Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or worse for our happiness? Are subways, sidewalks and condo towers an improvement on the car-dependence of sprawl?The award-winning journalist Charles Montgomery finds answers to such questions at the intersection between urban design and the emerging science of happiness, during an exhilarating journey through some of the world’s most dynamic cities. He meets the visionary mayor who introduced a “sexy” bus to ease status anxiety in Bogotá; the architect who brought the lessons of medieval Tuscan hill towns to modern-day New York City; the activist who turned Paris’s urban freeways into beaches; and an army of American suburbanites who have hacked the design of their own streets and neighborhoods.Rich with new insights from psychology, neuroscience and Montgomery’s own urban experiments, Happy City reveals how our cities can shape our thoughts as well as our behavior. The message is as surprising as it is hopeful: by retrofitting cities and our own lives for happiness, we can tackle the urgent challenges of our age. The happy city can save the world--and all of us can help build it.

    And he has boiled it down to one key factor: walkability. The very idea of a modern metropolis evokes visions of bustling sidewalks, vital mass transit, and a vibrant, pedestrian-friendly urban core. But in the typical American city, the car is still king, and downtown is a place that's easy to drive to but often not worth arriving at. Making walkability happen is relatively easy and cheap; seeing exactly what needs to be done is the trick. In this essential new book, Speck reveals the invisible workings of the city, how simple decisions have cascading effects, and how we can all make the right choices for our communities. Bursting with sharp observations and real-world examples, giving key insight into what urban planners actually do and how places can and do change, Walkable City lays out a practical, necessary, and eminently achievable vision of how to make our normal American cities great again.

    Completely re-designed with an accessible, four-color layout, this second edition continues to build upon the fast-changing state of the practice at the local level. The designs in this book were developed by cities for cities, since unique urban streets require innovative solutions.To create the Guide, the authors conducted an extensive worldwide literature search from design guidelines and real-life experience. They worked closely with a panel of urban bikeway planning professionals from NACTO member cities and from numerous other cities worldwide, as well as traffic engineers, planners, and academics with deep experience in urban bikeway applications. The Guide offers substantive guidance for cities seeking to improve bicycle transportation in places where competing demands for the use of the right-of-way present unique challenges.First and foremost, the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide, Second Edition will help practitioners make good decisions about urban bikeway design. The treatments outlined in this updated Guide are based on real-life experience in the world's most bicycle friendly cities and have been selected because of their utility in helping cities meet their goals related to bicycle transportation. Praised by Former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood as an “extraordinary piece of work,” the Guide is an indispensable tool every planner must have for their daily transportation design work.

    City Cycling offers a guide to this urban cycling renaissance, with the goal of promoting cycling as sustainable urban transportation available to everyone. It reports on cycling trends and policies in cities in North America, Europe, and Australia, and offers information on such topics as cycling safety, cycling infrastructure provisions including bikeways and bike parking, the wide range of bike designs and bike equipment, integration of cycling with public transportation, and promoting cycling for women and children.City Cycling emphasizes that bicycling should not be limited to those who are highly trained, extremely fit, and daring enough to battle traffic on busy roads. The chapters describe ways to make city cycling feasible, convenient, and safe for commutes to work and school, shopping trips, visits, and other daily transportation needs. The book also offers detailed examinations and illustrations of cycling conditions in different urban environments: small cities (including Davis, California, and Delft, the Netherlands), large cities (including Sydney, Chicago, Toronto and Berlin), and "megacities" (London, New York, Paris, and Tokyo). These chapters offer a closer look at how cities both with and without historical cycling cultures have developed cycling programs over time. The book makes clear that successful promotion of city cycling depends on coordinating infrastructure, programs, and government policies.

    By identifying the policies and amenities that foster such streetscapes, Campoli teaches urban developers, decision makers, and students how to create similar communities and help to mitigate climate change by lowering vehicle miles traveled.

    Covers a wide range of theoretical approaches to the city, from the historical to the cutting edge Emphasizes the important themes of space and place Offers a balanced account of cities and offers extensive coverage including urban inequality, environment and sustainability, and methods for studying the city Takes a global approach, with examples from Berlin and Chicago to Shanghai and Mumbai Includes a range of pedagogical features such as a substantial glossary of key terms, critical thinking questions, suggestions for further reading and a range of innovative textboxes which follow the themes of Exploring Further, Studying the City and Making the City Better Extensively illustrated with maps, charts, tables, and over 80 photographs Accompanied by a comprehensive student companion site featuring a list of relevant journals, a guide to useful web resources, and an annotated documentary film guide, alongside a useful instructor companion site with further examples, case studies, and discussion and essay questions; instructors will find a link to the instructor website on the student website at www.wiley.com/go/cities

    His interest in minimising the length of paved road to number of houses served, and 'greening' the ubiquitous mechanistic bye-law suburb of the late 19th century provided motivation for defining a general theory of design, which under pinned Garden City principles. Nothing Gained by Overcrowding emerged as a principle which was to have a revolutionary impact on housing and urban form over the next 50 years.Unwin's theory had developed with his work, but the origins can be found in two earlier and less well known publications. On the building of houses in the Garden City' was written for the first international conference of the Garden City Association, held in September 1901. The following year he published the Fabian Society Tract Cottage Plans and Common Sense, in which he took first principles, 'shelter, comfort, privacy', and drew out general criteria and specific standards. Housing had to be freed from the bye-law strait jacket. This would sweep away 'back yards, back alleys and abominations ... too long screened by that wretched prefix back'.Republished here for the first time together, with an introductory essay by Dr Mervyn Miller, these three papers make clear the development of Raymond Unwin's theories of planning and housing, theories which were among the most influential of the 20th Century.

    Democracy in Motion represents the first comprehensive attempt to assess the practice and impact of deliberative civicengagement. Organized in a series of chapters that address the big questions of deliberative civic engagement, it uses theory, research, and practice from around the world to explore what we know about, how we know it, and what remains to be understood. More than a simple summary of research, thebook is designed to be accessible and useful to a wide variety of audiences, from scholars and practitioners working in numerous disciplines and fields, to public officials, activists, and average citizens who are seeking to utilize deliberative civic engagement in their communities. The booksignificantly enhances current scholarship, serving as a guide to existing research and identifying useful future research. It also has promise for enhancing practice, for example by helping practitioners, public officials, and others better think through and articulate issues of design andoutcomes, thus enabling them to garner more support for public deliberation activities. In addition, by identifying what remains to be learned about public deliberation, practitioners and public officials may be inspired to connect with scholars to conduct research and evaluations of their efforts.

    The contributions show how architects, planners, and urban designers describe and give shape to the city, while novelists, humanists, and other scholars examine its operations and performances. The essential question is: How does the physical character of an urban environment influence or enable the events that take place within a specific setting? Contributors from a wide range of fields address the role and life of cities as diverse as Baku, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Detroit, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Paris, Quito, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv, Tirana, and Toronto. Portfolios of contemporary photography present the layered realities of urban life today. With contributions by Arjun Appadurai, Eve Blau, Svetlana Boym, Lindsay Bremner, Jana Cephas, Felipe Correa, Rahul Mehrotra, Mohsen Mostafavi, Antoine Picon, Gyan Prakash, Nasser Rabbat, Rafi Segal, Jorge Silvetti, AbdouMaliq Simone, and Charles Waldheim.Mohsen Mostafavi, an architect and educator, is dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design. He is the editor of Ecological Urbanism (with Gareth Doherty).

    Using the examples of the refugee camps in the Algerian desert in which Sahrawis originally from the Western Sahara have been living for 35 years, the book looks at the urban aspects of these settlements. In contrast to the standard way of seeing refugee camps as scenes of human misery and despair, the examination concentrates on how people live and dwell in refugee camps, on how they work, move around, and enjoy themselves, and looks at the spaces and structures that are created in the process. With numerous images and texts, individual aspects of urban life are presented and analyzed in the different chapters. As an examination of a borderline case of urbanity, the publication does not ignore the problematic aspects of this theme, but on the contrary: its potential explosiveness is further underscored by the focus on a vocabulary of the urban. It allows an understanding of the camps as a political project. The publication is based on research studies of the ETH Studio Basel, Institute of Contemporary Urbanism at the ETH Zurich. Manue l Herz is an architect, based in Basel, Switzerland. Amongst his recently constructed buildings are the Jewish Community Center and Synagogue of Mainz (Germany) and the mixed-use building Legal / Illegal in Cologne. He currently is the head of teaching and research at ETH Studio Basel--Institute of the Contemporary City. Besides his work as a practicing architect, he researches and works in the field of architecture of humanitarian action.

    The contributors to this new collection consider how far argumentative policy analysis has come during the past two decades and how its theories continue to be refined through engagement with current thinking in social theory and with the real-life challenges facing contemporary policy makers.The approach speaks in particular to the limits of rationalistic, technoscientific policy making in the complex, unpredictable world of the early twenty-first century. These limits have been starkly illustrated by responses to events such as the environmental crisis, the near collapse of the world economy, and the disaster at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan. Addressing topics including deliberative democracy, collaborative planning, new media, rhetoric, policy frames, and transformative learning, the essays shed new light on the ways that policy is communicatively created, conveyed, understood, and implemented. Taken together, they show argumentative policy inquiry to be an urgently needed approach to policy analysis and planning.Contributors. Giovanni Attili, Hubertus Buchstein, Stephen Coleman, John S. Dryzek, Frank Fischer, Herbert Gottweis, Steven Griggs, Mary Hawkesworth, Patsy Healey, Carolyn M. Hendriks, David Howarth, Dirk Jörke, Alan Mandell, Leonie Sandercock, Vivien A. Schmidt, Sanford F. SchramFrank Fischer is Professor of Politics and Global Affairs at Rutgers University. He also teaches at the university's E. J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy and is a Senior Faculty Fellow at the University of Kassel in Germany. His books include Democracy and Expertise: Reorienting Policy Inquiry and The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning (coedited with John Forester), which is also published by Duke University Press. Herbert Gottweis is Professor of Political Science at the University of Vienna and Visiting Professor at the United Nations University in Tokyo and in the Sociology Department at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. Among his books is Governing Molecules: The Discursive Politics of Genetic Engineering in Europe and the United States."The argumentative turn in policy analysis has taken another major turn for the better. Whether one accepts the arguments presented here or not, they cannot be ignored, and this book contains an impressive collection of essays advancing this approach to policy."—B. Guy Peters, coauthor of Interactive Governance: Advancing the Paradigm"The Argumentative Turn Revisited is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding and improving democracy in policy and planning. Through theoretical refinement and new empirical examples, the contributors do an excellent job of further developing an already-strong approach to policy analysis and planning research."—Bent Flyvbjerg, author of Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again"Given the strength of the argumentative turn in scholarly circles and its still-growing promise in policy studies, these essays by important figures in argumentative analysis will be welcomed by policy scholars and practitioners alike. Many rank-and-file social scientists still associate this school of thought with Habermasian communicative action/deliberative action frameworks. This collection recalls those origins even as it shows how far the argumentative turn has progressed beyond them. It should be used far and wide."—Timothy Luke, Director, Center for Digital Discourse and Culture, Virginia Tech

    In the context of an emerging "culture of sustainism," many successful social design projects have embraced qualities such as connectivity, sharing, and localism, as well as sustainability. Sustainism Design Primer charts what such "sustainist" values could mean for the practice of social design.It formulates an open-ended agenda for social design and presents a set of design criteria that goes well beyond "green" design. It brings together the key principles for sustainism design, maps out best practices, and explores workable ideas for developing future social design.Michiel Schwarz is a cultural thinker, innovator, and policy consultant working from Amsterdam and Berkeley, California. He holds a PhD in the sociology of technology from the University of London. He has advised public organizations and has initiated a wide range of projects on global issues, sustainable futures, design strategies, media culture, and innovation.

    Each chapter of this important and innovative book narrates the inspiring story of how faith is the prime motivation for an organised response to social and political need in different contexts.This book tells the story of a number of different faith-based organizations based in different parts of Europe, but characterized by the same set of goals and aspirations to bring faith-inspired action into contexts of social injustice and marginalization in urban areas.

    Restoring ecosystem services and promoting biodiversity is essential to sustainable development - even in the built environment. Ecosystem Services come to Town: greening cities by working with nature demonstrates how to make urban environments greener. It starts by explaining how, by mimicking nature and deliberately creating habitats to provide ecosystem services, cities can become more efficient and more pleasant to live in. The history of cities and city planning is covered with the impacts of industrial urban development described, as well as the contemporary concerns of biodiversity loss, peak oil and climate change.The later sections offer solutions to the challenges of sustainable urban development by describing and explaining a whole range of approaches and interventions, beginning at the regional scale with strategic green infrastructure, looking at districts and precincts, with trees, parks and rain gardens and ending with single buildings, including with green roofs and living walls.Technical enough to be valuable to practitioners but still readable and inspirational, this guide demonstrates to town planners, urban designers, architects, engineers, landscape architects how to make cities more liveable.

    These frequently disregarded existing social and cultural structures, while the old modernist planning model zoned space for home and work. At a time of urban growth, these models are now being replaced by more adaptable, mixed use plans dealing holistically with the physical, social and economic revival of districts, cities and regions. Through today's public participative approaches and using technologically enabled tools, contemporary masterplanning instruments embody fresh principles, giving cities a greater resilience and capacity for social integration and change in the future.Lucy Bullivant analyses the ideals and processes of international masterplans, and their role in the evolution of many different types of urban contexts in both the developed and developing world. Among the book's key themes are landscape-driven schemes, social equity through the reevaluation of spatial planning, and the evolution of strategies responding to a range of ecological issues and the demands of social growth.Drawing on first-hand accounts and illustrated throughout with colour photographs, plans and visualizations, the book includes twenty essays introduced by an extensive overview of the field and its objectives. These investigate plans including one-north Singapore, Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, Xochimilco in Mexico City and Waterfront Seattle, illuminating their distinct yet complementary integrated strategies. This is a key book for those interested in today's multiscalar masterplanning and conceptually advanced methodologies and principles being applied to meet the challenges and opportunities of the urbanizing world.The author's research was enabled by grants from the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), the SfA (the Netherlands Architecture Fund), the Danish Embassy and support from the Alfred Herrhausen Society.

     Utilizing research conducted primarily with residents of Sofia, Bulgaria, Iron Curtains: Gates, Suburbs, and Privatization of Space in the Post-socialist City explores the human dimension of new city-building that has emerged in East Europe.Features original data, illustrations, and theory on the process of privatization of resources in societies undergoing fundamental socio-economic transformations, such as those in Eastern Europe Represents the sole in-depth monograph on contemporary urbanism in Southeast Europe Makes a broader statement on issues of urbanism in Europe and other parts of the world while highlighting the complex connections between cultures and cities

    This book offers a new approach to managing water that will overcome the conflicts that emerge when the interactions among natural, societal, and political forces are overlooked. At the heart of these conflicts are complex water networks. In managing them, science alone is insufficient and so is policy-making that doesn't take science into account. Solutions will only emerge if a negotiated or diplomatic approach that blends science, policy, and politics is used to manage water networks.The authors show how open and constantly changing water networks can be managed successfully using collaborative adaptive techniques to build informed agreements among disciplinary experts, water users with conflicting interests, and governmental bodies with countervailing claims.Shafiqul Islam is an engineer with over twenty-five years of practical experience in addressing water issues. Lawrence Susskind is founder of MIT's Environmental Policy and Planning Program and a leader of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Together they have developed a text that is relevant for students and experienced professionals working in a variety of engineering, science, and applied social science fields. They show how new thinking about water conflict can replace the zero-sum battles that pit experts, politicians, and stakeholders against each other in counter-productive ways. Their volume not only presents the key elements of a theory of water diplomacy; it includes excerpts and commentary from more than two dozen seminal readings as well as practice exercises that challenge readers to apply what they have learned.

    By seamlessly integrating information and communication technologies into the provision and management of public services, such cities will enhance opportunity and bolster civic engagement. Smarter cities will bring in new revenue while saving money. They will be more of everything that a twenty-first century urban planner, citizen, and elected official wants: more efficient, more sustainable, and more inclusive. Is this true?In Uneven Innovation, Jennifer Clark considers the potential of these emerging technologies as well as their capacity to exacerbate existing inequalities and even produce new ones. She reframes the smart city concept within the trajectory of uneven development of cities and regions, as well as the long history of technocratic solutions to urban policy challenges. Clark argues that urban change driven by the technology sector is following the patterns that have previously led to imbalanced access, opportunities, and outcomes. The tech sector needs the city, yet it exploits and maintains unequal arrangements, embedding labor flexibility and precarity in the built environment. Technology development, Uneven Innovation contends, is the easy part; understanding the city and its governance, regulation, access, participation, and representation--all of which are complex and highly localized--is the real challenge. Clark's critique leads to policy prescriptions that present a path toward an alternative future in which smart cities result in more equitable communities.

    Unlike other real estate finance textbooks, with their encyclopedic but often stale details, it will combine a short traditional text with a living website. The book will give students and professors highly applied information, and its regularly updated online features will make it especially useful for this practitioner-oriented audience. Offers a concise and efficient "finance centric" alternative to traditional real estate finance texts.Website gives readers the tools to discover current information about their own areas of specialization-a different approach than that of other real estate finance textbooks.Gives students and professors the material to examine every subject in both broad and highly detailed terms.

    Not only is there climate change to contend with, but there are millions of people, right now, who do not have safe or adequate housing.In Urgent Architecture Bridgette Meinhold showcases 40 successful emergency and long-term housing projects—from repurposed shipping containers to sandbag homes. She surveys successful structures as well as highlighting promising projects that are still being developed. Every one is quickly deployable, affordable, and sustainable. This book is an essential resource for those who are interested in green building, sustainable design, eco-friendly materials, affordable housing, material reuse, and humanitarian relief.