Best of
Urban-Planning

2015

Street Smart: A Fifty-Year Mistake Set Right and the Great Urban Revival


Samuel I. Schwartz - 2015
    “Gridlock Sam,” one of the most respected transportation engineers in the world and consummate insider in NYC political circles, uncovers how American cities became so beholden to cars and why the current shift away from that trend will forever alter America’s urban landscapes, marking nothing short of a revolution in how we get from place to place.When Sam Schwartz was growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn—his block belonged to his community: the kids who played punchball and stickball & their parents, who’d regularly walk to the local businesses at which they also worked. He didn’t realize it then, but Bensonhurst was already more like a museum of a long-forgotten way-of-life than a picture of America’s future. Public transit traveled over and under city streets—New York’s first subway line opened in 1904—but the streets themselves had been conquered by the internal combustion engine.America’s dependency on the automobile began with the 1908 introduction of Henry Ford’s car-for-everyone, the Model T. The “battle for right-of-way” in the 1920s saw the demise of streetcars and transformed America’s streets from a multiuse resource for socializing, commerce, and public mobility into exclusive arteries for private automobiles. The subsequent destruction of urban transit systems and post WWII suburbanization of America enabled by the Interstate Highway System and the GI Bill forever changed the way Americans commuted.But today, for the first time in history, and after a hundred years of steady increase, automobile driving is in decline. Younger Americans increasingly prefer active transportation choices like walking or cycling and taking public transit, ride-shares or taxis. This isn’t a consequence of higher gas prices, or even the economic downturn, but rather a collective decision to be a lot less dependent on cars—and if American cities want to keep their younger populations, they need to plan accordingly. In Street Smart, Sam Schwartz explains how.In this clear and erudite presentation of the principles of smart transportation and sustainable urban planning—from the simplest cobblestoned street to the brave new world of driverless cars and trains—Sam Schwartz combines rigorous historical scholarship with the personal and entertaining recollections of a man who has spent more than forty years working on planning intelligent transit networks in New York City. Street Smart is a book for everyone who wants to know more about the who, what, when, where, and why of human mobility.

Creating Cities


Marcus Westbury - 2015
    Three years later the world’s largest travel publisher, Lonely Planet, named it one of the Top Ten cities to visit in the world.Creating Cities is about the unlikely events in between. How a failed idea to start a bar morphed into a scheme that has helped transform Newcastle, launched more than two hundred creative and community projects across Australia and is fast becoming a model for cities and towns around the world.In an engaging, thoughtful and observational style, Marcus Westbury argues that most towns and cities are wasting their most obvious opportunities: the talent, imagination, and passion of the people that live there. In a globalised age, local creativity has access to new possibilities that most places have barely begun to grasp.Marcus weaves a local story of how identifying and fixing small scale failures in Newcastle into a larger set of ideas and “why-to” strategy with potential applications in cities and towns around the world. Creating Cities is an inspiring must read for creative people, civic and business leaders, town planners, citizens and anyone who cares about the communities that they live in.

Streetopia


Erick Lyle - 2015
    The resulting exhibition, "Streetopia," was a massive anti-gentrification art fair that took place in venues throughout the city, featuring daily free talks, performances, skillshares and a free community kitchen out of the gallery. This book brings together all of the art and ephemera from the now-infamous show, featuring work by Swoon, Barry McGee, Emory Douglas, Monica Canilao, Rigo 23, Xara Thustra, Ryder Cooley and many more. Essays and interviews with key participants consider the effectiveness of "Streetopia"'s projects while offering a deeper rumination on the continuing search for community in today's increasingly homogenous and gentrified cities.

The Permaculture City: Regenerative Design for Urban, Suburban, and Town Resilience


Toby Hemenway - 2015
    And nowhere are those remedies more needed and desired than in our cities. The Permaculture City provides a new way of thinking about urban living, with practical examples for creating abundant food, energy security, close-knit communities, local and meaningful livelihoods, and sustainable policies in our cities and towns. The same nature-based approach that works so beautifully for growing food—connecting the pieces of the landscape together in harmonious ways—applies perfectly to many of our other needs. Toby Hemenway, one of the leading practitioners and teachers of permaculture design, illuminates a new way forward through examples of edge-pushing innovations, along with a deeply holistic conceptual framework for our cities, towns, and suburbs.The Permaculture City begins in the garden but takes what we have learned there and applies it to a much broader range of human experience; we’re not just gardening plants but people, neighborhoods, and even cultures. Hemenway lays out how permaculture design can help towndwellers solve the challenges of meeting our needs for food, water, shelter, energy, community, and livelihood in sustainable, resilient ways. Readers will find new information on designing the urban home garden and strategies for gardening in community, rethinking our water and energy systems, learning the difference between a “job” and a “livelihood,” and the importance of placemaking and an empowered community.This important book documents the rise of a new sophistication, depth, and diversity in the approaches and thinking of permaculture designers and practitioners. Understanding nature can do more than improve how we grow, make, or consume things; it can also teach us how to cooperate, make decisions, and arrive at good solutions.

Zoning Rules!: The Economics of Land Use Regulation


William A. Fischel - 2015
    Zoning Rules! explores the behavioral basis as well as the economic effects of local government land use regulation. This requires not just an economic model of how zoning works but a deeper understanding of the social, political, and technological factors that guided its history over the last century. Zoning’s popularity is due to its success in protecting the value of single family homes, and anti-sprawl reforms must take this into account.

Rebuilding the American City: Design and Strategy for the 21st Century Urban Core


David Gamble - 2015
    It takes a delicate alignment of goals, power, leadership and sustained advocacy on the part of many. Rebuilding the American City highlights 15 urban design and planning projects in the U.S. that have been catalysts for their downtowns--yet were implemented during the tumultuous start of the 21st century. The book presents five paradigms for redevelopment and a range of perspectives on the complexities, successes and challenges inherent to rebuilding American cities today. Rebuilding the American City is essential reading for practitioners and students in urban design, planning, and public policy looking for diverse models of urban transformation to create resilient urban cores.

Suburban Urbanities: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street


Laura Vaughan - 2015
    Suburban Urbanities challenges this view by defining the suburb as a temporally evolving feature of urban growth.Anchored in the architectural research discipline of space syntax, this book offers a comprehensive understanding of urban change, touching on the history of the suburb as well as its current development challenges, with a particular focus on suburban centres. Studies of the high street as a centre for social, economic and cultural exchange provide evidence for its critical role in sustaining local centres over time. Contributors from the architecture, urban design, geography, history and anthropology disciplines examine cases spanning Europe and around the Mediterranean.By linking large-scale city mapping, urban design scale expositions of high street activity and local-scale ethnographies, the book underscores the need to consider suburban space on its own terms as a specific and complex field of social practice

Global Street Design Guide


National Association of City Transportation Officials - 2015
    Cities around the world are facing the same challenges as cities in the US, and many of these problems are rooted in outdated codes and standards.   The Global Street Design Guide is a timely resource that sets a global baseline for designing streets and public spaces and redefines the role of streets in a rapidly urbanizing world. The guide will broaden how to measure the success of urban streets to include: access, safety, mobility for all users, environmental quality, economic benefit, public health, and overall quality of life. The first-ever worldwide standards for designing city streets and prioritizing safety, pedestrians, transit, and sustainable mobility are presented in the guide. Participating experts from global cities have helped to develop the principles that organize the guide. The Global Street Design Guide builds off the successful tools and tactics defined in NACTO’s Urban Street Design Guide and Urban Bikeway Design Guide while addressing a variety of street typologies and design elements found in various contexts around the world.   This innovative guide will inspire leaders, inform practitioners, and empower communities to realize the potential in their public space networks. It will help cities unlock the potential of streets as safe, accessible, and economically sustainable places. Example cities include: Bangalore, India; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Paris, France; Copenhagen, Denmark; Seoul, Korea; Medellin, Colombia; Toronto, Canada; Istanbul, Turkey; Auckland, New Zealand; Melbourne, Australia; New York, USA; and San Francisco, USA.

Housing First: Ending Homelessness, Transforming Systems, and Changing Lives


Deborah Padgett - 2015
    The authors report on the rise of a 'homeless industry' of shelters and transitional housing programs that the HF approach directly challenged by rejecting the usual demands of treatment, sobriety and housing readiness. Based upon principles of consumer choice, harm reduction and immediate access to permanent independent housing in the community, HF was initially greeted with skepticism and resistance from the 'industry'. However, rigorous experiments testing HF against 'usual care' produced consistent findings that the approach produced greater housing stability, lower use of drugs, and alcohol and cost savings. This evidence base, in conjunction with media accounts of HF's success, led to widespread adoption in the U.S., Canada, Western Europe, and Australia.The book traces the history of homelessness and the rapid growth of the publically funded homeless industry, an amalgam of religious and philanthropic organizations, advocacy groups, and non-profits that were insufficient to stem the tide of homelessness resulting from dramatic reductions in affordable housing in the 1980s and continuing to the present day. The authors summarize research findings on HF and include a chapter of personal stories of individuals who have experienced HF.Unique to this book is the participation of the founder of HF (Tsemberis) and well-known research on HF by the co-authors (Padgett and Henwood). Also unique is the deployment of theories-organizational, institutional and implementation-to conceptually frame the rise of HF and its wide adoption as well as the resistance that arose in some places. Highly readable yet informative and scholarly, this book addresses wider issues of innovation and systems change in social and human services.

How Real Estate Developers Think: Design, Profits, and Community


Peter Hendee Brown - 2015
    But even when a new project is designed to improve a community, neighborhood residents often find themselves at odds with the real estate developer who proposes it. Savvy developers are willing to work with residents to allay their concerns and gain public support, but at the same time, a real estate development is a business venture financed by private investors who take significant risks. In "How Real Estate Developers Think," Peter Hendee Brown explains the interests, motives, and actions of real estate developers, using case studies to show how the basic principles of development remain the same everywhere even as practices vary based on climate, local culture, and geography. An understanding of what developers do and why they do it will help community members, elected officials, and others participate more productively in the development process in their own communities.Based on interviews with over a hundred people involved in the real estate development business in Chicago, Miami, Portland (Oregon), and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, "How Real Estate Developers Think" considers developers from three different perspectives. Brown profiles the careers of individual developers to illustrate the character of the entrepreneur, considers the roles played by innovation, design, marketing, and sales in the production of real estate, and examines the risks and rewards that motivate developers as people. Ultimately, "How Real Estate Developers Think" portrays developers as creative visionaries who are able to imagine future possibilities for our cities and communities and shows that understanding them will lead to better outcomes for neighbors, communities, and cities.

Subway Adventure Guide: New York City: To the End of the Line


Kyle Knoke - 2015
    Each of the roughly three dozen end-of-the-line destinations spread out over New York City's five boroughs included in this easy-to-use guide, from restaurants and bars to landmarks and museums, are highlighted in great detail by authors Kyle Knoke and Amy Plitt—what to order, what to see, and how to get there. For even better exploring, each destination is organized by the more than 30 subway lines that run through the city, including handy maps with street names. From delighting in a little-known ethnic restaurant to admiring a local landmark, each adventure contained in this photo-packed pocket guide reveals a new hidden gem of the city. Van Cortlandt Park. Far Rockaway. Bay Ridge. Flatbush Avenue. Subway Adventure Guide: New York City takes you away from the tourist traps and closer to a genuine New York City experience.

Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies That Transformed a City


Nicholas Dagen Bloom - 2015
    Affordable Housing in New York explores the past, present, and future of the city’s pioneering efforts, from the 1920s to the major initiatives of Mayor Bill de Blasio.The book examines the people, places, and policies that have helped make New York livable, from early experiments by housing reformers and the innovative public-private solutions of the 1970s and 1980s to today’s professionalized affordable housing industry. More than two dozen leading scholars tell the story of key figures of the era, including Fiorello LaGuardia, Robert Moses, Jane Jacobs, and Ed Koch. Over twenty-five individual housing complexes are profiled, including Queensbridge Houses, America’s largest public housing complex; Stuyvesant Town; Co-op City; and recent additions like Via Verde. Plans, models, archival photos, and newly commissioned portraits of buildings and tenants put the efforts of the past century into social, political, and cultural context and look ahead to future prospects for below-market subsidized housing.A richly illustrated, dynamic portrait of an evolving city, this is a comprehensive and authoritative history of public and middle-income housing in New York and contributes significantly to contemporary debates on how to enable future generations of New Yorkers to call the city home.

The Grasping Hand: "Kelo v. City of New London" and the Limits of Eminent Domain


Ilya Somin - 2015
    Although the Fifth Amendment only permits the taking of private property for “public use,” the Court ruled that the transfer of condemned land to private parties for “economic development” is permitted by the Constitution—even if the government cannot prove that the expected development will ever actually happen. The Court’s decision in Kelo v. City of New London empowered the grasping hand of the state at the expense of the invisible hand of the market.             In this detailed study of one of the most controversial Supreme Court cases in modern times, Ilya Somin argues that Kelo was a grave error. Economic development and “blight” condemnations are unconstitutional under both originalist and most “living constitution” theories of legal interpretation. They also victimize the poor and the politically weak for the benefit of powerful interest groups and often destroy more economic value than they create. Kelo itself exemplifies these patterns. The residents targeted for condemnation lacked the influence needed to combat the formidable government and corporate interests arrayed against them.  Moreover, the city’s poorly conceived development plan ultimately failed: the condemned land lies empty to this day, occupied only by feral cats. The Supreme Court’s unpopular ruling triggered an unprecedented political reaction, with forty-five states passing new laws intended to limit the use of eminent domain. But many of the new laws impose few or no genuine constraints on takings. The Kelo backlash led to significant progress, but not nearly as much as it may have seemed. Despite its outcome, the closely divided 5-4 ruling shattered what many believed to be a consensus that virtually any condemnation qualifies as a public use under the Fifth Amendment. It also showed that there is widespread public opposition to eminent domain abuse. With controversy over takings sure to continue, The Grasping Hand offers the first book-length analysis of Kelo by a legal scholar, alongside a broader history of the dispute over public use and eminent domain and an evaluation of options for reform.

Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism


Tamar W. Carroll - 2015
    Drawing on a rich array of oral histories, archival records, newspapers, films, and photographs from post-World War II New York City, Carroll shows how poor people transformed the antipoverty organization Mobilization for Youth and shaped the subsequent War on Poverty. Highlighting the little-known National Congress of Neighborhood Women, she reveals the significant participation of working-class white ethnic women and women of color in New York City's feminist activism. Finally, Carroll traces the partnership between the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and Women's Health Action Mobilization (WHAM!), showing how gay men and feminists collaborated to create a supportive community for those affected by the AIDS epidemic, to improve health care, and to oppose homophobia and misogyny during the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Carroll contends that social policies that encourage the political mobilization of marginalized groups and foster coalitions across identity differences are the most effective means of solving social problems and realizing democracy.

Living Complex: From Zombie City to the New Communal


Niklas Maak - 2015
    The cost to live in a fortress-like luxury housing complex in London or Manhattan is so high that most of us can’t afford it. As the masses move to the suburbs, the construction industry responds by churning out clusters of the same barracks-style row houses, ensuring that, there too, one can live in utmost privacy and security. But what do these buildings say about us? Do they have anything to do with the way in which most people actually want to live? Niklas Maak provocatively argues that the construction industry and a number of outdated or poorly thought-out policies have prevented us from rethinking how we live in the city. Yet many of our current crises—from the mortgage crisis to global warming—are closely connected to problematic forms of accommodation in our cities. And the problem will only get worse: Over the next twenty years, influx into the world’s cities is expected to create the need for an additional one billion units of housing. Fortunately, Maak shows, there are practicable solutions. In Europe, Japan, and the United States, the author explores promising new forms of housing. Cities should be reflections of their inhabitants—not forces to be contended with. Controversial, yet well-researched and wryly funny, Living Complex is a call for change from the “comfortable defense lines” that epitomize the current sorry state of housing.

Transport Justice: Designing Fair Transportation Systems


Karel Martens - 2015
    Author Karel Martens starts from the observation that for the last fifty years the focus of transportation planning and policy has been on the performance of the transport system and ways to improve it, without much attention being paid to the persons actually using – or failing to use – that transport system.There are far-reaching consequences of this approach, with some enjoying the fruits of the improvements in the transport system, while others have experienced a substantial deterioration in their situation. The growing body of academic evidence on the resulting disparities in mobility and accessibility, have been paralleled by increasingly vocal calls for policy changes to address the inequities that have developed over time. Drawing on philosophies of social justice, Transport Justice argues that governments have the fundamental duty of providing virtually every person with adequate transportation and thus of mitigating the social disparities that have been created over the past decades. Critical reading for transport planners and students of transportation planning, this book develops a new approach to transportation planning that takes people as its starting point, and justice as its end.

From Boom to Bubble: How Finance Built the New Chicago


Rachel Weber - 2015
    In Chicago, for example, law firms and corporate headquarters abandoned their historic downtown office buildings for the millions of brand-new square feet that were built elsewhere in the central business district. What causes construction booms like this, and why do they so often leave a glut of vacant space and economic distress in their wake? In From Boom to Bubble, Rachel Weber debunks the idea that booms occur only when cities are growing and innovating. Instead, she argues, even in cities experiencing employment and population decline, developers rush to erect new office towers and apartment buildings when they have financial incentives to do so. Focusing on the main causes of overbuilding during the early 2000s, Weber documents the case of Chicago’s “Millennial Boom,” showing that the Loop’s expansion was a response to global and local pressures to produce new assets. An influx of cheap cash, made available through the use of complex financial instruments, helped transform what started as a boom grounded in modest occupant demand into a speculative bubble, where pricing and supply had only tenuous connections to the market. Innovative and compelling, From Boom to Bubble is an unprecedented historical, sociological, and geographic look at how property markets change and fail—and how that affects cities.

Strategic Green Infrastructure Planning: A Multi-Scale Approach


Karen Firehock - 2015
    Recognition of the need to manage our natural assets—trees, soils, water, and habitats—as part of our green infrastructure is vital to creating livable places and healthful landscapes. But the land management decisions about how to create plans, where to invest money, and how to get the most from these investments are complex, influenced by differing landscapes, goals, and stakeholders.Strategic Green Infrastructure Planning addresses the nuts and bolts of planning and preserving natural assets at a variety of scales—from dense urban environments to scenic rural landscapes. A practical guide to creating effective and well-crafted plans and then implementing them, the book presents a six-step process developed and field-tested by the Green Infrastructure Center in Charlottesville, Virginia. Well-organized chapters explain how each step, from setting goals to implementing opportunities, can be applied to a variety of scenarios, customizable to the reader's target geographical location. Chapters draw on a diverse group of case studies, from the arid open spaces of the Sonoran Desert to the streets of Jersey City. Abundant full color maps, photographs, and illustrations complement the text. For planners, elected officials, developers, conservationists, and others interested in the creation and maintenance of open space lands and urban green infrastructure projects or promoting a healthy economy, this book offers a comprehensive yet flexible approach to conceiving, refining, and implementing successful projects.

The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them


Wayde Compton - 2015
    The collection also includes short reflections on the poems, written by the poets themselves, providing readers with an intimate insight into the inspiration and meaning behind the poems.The Revolving City anthology evolved out of the Lunch Poems reading series, a stimulating exchange of poetic ideas and cadence held the third Wednesday of every month in public space at Simon Fraser University’s Vancouver campus.The Revolving City seeks to build community, extend poetry to new audiences, and reflect the rich diversity of the poetry scene both local and distant.Edited by much-lauded writer and director of the Writer’s Studio, Wayde Compton, and award-winning poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar.Contributors:Jordan Abel, Joanne Arnott, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Dennis E. Bolen, George Bowering, Tim Bowling, Colin Browne, Stephen Collis, Wayde Compton, Peter Culley, Jen Currin, Phinder Dulai, Daniela Elza, Mercedes Eng, Maxine Gadd, Heidi Greco, Heather Haley, Ray Hsu, Aislinn Hunter, Mariner Janes, Reg Johanson, Wanda John-Kehewin, Rahat Kurd, Sonnet L’Abbé, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Evelyn Lau, Christine Leclerc, Donato Mancini, Daphne Marlatt, Susan McCaslin, Kim Minkus, Cecily Nicholson, Billeh Nickerson, Juliane Okot Bitek, Catherine Owen, Miranda Pearson, Meredith Quartermain, Jamie Reid, Rachel Rose, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Jordan Scott, Sandy Shreve, George Stanley, Rob Taylor, Jacqueline Turner, Fred Wah, Betsy Warland, Calvin Wharton, Rita Wong, Changming Yuan, and Daniel Zomparelli.

The Urban Imperative Towards Competitive Cities


Edward L. Glaeser - 2015
    In the past two centuries, we have miraculously moved towards far greater prosperity through transformations, above all, in cities. Urbanization holds the potential of transforming the developing world. While the transition from farm to city is filled with economic, social, and political promises, urbanization also poses enormous challenges-the breakdown of public services, congestion, pollution, and crime. With the right policies cities can lead transformative change-providing jobs, creating prosperity, and lifting millions out of poverty.What policies can help harness this unprecedented urbanization and address the vast inequalities of access and opportunity that cities present today? What makes cities more competitive? This book answers these and other important questions.The volume emphasizes the need to rethink cities and to imagine a better urban future by providing the reader with diverse perspectives on urbanization such as the changing economic landscape, city competitiveness, entrepreneurship, inclusion, informality, sustainability, and provision of essential services. The book would help chart a path towards competitive and people-centered cities.

ECOVILLAGE: 1001 ways to heal the planet


Kosha Joubert - 2015
    Combining a supportive and high-quality social and cultural environment with a low-impact way of life, they have become precious playgrounds in which groups of committed people can experiment to find solutions for some of the challenges we face globally. Ecovillages are now part of a worldwide movement for social and environmental justice and have become regional and national beacons of inspiration for the social, cultural, ecological and economic revival of both rural and urban areas. This book (published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Global Ecovillage Network in July 2015) introduces a selection of ecovillage projects from all over the world. The editors have aimed to give a taste of their richness and diversity with examples from Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa and North America. Most of the chapters are based on interviews with founders or long-standing members of ecovillage communities; while a few chapters are about regional or national networks of ecovillage transition. The book sets out both to honour successes, but also to learn from difficulties and failure. As well as serving as an inspiration to its readers, the book is also intended as a learning resource. At the end of each chapter, the editors have given a few keywords listing some of the best approaches used by each ecovillage, for example, developing a water treatment facility, building a strawbale house or supporting groups of people in their endeavours. You can find out more about these solutions in the GEN Solution Library, and a link is provided in the book.

Sidewalk City: Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City


Annette Miae Kim - 2015
    In many of the world’s major cities, however, public spaces like these are not a part of the everyday lives of the public. Rather, business and social lives have always been conducted along main roads and sidewalks. With increasing urban growth and density, primarily from migration and immigration, rights to the sidewalk are being hotly contested among pedestrians, street vendors, property owners, tourists, and governments around the world. With Sidewalk City, Annette Miae Kim provides the first multidisciplinary case study of sidewalks in a distinctive geographical area. She focuses on Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, a rapidly growing and evolving city that throughout its history, her multicultural residents have built up alternative legitimacies and norms about how the sidewalk should be used. Based on fieldwork over 15 years, Kim developed methods of spatial ethnography to overcome habitual seeing, and recorded both the spatial patterns and the social relations of how the city’s vibrant sidewalk life is practiced. In Sidewalk City, she transforms this data into an imaginative array of maps, progressing through a primer of critical cartography, to unveil new insights about the importance and potential of this quotidian public space. This richly illustrated and fascinating study of Ho Chi Minh City’s sidewalks shows us that it is possible to have an aesthetic sidewalk life that is inclusive of multiple publics’ aspirations and livelihoods, particularly those of migrant vendors.

Historic Unionville: A Village in the City


George Duncan - 2015
    Since the late 1960s, when Unionville and its vintage Main Street were “discovered,” the village has been a magnet for visitors. Historic Unionville is the first detailed exploration of the facts and folklore behind Unionville’s winding ways and eclectic architectural sights, which span two centuries from the Georgian to the Postmodern.Touring the heritage sites that still stand proudly in the community as signposts to the past, George Duncan brings to life stories of the people, places, and events behind this unique and inviting Ontario village.

Sustainable Values, Sustainable Change: A Guide to Environmental Decision Making


Bryan G. Norton - 2015
    Norton in Sustainable Values, Sustainable Change. One of the most trafficked terms in the press, on university campuses, and in the corridors of government, sustainability has risen to prominence as a buzzword before the many parties laying claim to it have come close to agreeing how to define it. But the term’s political currency urgently demands that we develop an understanding of this elusive concept. While economists, philosophers, and ecologists argue about what in nature is valuable, and why, Norton here offers an action-oriented, pragmatic response to the disconnect between public and academic discourse around sustainability. Looking to the arenas in which decisions are made—and the problems that are driving these decisions—Norton reveals that the path to sustainability cannot be guided by fixed, utopian objectives projected into the future; sustainability will instead be achieved through experimentation, incremental learning, and adaptive management. Drawing inspiration from Aldo Leopold’s famed metaphor of “thinking like a mountain” for a spatially explicit, pluralistic approach to evaluating environmental change, Norton replaces theory-dependent definitions with a new decision-making process guided by deliberation and negotiation across science and philosophy, encompassing all stakeholders and activists and seeking to protect as many values as possible. Looking across scales to today’s global problems, Norton urges us to learn to think like a planet.

The City That Never Was


Christopher Marcinkoski - 2015
    The resulting scars on the landscape, large subdivisions with only marked-out plots and half-finished roads, are the subject of The City That Never Was, an eye-opening look at what happens when development, particularly what the author calls "speculative urbanization" is out of sync with financial reality. Presenting historical and recent examples from around the world—from the sprawl of the US Sun Belt and the unoccupied towns of western China, to the "ghost estates" of Ireland—and focusing on case studies in Spain, Marcinkoski proposes an ecologically based model in place of the capricious economic and political factors that typically drive development today.