Community developer and urban activist Robert D. Lupton looks to the Old Testament example of Nehemiah as a role model for community transformation and renewal.
There are nearly 20,000 general-purpose municipal governments—cities—in the United States, employing more people than the federal government. About twenty of those cities received charters of incorporation well before ratification of the U.S. Constitution, and several others were established urban centers more than a century before the American Revolution. Yet despite their estimable size and prevalence in the United States, city government and politics has been a woefully neglected topic within the recent study of American political development. The volume brings together some of the best of both the most established and the newest urban scholars in political science, sociology, and history, each of whom makes a new argument for rethinking the relationship between cities and the larger project of state-building. Each chapter shows explicitly how the American city demonstrates durable shifts in governing authority throughout the nation’s history. By filling an important gap in scholarship the book will thus become an indispensable part of the American political development canon, a crucial component of graduate and undergraduate courses in APD, urban politics, urban sociology, and urban history, and a key guide for future scholarship.
Why do some cities grow economically while others decline? Why do some show sustained economic performance while others cycle up and down? In Keys to the City, Michael Storper, one of the world's leading economic geographers, looks at why we should consider economic development issues within a regional context--at the level of the city-region--and why city economies develop unequally. Storper identifies four contexts that shape urban economic development: economic, institutional, innovational and interactional, and political. The book explores how these contexts operate and how they interact, leading to developmental success in some regions and failure in others. Demonstrating that the global economy is increasingly driven by its major cities, the keys to the city are the keys to global development. In his conclusion, Storper specifies eight rules of economic development targeted at policymakers. Keys to the City explains why economists, sociologists, and political scientists should take geography seriously.
Traditionally, city museums have been keepers of city history. Many have been exercises in nostalgia, reflecting city pride. However, a new generation of museums focuses increasingly on the city's present and future as well as its past, and on the city in all of its diversity, challenges, and possibilities. Above all, these museums are gateways to understanding the city—our greatest and most complex creation and the place where half the world's population now lives. In this book, experts in the field explore this 'new' city museum and the challenge of contributing positively to city development.
"Magisterial and critical study of city design in the Global South, tracing the historical, economic, political, and ideological forces influencing development up to the present"--
'Transforming Cities with Transit' explores the complex process of transit and land-use integration and provides policy recommendations and implementation strategies for effective integration in rapidly growing cities in developing countries.
The Reinvented City reflects on externity, the principal feature of a reinvented city. Three basic trends of the city are investigated; "discomposed", "generic" and "segregated" phenomena with the loss of the city as a space of social interaction and communication. Important questions are posed: What is the true public sphere in contemporary societies? What is the contemporary public space corresponding to it? In what way can the city project construct contemporary public space?
Patrick Geddes is one of the most important figures in planning history, variously presented as an inspiration to regional planning, environmental planning and sustainability, grass-roots planning, citizen democracy, historic preservation, neighbourhood upgrading, university–community partnership, lifelong learning, and co-operative housing. Though well-known and often praised by planning historians, his scholarship extended across a much broader range of disciplines, with extensive publication on biology and on civics, and significant contributions to sociology, economics, geography, education, and the arts and humanities. With the exception of his plan of Dunfermline, published in 1904, his plans are very hard to find. Most of his plans were prepared in India between 1915 and 1923, but beyond brief extracts from four of them included by Jaqueline Tyrwhitt in the book Patrick Geddes in India, they are very difficult to obtain. Some are lost altogether and the remainder are available in a handful of libraries, often held in Archives. Of all the plans prepared after Dunfermline, the most extensive is for the city of Indore, originally published in two volumes that combine a comprehensive scheme for the urban development of the city with a detailed plan for the proposed University of Central India.
This book summarizes experiences from the World Bank s activities related to low-carbon urban development in China. It highlights the need for low-carbon city development and presents details on specific sector-level experiences and lessons, a framework for action, and financing opportunities.