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Big Plans: The Allure and Folly of Urban Design springs from the idea that human aspirations for the city tend to overstate the role of rationality in public life. Inspired by the architectural and urban criticism of such writers as Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, and John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Kolson adopts a user's perspective on issues of urban design, an approach that highlights both the futility of social engineering and the resilience of the human spirit.

Originally published in 1976, this book highlights the problems faced by many inner-city working class communities in 1970s Britain, with particular reference to the Gairbraid housing clearance area of Maryhill, Glasgow. It examines the policy of local authority re-housing. Both the policy and practice of re-housing is carefully analysed and the efficacy of community action illustrated and discussed.

The book addresses urban transformations towards sustainability in light of challenges of global urbanization processes and the consequences of global environmental change. The aim is to show that urban transformations only succeed if both innovative scientific solutions and practice-oriented governance approaches are developed. This assumption is addressed by providing theoretical insights and empirical evidence pointing particularly at 3 concepts or qualities which are determined here as being...

A comprehensive and in-depth history of the 20th century English home, how it has been created, and how it works for people. It focuses on the various influences bearing on the development of domestic space since 1914 and covers both design and housing policy. Current debates from participation to co-operative housing are examined and several themes not previously brought together are linked, e.g. urban development/house design; technology at home/women and home; social meaning of home.

An illustrated account of Irish life in London in the twentieth century, which concentrates on the period following the Second World War. Most of the photographs were taken by Paddy Fahey, a newspaper photographer from the 1940s to the 1980s.

A collection of ethnographic case studies of urban planners and their practices Urban planners project the future of cities. As experts, they draft visions of places and times that do not yet exist, prescribing the tools to be used to achieve those visions. Their choices can determine how a city will merge its public transit and automobile traffic or how it will meet a demand for thousands of new dwelling units as quickly and with as little avoidable damage as possible. Life Among Urban Planners...

This work analyses the vulnerability of America's land-based missile force to a pre-emptive Soviet strike as an issue in US strategic and political debate. It examines why the issue rose to prominence in the way it did in the 1970s and then fell away as a concern in the 1980s without being solved in the way it had been presented. It details the way in which the issue was exploited for political and strategic purposes which were often at odds with a concern for this vulnerability.

Gentrification is reshaping cities worldwide, resulting in seductive spaces and exclusive communities that aspire to innovation, creativity, sustainability, and technological sophistication. Gentrification is also contributing to growing social-spatial division and urban inequality and precarity. In a time of escalating housing crisis, unaffordable cities, and racial tension, scholars speak of eco-gentrification, techno-gentrification, super-gentrification, and planetary gentrification to descri...

This work examines urban problems, issues and policy approaches in the United States. It questions whether President Nixon's National Urban Policy Report of 1972, used by subsequent administrations as a policy viewpoint, could be made into a more useful document for reflecting urban concerns.

More than half a decade has passed since Gorbachev launched his "prerestroika" programme to reform the Soviet Union, but the struggle between reformers and conservatives continues to rage while the final outcome, and even the goals of the programme, remains a mystery. Whatever the outcome of this transformation, its impact will reverberate well beyond the borders of the USSR to shape US security and commercial policies into the next century. This edited volume brings together original essays by...

Cities are where solutions to the twenty-first century’s key challenges—addressing inequality, fostering political participation, responding to climate change—will be tested. And as cities adapt to new developments in technology, infrastructure, public space, transportation, and housing, so too must urban practices and our understanding of how to effect positive change evolve. In Citymakers, Cassim Shepard—2019 Guggenheim Fellow for Architecture, Planning, and Design—offers a vivid survey of how...

Cities are responsible for three-quarters of the world s energy consumption. If we are to reduce our demands on the planet s resources how can we make our urban areas more energy efficient? One way is to refit existing buildings with more thermally efficient building materials. But such retrofitting involves significant issues of social acceptance and public participation. Retrofitting the City provides an important corrective to the assumptions that have been made concerning the ability of peop...

This book offers a unique contribution to the burgeoning field of Chinese historical geography. Urban transformation in China constitutes both a domestic revolution and a world-historical event. Through the exploration of nine urban sites of momentous change, over an extended period of time, this book connects the past with the present, and provides much-needed literature on city growth and how they became complex laboratories of prosperity. The first part of this book puts Chinese urban changes...

Richard Bryant's London is a fitting love letter to a city with an unparalleled history and an inimitable and tangible soul. Following the path of the river, the reader travels across London, from the bucolic West to the postmodern East--from the beautiful villas and gardens of Notting Hill through Bedford Square and Georgian London to Roman ruins, the historic monuments of Greenwich, and the new city rising in the docklands. Richard Bryant's spectacular photographs capture every aspect of Londo...

This second volume deals with a much shorter period than the first - from the impact of the Black Death to the urban crises at the end of the medieval era - but the survival of fuller, richer and more varied records allows David Nicholas to get closer to the splendours and squalors of everyday life in the cities of the time. If the first volume is largely an account of a long process of urban renewal, this is in many ways a portrait of the later medieval city itself. He discusses urban governmen...

As a result of global dynamics—the increasing interconnection of people and places—innovations in global environmental governance haved altered the role of cities in shaping the future of the planet. This book is a timely study of the importance of these social transformations in our increasingly global and increasingly urban world. Through analysis of transnational municipal networks, such as Metropolis and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, Sofie Bouteligier's innovative study examines...