Showing results by publisher "-emdashery books-" in Urban

The neighborhoods we live in impact our lives in so many ways: they determine who we know, what resources and opportunities we have access to, the quality of schools our kids go to, our sense of security and belonging, and even how long we live. Yet too many of us live in neighborhoods plagued by rising crime, school violence, family disintegration, addiction, alienation, and despair. In Fragile Neighborhoods, fragile states expert Seth D. Kaplan offers a bold new vision for addressing social decline in America, one zip code at a time.

Ours is an urban age. From Uruk and Eridu in ancient Mesopotamia to London and New York City in the 21st century, cities have long supported and sustained what makes us human. But can they survive the next 100 years? If so, they’re going to have to remain livable. In this 10-lecture series, focusing on that livability is at the heart of livable cities, Professor Mark Alan Hughes discusses why we seek out cities and how they create the conditions that allow us to meet our fundamental needs as individuals and as a human community.

Urban planning is a craft learned through practice. Planners make rapid decisions that have an immediate impact on the ground - the width of streets, the minimum size of land parcels, the heights of buildings. The language they use to describe their objectives is qualitative - “sustainable,” “livable,” “resilient” - often with no link to measurable outcomes. Urban economics, on the other hand, is a quantitative science, based on theories, models, and empirical evidence largely developed in academic settings.

From centres of antiquity like Athens or Rome to modern metropolises like New York or Shanghai, cities throughout history have been the engines of human progress and the epicentres of our greatest achievements. Now, for the first time, more than half of humanity lives in cities, a share that continues to rise. In the developing world, cities are growing at a rate never seen before. In this book, Professor Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin show why making our societies fairer, more cohesive and sustainable must start with our cities.

In this fierce and moving account, journalist Vicky Spratt traces decades of bad policy decisions to show how and why the British dream of homeownership has withered and the safety net of social housing has broken. Through the lives of those in the renting trap, she illuminates the ways this crisis is devastating our health, communities and political landscape. But, as the COVID epidemic showed, there are also real, radical steps we can take to give everyone the chance of a good home.

Thomas Heatherwick shows how design has a profound effect on our mental and physical health, the climate, as well as the peace and cohesion of societies. He shows how a flawed idea of utility and 'efficiency' has engulfed our towns and cities and hardened into a form of bland minimalism. But it doesn't have to be this way: there are other ways to build - with the power to lift our spirits, engage and connect us.

Inner-city Black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence; in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. How you dress, talk, and behave can have life-or-death consequences, with young people particularly at risk. The most powerful force counteracting this code and its reign of terror is the strong, loving, decent family, and we meet many heroic figures in the course of this narrative.

City of Big Shoulders links key events in Chicago's development, from its marshy origins in the 1600's to today's robust metropolis. Robert G. Spinney presents Chicago in terms of the people whose lives made the city - from the tycoons and the politicians, to the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from all over the world. In this revised and updated second edition that brings Chicago's story into the 21st century, Spinney sweeps his historian's gaze across the colorful and dramatic panorama of the city's explosive past.

Encircling London like a noose, the M25 is a road to nowhere, but when Iain Sinclair sets out to walk this asphalt loop - keeping within the 'acoustic footprints' - he is determined to find out where the journey will lead him. Stumbling upon converted asylums, industrial and retail parks, ring-fenced government institutions and lost villages, Sinclair discovers a Britain of the fringes, a landscape consumed by developers. London Orbital charts this extraordinary trek and round trip of the soul, revealing the country as you've never seen it before.

The arbitrary lines of zoning maps across the country have come to dictate where Americans may live and work, forcing cities into a pattern of growth that is segregated and sprawling. The good news is that reform is in the air, with states across the country critically reevaluating zoning. In cities as diverse as Minneapolis, Fayetteville, and Hartford, the key pillars of zoning are under fire, with apartment bans being scrapped, minimum lot sizes dropping, and off-street parking requirements disappearing altogether.

The Power of Art is an epic work of non-fiction that will transform our understanding of the world by unlocking the human stories behind millennia of art. Taking listeners from ancient Babylon to contemporary Pyongyang, the eminent curator Caroline Campbell explains art's power to illuminate our lives, and inspires us to benefit from its transformative and regenerative power.

From the medieval cobbles, through Dickensian iron and fog, to the neon lights and bustle of the twenty-first century, the ever-changing streets of London map out the vibrant stories, triumphs and struggles of everyone who ever called London home. From the Roman and Celts marching along the ancient Old Kent Road, to the rattling newspaper presses of Fleet Street, the game of Monopoly has painted London's story across cheerful coloured tiles. But those Monopoly streets live and breathe—they don't just illuminate our history.

In 1973, Roseann Quinn, an Irish-Catholic teacher at a school for deaf children, was killed in New York City after bringing a man home to her apartment from an Upper West Side pub. The crime made headlines and the ensuing case quickly evolved into a cultural phenomenon. In this groundbreaking true crime tale, Lacey Fosburgh, the New York Times reporter first assigned to the story, utilizes an inventive dramatization technique to veer between the chilling, suspenseful personal interactions leading up to the brutal stabbing and the gritty details of its aftermath.

London is a plutocrat's paradise, with more resident billionaires than New York, Hong Kong or Moscow. Far from trickling down, their wealth is burning up the environment and swallowing up the city. But what do we really know about London's super rich, and the lives they lead? To find out more about this secretive, security-heavy elite, sociologist Caroline Knowles walks the streets of London from the City to suburban Surrey, via Kensington, Notting Hill, Mayfair and elsewhere.

It’s the late 1960s, and two lovers converge on an arid patch of earth in South India. John Walker is the handsome scion of a powerful East-Coast American family. Diane Maes is a beautiful hippie from Belgium. They have come to build a new world - Auroville, an international utopian community for thousands of people. Their faith is strong, the future bright.

Viennese ideas saturate the modern world. From California architecture to Hollywood Westerns, modern advertising to shopping malls, orgasms to gender confirmation surgery, nuclear fission to fitted kitchens—every aspect of our history, science, and culture is in some way shaped by Vienna. Richard Cockett gives us the entirety of an extraordinary story of how one city made the modern world—and how we all remain inescapably Viennese.

What would the city of the future look like if we tried to build a better life from the ground up? And would anyone want to live there? Here, Des Fitzgerald takes us on an urgent, unforgettable journey into the future of urban life, from shimmering edifices in the Arizona desert to forest-bathing in Japan, and from rats in mazes to neuroscientific studies of the effects of our surroundings. Along the way, he reveals the deep-lying and often problematic roots of today's green city movement, and offers an argument for celebrating our cities as they are.

During the Roaring Twenties, two of the most revered and influential men in American business proposed to transform one of the country’s poorest regions into a dream technological metropolis, a shining paradise of small farms, giant factories, and sparkling laboratories. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison’s “Detroit of the South” would be 10 times the size of Manhattan, powered by renewable energy, and free of air pollution. And it would reshape American society.

This Must Be the Place introduces and examines music's relationship to cities. Not the influence cities have on music, but the powerful impact music can have on how cities are developed, built, managed, and governed.

Take a close look at today’s Democratic Party power brokers and you’ll quickly realize most of them share one thing in common: California. Residents are fleeing the Golden State in droves, the state’s homelessness crisis is the worst in the country, drug-related deaths are skyrocketing, and violent crime and smash-and-grab retail theft is now commonplace. For too many across the state, pursuing the Californian Dream is now a fool’s errand. But what people don't know is what's driving these failures and why California leaders have allowed them to spiral.