This accessible critique of urban construction reimagines city development and life in an era of unprecedented building.Exploring the proliferation of building and construction, Imrie sets out its many degrading impacts on both people and the environment. Using examples from around the world, he illustrates how construction is motivated by economic and political ideologies rather than actual need, and calls for a more sensitive, humane and nature-focused culture of construction.

With an ever increasing proportion of the world's population inhabiting urban environments, the management of cities remains a perennial challenge for governments and policymakers. This concise, but wide-ranging text makes sense of the multiple ways in which urban issues and problems have been defined and addressed in different places at different times. From initiatives that focus on social tensions within the urban realm, to those which seek to develop cities as economic entities, the bo...

This book provides a critique of the knowledge business, and describes and evaluates its different manifestations in, and impacts on, the university sector. Its focus is the social sciences and, in particular, housing and urban studies. Drawing on a wide range of experiences, both in the UK and elsewhere, it illustrates the changing management of the academy, and the development, by university managers, of instruments or techniques of control to ensure that academics are disciplined in way...

How is London responding to social and economic crises, and to the challenges of sustaining its population, economy and global status?Sustainable development discourse has come to permeate different policy fields, including transport, housing, property development and education. In this exciting book, authors highlight the uneven impacts and effects of these policies in London, including the creation of new social and economic inequalities. The contributors seek to move sustainable...

Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities connects the study of design with care, and explores how concepts of care may have relevance for the ways in which urban environments are designed. It explores how practices and spaces of care are sustained specifically in urban settings, thereby throwing light on an important arena of care that current work has rarely discussed in detail.

Considering the interrelationships between disability and housing design with a focus on the role of policy in addressing the housing needs of disabled people, this book sets out some of the broader debates about the nature of housing, quality and design. In what ways are domestic design and architecture implicated in inhibiting or facilitating mobility and movement of people? What is the nature of government regulation and policy in relation to the design of home environments? The author ...

The reality of the built environment for disabled people is one of social, physical and attitudinal barriers which prevent their ease of mobility, movement and access. In the United Kingdom, most homes cannot be accessed by wheelchair, while accessible transport is the exception rather than the rule. Pavements are littered with street furniture, while most public and commercial buildings provide few design features to permit disabled people ease of access.Inclusive Design i...

From the earliest periods of architecture and building, architects’ actions have been conditioned by rules, regulations, standards, and governance practices. These range from socio-cultural and religious codes seeking to influence the formal structure of settlement patterns, to prescriptive building regulations specifying detailed elements of design in relation to the safety of building structures. In Architectural Design and Regulation the authors argue that the rule and regulatory basis ...

Regenerating London explores latest thinking on urban regeneration in one of the fastest changing world cities. Engaging with social, economic, and political structures of cities, it highlights paradoxes and contradictions in urban policy and offers an evaluation of the contemporary forms of urban redevelopment.