How do you create inviting and authentic urban environments where people feel at home? Countless community engagement workshops, studies by consulting firms, and downtown revitalization campaigns have attempted to answer this age-old question. In Urbanism Without Effort, Chuck Wolfe argues that "unplanned" places can often teach us more about great placemaking than planned ones.

From impromptu movie nights in a Seattle alley

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Making and Dwelling is the definitive statement on cities by the renowned public intellectual Richard Sennett. In this sweeping work, he traces the anguished relation between how cities are built and how people live in them, from ancient Athens to twenty-first-century Shanghai. He shows how Paris, Barcelona, and New York City assumed their modern forms; rethinks the reputations of Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, and others; and takes us on a tour of emblematic...

"This book explores two centuries of suburban growth as integral to global urbanism. It argues that the future of an urbanizing world will be a suburban world and presents suburbs as places that are interesting and viable on their own terms rather than simply poor cousins of big cities. Examples come from every peopled continent, offering glimpses of suburbs from London to Lima, Sao Paolo to Singapore, Cairo to Chicago, and Dublin to Delhi. The approach...

American cities are shifting collections of individual neghborhoods. Thousands of residents move every year within and among neighborhoods; their flows across a city can radically and quickly alter the character of its neighborhoods. What is behind all this ferment—the decline of one area, the revitalization of another? Can the process be made more rational? Can city neighborhoods be stabilized—and older cities thus preserved?

This

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"Rising income inequality and concentrated poverty threaten the social sustainability of North American cities. Suburban growth endangers sensitive ecosystems, water supplies, and food security. Existing urban infrastructure is crumbling while governments struggle to pay for new and expanded services. Can our inherited urban governance institutions and policies effectively respond to these problems? In Shaping the Metropolis Zack Taylor compares the...

"A critical examination of how single-family housing, the building block of US cities, is changing and its transformative potential for American urbanism"--

"Certain cities-most famously New York, London, and Tokyo-have been identified as "global cities," whose function in the world economy transcends national borders. Without the same fanfare, formerly peripheral and secondary cities have been growing in importance, emerging as global cities in their own right. The striking similarity of the skylines of Dubai, Miami, and Singapore is no coincidence: despite following different historical paths, all three...

During the last decade, the South American continent has seen a strong push for transnational integration, initiated by the former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who (with the endorsement of eleven other nations) spearheaded the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA), a comprehensive energy, transport, and communications network. The most aggressive transcontinental integration project

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"Now, for the first time in history, the majority of the world's population lives in cities. But urbanization is accelerating in some places and slowing down in others. The sprawling megacities of Asia and Africa as well as many other smaller and medium-sized cities throughout the "Global South" are expected to continue growing. At the same time, older industrial cities in wealthier countries are experiencing protracted socioeconomic decline. Nonetheless,...

The concept of civilization has long been the basis for theories about how socities evolve. This provocative book challenges that concept. The author argues that a "civilization bias" shapes academic explanations of urbanization, colonization, state formation, and cultural horizons. Although theorists have criticized the concept, Jennings argues that we remain beholden to the idea of civilization, holding back our understanding of the development...