Urban Studies

Building an Emerald City is the story of how Seattle transformed itself into a leader in sustainable "green" building, written by one of the principal figures in that transformation. It is both a personal account--filled with the experiences and insights of an insider--and a guide for anyone who wants to bring about similar changes in any city.

In How to Build a Global City , Michele Acuto considers the rise of a new generation of so-called global cities-Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai-and the power that this concept had in their ascent, in order to analyze the general relationship between global city theory and its urban public policy practice.

In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity.

While federal action on immigration faces an uncertain future, states, cities and suburban municipalities craft their own responses to immigration. Twenty-First-Century Gateways, focuses on the fastest-growing immigrant populations in metropolitan areas with previously low levels of immigration--places such as Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Dallas-Fort Worth, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, and Washington, D.C. These places are typical of the newest, largest immigrant gateways to America, characterized by post-WWII growth, recent burgeoning immigrant populations, and predominantly suburban settlement.

Michael Oluf Emerson and Kevin T. Smiley argue that western cities have diverged into two specific and different types: market cities and people cities. Market cities are focused on wealth, jobs, individualism and economic opportunities. People cities are more egalitarian, with government investment in infrastructure and an active civil society.

How have urban planning policies contributed to racial injustices in American cities? Does contemporary urban planning really address and attempt to solve the social and economic problems of African Americans in cities, or does it just perpetuate ghetto conditions? What have African Americans done to confront injustices in planning? Historically, race and city design are linked, and Urban Planning and the African American Community aims to clarify the historical connections between the African American population and the urban planning profession and to suggest means by which cooperation and justice may be increased.

Since the demise of urban renewal in the early 1970s, the politics of large-scale public investment in and around major American cities has received little scholarly attention. In Mega-Projects, Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff analyze the unprecedented wave of large-scale (mega-) public investments that occurred in American cities during the 1950s and 1960s; the social upheavals they triggered, which derailed large numbers of projects during the late 1960s and early 1970s; and the political impulses that have shaped a new generation of urban mega-projects in the decades since.

Reporting on the innovative, transdisciplinary research on sustainable urbanisation undertaken by Mistra Urban Futures, a highly influential research centre based in Sweden (2010-19), this book builds on the Policy Press title Rethinking Sustainable Cities to make a significant contribution to evolving theory about comparative urban research.

An alternative history of capitalist urbanization through the lens of the commons. Characterized by shared, self-managed access to food, housing, and the basic conditions for a creative life, the commons are essential for communities to flourish and protect spaces of collective autonomy from capitalist encroachment.