Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he co-founded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem.Inside, you'll learn why inducing growth and development has been the conventional response to urban financial struggles--and why it just doesn't work. New development and high-risk investing don't generate enough wealth to support itself, and cities continue to struggle. Read this book to find out how cities large and small can focus on bottom-up investments to minimize risk and maximize their ability to strengthen the community financially and improve citizens' quality of life.Develop in-depth knowledge of the underlying logic behind the "traditional" search for never-ending urban growth Learn practical solutions for ameliorating financial struggles through low-risk investment and a grassroots focus Gain insights and tools that can stop the vicious cycle of budget shortfalls and unexpected downturns Become a part of the Strong Towns revolution by shifting the focus away from top-down growth toward rebuilding American prosperity Strong Towns acknowledges that there is a problem with the American approach to growth and shows community leaders a new way forward. The Strong Towns response is a revolution in how we assemble the places we live.

    In the changing locations and architecture of our ballparks, Goldberger reveals the manifestations of a changing society: the earliest ballparks evoked Victorian society in the accommodations--bleachers for the riffraff, grandstands for the middle-class; the "concrete donuts" of the 1950s and 60s made plain television's grip on the public's attention and the new need for stadiums that could also accommodate football; and more recent ballparks, like Baltimore's Camden Yards, signal a new way forward for stadium design and for baseball's role in urban development. Throughout, Goldberger shows us the ways in which baseball's history--its concurrent rise with the railway system, the origins of the American and National Leagues, the first stolen base--is clued into the important architectural, material, engineering, and site details and requirements that shaped our most beloved stadiums. A fascinating, exuberant ode to the Edens at the heart of our cities--where dreams are as limitless as the outfields.

    They offer affordable mobility and can connect citizens with every aspect of their lives. But in the US, they have long been an afterthought in budgeting and planning. With a compelling narrative and actionable steps, Better Buses, Better Cities inspires us to fix the bus. Transit expert Steven Higashide shows us what a successful bus system looks like with real-world stories of reform—such as Houston redrawing its bus network overnight, Boston making room on its streets to put buses first, and Indianapolis winning better bus service on Election Day. Higashide shows how to marshal the public in support of better buses and how new technologies can keep buses on time and make complex transit systems understandable. Higashide argues that better bus systems will create better cities for all citizens. The consequences of subpar transit service fall most heavily on vulnerable members of society. Transit systems should be planned to be inclusive and provide better service for all. These are difficult tasks that require institutional culture shifts; doing all of them requires resilient organizations and transformational leadership. Better bus service is key to making our cities better for all citizens. Better Buses, Better Cities describes how decision-makers, philanthropists, activists, and public agency leaders can work together to make the bus a win in any city.

    Soft City is about ease and comfort, where density has a human dimension, adapting to our ever-changing needs, nurturing relationships, and accommodating the pleasures of everyday life. How do we move from the current reality in most cites—separated uses and lengthy commutes in single-occupancy vehicles that drain human, environmental, and community resources—to support a soft city approach?   In Soft City David Sim, partner and creative director at Gehl, shows how this is possible, presenting ideas and graphic examples from around the globe. He draws from his vast design experience to make a case for a dense and diverse built environment at a human scale, which he presents through a series of observations of older and newer places, and a range of simple built phenomena, some traditional and some totally new inventions.   Sim shows that increasing density is not enough. The soft city must consider the organization and layout of the built environment for more fluid movement and comfort, a diversity of building types, and thoughtful design to ensure a sustainable urban environment and society.  Soft City begins with the big ideas of happiness and quality of life, and then shows how they are tied to the way we live. The heart of the book is highly visual and shows the building blocks for neighborhoods: building types and their organization and orientation; how we can get along as we get around a city; and living with the weather. As every citizen deals with the reality of a changing climate, Soft City explores how the built environment can adapt and respond.  Soft City offers inspiration, ideas, and guidance for anyone interested in city building. Sim shows how to make any city more efficient, more livable, and better connected to the environment.

    Take your eye off it for more than a moment and you're lost.'Robert Elms has seen London change beyond all imagining: the house he grew up in is now the behemoth that is the Westway flyover, and areas once deemed murder miles have morphed into the stuff of estate agents' dreams, seemingly in a matter of months.Elms takes us back through time and place to myriad Londons. He is our guide through a place that has seen scientific experiments conducted in subterranean lairs, a small community declare itself an independent nation and animals of varying exoticism roam free through its streets; a place his great-great-grandfather made the Elms' home over a century ago and a city that has borne witness to epoch- and world-changing events.

    Reese makes clear the structural forces that determine food access in urban areas, highlighting Black residents' navigation of and resistance to unequal food distribution systems. Linking these local food issues to the national problem of systemic racism, Reese examines the history of the majority-Black Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Reese not only documents racism and residential segregation in the nation's capital but also tracks the ways transnational food corporations have shaped food availability. By connecting community members' stories to the larger issues of racism and gentrification, Reese shows there are hundreds of Deanwoods across the country. Reese's geographies of self-reliance offer an alternative to models that depict Black residents as lacking agency, demonstrating how an ethnographically grounded study can locate and amplify nuances in how Black life unfolds within the context of unequal food access.

    Rather than the straightforward systems of London, Paris or New York, these networks were used as a propaganda artwork--a fusion of sculpture, architecture and art that combined Byzantine, medieval, baroque and constructivist ideas and infused them with the notion that communism would mean a "communal luxury" for all. Today these astonishing spaces remain the closest realization of a Soviet utopia.Following his bestselling quest for Soviet Bus Stops, Canadian photographer Christopher Herwig has completed a subterranean expedition photographing the stations of each Metro network of the former USSR. From extreme marble and chandelier opulence to brutal futuristic minimalist glory, Soviet Metro Stations documents this wealth of diverse architecture. Along the way Herwig captures the elements that make up this singular Soviet experience: neon, concrete, escalators, signage, mosaics and relief sculptures all combine to build a vivid map of the Soviet Metro.Soviet Metro Stations includes an essay by the leading architectural and political writer Owen Hatherley, author of the acclaimed books Landscapes of Communism (2015), Trans-Europe Express (2018) and The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space.

    These changes were largely promoted by those who benefit the most: construction companies and banks, supported by government-facilitated schemes, such as “the right to buy,” micro-financing and urban land reforms.Using examples from Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Chile, Israel, Haiti, the UK and especially Brazil, Rolnik shows how our homes and neighbourhoods have effectively become the “last subprime frontiers of capitalism’. This neoliberal colonialism is experienced on the scale of the city but also within our everyday lives. Since the financial crisis, millions have been left homeless, forced onto the streets by urban development politics, and mega-events such as the Rio World Cup in 2014. These narratives are weaved together with theoretical reflections and empirical evidence to explain the crisis in depth. In response, Rolnik restates the political need for activism and resistance around the right to housing and to the city.

    We are promised that apps, algorithms, and artificial intelligence will relieve congestion, restore democracy, prevent crime, and improve public services. In The Smart Enough City, Ben Green warns against seeing the city only through the lens of technology; taking an exclusively technical view of urban life will lead to cities that appear smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequality. He proposes instead that cities strive to be "smart enough" to embrace technology as a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other forms of social change--but not to value technology as an end in itself.In a technology-centric smart city, self-driving cars have the run of downtown and force out pedestrians, civic engagement is limited to requesting services through an app, police use algorithms to justify and perpetuate racist practices, and governments and private companies surveil public space to control behavior. Green describes smart city efforts gone wrong but also smart enough alternatives, attainable with the help of technology but not reducible to technology: a livable city, a democratic city, a just city, a responsible city, and an innovative city. By recognizing the complexity of urban life rather than merely seeing the city as something to optimize, these Smart Enough Cities successfully incorporate technology into a holistic vision of justice and equity.

    But, to me, we were just regular kids growing up hard in America and making the city our own. Being ‘writers’ gave us something to live for and ‘going all city’ gave us something to strive for; and for some of my friends it was something to die for.”   In the age of commissioned wall murals and trendy street art, it’s easy to forget graffiti’s complicated and often violent past in the United States. Though graffiti has become one of the most influential art forms of the twenty-first century, cities across the United States waged a war against it from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, complete with brutal police task forces. Who were the vilified taggers they targeted? Teenagers, usually, from low-income neighborhoods with little to their names except a few spray cans and a desperate need to be seen—to mark their presence on city walls and buildings even as their cities turned a blind eye to them.  Going All City is the mesmerizing and painful story of these young graffiti writers, told by one of their own. Prolific LA writer Stefano Bloch came of age in the late 1990s amid constant violence, poverty, and vulnerability. He recounts vicious interactions with police; debating whether to take friends with gunshot wounds to the hospital; coping with his mother’s heroin addiction; instability and homelessness; and his dread that his stepfather would get out of jail and tip his unstable life into full-blown chaos. But he also recalls moments of peace and exhilaration: marking a fresh tag; the thrill of running with his crew at night; exploring the secret landscape of LA; the dream and success of going all city.   Bloch holds nothing back in this fierce, poignant memoir. Going All City is an unflinching portrait of a deeply maligned subculture and an unforgettable account of what writing on city walls means to the most vulnerable people living within them.

    Divided into 6 chapters, Eastern Blocks includes a foreword by writer and journalist Christopher Beanland, orientative maps, index of architects and informative texts on the featured cities and constructions.zupagrafika.com/eastern-blocks

    It provides the first narrative of a previously secret and barely understood aspect of London’s history. Behind locked doors and lost entrances lies a secret world of abandoned stations, redundant passageways, empty elevator shafts, and cavernous ventilation ducts. The Tube is an ever-expanding network that has left in its wake hidden places and spaces. Hidden London opens up the lost worlds of London’s Underground and offers a fascinating analysis of why Underground spaces—including the deep-level shelter at Clapham South, the closed Aldwych station, the lost tunnels of Euston—have fallen into disuse and how they have been repurposed. With access to previously unseen archives, architectural drawings, and images, the authors create an authoritative account of London’s hidden Underground story. This surprising and at times myth-breaking narrative interweaves spectacular, newly commissioned photography of disused stations and Underground structures today.

    Our public spaces are not designed for female bodies. There is little consideration for women as mothers, workers or carers. The urban streets often are a place of threats rather than community. Gentrification has made the everyday lives of women even more difficult. What would a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment.In Feminist City, through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built into our cities, homes, and neighborhoods. Kern offers an alternative vision of the feminist city. Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out an intersectional feminist approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and women-friendly cities together.

    With sumptuous photography, the unexpected, softer side of New York is revealed by juxtaposing floral beauty with exquisite botanical details found in the city’s iconic architecture. Also included are field guides to locating and identifying common spring blooms, a list of recommended locations and vendors, and a tutorial on how to create your own New York–style floral bouquet. For anyone who loves New York City, flowers, and photography, New York in Bloom is a gorgeous gift and an essential addition to one’s library of fine books.

    It had retreated as a significant port after the Second World War and by 1979, it was already on the brink. What it needed was support but instead, a Conservative Party with aggressive new ideas allowed it to slide. Thirty-years after the Toxteth Riots, classified government papers revealed that the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was urged to abandon the city and embark on a programme of 'managed decline'. Why did Liverpool's fortunes change so dramatically? Why did it fight back when other cities did not? This is the untold story of what it was like for Liverpool's people and how the period defines who they are.

    Entirely rebuilt after the Korean War, North Korea's capital city was planned and fully implemented to embody a single ideological vision. This extraordinary, richly illustrated book takes readers on a photographic journey through the architecture of North Korea's "model" utopia.Built as an ideological guide for its citizens, Pyongyang displays a unique architectural cohesion and narrative. From the city's large-scale monumental axes to its symbolic sports halls and experimental housing, Model City offers offers comprehensive visual access to Pyongyang's restricted buildings. The architecture of Pyongyang exists within a culture that favors construction and renewal over historical preservation, and in recent years many buildings have been redeveloped to remove interior features or render facades unrecognizable. Often kitschy, colorful, and dramatic, Pyongyang's architecture makes it difficult to distinguish between reality and theater. As befits a culture that has carefully crafted its own narrative, the backdrop of each photograph in Model City has been replaced with a color gradient, evoking the pastel skies of North Korea's propaganda posters.Model City features two hundred color illustrations of buildings rarely seen by non-North Koreans, diagrams and architectural drawings that reveal the planning behind the city's elaborate symbolism, and texts by experts on Korean architecture--including an excerpt from On Architecture by Kim Jong-Il, father of the current leader Kim Jong-un. The authors' research has been supported by Koryo Studio and Korea Cities Federation.

    Pretty tree-lined avenues, cute shops, and serene getaways do not immediately come to mind for this cosmopolitan city, but they are there. Acclaimed Instagrammer Siobhan Ferguson, author of prettycitylondon, now turns her discerning eye to the Big Apple itself. Travel along with her as she uncovers the hidden gems—the sweet, secluded alleys, the fantastic markets, the artisan boutiques—that New York has to offer, and reveals the beautiful, the quaint, and the downright pretty scattered among the urban landscape of the world's most famous city. Stunning photographs alongside fantastic tips to take your own pictures and create a prettycitynewyork experience for yourself make this the perfect book for visitors on foot and armchair travelers alike.

    In the face of gross mismanagement by those in power, Chennai lost lives, homes and livelihoods.Waters from the city’s many lakes, canals and rivers, which humans had usurped and eaten into with tar roads and concrete jungles, retraced their old routes and ate anything that came in their way. Like they did in Mumbai in 2005, Surat in 2006, Srinagar in 2014 and Kerala in 2018. As they might in Bangalore someday, or in Kolkata.To make sense of the horror of those days, Krupa Ge spent over three years filing RTIs, reading government documents and archival material, and interviewing stakeholders, journalists and the people of Chennai. What she arrives at is the shocking truth of how masterly inactivity drowned the city, and how it could happen again. And again.But the heart of the book is in the stories of the people, including Krupa’s own parents, who were caught up in the nightmare of the floods—of their resilience and kindness, and the faultlines of caste and class that the crisis exposed.‘Chennai’s history, tradition, culture and people are vital to the idea of a rich, diverse India. The floods that ravaged this great city should never be forgotten, to continually remind us of the stakes and hence our responsibilities. Combining historical documents, first-person accounts, interviews and government reports, this painstakingly researched book makes an important contribution to keeping such memories alive.’-Arvind Subramanian, former chief economic advisor and besotted Chennaiite‘In December 2015, a city drowned when forgotten rivers and built-over lakes came back to reclaim what was rightfully theirs. Weaving together Krupa’s own harrowing experience of the floods with that of others whose lives were forever changed, Rivers Remember also meticulously traces the why and how of what happened. Taut and incisive, this is a cautionary tale that serves to remind us we can only abuse nature so much, while telling the larger story of how urban planning works across India.’-Anita Nair‘The Cooum, Adyar and Kosasthalaiyar Rivers carry within their dark waters the future, present and the past of their city—Chennai. In December 2015, that city drowned. From deep within those unforgiving waters, Krupa Ge recovers stories, memories and truths of despair, nostalgia, neglect, discrimination, hope, tragedy, corruption, death and life. Through this telling, she warns us of a dystopian future where 2015 comes to stay, even as the death knell gets louder.-T.M. Krishna

    In D.C., no place represents this shift better than the H Street corridor. In this book, Brandi Thompson Summers documents D.C.'s shift to a post-chocolate cosmopolitan metropolis by charting H Street's economic and racial developments. In doing so, she offers a theoretical framework for understanding how blackness is aestheticized and deployed to organize landscapes and raise capital. Summers focuses on the continuing significance of blackness in a place like the nation's capital, how blackness contributes to our understanding of contemporary urbanization, and how it laid an important foundation for how Black people have been thought to exist in cities. Summers also analyzes how blackness--as a representation of diversity--is marketed to sell a progressive, cool, and authentic experience of being in and moving through an urban center.Using a mix of participant observation, visual and media analysis, interviews, and archival research, Summers shows how blackness has become a prized and lucrative aesthetic that often excludes D.C.'s Black residents.

    Chicago is a bona fide theater town, bursting with an explosive, innovative vitality that's fed every sector of the entertainment industry--from Hollywood to Broadway to Studio 8H--for as long as it's delighted adoring local fans.Ensemble is an in-depth, first-of-its-kind history of Chicago's internationally celebrated theater scene, spanning 65 years and told through first-person accounts from the people who made it happen.Among many other topics, this book explores the early days of the fabled Compass Players and the legendary Second City in the '50s and '60s; the rise of internationally acclaimed ensembles like Steppenwolf in the '70s; the explosion of storefront and neighborhood companies that began in earnest in the '80s; and the enduring global influence of the city as the center of improv training and performance.Drawing from more than 300 interviews, author Mark Larson has woven a narrative that expresses the spirit of Chicago's ensemble ethos: the voices of celebrities such as Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Asner, George Wendt, Michael Shannon, and Tracy Letts comingle with stories from designers, composers, and others who have played a crucial role in making Chicago theater so powerful, influential, and unique.

    Name any 'old world' financial metropolis—New York, London, Frankfurt—and he's had a hand in designing its skyline, too.” ( Juan Sebastian Pinto for Forbes.com) In a series of fascinating tales, Gene Kohn explains how he helped build one of the most successful architecture firms in the world, offering inspiring lessons on business leadership and design innovation that can be applied to many fields. Founded on July 4, 1976, Kohn Pedersen Fox quickly became a darling of the architectural press with groundbreaking buildings such as the headquarters for the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, 333 Wacker Drive in Chicago, the Procter & Gamble headquarters in Cincinnati, and the World Bank Headquarters in Washington, DC. By the early 1990s, when most architecture firms in the U.S. were struggling to survive a major recession, KPF was busy with significant buildings in London, Germany, Canada, Japan, Korea, and Indonesia—pioneering a model of global practice that has influenced architecture, design, and creative-services firms ever since. Like any other business, though, KPF has stumbled along the way and wrestled with crises. But through it all, it has remained innovative in a field that changes all the time and often favors the newest star on the horizon. Now in its fifth decade, the firm has shaped skylines and cities around the world with iconic buildings such as the World Financial Center in Shanghai, Roppongi Hills in Tokyo, the International Commerce Centre in Hong Kong, the DZ Bank Tower in Frankfurt, the Heron Tower in London, and Hudson Yards in New York. Forthright and engaging, Kohn examines both award-winning achievements and missteps in his 50-year career in architecture. In the process, he shows how his firm, KPF, has helped change the buildings and cities where we live, work, learn, and play.

    Today’s suburbs are racially, ethnically, and economically diverse, with as many Democratic as Republican voters, a growing population of renters, and rising poverty. The cliche of white picket fences is well past its expiration date.The history of suburbia is equally surprising: American suburbs were once fertile ground for utopian planning, communal living, socially-conscious design, and integrated housing. We have forgotten that we built suburbs like these, such as the co-housing commune of Old Economy, Pennsylvania; a tiny-house anarchist community in Piscataway, New Jersey; a government-planned garden city in Greenbelt, Maryland; a racially integrated subdivision (before the Fair Housing Act) in Trevose, Pennsylvania; experimental Modernist enclaves in Lexington, Massachusetts; and the mixed-use, architecturally daring Reston, Virginia.Inside Radical Suburbs: Experimental Living on the Fringes of the American City you will find blueprints for affordable, walkable, and integrated communities, filled with a range of environmentally sound residential options. Radical Suburbs is a history that will help us remake the future and rethink our assumptions of suburbia.

    Ho has been elected Fellow of the Photographic Society of America, Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, England; Honorary Member of the Photographic Societies of Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Brazil, Argentina, Singapore and etc, and was honored with One-Man-Shows in the above countries. Ho's works can be seen and have been published in many International Photographic Annuals all over the world."

    It put forth a new vision for what its author, Ray C. Anderson, called the "prototypical company of the 21st century"--a restorative company that does no harm to society or the environment. In it Anderson recounts his eureka moment as founder and leader of Interface, Inc., one of the world's largest carpet and flooring companies, and one that was doing business in all the usual ways. Bit by bit, he began learning how much environmental destruction companies like his had caused, prompting him to make a radical change. Mid-Course Correction not only outlined what eco-centered leadership looks like, it also mapped out a specific set of goals for Anderson's company to eliminate its environmental footprint.Those goals remain visionary even today, and this second edition delves into how Interface worked toward making them a reality, birthing one of the most innovative and successful corporate sustainability efforts in the world. The new edition also explores why we need to create not only prototypical companies, but also the prototypical economy of the twenty-first century. As our global economy shifts toward sustainability, challenges like building the circular economy and reversing global warming present tremendous opportunities for business and industry. Mid-Course Correction Revisted contains a new foreword by Paul Hawken, several new chapters by Ray C. Anderson Foundation executive director John A. Lanier, and interviews with Janine Benyus, Joel Makower, Andrew Winston, Ellen MacArthur and other leaders in green enterprise, the circular economy, and biomimicry.A wide range of business readers--from sustainability professionals to green entrepreneurs to CEOs--will find both wise advice and concrete examples in this new look at a master in corporate and environmental leadership, and the legacy he left.

    A site of momentous national political events from the Revolutionary War through the civil rights movement, Boston has also been an influential literary and cultural capital. From ancient glaciers to landmaking schemes and modern infrastructure projects, the city’s terrain has been transformed almost constantly over the centuries. The Atlas of Boston History traces the city’s history and geography from the last ice age to the present with beautifully rendered maps.   Edited by historian Nancy S. Seasholes, this landmark volume captures all aspects of Boston’s past in a series of fifty-seven stunning full-color spreads. Each section features newly created thematic maps that focus on moments and topics in that history. These maps are accompanied by hundreds of historical and contemporary illustrations and explanatory text from historians and other expert contributors. They illuminate a wide range of topics including Boston’s physical and economic development, changing demography, and social and cultural life. In lavishly produced detail, The Atlas of Boston History offers a vivid, refreshing perspective on the development of this iconic American city. Contributors Robert J. Allison, Robert Charles Anderson, John Avault, Joseph Bagley, Charles Bahne, Laurie Baise, J. L. Bell, Rebekah Bryer, Aubrey Butts, Benjamin L. Carp, Amy D. Finstein, Gerald Gamm, Richard Garver, Katherine Grandjean, Michelle Granshaw, James Green, Dean Grodzins, Karl Haglund, Ruth-Ann M. Harris, Arthur Krim, Stephanie Kruel, Kerima M. Lewis, Noam Maggor, Dane A. Morrison, James C. O’Connell, Mark Peterson, Marshall Pontrelli, Gayle Sawtelle, Nancy S. Seasholes, Reed Ueda, Lawrence J. Vale, Jim Vrabel, Sam Bass Warner, Jay Wickersham, and Susan Wilson

     Desiree Schulman is home from federal prison—almost. When Des returns to Washington, DC under "conditional release," she wants three things: to repair her relationships, to practice humility, and to stay out of prison. So she reconnects with her local sadomasochists' group, and pursues an elusive ex. She takes a state-mandated job cleaning (and judging) other people's houses, flings a few prayers at whatever Higher Power might be listening, and spends her group therapy trying to justify her happy childhood to the women of her halfway house. But Des's downwardly-mobile skid through the gentrifying city is more dangerous than she realizes. Behind a high fence in wealthy Upper Northwest, a cult is preying on vulnerable women. And when Des discovers their secret, she'll have to find out whether she's willing to risk her own freedom for somebody else's. Set in the shadow of the 2016 elections, Punishment is a story about all the ways we surrender: the ridiculous ways and the sublime ways and the sad sordid ways; the ways which damage us and the ways which may, if we're lucky, heal us.

    

    Artificiality, astronomy, and automation form the basis of that alternative planetarity. This short book was written in July 2019. It is is an opening brief and manifesto for The Terraforming urban design research programme at the Strelka Institute in Moscow. It is a narrowly targeted polemic against dominant modes of planetarity and a rejoinder to inadequacies seen in how critical philosophy and design seeks to confront them. The title refers both to the terraforming that has taken place in recent centuries in the form of urbanisation, and to the terraforming that must now be planned and conducted as the planetary design initiative of the next centuries if true catastrophes are to be prevented. The term 'terraforming' usually refers to transforming the ecosystems of other planets or moons to make them capable of supporting Earth-like life, but the looming ecological consequences of what is called the Anthropocene suggest that in the decades to come, we will need to terraform Earth if it is to remain a viable host for Earth-like life. Planetarity itself comes into focus through orbiting imagining and terrestrial modeling technologies (satellites, sensors, servers in sync) that have made it possible to measure climate change with any confidence. We will explore a renewed Copernican turn, and how the technologically mediated shift away from anthropocentric perspectives is crucially necessary in both theory and practice. The Copernican turn is also a trauma, as Freud once suggested, but this is one that demands more agency, not less. The implications of the shift are perhaps counterintuitive. Instead of reviving ideas of 'nature,' we will reclaim 'the artificial'—not as in 'fake,' but rather 'designed'—as a foundation which links the mitigation of anthropogenic climate change to the geopolitics of automation. For this, urban-scale automation is seen as part of an expanded landscape of information, agency, labor, and energy that is part of a living ecology, not a substitute for one. As such, the focus of urban design research shifts toward the governance of infrastructures that operate on much longer timescales than our cultural narratives.

    From Rebecca Solnit, Rebecca Snedeker, and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro.In the past decade, Rebecca Solnit--aided by local writers, artists, historians, urbanists, ethnographers, and cartographers--has compiled three stunning atlases that have radically changed the way we think about place. Each atlas provides a vivid, complex look at the multi-faceted nature of a city as experienced by its different inhabitants, replete with the celebrations and contradictions that make up urban life.This three-volume paperback set contains:The original, gorgeously designed atlases--Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas; Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas; and Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas Three new and updated, full-color, fold-out posters for each city, including the popular "City of Women" mapA new and thoughtful essay by Rebecca Solnit reflecting on the project ten years after the publication of the first atlas A stunning collection, this boxed set is a perfect treasury of imagination and insight, a rich people's history of these infinite cities.

    Around the world, more and more money is being invested in buildings and land. Real estate is now a $217 trillion dollar industry, worth thirty-six times the value of all the gold ever mined. It forms sixty percent of global assets, and one of the most powerful people in the world—the president of the United States—made his name as a landlord and developer.Samuel Stein shows that this explosive transformation of urban life and politics has been driven not only by the tastes of wealthy newcomers, but by the state-led process of urban planning. Planning agencies provide a unique window into the ways the state uses and is used by capital, and the means by which urban renovations are translated into rising real estate values and rising rents.Capital City explains the role of planners in the real estate state, as well as the remarkable power of planning to reclaim urban life.

    The failure to construct sufficient housing - especially affordable housing - in desirable communities and neighborhoods comes with significant social, economic, and environmental costs. This book examines how local participatory land use institutions amplify the power of entrenched interests and privileged homeowners. The book draws on sweeping data to examine the dominance of land use politics by 'neighborhood defenders' - individuals who oppose new housing projects far more strongly than their broader communities and who are likely to be privileged on a variety of dimensions. Neighborhood defenders participate disproportionately and take advantage of land use regulations to restrict the construction of multifamily housing. The result is diminished housing stock and higher housing costs, with participatory institutions perversely reproducing inequality.

    Drawing on historical and social science research and case studies of contemporary democratic innovations across the country, Civic Power calls for a broader approach to democracy reform focused on meaningfully redistributing power to citizens. It advocates for both reviving grassroots civil society and novel approaches to governance, policymaking, civic technology, and institutional design - aimed at dismantling structural disparities to build a more inclusive, empowered, bottom-up democracy, where communities and people have greater voice, power, and agency.

    Wresting this iconic urban center from these misleading, tired clich�s, The City-State of Boston highlights Boston's overlooked past as an autonomous city-state, and in doing so, offers a pathbreaking and brilliant new history of early America. Following Boston's development over three centuries, Mark Peterson discusses how this self-governing Atlantic trading center began as a refuge from Britain's Stuart monarchs and how--through its bargain with slavery and ratification of the Constitution--it would tragically lose integrity and autonomy as it became incorporated into the greater United States.Drawing from vast archives, and featuring unfamiliar figures alongside well-known ones, such as John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and John Adams, Peterson explores Boston's origins in sixteenth-century utopian ideals, its founding and expansion into the hinterland of New England, and the growth of its distinctive political economy, with ties to the West Indies and southern Europe. By the 1700s, Boston was at full strength, with wide Atlantic trading circuits and cultural ties, both within and beyond Britain's empire. After the cataclysmic Revolutionary War, "Bostoners" aimed to negotiate a relationship with the American confederation, but through the next century, the new United States unraveled Boston's regional reign. The fateful decision to ratify the Constitution undercut its power, as Southern planters and slave owners dominated national politics and corroded the city-state's vision of a common good for all.Peeling away the layers of myth surrounding a revered city, The City-State of Boston offers a startlingly fresh understanding of America's history.

    Each chapter follows a single material's movement: guano from Peru that landed in Central Park in the 1860s, granite from Maine that paved Broadway in the 1890s, structural steel from Pittsburgh that restructured Riverside Park in the 1930s, London Plane street trees grown on Rikers Island by incarcerated workers that were planted on 7th Avenue north of Central Park, and the popular tropical hardwood, ipe, from northern Brazil installed in the High Line in the 2000s. Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements considers the social, political, and ecological entanglements of material practice, challenging readers to think of materials not as inert products but as continuous with land and the people that shape them, and to reimagine forms of construction in solidarity with people, other species, and landscapes elsewhere.

    Seventy-seven of them, formally; more than 200 in subjective, ever-changing fact. But what does that actually mean? The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook, the latest in Belt's series of idiosyncratic city guides (after Cleveland and Detroit), aims to explore community history and identity in a global city through essays, poems, photo essays, and art articulating the lived experience of its residents. Edited by Martha Bayne with help from the Read/Write Library, the book builds on 2017's critically acclaimed Rust Belt Chicago: An Anthology. What did one pizzeria mean to a boy growing up in Ashburn? How can South Shore encompass so much beauty and so much pain? Where's the best borscht in Ukranian Village? Who's got a handle on the ever-shifting identity of Rogers Park? All this and more in this lyrical, subjective, completely non-comprehensive guide to Chicago. Featuring work by Megan Stielstra, Audrey Petty, Alex Hernandez, Sebastián Hidalgo, Dmitry Samarov, Ed Marszewski, Lily Be, Jonathan Foiles, and many more.

    These ubiquitous touchstones of modern life were once anything but. Disability advocates fought tirelessly to ensure that the needs of people with disabilities became a standard part of public design thinking. That fight took many forms worldwide, but in the United States it became a civil rights issue; activists used design to make an argument about the place of people with disabilities in public life.In the aftermath of World War II, with injured veterans returning home and the polio epidemic reaching the Oval Office, the needs of people with disabilities came forcibly into the public eye as they never had before. The US became the first country to enact federal accessibility laws, beginning with the Architectural Barriers Act in 1968 and continuing through the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, bringing about a wholesale rethinking of our built environment. This progression wasn't straightforward or easy. Early legislation and design efforts were often haphazard or poorly implemented, with decidedly mixed results. Political resistance to accommodating the needs of people with disabilities was strong; so, too, was resistance among architectural and industrial designers, for whom accessible design wasn't "real" design.Bess Williamson provides an extraordinary look at everyday design, marrying accessibility with aesthetic, to provide an insight into a world in which we are all active participants, but often passive onlookers. Richly detailed, with stories of politics and innovation, Williamson's Accessible America takes us through this important history, showing how American ideas of individualism and rights came to shape the material world, often with unexpected consequences.

    Kim reexamines the rise of Los Angeles from a small town to a global city against the backdrop of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Gilded Age economics, and American empire. It is a far-reaching transnational history, chronicling how Los Angeles boosters transformed the borderlands through urban and imperial capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century and how the Mexican Revolution redefined those same capitalist networks into the twentieth.Kim draws on archives in the United States and Mexico to argue that financial networks emerging from Los Angeles drove economic transformations in the borderlands, reshaped social relations across wide swaths of territory, and deployed racial hierarchies to advance investment projects across the border. However, the Mexican Revolution, with its implicit critique of imperialism, disrupted the networks of investment and exploitation that had structured the borderlands for sixty years, and reconfigured transnational systems of infrastructure and trade. Kim provides the first history to connect Los Angeles's urban expansionism with more continental and global currents, and what results is a rich account of real and imagined geographies of city, race, and empire.

    … Moving beyond words.”— Roy Gutman, Pulitzer Prize winner and Crimes of War Project chairman“A universal human story … and an invaluable historical source.”— Robert Donia, author of Sarajevo: A Biography “Sanja Kulenovic’s memoir captures courage and resilience … and shines a light on immigration crises everywhere.”— Foreword ReviewsIn 1992, Bosnian honeymooners in Southern California are suddenly stranded and homeless when their native Yugoslavia erupts into civil war. The stunned refugees must scrape together a new life in America with sporadic letters their sole, tenuous link to besieged family and loved ones back in Sarajevo.Sanja Kulenovic shares those precious letters—often written in darkness as bombs fell and gunfire rang out—to vividly capture the suffering her family and other Sarajevans endured through almost four years of daily bombardments, the perpetual threat of sniper fire, and three frozen, foodless winters.The Siege of Sarajevo searingly illustrates the human toll of war and the highly personal consequences of what often are dismissed as faraway conflicts. Highlighting the resilience and determination of immigrants, Kulenovic’s powerful story reminds us all that we are stronger than we’ve ever imagined.

    Its literary tradition has always been deeply ingrained in the city's history and poets and writers continue to hold court in the city's literary salons. Jules Stewart guides the reader on a colourful journey through more than 400 years of literary and intellectual life, centred mostly in the Barrio de las Letras, and brings to life the people and places, vivid anecdotes and rich historical detail that made Madrid the heart of literary Spain.

    Around the world, libraries have reinvented themselves as networked hubs, community centres, innovation labs, and makerspaces. Coupling striking architectural design with attention to ambience and comfort, libraries have signaled their desire to be seen as both engines of innovation and creative production, and hearts of community life. This book argues that the library's transformation is deeply connected to a broader project of urban redevelopment and the transition to a knowledge economy. In particular, libraries have become entangled in visions of the smart city, where densely networked, ubiquitous connectivity promises urban prosperity built on efficiency, innovation, and new avenues for civic participation. Drawing on theoretical analysis and interviews with library professionals, policymakers, and users, this book examines the inevitable tensions emerging when a public institution dedicated to universal access to knowledge and a shared public culture intersects with the technology-driven, entrepreneurialist ideals of the smart city.

    

    Never has it taken to the streets without controversy: 1819 was the year of the city's first bicycle and also its first bicycle ban. Debates around the bicycle's place in city life have been so persistent not just because of its many uses--recreation, sport, transportation, business--but because of changing conceptions of who cyclists are.In On Bicycles, Evan Friss traces the colorful and fraught history of cycling in New York City. He uncovers the bicycle's place in the city over time, showing how it has served as a mirror of the city's changing social, economic, infrastructural, and cultural politics since it first appeared. It has been central, as when horse-drawn carriages shared the road with bicycle lanes in the 1890s; peripheral, when Robert Moses's car-centric vision made room for bicycles only as recreation; and aggressively marginalized, when Ed Koch's battle against bike messengers culminated in the short-lived 1987 Midtown Bike Ban. On Bicycles illuminates how the city as we know it today--veined with over a thousand miles of bicycle lanes--reflects a fitful journey powered, and opposed, by New York City's people and its politics.

    Yet, rather than halting the flow of capital, these crises served to secure it. In colonial Bombay, capitalists and governors, Indian and British alike, used moments of crisis to justify interventions that delimited the city as a distinct object and progressively excluded laborers and migrants from it. Town planners, financiers, and property developers joined forces to secure the city as a space for commerce and encoded shelter types as legitimate or illegitimate. By the early twentieth century, the slum emerged as a particularly useful category of stigmatization that would animate city-making projects in subsequent decades.Sheetal Chhabria locates the origins of Bombay's now infamous "slum problem" in the broader histories of colonialism and capitalism. She not only challenges assumptions about colonial urbanization and cities in the global south, but also provides a new analytical approach to urban history. Making the Modern Slum shows how the wellbeing of the city-rather than of its people-became an increasingly urgent goal of government, positioning agrarian distress, famished migrants, and the laboring poor as threats to be contained or excluded.

    Houses and stores and streets define it in one way. But it’s also people—the people who make it their home, some eagerly, others grudgingly. A neighborhood can thrive or it can decline, and neighbors move in and move out. Sometimes they stay but withdraw behind fences and burglar alarms. If a neighborhood becomes no longer a place of sociability and street life, but of privacy indoors and fearful distrust outdoors, is it still a neighborhood?   In the late 1960s and 1970s Carlo Rotella grew up in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood—a place of neat bungalow blocks and desolate commercial strips, and sharp, sometimes painful social contrasts. In the decades since, the hollowing out of the middle class has left residents confronting—or avoiding—each other across an expanding gap that makes it ever harder for them to recognize each other as neighbors. Rotella tells the stories that reveal how that happened—stories of deindustrialization and street life; stories of gorgeous apartments with vistas onto Lake Michigan and of Section 8 housing vouchers held by the poor. At every turn, South Shore is a study in contrasts, shaped and reshaped over the past half-century by individual stories and larger waves of change that make it an exemplar of many American urban neighborhoods. Talking with current and former residents and looking carefully at the interactions of race and class, persistence and change, Rotella explores the tension between residents’ deep investment of feeling and resources in the physical landscape of South Shore and their hesitation to make a similar commitment to the community of neighbors living there.   Blending journalism, memoir, and archival research, The World Is Always Coming to an End uses the story of one American neighborhood to challenge our assumptions about what neighborhoods are, and to think anew about what they might be if we can bridge gaps and commit anew to the people who share them with us. Tomorrow is another ending.

    

    However, most city commuters would be quick to tell you otherwise.Of all the technological interventions continuously inserted into our daily travels, which ones will last? Is ride-sharing here to stay? In ten years will we all be taking autonomous vehicles to work? Will traffic as we know it cease to exist? While this volume makes no promises or predictions, it does take a step back from the hype of the new to explore more of the options from what might seem like yesterday's solutions: busses, bikes and even trains. Perhaps remedies to our transportation woes are not all in the future but are hiding in plain and present site.The Future of Transportation is the third volume in the SOM Thinkers series, conceived by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. SOM Thinkers originated from a desire to start a public conversation about the built environment. Rather than frame the subject in the expected "professional" language, the series poses today's most pressing questions about design and architecture in a bold and accessible way.This volume features work by Henry Grabar, Oliver Franklin-Wallis, Laura Bliss, Darran Anderson, Nick Van Mead, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Alison Griswold and Christopher Schaberg, with artwork by Olalekan Jeyifous.

    The mobility world we know today is based on 100 years of technological development. From the Internal Combustion Engine enabled by Rockefeller’s refined Standard Oil to Ford’s innovative supply chain that allowed Model T’s to come off factory lines as easily as bottles of soda. From the mandates of President Eisenhower putting WWII US veterans to work building the most massive network of roads the world had ever seen to the rise of suburbia, malls and edge cities, a car in every driveway came to symbolize the American Dream.But that car is a bundle. As a pre-paid option to go anywhere and at anytime, a car offers a bundle of trips whether short or long and whether used or not in a box weighing, on average, 20 times its payload. The externalities of this arrangement are becoming daunting. From more than 1 million fatalities every year, to climate change, to congestion that saps productivity and enrages, this object, carrying typically only one passenger, ceased being a liberator. The bundle became overbearing and over-serving crushing more value than it creates.Where do we need to go? The other way. Just as the mainframe was unbundled into the personal computer and the network and the PC itself was unbundled into phones, tablets and wearables, transport is moving from monolithic all-in-one owned cars into ever-smaller on-demand vehicles that are optimized for journey length, payload, fleet use, utilization, energy consumed and space allocated. The capital saved through high utilization and energy saved with weight reduction are providing profit motives that are becoming irresistible to investors.Our focus is on what this unbundling will entail and what we can do to accelerate it. It’s a transformation that is not only virtuous but highly profitable.The hard part about predicting the future of mobility isn’t really a question of “what”, it’s much more about the “when” and “who”. Here are some of the questions we want to answer:How quickly will micromobility be adopted?Which business strategy will be successful?How will capital be allocated?How will policy change?How will consumers react?What is the best segmentation of travel into the right “job-to-be-done” categories?How were the categories of travel merged into one object of conveyance?How do we move from product ownership to product as a service to product as a security? How are the various services inducing the introduction of new vehicles? — bespoke to categories of travelHow are three vectors of innovation--on-demand dispatch, Li-ion batteries and automated driving-- affecting vehicular designs and service models.How are new manufacturing and distribution technologies affecting the vehicle?How will the great unbundling affect cities, nations, work and urbanization?

    It formulates what postdisciplinarity is, and how it can be implemented in research practice.The diverse chapters present a rich collection of highly creative thought-provoking essays and methodological insights. Written by a number of pioneering intellectuals with a range of backgrounds and research foci, these chapters cover a broad spectrum of areas demonstrating alternative ways of producing knowledge. Essays are interspersed with dialogue, encouraging a comprehensive and engaging discussion on this emerging movement.Not limited to a specific field or discipline, this will be of great interest to upper-level students and researchers in a wide range of subject areas, including: tourism, sociology, education, psychology, physiotherapy, fine arts, architecture and design, as well as those with a general interest in epistemology and methodology.

    It focuses on these fifteen cities at some of the defining moments in Islamic history: from the Prophet Mohammed receiving his divine revelations in Mecca and the First Crusade of 1099 to the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the phenomenal creation of the merchant republic of Beirut in the nineteenth century.