Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion -- imageability -- and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.

    And to do this wholeheartedly, energetically and joyfully.’ Finally! A book about saving our planet that is fast, funny and inspiring too. Isabel doesn’t bother with an examination of the problem but gets right on with the solutions. Her aim: to look for every single way that we can take care of the planet; how we live and work, travel, shop, eat, drink, dress, vote, play, volunteer, bank – everything. The feel-good book of the year for anyone who loves nature and knows that one person can make a HUGE difference. ‘This is the joy we need in our lives.’ - George Monbiot ‘She gave my spirit a lift and my feet somewhere to stand.’ - Sir Mark Rylance ‘Practical and realistic as well as visionary.’ - Dr Rowan Williams ‘A manifesto of brilliant advice offered with humility and good grace. A practical guide to empower us all.’ - Isabella Tree ISABEL LOSADA is the bestselling author of six previous books including The Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment.

    His firsthand experiences are collected in this highly personal account of the rough and tumble world of modern politics and the growing disenchantment with Australia’s Labor Party. Button describes how politics took a detrimental toll on his own family, revealing that the death of his brother haunted their father—who in turn blamed the tragedy on his all-consuming absorption of politics. This moving memoir paints a colorful picture of the machinations of government and shows how far the party has strayed from the idealism and pragmatism of previous generations, ending on a hopeful note for the party’s revival.

    Infrastructure is not only the underground pipes and cables controlling our cities. It also determines the hidden rules that structure the spaces all around us – free trade zones, smart cities, suburbs, and shopping malls. Extrastatecraft charts the emergent new powers controlling this space and shows how they extend beyond the reach of government. Keller Easterling explores areas of infrastructure with the greatest impact on our world – examining everything from standards for the thinness of credit cards to the urbanism of mobile telephony, the world’s largest shared platform, to the “free zone,” the most virulent new world city paradigm. In conclusion, she proposes some unexpected techniques for resisting power in the modern world.Extrastatecraft will change the way we think about urban spaces – and how we live in them.

    Like other European cities, it was still emerging from its medieval past. But in a mere century Paris would be transformed into the modern and mythic city we know today.Though most people associate the signature characteristics of Paris with the public works of the nineteenth century, Joan DeJean demonstrates that the Parisian model for urban space was in fact invented two centuries earlier, when the first complete design for the French capital was drawn up and implemented. As a result, Paris saw many changes. It became the first city to tear down its fortifications, inviting people in rather than keeping them out. Parisian urban planning showcased new kinds of streets, including the original boulevard, as well as public parks and the earliest sidewalks and bridges without houses. Venues opened for urban entertainment of all kinds, from opera and ballet to a pastime invented in Paris, recreational shopping. Parisians enjoyed the earliest public transportation and street lighting, and Paris became Europe's first great walking city.A century of planned development made Paris both beautiful and exciting. It gave people reasons to be out in public as never before and as nowhere else. And it gave Paris its modern identity as a place that people dreamed of seeing. By 1700, Paris had become the capital that would revolutionize our conception of the city and of urban life.

    It is the single most important tool for improving our cities. Designing around it is the most efficient way to make our cities life-sized—to scale cities for humans. It is time to cement the bicycle firmly in the urban narrative in US and global cities. Enter urban designer Mikael Colville-Andersen. He has worked for dozens of global cities on bicycle planning, strategy, infrastructure design, and communication. He is known around the world for his colorful personality and enthusiasm for the role of bike in urban design. In Copenhagenize, he shows cities how to effectively and profitably re-establish the bicycle as a respected, accepted, and feasible form of transportation. Building on his popular blog of the same name, Copenhagenize offers vivid project descriptions, engaging stories, and best practices, alongside beautiful and informative visuals to show how to make the bicycle an easy, preferred part of everyday urban life. Copenhagenize will serve as inspiration for everyone working to get the bicycle back into our cities. It will give planners and designers the ammunition to push back against the Automobile Age and convince the skeptics of the value of the life-sized city. This is not a guide on how to become Copenhagen, but how to learn from the successes and failures (yes, failures) of Copenhagen and other cities around the world that are striving to become more livable. We need to act in order to save our cities—and us—from ourselves. Copenhagenize shows the path forward.

    But behind the music lay a ghost city of malice and corruption.Pressed under the thumb of the Bjelke-Petersen government and its toughest enforcers - the police - Brisbane's musicians, radio announcers and political activists braved ignorance, harassment and often violence to be heard."Pig City" maps the shifts in musical, political and cultural consciousness that have shaped the city's history and identity. This is Brisbane's story - the story of how a city finally grew up.

    The book led directly to two experiments in town-founding that have had a profound influence on practical urban development around the world. The book was also responsible for the introduction of the term Garden City, and set into motion ideas that helped transform town planning.

    So what went wrong? To answer this complicated question, D. Bradford Hunt traces public housing’s history in Chicago from its New Deal roots through current mayor Richard M. Daley’s Plan for Transformation. In the process, he chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority’s own transformation from the city’s most progressive government agency to its largest slumlord.Challenging explanations that attribute the projects’ decline primarily to racial discrimination and real estate interests, Hunt argues that well-intentioned but misguided policy decisions—ranging from design choices to maintenance contracts—also paved the road to failure. Moreover, administrators who fully understood the potential drawbacks did not try to halt such deeply flawed projects as Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. These massive high-rise complexes housed unprecedented numbers of children but relatively few adults, engendering disorder that pushed out the working class and, consequently, the rents needed to maintain the buildings. The resulting combination of fiscal crisis, managerial incompetence, and social unrest plunged the CHA into a quagmire from which it is still struggling to emerge.Blueprint for Disaster, then, is an urgent reminder of the havoc poorly conceived policy can wreak on our most vulnerable citizens.

    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.

    Newman's message is clear and timely." --The Philadelphia InquirerIn No Shame in My Game, Harvard anthropologist Katherine Newman gives voice to a population for whom work, family, and self-esteem are top priorities despite all the factors that make earning a living next to impossible--minimum wage, lack of child care and health care, and a desperate shortage of even low-paying jobs. By intimately following the lives of nearly 300 inner-city workers and job seekers for two yearsin Harlem, Newman explores a side of poverty often ignored by media and politicians--the working poor.The working poor find dignity in earning a paycheck and shunning the welfare system, arguing that even low-paying jobs give order to their lives. No Shame in My Game gives voice to a misrepresented segment of today's society, and is sure to spark dialogue over the issues surrounding poverty, working and welfare.

    

    It has so altered the way cities look, feel, cost, and even smell to such an extent that it’s hard to imagine that it could ever have been otherwise.   Over the last few years, journalists, policy­makers, critics, and historians have all tried to ex­plain just what it is that happens when new money and new residents flow in, yet we’ve had very little access to the human side of this phenomenon.  Up and Coming captures the stories of the many kinds of people—brokers, buyers, sellers, renters, landlords, artists, contractors, politicians and everyone in between—who are being shaped by—and are shaping—the new New York City. In this extraordinary oral history, DW Gibson takes gentrification out of the op-ed columns and the textbooks and brings it to life. Gibson explains— in the voices of the people living through it—what urban change really looks and feels like.   In the plainspoken, casually authoritative tradition of Jane Jacobs and Studs Terkel, Up and Coming is an inviting and essential portrait of the way we live now.

    “Nothing,” he says. I look him in the eye. Nothing? He nods. I ask him about his chronic skin infections, his diabetes. He tears up: “I eat hot chips and fried dim sims and drink three bottles of Coke every afternoon. The truth is I’m addicted to eating. I’m addicted.” He punches his thigh.In Fat City, Karen Hitchcock unpicks the idea of obesity as a disease. In a riveting blend of story and analysis, she explores chemistry, psychology and the impulse to excess to explain the West’s growing obesity epidemic.

    Sociology. Urban studies.