Part architectural guidebook and part critique, Sky-High documents the pencil-thin, supertall towers that are transforming New York City's skyline as well as its streets.New York City's penchant for building skyward has reached new heights with its crop of supertall towers—those that rise at least 984 feet above the sidewalk. The city that never sleeps is also the city that never stops building ever higher, from the Woolworth and Chrysler buildings of an e...

The New Localism provides a roadmap for change that starts in the communities where most people live and work.In their new book, The New Localism, urban experts Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak reveal where the real power to create change lies and how it can be used to address our most serious social, economic, and environmental challenges.Power is shifting in the world: downward from national governments and states to cities and metropolitan com...

Across the US, cities and metropolitan areas are facing huge economic and competitive challenges that Washington won't, or can't, solve. The good news is that networks of metropolitan leaders mayors, business and labor leaders, educators, and philanthropists are stepping up and powering the nation forward. These state and local leaders are doing the hard work to grow more jobs and make their communities more prosperous, and they're investing in infrastructure, making manufacturing a pr...

In their new book, The New Localism, urban experts Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak reveal where the real power to create change lies and how it can be used to address our most serious social, economic, and environmental challenges.Power is shifting in the world: downward from national governments and states to cities and metropolitan communities; horizontally from the public sector to networks of public, private and civic actors; and globally along circuits of capital, trade, ...

In recent years, the young, educated, and affluent have surged back into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. And yet all is not well, Richard Florida argues in The New Urban Crisis. Florida, one of the first scholars to anticipate this back-to-the-city movement in his groundbreaking The Rise of the Creative Class, demonstrates how the same forces that power the growth of the world’s superstar cities also generate their vexing challenges: gentri...

In Welcome to the Urban Revolution, internationally recognized urbanist Jeb Brugmann turns traditional thinking about globalization on its head to show that the city isn't a backdrop to global change; it is a central driver of change—political, economic, social, and environmental. This powerful reappraisal of the global role of cities brilliantly synthesizes urban studies, economics, and sociology to show how cities create but can also help solve some of the 21st century's major c...

Jeff Speck has dedicated his career to determining what makes cities thrive. And he has boiled it down to one key factor: walkability.The very idea of a modern metropolis evokes visions of bustling sidewalks, vital mass transit, and a vibrant, pedestrian-friendly urban core. But in the typical American city, the car is still king, and downtown is a place that's easy to drive to but often not worth arriving at.Making walkability happen is relatively easy and cheap; seeing exac...

A case study of how an award-winning start-up used a large-scale collaboration to achieve a bold objective, and what it shows us about leadership.Machiavelli famously wrote, "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."That's what this book is about—innovation far more audacious than a new way to find a restaurant or a smart ph...

"The just city is one in which equity, democracy, and diversity are important considerations. This is in contrast with the city as growth machine. Fainstein examines three cities: New York, London, and Amsterdam. She provides a history of post–World War II planning and then focuses on fairly recent cases of development in each. Her goals, though modest, are important if growing inequality in urban areas is to be reversed. Recommended."― ChoiceFor mu...

After a long period of suburbanization, cities have been in vogue again since the 1980s. But why are people prepared to spend far more money on a small house in the city centre than on a large house in the countryside - and why doesn't this apply to all cities? The authors of this book argue that the appeal of the city in the 21st century is not only determined by the production side of the economy, but also by the consumption side: its array of shops, cultural activities and, for example,...

This book is a welcome and timely analysis of how global economic and financial powerhouses in Asia also aim to become global cultural cities. It critically examines the tension between top-down policies implemented by strong states to boost urban culture, which are typically focused on the hardware of iconic venues, museums, and opera houses mostly designed by famous western architects, and the need for freedom to enable more organic cultural initiatives rooted in local practices.

The story of one village, Yantian, and its remarkable economic and social transformation, this book shows how outcomes are shaped by a number of factors such as path dependence, social structures, economic resources and local entrepreneurship.