The book takes as its starting point the city of Canton, at the heart of the most populous built-up metropolitan area in Mainland China, and a city that has for several centuries held a central position with regard to economic, social, and physical change in the country. Included are hundreds of beautiful illustrations and drawings that help articulate Smith's historical insight into key events surrounding the development of Canton, from its preliminary trading and treaty port history, to its Republican city building program, the Socialist planned economy after 1949, the post-1978 reform period, and the regenerative impetus of the contemporary city. Shaping Canton focuses on the modern history of Canton. The text and illustrations explore and set out the various stages and events leading up to the modern city, by way of a reinvigorated Chinese superpower, from the founding of trade between Europe and the East in the late 15th century, to the beachheads of foreign influence, and forces of transformation through periods of revolution, political transition, and reform up to the present time.

The book examines the contemporary Asian city through the prism of urban design in assimilating new and established drivers of growth. This includes intensified forms of residential development, specialised commercial centres and technology parks, that drive the momentum of the contemporary city, while acting to restructure and reshape forms of capital investment. New spatial patterns are facilitated by tranches of urban expansion, redevelopment, regeneration and suburbanisation that have emerged as by-products of both formal and informal development processes. The book also examines the Asian city language embodied in the local morphology — the essential values of the street, block, temple precinct and monument, and how these can be incorporated as drivers of new urban identities that relate to the changing culture and configuration of city neighbourhoods. All of these continue to impose different levels of impact on the creation of livable cities and the quality of life for their inhabitants. In this way urban design can look to the future while respecting the past. The book frames a perspective on the urban design challenges presented by the rapidly expanding and regenerating Asian cities, and how these can be shaped by memory, meaning and identity while meeting sustainable, resilient and community concerns.

A disparate but exuberant group of scholars are brought together in Savannah by an eminent professor to explore and debate the history and characteristics of the city and its implications for a twenty-first century urbanism. This narrative represents a forceful and humorous interplay between formal discussion, informal interludes, irreverent comments, and less than academic relationships. Its serious purpose is to identify the urban challenges facing America in terms of containing and consolidating growth within livable communities. However like all such participatory events it is also an opportunity for informal personal agendas set against a backdrop of real life events. The text is interspersed with 90 drawings of Savannah, illustrating its unique and multilayered identity as a potential urban paradigm for the future.

In 1925 a journalist on the Barcelona newspaper El Escandalo used the term Barrio Chino in a somewhat derogatory way to describe part of the older city. While the area in question represented a dystopian underbelly of the city, known for its impoverished living and working conditions together with its 'red-light' subcultures, it never existed as a 'Chinatown' in either a physical or social sense. However the name of this mythical community stuck from the 1920s onwards, appearing on maps and descriptions of the inner city but devoid of any hint of Chinese inhabitants or their culture. The book takes this as a starting point to chart the development of Barcelona over two hundred years using a series of 'diaries' and drawn images. These are set around four generations of a fictional Chinese dynasty and their imagined architectural participation in some of the major events in Barcelona's modern history. As residents of the Barrio from the mid-nineteenth century, they individually document diverse contributions to the city during periods of dynamic growth. This is set against a backdrop of cataclysmic political change and exemplary forms of urban regeneration which have provided Barcelona with its contemporary 'World City' status as it plans for the future.

This book focuses on the philosophical, artistic, and scientific forces that impacted on the humanist of the late Medieval and Renaissance period, profuse in the exchange of ideas and discovery, behind much of which was the impact of Dante’s Divine Comedy with a message which continues to reverberate through the centuries. What has also persisted is the perpetual tension between science, religion, and design because of their perceived contradictions. The book explores how we might gain inspiration and motivation to embrace a consistent artistry and sense of exploration in the face of an ever-expanding knowledge-based frontier.