For the first time in history, more than half the people of the world live in cities. Comprehending the impact of this widespread urbanization requires an awareness of the complex relationships between cities and natural ecosystems. This innovative book moves beyond the anti-urban lamentations that often dominate today's academic discourse to examine the evolution of cities and to illuminate the roles that humans play in shaping their environments, both natural and constructed. Christopher...

A powerful account of the lesser-known heroes of 9/11—the construction workers who toiled outside the spotlight cleaning up the stunning destruction at Ground Zero, and recovering the bodies of the victims who perished there. With color photographs by Joel Meyerowitz.Hours after two airplanes hit the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, Charlie Vitchers, a construction superintendent, and Bobby Gray, a crane operator, headed downtown. They knew ...

In Up from Zero, Paul Goldberger, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, tells the inside story of the quest to rebuild one of the most important symbolic sites in the world, the sixteen acres where the towers of the former World Trade Center stood. A story of power, politics, architecture, community, and culture, Up from Zero takes us inside the controversial struggle to create and build one of the most challenging urban-design projects in history.What should replace the ...

For James Barilla and his family, the dream of transforming their Columbia, South Carolina, backyard into a haven for wildlife evoked images of kids catching grasshoppers by day and fireflies at night, of digging up potatoes and picking strawberries. When they signed up with the National Wildlife Federation to certify their yard as a wildlife habitat, it felt like pushing back, in however small a way, against the tide of bad news about vanishing species, changing climate, dying coral reefs...

As humans have come to dominate the earth, the ideal of studying and teaching ecology in pristine ecosystems has become impossible to achieve. Our planet is now a mosaic of ecosystems ranging from the relatively undisturbed to the completely built, with the majority of people living in urban environments. This accessible introduction to the principles of urban ecology provides students with the tools they need to understand these increasingly important urban ecosystems. It builds upon the ...

Yasser Elsheshtawy explores Dubai’s history from its beginnings as a small fishing village to its place on the world stage today, using historical narratives, travel descriptions, novels and fictional accounts by local writers to bring colour to his history of the city’s urban development.With the help of case studies and surveys this book explores the economic and political forces driving Dubai’s urban growth, its changing urbanity and its place within the global city network. Uni...

This unique book, written by local experts in the city, deals with the transformation of Barcelona during the last twenty years. Barcelona has been held up as a model of urban planning and economic regeneration amongst built environment professionals. The redesign of square parks and streets throughout the city in the 1980s first attracted attention and praise and then the 1992 Olympics hosted in the city raised international awareness. The city received many awards and accolades including...

In Small Business and the City, Rafael Gomez, Andre Isakov, and Matt Semansky highlight the power of small-scale entrepreneurship to transform local neighbourhoods and the cities they inhabit. Studying the factors which enable small businesses to survive and thrive, they highlight the success of a Canadian concept which has spread worldwide: the Business Improvement Area (BIA). BIAs allow small-scale entrepreneurs to pool their resources with like-minded businesses, becoming sourc...

With increasing awareness of the urgent need to respond to global warming by reducing carbon emissions and recognition of the social benefits of car-free and car-lite living, more and more city planners, advocates, and everyday urban dwellers are demanding new ways of building cities. In Low Car(bon) Communities, authors Nicole Foletta and Jason Henderson examine seven case studies in Europe and the United States that aim explicitly to reduce dependency on cars. Innovative and ins...

Since the late 1990s, there have been broad discussions concerning the rapid rise of the creative economy. Creative or cultural industry is seen as the new engine of the regional growth for both developed economies and emerging nations. At the point of transition in economy and society, China is recently striving to transform its economy from “made in China” towards “created in China”. This book provides an insight into creative industries and spaces in Shanghai, which is the fastest growi...

Historically, we see the city as the cramped, crumbling core of development and culture, and the suburb as the vast outlying wasteland – convenient, but vacant. Contemporary urban design proves this wrong. In New SubUrbanisms, Judith De Jong explains the on-going "flattening" of the American Metropolis, as suburbs are becoming more like their central cities – and cities more like their suburbs through significant changes in spatial and formal practice as well as demographic and cu...

Global warming and human-driven impacts are changing the World’s ecological zones. This book applies the principles described in Bailey’s Ecosystem Geography: From Ecoregions to Sites, 2nd ed. (Springer 2009, 1st ed. 1996) to describe and characterize the major terrestrial and aquatic ecological zones of the Earth. Bailey’s system for classifying these zones has been adopted by major organizations such as the U.S. Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy and this book is a significant con...