Showing 1-20 of 117 items.

Nature-First Cities

Restoring Relationships with Ecosystems and with Each Other

UBC Press

Nature-First Cities recognizes nature as the lead architect in the most essential of restoration projects – our cities.

  • Copyright year: 2024
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Modernism’s Magic Hat

Architecture and the Illusion of Development without Capital

University of Texas Press

Examines the role of architecture in the history of global development and decolonization.

  • Copyright year: 2024
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Broken City

Land Speculation, Inequality, and Urban Crisis

UBC Press

Broken City argues that skyrocketing urban land prices drive our global housing market failure – so, how did we get here, and what can be done about it?

  • Copyright year: 2024
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Movement

How to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives

Island Press

In Movement: How to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives, journalist Thalia Verkade and mobility expert (“the cycling professor”) Marco te Brömmelstroet take a three-year shared journey of discovery into the possibilities of our streets. They investigate and question the choices and mechanisms underpinning how these public spaces are designed and look at how they could be different. Verkade and te Brömmelstroet draw inspiration from the Netherlands and look at what other countries are doing, and could do, to diversify how they use their streets and make them safer.

Making our communities safer, cleaner, and greener starts with asking these fundamental questions: who do our streets belong to, how do we want to use them, and who gets to decide? To truly transform mobility, we need to look far beyond the technical aspects and put people at the center of urban design. Movement will change the way that you view our streets.

  • Copyright year: 2024
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Creating the Hudson River Park

Environmental and Community Activism, Politics, and Greed

Rutgers University Press

Former Hudson River Park Conservancy president Tom Fox offers an insider’s look at the park’s expansion and the conflicts it has spawned among community activists, local politicians, and private developers. Explaining how the park’s current problems might be surmounted, he provides a model for future urban planners. 
 

  • Copyright year: 2024
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Sites of Conscience

Place, Memory, and the Project of Deinstitutionalization

UBC Press

Sites of Conscience charts the importance of public engagement with histories, memories, and lived experiences of institutions in forging new directions in social justice with and for disabled people and people experiencing mental distress, in a context where deinstitutionalization has failed to fully recognise, redress, and repair the ongoing impacts of institutions.

  • Copyright year: 2024
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Empathic Design

Perspectives on Creating Inclusive Spaces

Edited by Elgin Cleckley
Island Press

How do you experience a public space? Do you feel safe? Seen? Represented? The response to these questions may differ based on factors including your race, age, ethnicity, or gender identity. In Empathic Design, designer and architecture professor Elgin Cleckley brings together leaders and visionaries in architecture, urban design, planning, and design activism to explore what it means to design with empathy. Empathic designers work with and in the communities affected. They acknowledge the full history of a place and approach the lived experience and memories of those in the community with respect.
 
Contributors explore broader conceptual approaches and highlight design projects including the Harriet Tubman Memorial in Newark, which replaced a long-standing statue of Christopher Columbus; and restoration of the Freedom Center in Oklahoma City, first built by civil activist Clara Luper to provide a safe place for gathering and youth education; and The Camp Barker Memorial in Washington, D.C., which commemorates a “contraband camp” used to house former slaves who had been captured by the Union Army.
 
Empathic Design provides essential approaches and methods from multiple perspectives, meeting the needs of our time and holding space for readers to find themselves. 
 
 

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Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation

Island Press

Our population is aging—by 2034, the US will have more people over 65 than under 18, and older residents make up a disproportionate number of casualties from natural disasters. In Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation, community resilience and housing expert Danielle Arigoni argues that we cannot achieve true resilience until communities adopt interventions that work to meet the needs of their oldest residents.
 
Arigoni explores how to integrate age-friendly resilience into community planning and disaster preparedness efforts through new planning approaches. These include an age-friendly process, and a planning framework dedicated to inclusive disaster recovery.
 
Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation will help professionals and concerned citizens understand how to best plan for both the aging of our population and the climate changes underway to create communities that serve the needs of older adults better, not only during disasters but for all the days in between.
 

  • Copyright year: 2023
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Beyond Greenways

The Next Step for City Trails and Walking Routes

Island Press

Would you experience your city differently if your doorstep were a trailhead? Many people don’t have close-by, safe places to walk, despite walking’s known benefits. In Beyond Greenways: The Next Step for City Trails and Walking Routes, greenways expert Robert Searns introduces a new generation of more accessible pathways that stitch together urban and suburban areas.

Searns introduces two models—grand loop trails and town walks. Grand loop trails are 20 to 350-mile systems that encircle metro areas. Town walks are shorter—2 to 6-mile routes in cities. He then lays out how to plan, design, and build support for them, drawing inspiration from trails in the US and abroad.

Planners, trail advocates, and community leaders will find the tools here to develop successful and affordable trails. Now is the time to pursue accessible pedestrian routes for this, and future, generations.

  • Copyright year: 2023
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Condoland

The Planning, Design, and Development of Toronto’s CityPlace

UBC Press

In an era of frantic vertical urbanization known as “condoism,” Condoland explores the planning and design of Toronto’s CityPlace, one of North America’s largest residential development projects – and reveals what can happen when the real estate industry comes to dominate city planning.

  • Copyright year: 2023
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Crossing Paths Crossing Perspectives

Urban Studies in British Columbia and Quebec

Edited by Meg Holden and Sandra Breux
Les Presses de l'Université Laval, Laval University Press
  • Copyright year: 2023
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The Freedom of the City

Island Press

Published in 1926, The Freedom of the City by Charles Downing Lay is an eloquent and timely defense of urbanism and city life. Award-winning author and urban historian Thomas J. Campanella has given Lay’s text new life and relevance, with the addition of explanatory notes, imagery, an introduction, and biographical essay, to bring this important work to a new generation of urbanists. 
 
Campanella writes “The Freedom of the City was prescient in 1926 and timely now. Certainly, the essentials of good urbanism extolled in the book—human scale, diversity, walkability, the serendipities of the street; above all, density—are articles of faith among architects and urbanists today.”
 
Lay’s words are relevant today as density and congestion are once again under siege, especially in our most productive and thriving cities.
 

  • Copyright year: 2023
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Place and Prosperity

How Cities Help Us to Connect and Innovate

Island Press

In Place and Prosperity: How Cities Help Us to Connect and Innovate, urban planning expert William Fulton takes an engaging look at the importance of connecting to place, how cities are engines of prosperity, and how these two ideas – place and prosperity – lie at the heart of what a city is and, by extension, what our society is all about.

Fulton has been writing about cities over his forty-year career as a journalist, professor, mayor, planning director, and the director of an urban think tank in one of America’s great cities. Place and Prosperity is a curated collection of his writings with new and updated selections and framing material.             

Fulton shows that at their best, cities not only inspire and uplift us, but they make our daily life more convenient, more fulfilling, and more prosperous.
 

  • Copyright year: 2022
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Managing the Climate Crisis

Designing and Building for Floods, Heat, Drought, and Wildfire

Island Press

Natural disasters from heat waves to coastal and river flooding will inevitably become worse because of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. Managing them is possible, but planners, designers, and policymakers need to advance adaptation and preventative measures now.

Managing the Climate Crisis: Designing and Building for Floods, Heat, Drought and Wildfire by design and planning experts Jonathan Barnett and Matthijs Bouw is a practical guide to addressing this urgent national security problem. Barnett and Bouw draw from the latest scientific findings and include many recent, real-world examples to illustrate how to manage seven climate-related threats: flooding along coastlines, river flooding, flash floods from extreme rain events, drought, wildfire, long periods of high heat, and food shortages.
 

  • Copyright year: 2022
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Making Healthy Places, Second Edition

Designing and Building for Well-Being, Equity, and Sustainability

Island Press

Making Healthy Places surveys the many intersections between health and the built environment, from the scale of buildings to the scale of metro areas, and across a range of outcomes, from cardiovascular health and infectious disease to social connectedness and happiness. This new edition is significantly updated, with a special emphasis on equity and sustainability, and takes a global perspective. It provides current evidence not only on how poorly designed places may threaten well-being, but also on solutions that have been found to be effective.

Making Healthy Places is a must-read for students, academics, and professionals in health, architecture, urban planning, civil engineering, parks and recreation, and related fields. 
 

  • Copyright year: 2022
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City Forward

How Innovation Districts Can Embrace Risk and Strengthen Community

Island Press

Innovation districts and anchor institutions—like hospitals and universities—drive economic growth. But the benefits often fail to reach the very neighborhoods they are built in. As CEO of the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus (BNMC), Matt Enstice fosters a different, collaborative approach. City Forward explains how BNMC promotes a shared goal of equity among companies and institutions with diverse motivations. Offering a candid look at BNMC’s setbacks and successes, along with efforts from other institutions nationwide, Enstice shares twelve strategies that innovation districts can harness to weave equity into their core work.

Institutional leadership, business owners, and professionals will find experienced direction here. City Forward is a refreshing look at the brighter futures that we can create through thoughtful collaboration—moving forward, together.
 

  • Copyright year: 2022
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Arbitrary Lines

How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

Island Press

It’s time for America to move beyond zoning, argues city planner M. Nolan Gray in Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. With lively explanations, Gray shows why zoning abolition is a necessary—if not sufficient—condition for building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities.

Gray lays the groundwork for this ambitious cause by clearing up common misconceptions about how American cities regulate growth and examining four contemporary critiques of zoning (its role in increasing housing costs, restricting growth in our most productive cities, institutionalizing racial and economic segregation, and mandating sprawl). He sets out some of the efforts currently underway to reform zoning and charts how land-use regulation might work in the post-zoning American city.

Arbitrary Lines is an invitation to rethink the rules that will continue to shape American life—where we may live or work, who we may encounter, how we may travel. If the task seems daunting, the good news is that we have nowhere to go but up.
 
 

  • Copyright year: 2022
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The Heart of Toronto

Corporate Power, Civic Activism, and the Remaking of Downtown Yonge Street

UBC Press

From the sidewalk to City Hall, in the corporate boardroom, and around the kitchen table, The Heart of Toronto traces the power dynamics and projects that have transformed downtown Toronto.

  • Copyright year: 2022
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Climate Change and U.S. Cities

Urban Systems, Sectors, and Prospects for Action

Island Press, NCA Regional Input Reports

From roads to clean water systems, the built infrastructure sustaining urban populations is increasingly vulnerable to climate. Understanding the dilemma and identifying a path forward is particularly important as cities are significant agents of climate action.

A follow-up to the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA), Climate Change and U.S. Cities documents the current and future climate risk for U.S. cities, urban systems, and their residents. It is an examination of research findings since early 2012, with a critical emphasis on the cross-cutting factors of economics, equity, and governance.

Urban stakeholders and decision makers will gain an understanding of climate risks and a set of conclusions and recommendations for action. Climate Change and U.S. Cities boldly lays out the tools that cities must harness to effect decisive, meaningful change.
 

  • Copyright year: 2021
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Dream Play Build

Hands-On Community Engagement for Enduring Spaces and Places

Island Press

People love their communities and want them to become safer, healthier, more prosperous places. But the standard approach to public meetings somehow makes everyone miserable. Conversations that should be inspiring can become shouting matches. So what would it look like to facilitate truly meaningful discussions? What if they could be fun?

For twenty years, James Rojas and John Kamp have been using art, creative expression, and storytelling to shake up the classic community meeting. In Dream Play Build, they share their insights into building common ground and inviting active participation among diverse groups. Their approach, “Place It!,” draws on three methods: the interactive model-building workshop, the pop-up, and site exploration using our senses. Inspirational and fun, this book celebrates the value of engaging with the dreams we have for our communities.

  • Copyright year: 2022
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