middle to upper-middle class. But even existing modest-income neighborhoods are using barricades and gates to seal themselves off. The book looks at the three main categories of gated communities and the reasons for their popularity: lifestyle communities, including retirement communities, golf and country club leisure developments, and suburban new towns; prestige communities, including enclaves of the rich and famous, developments for high-level professionals, and executive home developments for the middle class, where the gates symbolize distinction and stature; and security zones, where fear of crime and outsiders is the main motivation for fortifications. They argue that gating does nothing to address the problems it is a response to. They propose alternatives, such as emphasizing crime prevention, controlling traffic in neighborhoods, designing new developments to encourage sustainable communities, and creating metropolitan regional planning governance.