A field-defining work that demonstrates how architects are breaking with professional conventions to advance spatial justice and design more equitable buildings and cities.As state violence, the pandemic, and environmental collapse have exposed systemic inequities, architects and urbanists have been pushed to confront how their actions contribute to racism and climate crisis—and how they can effect change. Establishing an ethics of spatial justice to lead architect...

Original, action-oriented humanist practices for interpreting and intervening in the city: a new methodology at the intersection of the humanities, design, and urban studies.Urban humanities is an emerging field at the intersection of the humanities, urban planning, and design. It offers a new approach not only for understanding cities in a global context but for intervening in them, interpreting their histories, engaging with them in the present, and speculating a...

Public Los Angeles is a collection of unpublished essays by scholar Don Parson focusing on little-known characters and histories located in the first half of twentieth-century Los Angeles. An infamously private city in the eyes of outside observers, structured around single-family homes and an aggressively competitive regional economy, Los Angeles has often been celebrated or caricatured as the epitome of an American society bent on individualism, entrepreneurialism, and market in...

From the author of the best-selling Feminist City, this urbanite’s guide to gentrification knocks down the myths and exposes the forces behind the most urgent housing crisis of our time.Gentrification is no longer a phenomenon to be debated by geographers or downplayed by urban planners—it’s an experience lived and felt by working-class people everywhere. Leslie Kern travels to Toronto, Vancouver, New York, London, and Paris to look beyond the familiar and false stories we...

In 1970, Richard Sennett published the groundbreaking The Uses of Disorder, arguing that the ideal of a planned and ordered city was flawed. Fifty years later, Sennett returns to these still fertile ideas and, alongside campaigner and architect Pablo Sendra, sets out an agenda for the design and ethics of the Open City.The public spaces of our cities are under siege from planners, privatisation and increased surveillance. Our streets are becoming ever more lifeless and ord...

The second edition of The Urban Design Reader draws together the very best of classic and contemporary writings to illuminate and expand the theory and practice of urban design. Nearly 50 generous selections include seminal contributions from Howard, Le Corbusier, Lynch, and Jacobs to more recent writings by Waldheim, Koolhaas, and Sorkin. Following the widespread success of the first edition of The Urban Design Reader, this updated edition continues to provide the most i...

This concise yet comprehensive overview of the political and economic development of the world's cities offers a unique emphasis on its cultural impacts. The book emphasizes the transition from modern (industrial) to post-modern (post-industrial) eras and its effect on established and developing global cities, and arguments are supported with case studies for each of the main concepts of urban theory and research. Mark Abrahamson analyzes contemporary global cities - ranging from Lagos to ...

Visionary activist and author Jeremy Rifkin exposes the real stakes of the new economy, delivering "the clearest summation yet of how the Internet is really changing our lives" (The Seattle Times).Imagine waking up one day to find that virtually every activity you engage in outside your immediate family has become a "paid-for" experience. It's all part of a fundamental change taking place in the nature of business, contends Jeremy Rifkin. After sev...

The promise of competitiveness and economic growth in so-called smart cities is widely advertised in Europe and the US. The promise is focussed on global talent and knowledge economies and not on learning and innovation. But to really achieve smart cities – that is to create the conditions of continuous learning and innovation – this book argues that there is a need to understand what is below the surface and to examine the mechanisms which affect the way cities learn and then connect toge...

It is possible to overcome barriers to minority success in Canada. The stance of this book is that new immigrants, refugees and international students do not have to settle for underachievement despite the cultural and structural disadvantages they face in Canada. The fact is, the unequal social structure of Canada has some cracks, and many minorities have used strategic resources to open up these cracks and achieved tremendous upward social mobility in Canadian society from the margins. Thes...

In What We Made, Tom Finkelpearl examines the activist, participatory, coauthored aesthetic experiences being created in contemporary art. He suggests social cooperation as a meaningful way to think about this work and provides a framework for understanding its emergence and acceptance. In a series of fifteen conversations, artists comment on their experiences working cooperatively, joined at times by colleagues from related fields, including social policy, architecture, art histo...

How cities can build on the “sharing economy” and smart technology to deliver a “sharing paradigm” that supports justice, solidarity, and sustainability.The future of humanity is urban, and the nature of urban space enables, and necessitates, sharing—of resources, goods and services, experiences. Yet traditional forms of sharing have been undermined in modern cities by social fragmentation and commercialization of the public realm. In Sharing Cities, Dunca...