Book picks similar to
Saving Our Cities: A Progressive Plan to Transform Urban America by William W Goldsmith
urban-planning
political-science
urbanist
politics-international
Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution
Caroline Fraser - 2009
If the destruction continues, a third of all plants and animals could disappear by 2050—and with them earth’s life-support ecosystems that provide our food, water, medicine, and natural defenses against climate change.Now Caroline Fraser offers the first definitive account of a visionary campaign to confront this crisis: rewilding. Breathtaking in scope and ambition, rewilding aims to save species by restoring habitats, reviving migration corridors, and brokering peace between people and predators. Traveling with wildlife biologists and conservationists, Fraser reports on the vast projects that are turning Europe’s former Iron Curtain into a greenbelt, creating trans-frontier Peace Parks to renew elephant routes throughout Africa, and linking protected areas from the Yukon to Mexico and beyond. An inspiring story of scientific discovery and grassroots action, Rewilding the World offers hope for a richer, wilder future.
Blockchain for Everyone: How I Learned the Secrets of the New Millionaire Class (And You Can, Too)
John Hargrave - 2019
When John Hargrave first invested in cryptocurrency, the price of a single bitcoin was about $125; a few years later, that same bitcoin was worth $20,000. He wasn’t alone: this flood of new money is like the early days of the Internet, creating a new breed of “blockchain billionaires.” Sir John has unlocked their secrets. In Blockchain for Everyone, Sir John reveals the formula for investing in bitcoin and blockchain, using real-life stories, easy-to-understand examples, and a healthy helping of humor. Packed with illustrations, Blockchain for Everyone explains how (and when) to buy bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and other blockchain assets, with step-by-step instructions. Blockchain for Everyone is the first blockchain investing book written for the layperson: a guide that helps everyone understand how to build wealth wisely. It’s the new investing manifesto!
Lyndon Johnson's War: America's Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945-1968
Michael H. Hunt - 1996
Hunt's Lyndon Johnson's War reinterprets the values, choices, misconceptions, and miscalculations that shaped the long process of American intervention in Southeast Asia, and renders more comprehensible--if no less troubling--the tangled origins of the war.
The Smart Swarm: How Understanding Flocks, Schools, and Colonies Can Make Us Better at Communicating, Decision Making, and Getting Things Done
Peter Miller - 2010
A fascinating new take on the concept of collective intelligence and its colorful manifestations in some of our most complex problems, "The Smart Swarm" introduces a compelling new understanding of the real experts on solving our own complex problems relating to such topics as business, politics, and technology. Based on extensive globe-trotting research, this lively tour from "National Geographic" reporter Peter Miller introduces thriving throngs of ant colonies, which have inspired computer programs for streamlining factory processes, telephone networks, and truck routes; termites, used in recent studies for climate-control solutions; schools of fish, on which the U.S. military modeled a team of robots; and many other examples of the wisdom to be gleaned about the behavior of crowds-among critters and corporations alike. In the tradition of James Surowiecki's "The Wisdom of Crowds" and the innovative works of Malcolm Gladwell, "The Smart Swarm" is an entertaining yet enlightening look at small-scale phenomena with big implications for us all.
Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies, and Aid
Samantha Nutt - 2011
Combining original research with her personal story, it is a deeply thoughtful meditation on war as it is being waged around the world against millions of civilians -- primarily women and children. Samantha's boundless energy, dedication, and compassion shine through on every page as she lays out real, lasting solutions to these problems and shows how to move beyond outdated notions of charity towards a more progressive, inclusive, and respectful world view.
The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground
Jeffrey Ostler - 2010
Their homeland was in the magnificent Black Hills in South Dakota, where they found plentiful game and held religious ceremonies at charged locations like Devil's Tower. Bullied by settlers and the U. S. Army, they refused to relinquish the land without a fight, most famously bringing down Custer at Little Bighorn. In 1873, though, on the brink of starvation, the Lakotas surrendered the Hills. But the story does not end there. Over the next hundred years, the Lakotas waged a remarkable campaign to recover the Black Hills, this time using the weapons of the law. In "The Lakotas and the Black Hills," the latest addition to the Penguin Library of American Indian History, Jeffrey Ostler moves with ease from battlefields to reservations to the Supreme Court, capturing the enduring spiritual strength that bore the Lakotas through the worst times and kept alive the dream of reclaiming their cherished homeland.
The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
Thomas J. Sugrue - 1996
In this reappraisal of America's dilemma of racial and economic inequality, Thomas Sugrue asks why Detroit and other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty.
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
William H. Whyte - 1980
Whyte published the findings from his revolutionary Street Life Project in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Both the book and the accompanying film were instantly labeled classics, and launched a mini-revolution in the planning and study of public spaces. They have since become standard texts, and appear on syllabi and reading lists in urban planning, sociology, environmental design, and architecture departments around the world.Project for Public Spaces, which grew out of Holly's Street Life Project and continues his work around the world, has acquired the reprint rights to Social Life, with the intent of making it available to the widest possible audience and ensuring that the Whyte family receive their fair share of Holly's legacy.From the forward: For more than 30 years, Project for Public Spaces has been using observations, surveys, interviews and workshops to study and transform public spaces around the world into community places. Every week we give presentations about why some public spaces work and why others don't, using the techniques, ideas, and memorable phrases from William H. "Holly" Whyte's The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.Holly Whyte was both our mentor and our friend. Perhaps his most important gift was the ability to show us how to discover for ourselves why some public spaces work and others don't. With the publication of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces and its companion film in 1980, the world could see that through the basic tools of observation and interviews, we can learn an immense amount about how to make our cities more livable. In doing so, Holly Whyte laid the groundwork for a major movement to change the way public spaces are built and planned. It is our pleasure to offer this important book back to the world it is helping to transform.
Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature
Vaclav Smil - 2012
Many species have exerted enormous influence on the biosphere's character and productivity, but none has transformed the Earth in so many ways and on such a scale as Homo sapiens. In Harvesting the Biosphere, Vaclav Smil offers an interdisciplinary and quantitative account of human claims on the biosphere's stores of living matter, from prehistory to the present day. Smil examines all harvests--from prehistoric man's hunting of megafauna to modern crop production--and all uses of harvested biomass, including energy, food, and raw materials. Without harvesting of the biomass, Smil points out, there would be no story of human evolution and advancing civilization; but at the same time, the increasing extent and intensity of present-day biomass harvests are changing the very foundations of civilization's well-being.In his detailed and comprehensive account, Smil presents the best possible quantifications of past and current global losses in order to assess the evolution and extent of biomass harvests. Drawing on the latest work in disciplines ranging from anthropology to environmental science, Smil offers a valuable long-term, planet-wide perspective on human-caused environmental change.
Agendas and Instability in American Politics
Frank R. Baumgartner - 1993
Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones show that rapid change not only can but does happen in the hidebound institutions of government.Short-term, single-issue analyses of public policy, the authors contend, give a narrow and distorted view of public policy as the result of a cozy arrangement between politicians, interest groups, and the media. Baumgartner and Jones upset these notions by focusing on several issues—including civilian nuclear power, urban affairs, smoking, and auto safety—over a much longer period of time to reveal patterns of stability alternating with bursts of rapid, unpredictable change.A welcome corrective to conventional political wisdom, Agendas and Instability revises our understanding of the dynamics of agenda-setting and clarifies a subject at the very center of the study of American politics.
Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination
Benedict Anderson - 2005
Anderson explores the impact of avant-garde European literature and politics on Rizal and his contemporary, the pioneering folklorist Isabelo de los Reyes, who was imprisoned in Manila after the violent uprisings of 1896 and later incarcerated, together with Catalan anarchists, in the prison fortress of Montjuich in Barcelona. On his return to the Philippines, by now under American occupation, Isabelo formed the first militant trade unions under the influence of Malatesta and Bakunin.Anderson considers the complex intellectual interactions of these young Filipinos with the new “science” of anthropology in Germany and Austro-Hungary, and with post-Communard experimentalists in Paris, against a background of militant anarchism in Spain, France, Italy and the Americas, Jose Marti’s armed uprising in Cuba and anti-imperialist protests in China and Japan. In doing so, he depicts the dense intertwining of anarchist internationalism and radical anti-colonialism.Under Three Flags is a brilliantly original work on the explosive history of national independence and global politics.
Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World
Doug Saunders - 2010
These transitional spaces are where the next great economic and cultural boom will be born, or where the great explosion of violence will occur. The difference depends on our ability to notice.The twenty-first century is going to be remembered for the great, and final, shift of human populations out of rural, agricultural life into cities. The movement engages an unprecedented number of people, perhaps a third of the world's population, and will affect almost everyone in tangible ways. The last human movement of this size and scope, and the changes it will bring to family life, from large agrarian families to small urban ones, will put an end to the major theme of human history: continuous population growth.Arrival City offers a detailed tour of the key places of the "final migration" and explores the possibilities and pitfalls inherent in the developing new world order. From villages in China, India, Bangladesh and Poland to the international cities of the world, Doug Saunders portrays a diverse group of people as they struggle to make the transition, and in telling the story of their journeys — and the history of their often multi-generational families enmeshed in the struggle of transition — gives an often surprising sense of what factors aid in the creation of a stable, productive community.
Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival
Carl Safina - 2002
Carl Safina's guide and inspiration is an albatross he calls Amelia, whose life and far-flung flights he describes in fascinating detail. Interwoven with recollections of whalers and famous explorers, Eye of the Albatross probes the unmistakable environmental impact of the encounters between man and marine life. Safina's perceptive and authoritative portrait results in a transforming ride to the ends of the Earth for the reader, as well as an eye-opening look at the health of our oceans.
Investing To Save The Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference
Alice Ross - 2020
Together, we can and must act now' Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States 'Everyone's savings account and pension can meaningfully contribute. Ross tells us how in this clear, easy to understand yet transformative book' Christiana Figueres, Founding Partner, Global Optimism and Former Executive Secretary, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 'I can't imagine a more important book at the moment. A detailed, action-oriented guide on how to make our money matter and save us and the planet we live on' Richard Curtis, Writer, Director, Co-Founder of Red Nose Day and UN Sustainable Development Goals Advocate Investing responsibly is one of the most powerful ways that you can fight climate change. No longer a niche sector for rebel fund managers, conscious investing has the potential to raise huge sums of money to the companies and organisations on the front line fighting the climate crisis and make investors positive returns in the process. In this essential introduction to green investing, Alice Ross shows you how you can turn your savings and pensions, however big or small, into a force for change. You will learn: - Which sectors are leading the charge by developing cutting-edge solutions; from smart farming to renewable energy- How to cut through 'alphabet soup' jargon and identify 'greenwashing' - The ways you can maximise your economic power and hold those you're investing in to account 'Changing the way that we invest is one of the most powerful levers we have for solving climate change. This hugely interesting and immensely practical book not only explains why changing how we invest is so critically important but also provides a set of powerful tools for actually doing it' Rebecca Henderson, John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard University and author of Reimagining Capitalism 'Explains the power you have, through your investment choices, to accelerate the path toward a sustainable clean energy future. Read this book and be empowered to create a better future for the planet' Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor, Penn State University, author of The New Climate War