From parks and libraries to pubs and schools, social infrastructures are the everyday places that bring people together, support community life, and foster connection. As interest in the concept grows, this timely and accessible edited collection offers a comprehensive overview of social infrastructure—its origins, development, and practical impact.Packed with innovative case studies from the UK, Europe, Australia, and the US, it highlights how these shared spaces can shape urban l...

The advent of the 21st century marks the unfolding of a new urbanism, of a new urban fabric in the making. Bringing together a range of leading scholars from a wide range of disciplines, this edited collection examines innovative urban redevelopment projects around Europe and North America which are at the forefront of this new urbanism and which are here termed 'New Downtowns'. It introduces this term and concept and addresses major questions such as: What does a sustained urbanity for th...

A “tremendously intelligent and stylish” guide to the new technologies that are transforming our everyday lives, in ways both good and bad (Guardian)Everywhere we turn, a startling new device promises to transfigure our lives. But at what cost? In this urgent and revelatory excavation of our Information Age, leading technology thinker Adam Greenfield forces us to reconsider our relationship with the networked objects, services and spaces that define us. It...

At its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, Detroit's status as epicenter of the American auto industry made it a vibrant, populous, commercial hub—and then the bottom fell out. Detroit : A Biography takes a long, unflinching look at the evolution of one of America's great cities and one of the nation's greatest urban failures. This authoritative yet accessible narrative seeks to explain how the city grew to become the heart of American industry and how its utter collapse—from ...

The story of how the richest city in the world became one of the poorest in North America, with a new introduction by Peter KwongHow did New York City come to be a network of steel towers, banks, and nail salons, with chain drugstores on every block—a place where, increasingly, no one can afford to live except the lords of Wall Street and foreign billionaires, and where more and more of the Big Apple's best-loved businesses have closed their doors? It didn't start w...

Resilient Downtowns provides a guide to communities in reviving and redeveloping their core districts into resilient, thriving neighborhoods. While the National Main Street program’s four-point approach of organization, promotion, economic restructuring, and design has been standard practice for cities seeking to rejuvenate their downtowns for decades there is disquiet among downtown managers and civic leaders about the versatility of the program. Resilient Downtowns prov...

Urban redevelopment in American cities is neither easy nor quick. It takes a delicate alignment of goals, power, leadership and sustained advocacy on the part of many. Rebuilding the American City highlights 15 urban design and planning projects in the U.S. that have been catalysts for their downtowns—yet were implemented during the tumultuous start of the 21st century. The book presents five paradigms for redevelopment and a range of perspectives on the complexities, successes an...

This unique study is based on the careful interpretation of evidence in the commercial and administrative records of the City and in the royal records, of the process by which London developed from a commune of a feudal kingdom into the capital city of the English nation. The period covered is the century and a half between 1191 and the beginnings of the Hundred Years' War. Leading themes are the emergence of its administrative elite, the changing pattern of its mercantile interests, and t...

The survey and the transference are the distinctive and operative acts in the transmission of real property and, where they differ from each other, one must of necessity control the other. This book addresses the aforementioned concepts by external explanations in order to understand the discrepancies between them. It also helps to avoid expensive and wasteful litigation over boundaries that were previously not in conflict. The text offers an extensive review of the law for boundary retrac...

First published in 1984, this book presents a survey of housing problems in various European countries and how individual states have responded.Each chapter begins by surveying the problem in each country since the Second World War, before going on to outline the roles fulfilled by national housing agencies and local authorities, as well as assessing the impact of housing policies on society and on the physical shape of cities. It considers whether housing policies have succeeded o...

Our societies need to solve difficult issues to attain sustainability. The main challenges include, among others, global warming, demographic change, an energy crisis, and loss of biodiversity. In tackling these issues, a holistic understanding of our living space is important. The field of landscape planning and design is at the core the holistic concept and it makes several contributions to achieving sustainability. First, landscape planning and design connects different spatial scales: ...

Christopher Ward provides a complete analysis of the water crisis in Yemen, including the institutional, environmental, technical and political economy components. He assesses the social and economic impacts of the crisis and provides in-depth case studies in the key management areas. The final part of the book offers an assessment of current strategy and looks at future ways in which the people of the country and their government can influence outcomes and make the transition to a sustain...