Safe drinking water is essential to daily life. Meeting that demand with bottled water is a luxury too far, argues Emma Jones. She is not a lone critic of the packaged water industry. However, this author looks to history for solutions to a major sustainability problem: in the design, management and use of the city. With original stories from London's archives, Parched City tracks drinking-water obsessions through a popular architectural history tale.

International trade has moved into a new phase. Gone are the days when years of effort were required in the domestic market before going global. You can now start a company on Monday and be trading with the world by Wednesday. The web has made this perfectly possible and faced with a sluggish UK market there's never been a better time to leverage technology and look overseas; after all, a connection to the internet is a connection to over 1 billion potential customers. Our politicians are encouraging it and technology is in place to enable it, yet small business owners are resisting the...

Cities are shaped as much by a repertoire of buildings, works and objects, as by cultural institutions, ideas and interactions between forms and practices entangled in identity formations. This is particularly true when seen through a city as forceful and splendid as Venice. The essays in this volume investigate these connections between art and identity, through discussions of patronage, space and the dissemination of architectural models and knowledge in Venice, its territories and beyond. They celebrate Professor Deborah Howard s leading role in fostering a historically grounded and...