Investigates the systems of infrastructure that sustain the world and the cultures of historical periods, following various elements, from electricity and pavement to water and waste disposal, back to their origins and people who operate them.

"An eminent sociologist--and coauthor, with Aziz Ansari, of the #1 New York Times bestseller Modern Romance--makes the provocative case that the future of democratic societies rests not only on shared values but also on shared "social infrastructure": the libraries, childcare centers, bookstores, coffee shops, pools, and parks that promote crucial, sometimes life-saving connections between people who might otherwise fail to find common cause"-- "An...

Two leading economists present a new model for sustainable capitalism based on the economics of mutuality.
For decades, leaders in the business world have believed that their sole responsibility is to maximize profit for shareholders. But this obsessive focus was a major cause of the abuses that nearly sunk the global economy in 2008. While books like Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century have exposed the shortcomings...

India is undergoing a retail revolution in which the aspiring middle-class is demanding more western goods and services. Modern malls are muscling into the traditional marketplace, pushing India's economic infrastructure to the limits and threatening to put thousands of bazaar owners and small farmers out of business. In Hindi "Mallamall" literally means "bountiful goods," and nowhere else in the world are the markets so lively with their jewel-colored...

"Illustrates the major systems that lie beneath a city to help it function, including sewer, gas, electrical, and more"--

"The Congressional Budget Office has laid out seven infrastructure categories: highways, public transit, wastewater treatment, water resources, air traffic control, airports, and municipal water supply. This book focuses on a broadened version of the first and, in many ways, most visible and historically significant category: roads and bridges, as well as their aquatic kin, the nineteenth-century canal. Also examined is US transportation policy from...

"This illustrated book extends the field guide genre from natural phenomena to human-made structures, making their design and construction approachable and understandable to non-engineers. Readers will learn to identify characteristics of the electrical grid, roadways, railways, bridges, tunnels, waterways, and more"--

"People have gathered in public drinking places to drink, relax, socialize, and do business for hundreds of years. For just as long, critics have described taverns and similar drinking establishments as sources of individual ruin and public disorder. Examining these dynamics as Americans surged westward in the early nineteenth century, Kirsten E. Wood argues that entrepreneurial, improvement-minded men integrated many village and town taverns into...

"How Nazi architects and planners envisioned and began to build a model 'Aryan' society in Norway during World War II"--