This text focuses on cities as the dominant form of human settlement for the future, examining the transformation that is happening in urban connobations worldwide today. The last few decades have seen a rate of change and growth in cities that has never been seen before, resulting in giant metropoles with over twenty million inhabitants. This book tackles the causes of these changes, and looks at how the planning and design of cities can shape the urban future.

A classic work advocating ecological urban planning—from a civic visionary and former architecture critic for the New Yorker.Considered among the greatest works of Lewis Mumford—a prolific historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and longtime architecture critic for the New Yorker—The Culture of Cities is a call for communal action to "rebuild the urban world on a sounder human foundation." First published in 1938, this radical investig...

What makes the city of the future? How do you heal a divided city?In Radical Cities, Justin McGuirk travels across Latin America in search of the activist architects, maverick politicians and alternative communities already answering these questions. From Brazil to Venezuela, and from Mexico to Argentina, McGuirk discovers the people and ideas shaping the way cities are evolving.Ever since the mid twentieth century, when the dream of modernist utopia went to Latin ...

Acclaimed exploration of the political space created by Israel’s colonial occupationThis new edition of the classic work on the politics of architecture—and the architecture of politics—appears on the fiftieth anniversary of the Six-Day War, which expanded Israel’s domination over Palestinian lands.From the tunnels of Gaza to the militarized airspace of the Occupied Territories, Eyal Weizman unravels Israel’s mechanisms of control and its transformation of ...

In this book, the first on the planning history of Jarkarta, able expert Christopher Silver describes how planning has shaped urban development in Southeast Asia, and in particular how its largest city, Jakarta, Indonesia, was transformed from a colonial capital of approximately 150,000 in 1900 to a megacity of 12–13 million inhabitants in 2000.Placing the city's planning history within local, national and international contexts, exploring not only the formal planning actions, but ...

More than two decades of mounting evidence confirms that the existing scale of the human enterprise has surpassed global ecological limits to growth. Based on such limits, The No-Growth Imperative discounts current efforts to maintain growth through eco-efficiency initiatives and smart-growth programs, and argues that growth is inherently unsustainable and that the true nature of the challenge confronting us now is one of replacing the current growth imperative with a no-growth im...

This book examines wayfinding from a broad public health perspective and articulates what needs to be done to create better wayfinding for all people regardless of age, ability, or mode of transportation. Addressing both science and the human experience, the book brings together a group of international experts to examine community wayfinding from a variety of viewpoints.It first presents a critical foundation for understanding wayfinding from an individual perspective. Next, it de...

Are Britain’s cities attractive places in which to live, work and play? Asking that question, this is a critical review of how the design dimension of the Urban Renaissance strategy was developed and applied, based on expert academic assessments of progress in Britain’s thirteen largest cities. The case studies are preceded by a dissection of New Labour’s renaissance agenda, and concluded by a synthesis of achievements and failings. Exploring the implications of this strategy for the futur...

For many years, a uniform and uncontested picture of utility system organization has endured across Europe. Provider and consumer roles have been largely taken for granted, and consumers have had little choice but to use the infrastructure of the only network provider available. Recent transformations have challenged this model. This book examines the ongoing environmental restructuring of consumption and provision in energy, water and waste systems. In accounting for the distinctive envir...

As Place Branding has become a widely established but contested practice, there is a dire need to rethink its theoretical foundations and its contribution to development and to re-assert its future. This important new book advances understanding of place branding through its holistic, critical and evidence-based approach. Contributions by world-leading specialists explore a series of crucially significant issues and demonstrate how place branding will contribute more to cultural, economic ...

Winner of the ACSA/AIA Housing Design Education Award!There is an increased interest among architects, urban specialists and design professionals to contribute to solve "the housing problem" in developing countries. The Invisible Houses takes us on a journey through the slums and informal settlements of South Africa, India, Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador, Cuba, Haiti and many other countries of the Global South, revealing the challenges of, and opportunit...

Today, urban scholars think of cities and regions as evolving through networks of human associations, technologies, and natural ecologies. This being the case, planners are faced with the task of navigating a profoundly material world. Planning with and for humans alone is unacceptable: in the unfolding of urban processes, non-human things cannot be ignored. This inclusive vision has consequences for how planners envision the connections among norms, technologies and life-worlds as well as...