Vital Little Plans

Vital Little Plans
Author: Jane Jacobs
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2016-10-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0399589619

A career-spanning selection of previously uncollected writings and talks by the legendary author and activist No one did more to change how we look at cities than Jane Jacobs, the visionary urbanist and economic thinker whose 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities started a global conversation that remains profoundly relevant more than half a century later. Vital Little Plans is an essential companion to Death and Life and Jacobs’s other books on urbanism, economics, politics, and ethics. It offers readers a unique survey of her entire career in forty short pieces that have never been collected in a single volume, from charming and incisive urban vignettes from the 1930s to the raw materials of her two unfinished books of the 2000s, together with introductions and annotations by editors Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring. Readers will find classics here, including Jacobs’s breakout article “Downtown Is for People,” as well as lesser-known gems like her speech at the inaugural Earth Day and a host of other rare or previously unavailable essays, articles, speeches, interviews, and lectures. Some pieces shed light on the development of her most famous insights, while others explore topics rarely dissected in her major works, from globalization to feminism to universal health care. With this book, published in Jacobs’s centenary year, contemporary readers—whether well versed in her ideas or new to her writing—are finally able to appreciate the full scope of her remarkable voice and vision. At a time when urban life is booming and people all over the world are moving to cities, the words of Jane Jacobs have never been more significant. Vital Little Plans weaves a lifetime of ideas from the most prominent urbanist of the twentieth century into a book that’s indispensable to life in the twenty-first. Praise for Vital Little Plans “Jacobs’s work . . . was a singularly accurate prediction of the future we live in.”—The New Republic “In Vital Little Plans, a new collection of the short writings and speeches of Jane Jacobs, one of the most influential thinkers on the built environment, editors Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring have done readers a great service.”—The Huffington Post “A wonderful new anthology that captures [Jacobs’s] confident prose and her empathetic, patient eye for the way humans live and work together.”—The Globe and Mail “[A timely reminder] of the clarity and originality of [Jane Jacobs’s] thought.”—Toronto Star “[Vital Little Plans] comes to the foreground for [Jane Jacobs’s] centennial, and in a time when more of Jacobs’s prescient wisdom is needed.”—Metropolis “[Jacobs] changed the debate on urban planning. . . . As [Vital Little Plans] shows, she never stopped refining her observations about how cities thrived.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune “[Jane Jacobs] was one of three people I have met in a lifetime of meeting people who had an aura of sainthood about them. . . . The ability to radiate certainty without condescension, to be both very sure and very simple, is a potent one, and witnessing it in life explains a lot in history that might otherwise be inexplicable.”—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker “A rich, provocative, and insightful collection.”—Reason

Cities Demanding the Earth

Cities Demanding the Earth
Author: Taylor, Peter
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2020-03-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 152921047X

This urgent book brings our cities to the fore in understanding the human input into climate change. The demands we are making on nature by living in cities has reached a crisis point and unless we make significant changes to address it, the prognosis is terminal consumption. Providing a radical new argument that integrates global understandings of making nature and making cities, the authors move beyond current policies of mitigation and adaption and pose the challenge of urban stewardship to tackle the crisis. Their new way of thinking re-orients possibilities for environmental policy and calls for us to reinvent our cities as spaces for activism.

Women Reclaiming the City

Women Reclaiming the City
Author: Tigran Haas
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2023-04-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1538162660

The originality of Women Reclaiming the City lies not only in the variety of themes being presented, but also in the variety of all these different highly respected women researchers. This book is the first in which current societal themes revolving around urbanism, architecture, and city planning are put forth solely through female perspectives. It reveals the importance of having female lenses on certain societal debates. Twenty-five leading female urban scholars draw on principles, concepts, and positions that are foundational to other frameworks and fields—specifically, critical studies, indigenous and ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, queer theory, feminist theory, progressive urban theory, social ecology, urban planning and design, architecture, urban economics and urban social geography, landscape urbanism, new urbanism, heritage management and urbanism, political ecology, and cultural studies— to present alternatives to the current classical theories and conceptualizations that have failed to engage a truly intersectional analysis of dominant city and urban discourses, policies, and practices. The book is intended for scholars of urban studies, policy makers, and city planning professionals.

Hyperlocal

Hyperlocal
Author: Jennifer S. Vey
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2022-10-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0815739583

An examination of how the (hyper)local is the locus of real change Many of America’s downtowns, waterfronts, and innovation districts have experienced significant revitalization and reinvestment in recent years, but concentrated poverty and racial segregation remain persistent across thousands of urban, suburban, and rural neighborhoods. The coronavirus pandemic magnified this sustained and growing landscape of inequality. Uneven patterns of economic growth and investment require a shift in how communities are governed and managed. This shift must take into account the changing socioeconomic realities of regions and the pressing need to bring inclusive economic growth and prosperity to more people and places. In this context, place-based (“hyperlocal”) governance structures in the United States and around the globe have been both part of the problem and part of the solution. These organizations range from community land trusts to business improvement districts to neighborhood councils. However, very little systematic research has documented the full diversity and evolution of these organizations as part of one interrelated field. Hyperlocal helps fill that gap by describing the challenges and opportunities of “place governance.” The chapters in Hyperlocal explore both the tensions and benefits associated with governing places in an increasingly fragmented—and inequitable—economic landscape. Together they explore the potential of place governance to give stakeholders a structure through which to share ideas, voice concerns, advocate for investments, and co-design strategies with others both inside and outside their place. They also discuss how place governance can serve the interests of some stakeholders over others, in turn exacerbating wealth-based inequities within and across communities. Finally, they highlight innovative financing, organizing, and ownership models for creating and sustaining more effective and inclusive place governance structures. The authors hope to provoke new thinking among place governance practitioners, policymakers, private sector leaders, urban planners, scholars, students, and philanthropists about how, why, and for whom place governance matters. The book also provides guidance on how to improve place governance practice to benefit more people and places.

Urban Transformational Landscapes in the City-Hinterlands of Asia

Urban Transformational Landscapes in the City-Hinterlands of Asia
Author: Debnath Mookherjee
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 612
Release: 2023-05-16
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9811987262

In the context of mounting challenges stemming from a rapid transformation of the urban-regional landscapes in many Asian countries, this book highlights a multifaceted array of issues that increasingly engage the academic and planning communities in search of viable solutions to complex problems facing us. Even though cities continue to dominate development studies, urbanization of Asia is evolving toward a hybrid urban-rural nexus beyond the cities. This volume considers these shifting dynamics of Asian urbanization, including urban spatial transformations and their ramifications in the context of sustainability and planning. Through the lens of a set of empirical studies across diverse disciplines, geographies and methodologies. yet with an overarching concern for sustainability in varied (but interconnected) areas such as climate change, land use planning, infrastructure and urban mobility, and quality of life, these studies examine a range of important topics (e.g., flooding, transportation, housing, open space/ green space, urban garden and such) in city/regional settings. Together, they add insights into varied transformational processes or patterns at work on the urban-regional landscapes in a number of Asian countries while offering innovative approaches or alternatives. The proposed volume fills a gap in urban/regional studies in context of South and Southeast Asia that will be of interest to all stakeholders (e.g., planners, administrators, academicians and the citizenry), particularly those interested in sustainability and planning paradigms. It should be a timely and valuable addition to the Asian urbanization literature.

Architecture and Collective Life

Architecture and Collective Life
Author: Penny Lewis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2021-10-28
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1000457508

This book addresses the complex relationship between architecture and public life. It’s a study of architecture and urbanism as cultural activity that both reflects and gives shape to our social relations, public institutions and political processes. Written by an international range of contributors, the chapters address the intersection of public life and the built environment around the themes of authority and planning, the welfare state, place and identity and autonomy. The book covers a diverse range of material from Foucault’s evolving thoughts on space to land-scraping leisure centres in inter-war Belgium. It unpacks concepts such as ‘community’ and ‘collectivity’ alongside themes of self-organisation and authorship. Architecture and Collective Life reflects on urban and architectural practice and historical, political and social change. As such this book will be of great interest to students and academics in architecture and urbanism as well as practicing architects.

Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances

Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances
Author: Owen Hatherley
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2021-06-22
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1839762217

How to make a fairer, more just city From the grandiose histories of monumental state building projects to the minutiae of street signs and corner cafés, from the rebuilding of capital cities to the provision of the humble public toilet, Clean Living under Difficult Circumstances argues for the city as a socialist project. This essay collection spans a period from immediately before the 2008 financial crash to the year of the pandemic. Against the business-as-usual responses to both crises, Owen Hatherley outlines a vision of the city as both a venue for political debate and dispute as well as a space of everyday experience, one that we shape as much as it shapes us. Incorporated here are the genres of memoir, history, music and film criticism, as well as portraits of figures who have inspired new ways of looking at cities, such as the architect Zaha Hadid, the activist and urbanist Jane Jacobs, and thinkers such as Mark Fisher and Adam Curtis. Throughout these pieces, Hatherley argues that the only way out of our difficult circumstances is to imagine and try to construct a better modernity.

Chaos Reconsidered

Chaos Reconsidered
Author: Robert Jervis
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2023-07-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0231556268

The shock of Donald Trump’s election caused many observers to ask whether the liberal international order—the system of institutions and norms established after World War II—was coming to an end. The victory of Joe Biden, a committed institutionalist, suggested that the liberal order would endure. Even so, important questions remained: Was Trump an aberration? Is Biden struggling in vain against irreparable changes in international politics? What does the future hold for the international order? The essays in Chaos Reconsidered answer those questions. Leading scholars assess the domestic and global effects of the Trump and Biden presidencies. The historians put the Trump years and Biden’s victory in historical context. Regional specialists evaluate U.S. diplomacy in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Others foreground topics such as global right-wing populism, the COVID-19 pandemic, racial inequality, and environmental degradation. International relations theorists reconsider the nature of international politics, pointing to deficiencies in traditional IR methods for explaining world events and Trump’s presidency in particular. Together, these experts provide a comprehensive analysis of the state of U.S. alliances and partnerships, the durability of the liberal international order, the standing and reputation of the United States as a global leader, the implications of China’s assertiveness and Russia’s aggression, and the prospects for the Biden administration and its successors.

The Routledge Companion to Smart Cities

The Routledge Companion to Smart Cities
Author: Katharine S. Willis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2020-03-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351713205

The Routledge Companion to Smart Cities explores the question of what it means for a city to be ‘smart’, raises some of the tensions emerging in smart city developments and considers the implications for future ways of inhabiting and understanding the urban condition. The volume draws together a critical and cross-disciplinary overview of the emerging topic of smart cities and explores it from a range of theoretical and empirical viewpoints. This timely book brings together key thinkers and projects from a wide range of fields and perspectives into one volume to provide a valuable resource that would enable the reader to take their own critical position within the topic. To situate the topic of the smart city for the reader and establish key concepts, the volume sets out the various interpretations and aspects of what constitutes and defines smart cities. It investigates and considers the range of factors that shape the characteristics of smart cities and draws together different disciplinary perspectives. The consideration of what shapes the smart city is explored through discussing three broad ‘parts’ – issues of governance, the nature of urban development and how visions are realised – and includes chapters that draw on empirical studies to frame the discussion with an understanding not just of the nature of the smart city but also how it is studied, understood and reflected upon. The Companion will appeal to academics and advanced undergraduates and postgraduates from across many disciplines including Urban Studies, Geography, Urban Planning, Sociology and Architecture, by providing state of the art reviews of key themes by leading scholars in the field, arranged under clearly themed sections.