Showing titles in Urban

In Saving Our Cities, William W. Goldsmith shows how cities can be places of opportunity rather than places with problems. With strongly revived cities and suburbs, working as places that serve all their residents, metropolitan areas will thrive, thus making the national economy more productive, the environment better protected, the citizenry better educated, and the society more reflective, sensitive, and humane.

Street Farm is the inspirational account of residents in the notorious Low Track in Vancouver, British Columbia, one of the worst urban slums in North America, who joined together to create an urban farm as a means of addressing the chronic problems in their neighborhood. It is a story of recovery, of land and food, of people, and of the power of farming and nourishing others as a way to heal our world and ourselves.

Strategically situated at the gateway to the Mississippi River yet standing atop a former swamp, New Orleans was from the first what geographer Peirce Lewis called an "impossible but inevitable city". How New Orleans came to be, taking shape between the mutual and often contradictory forces of nature and urban development, is the subject of An Unnatural Metropolis.

In Sidewalking, David L. Ulin offers a compelling inquiry into the evolving landscape of Los Angeles. Part personal narrative, part investigation of the city as both idea and environment, Sidewalking is many things: a discussion of Los Angeles as urban space, a history of the city's built environment, a meditation on the author's relationship to the city, and a rumination on the art of urban walking.

The remarkable lengths Ruderman and Laker go to for the story - chasing down witnesses on the city's grimmest streets, sifting through archive boxes and hours of surveillance tape for crucial clues, and coaxing reluctant victims to come forward - put their determination to balance motherhood with the career they love to the ultimate test.

Empire City tells the story of the dreams that inspired the changes in the landscape and the problems that eluded solution. Author David Scobey paints a remarkable panorama of New York's uneven development, a city-building process careening between obsessive calculation and speculative excess. Envisioning a new kind of national civilization, “bourgeois urbanists” attempted to make New York the nation's pre-eminent city.

Revealing how seemingly race-neutral urban sites contain hidden racial assumptions and imperatives, Lipsitz examines the ways in which urban space and social experience are racialized and emphasizes that aggrieved communities do not passively acquiesce to racism. He recognizes the people and communities that have re-imagined segregated spaces in expressive culture as places for congregation.

With a new afterword covering the two decades since its first publication, two of Washington, D.C.'s most respected journalists expose one of America's most tragic ironies: How the nation's capital, often a gleaming symbol of peace and hope, is the setting for vicious contradictions and devastating conflicts over race, class, and power. Jaffe and Sherwood have chillingly chronicled the descent of the District of Columbia.

Community shapes our identity, quenches our thirst for belonging, and bolsters our physical, mental, emotional, and economic health. But in the chaos of modern life, community ties have become unraveled, leaving many feeling afraid or alone in the crowd, grasping at shallow substitutes for true community. In this thoughtful and moving book, Paul Born describes the four pillars of deep community: sharing our stories, taking the time to enjoy one another, taking care of one another, and working together for a better world.

A groundbreaking review of China's historic urbanization and an analysis of the opportunities and hazards ahead for the world's most populous nation. China's accelerating urbanisation is approaching a critical stage, and how this is managed will have wide ramifications for the outcomes of many of China's present development challenges, according to United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in China's 2013 National Human Development Report (NHDR).

Since 2010, Toronto's headlines have been consumed by the outrageous personal foibles and government-slashing, anti-urbanist policies of Mayor Rob Ford. But the heated debate at City Hall has obscured a bigger, decade-long narrative of Toronto's ascendance as a mature global city. Some Great Idea traces how post-amalgamation, and under three very different mayors, Toronto managed to so quickly oscillate from one extreme to another, and how the city might proceed from here.

The Agile City engages the fundamental question: what to do about it? Journalist and urban analyst James S. Russell argues that we'll more quickly slow global warming - and blunt its effects - by retrofitting cities, suburbs, and towns. The Agile City shows that change undertaken at the building and community level can reach carbon-reduction goals rapidly. Adapting buildings (39 percent of greenhouse-gas emission) and communities (slashing the 33 percent of transportation related emissions) offers numerous other benefits that tax gimmicks and massive alternative-energy investments can't match.

In 1983 Chicago elected Harold Washington as the city's first black mayor. This is the story of Washington's improbable victory over Jane Byrne, heir to the late Richard J. Daley's political empire, and over Daley's eldest son. It's the story of a coalition outside the party's mainstream coming to power and ruling in the country's most political of cities. In Fire on the Prairie, Gary Rivlin reveals the personalities and philosophies of those who were at the center of events, from black separatists such as Lu Palmer to community organizers such as Jesse Jackson....

Jonathan Kozol's books have become touchstones of the American conscience. Unlike his previous books, however, Ordinary Resurrections is almost entirely narrative and takes us into the fascinating details of daily life as he has lived it with young children who befriended him over the course of several years. Like Amazing Grace, this book describes the children of New York's South Bronx, but it is a markedly different book in mood and vantage point.

Lucid, forward-looking, and guided by a level-headed optimism that clearly distinguishes between genuine progress and exaggerated claims, Emerald Cities points the way toward a sustainable future for the American city.

In this brilliant, gracefully written, and important new book, former Secretary of the Interior and Governor of Arizona Bruce Babbitt brings fresh thought to questions of how we can build a future we want to live in.

We have released the genie from the bottle: climate change is coming, and there's no stopping it. The question, according to Matthew Kahn, is not how were going to avoid a hotter future but how were going to adapt to it. In Climatopolis, Kahn, one of the worlds foremost experts on the economics of the environment, argues that cities and regions will adapt to rising temperatures over time, slowly transforming our everyday lives.

Liguria, un altro viadotto a rischio. "Chiudete o finirà come il Morandi": ecco l'Italia delle strade a pezzi, di Giuseppe Filetto e Marco Preve; Dissesto, la solitudine della Liguria. Allarme porti: "Così si chiude", di Maurizio Crosetti; Nel Paese dell'eterna burocrazia un cantiere su due è bloccato, di Sergio Rizzo; I ponti mettono paura, la procura fa chiudere un pezzo di autostrada, di Giuseppe Filetto e Marco Lignana; Venti ponti a rischio. Conte: revoca vicina per Autostrade, di Giuseppe Filetto e Marco Lignana;

Mose, Ilva, Alitalia. Un Paese in crisi: Mose, Ilva e Alitalia, il paese dei fallimenti, di Massimo Giannini; L'irresponsabilità al governo, di Claudio Tito; Il bivio dei Benetton: ingresso nella compagnia o rischio concessioni, di Ettore Livini; Alitalia, il governo cambia rotta. Prima ristrutturazione, poi la vendita, di Lucio De Lellis; Conte: "Mittal rimane ma non escludo intervento pubblico. Non cadremo a gennaio", di Claudio Tito.

Tav si, Tav no: Toninelli licenzia il sì Tav. Ira di Salvini: "Basta rinvii", di Maria Chiara Giacosa; Tav, Coppola: "Cacciato ma di quella linea non mi occupo da mesi", di Paolo Griseri; Perché la Tav è uno spreco, di Gad Lerner; Tav, lo spreco sarebbe fermarla, di Paolo Griseri; Tav, la mozione bluff del M5S e il rovello Pd: che fare in aula?, di Emanuele Lauria; Pd, Delrio: "Sulla Tav non faremo tatticismi. Saremo in aula contro il M5S", di Giovanna Casadio.