We live in the suburban era. Well over half of all Americans and two-thirds of Canadians live in suburbs. Tracts of suburban bungalows ring Sydney and Melbourne. Suburban apartments rise on the outskirts of Paris, Prague, Singapore, and Beijing. Nearly everyone has a strong opinion about suburbs. Folks who love dense cities scorn "suburbia," while people who like big yards dislike bustling sidewalks and subways. Social scientists argue whether contemporary suburbs are losing their luster o...

City planning is a practice and a profession. It is also a set of goals and--sometimes utopian--aspirations. Formal thought about the shaping of cities as physical spaces and social environments calls on the same range of disciplines and approaches that we use for understanding cities themselves, from art and literature through the social and natural sciences. Surrounding the core profession of city planning, also known as urban or town planning, are related fields of architecture, landsca...

What science fiction can teach us about urban planningCarl Abbott, who has taught urban studies and urban planning in five decades, brings together urban studies and literary studies to examine how fictional cities in work by authors as different as E. M. Forster, Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, and China Miéville might help us to envision an urban future that is viable and resilient. Imagining Urban Futures is a remarkable treatise on what is best and strongest...

Washington, D.C., President John F. Kennedy once remarked, is a city of “southern efficiency and northern charm.” Kennedy’s quip was close to the mark. Since its creation two centuries ago, Washington has been a community with multiple personalities. Located on the regional divide between North and South, it has been a tidewater town, a southern city, a coveted prize in fighting between the states, a symbol of a reunited nation, a hub for central government, an extension of the Boston–New ...

Cities rather than individual pioneers have been the driving force in the settlement and economic development of the western half of North America. Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, western urban centers served as starting points for conquest and settlement. As these frontier cities matured into metropolitan centers, they grew from imitators of eastern culture and outposts of eastern capital into independent sources of economic, cultural, and intellectual ch...

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleIt has been called one of the nation's most livable regions, ranked among the best managed cities in America, hailed as a top spot to work, and favored as a great place to do business, enjoy the arts, pursue outdoor recreation, and make one's home. Indeed, years of cooperative urban planning between developers and those interested in ecology and habitability have transformed Portland from a provincial western city...

We live near the edge—whether in a settlement at the core of the Rockies, a gated community tucked into the wilds of the Santa Monica Mountains, a silicon culture emerging in the suburbs, or, in the future, homesteading on a terraformed Mars. In Imagined Frontiers, urban historian and popular culture scholar Carl Abbott looks at the work of American artists who have used novels, film, television, maps, and occasionally even performance art to explore these frontiers—the metropolit...

When the American West represented the country’s frontier, many of its cities may have seemed little more than trading centers to serve the outlying populace. Now the nation’s most open and empty region is also its most heavily urbanized, with eighty percent of Westerners living in its metropolitan areas. The process of urbanization that had already transformed the United States from a rural to an urban society between 1815 and 1930 has continued most clearly and completely in the modern W...

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleIt has been called one of the nation's most livable regions, ranked among the best managed cities in America, hailed as a top spot to work, and favored as a great place to do business, enjoy the arts, pursue outdoor recreation, and make one's home. Indeed, years of cooperative urban planning between developers and those interested in ecology and habitability have transformed Portland from a provincial western city...

We live in the suburban era. Well over half of all Americans and two-thirds of Canadians live in suburbs. Tracts of suburban bungalows ring Sydney and Melbourne. Suburban apartments rise on the outskirts of Paris, Prague, Singapore, and Beijing. Nearly everyone has a strong opinion about suburbs. Folks who love dense cities scorn "suburbia," while people who like big yards dislike bustling sidewalks and subways. Social scientists argue whether suburbs are losing their luster or if a suppos...

In January 1933, widowed Canadian psychiatrist Charles Flemming traveled to Rome to deliver a paper at an international psychiatric meeting and to further research the career of the eccentric Ukranian pianist, Vladimir de Pachmann, for a biography he has always wanted to write. En route, he learns of a young, virtually blind Polish pianist, Agnieszka Lipska, who will be giving several recitals in Rome. She has familial retinitis pigmentosa and her specialty is the music of Chopin. Charles ...

Carl Abbott, who has taught urban studies and urban planning in five decades, brings together urban studies and literary studies to examine how fictional cities in work by authors as different as E. M. Forster, Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, and China Miéville might help us to envision an urban future that is viable and resilient. Imagining Urban Futures is a remarkable treatise on what is best and strongest in urban theory and practice today, as refracted and intensely imagined in sc...