At the current time, many issues and problems within sustainable urban development are managed within traditional disciplinary and organizational structures. However, problems such as, climate change, resource constraints, poverty and social tensions all exceed current compartmentalization of policy-making, administration and knowledge production. This book provides a better understanding of how researchers and practitioners together can co-produce knowledge to better contribute to solving the complex challenges of reaching sustainable urban futures. It is written for academic and...

American cities are increasingly turning to revitalization strategies that embrace the ideas of new urbanism and the so-called creative class in an attempt to boost economic growth and prosperity to downtown areas. These efforts stir controversy over residential and commercial gentrification of working class, ethnic areas.

Spanning forty years, Latino City provides an in-depth case study of the new urbanism, creative class, and transit-oriented models of planning and their implementation in Santa Ana, California, one of the United States most Mexican communities....

Cities continue to be key sites for the production and contestation of inequalities generated by an ongoing but troubled neoliberal project.　 Neoliberalism's onslaught across the globe now shapes diverse inequalities -- poverty, segregation, racism, social exclusion, homelessness -- as city inhabitants feel the brunt of privatization, state re-organization, and punishing social policy. This book examines the relationship between persistent neoliberalism and the production and contestation of inequalities in cities across the world. Case studies of current city realities reveal a...

The global south is entering an Urban Age where, for the first time in history, more people will be living in cities than in the countryside. The logics of this prediction have a dominant framing - rapid urbanization, uncontrolled migration, resource depletion, severe fuel shortages and the breakdown of law and order. We are told that we must be prepared. The solution is simple, they say. Mega-urbanization is an opportunity for economic growth and prosperity. Therefore we must build big, build new and build fast.

With contributions from an international range of established...

In the last decade a new wave of urban research has emerged, putting comparative perspectives back on the urban studies agenda. However, this research is frequently based on similar case studies, on a few selected cities in America and Europe, and all too often focus on the abstract city level with marginal attention given to particular local contexts.

Moving away from loosely defined urban theories and contexts, this book argues that it is timely to start learning from, and compare across different "contested cities." It questions urban studies and planning research long standing...

Urban spaces have always functioned as cradles and laboratories for religious movements and spiritualities. The urban forms a central and nourishing agent for the creation of new religious expressions, and continually negotiates new ways of being spiritual and establishing spiritual ideas and practices.

This book explores the intense and complex interplay between the (post) modern city and new religious and spiritual movement, bringing the city and its annexes into the foreground of current research into religion. It develops a new, ethnography-based analysis of the ways in which...

Most of us have heard of green belts but how much do we really know about them? This book tries to separate the fact from the fiction when it comes to green belts by looking both backwards and forwards. They were introduced in the mid-twentieth century to try and stop cities merging together as they grew. There is little doubt they have been very effective at doing that, but at what cost? Are green belts still the answer to today s problems of an increasing population and ever higher demands on our natural resources?

Green Belts: Past; present; future? reflects upon green...

Shrinking Cities: Understanding Shrinkage and Decline in the United States offers a contemporary look at patterns of shrinkage and decline in the United States. The book juxtaposes the complex and numerous processes that contribute to these patterns with broader policy frameworks that have been under consideration to address shrinkage in U.S. cities. A range of methods are employed to answer theoretically-grounded questions about patterns of shrinkage and decline, the relationships between the two, and the empirical associations among shrinkage, decline, and several socio-economic...

Using a transnational analytical framework, this book provides a comprehensive overview of formal and informal markets and place in globalised cities. It examines how urban markets are situated within social, cultural and media discourses, and within material and symbolic economies. The book addresses four key narratives redevelopment and relocation; privatization of public space; urban renewal; and urbanism and sustainability to investigate shared and individual attributes of markets and place in diverse, international urban contexts. With case studies in Sydney, Hong Kong, Beijing, Rio...