Product Description: This book rethinks the city by examining its various forms of collectivity – their atmospheres, modes of exclusion and self-organization, as well as how they are governed – on the basis of a critical discussion of the notion of urban commons...read more

Product Description: This book will speak to the new human epoch, the Urban Age. A majority of humanity now lives for the first time in cities. The city, the highest invention of the modern age, is now the human heartland. And yet the same process that brought us the city and its wonders, modernisation, has also thrown up challenges and threats, especially climate change, resource depletion, social division and economic insecurity...read more

Exploring your hometown can be like a vacation in your backyard, and learning about someone elses city is a great way to expand your concept of home. This fun book takes a trip through the narrators town, complete with a trip through their backyard pool, school, and even the fire station. From the fountain in the town square to shopping on Main Street, beginning readers will love the accessible text and color photographs that leap off the page and bring a narrators hometown to life.

Product Description: After more than a century of heroic urban visions, urban dwellers today live in suburban subdivisions, gated communities, edge cities, apartment towers, and slums. The contemporary cities we know are more often the embodiment of unexpected outcomes and unintended consequences rather than visionary planning...read more

Product Description: As a result of global dynamics―the increasing interconnection of people and places―innovations in global environmental governance haved altered the role of cities in shaping the future of the planet.  This book is a timely study of the importance of these social transformations in our increasingly global and increasingly urban world...read more

Product Description: In 2010 Shanghai hosted the largest, most spectacular and most expensive expo ever. Attracting a staggering 73 million visitors, and costing around US$45 billion dollars, Shanghai Expo broke the records in the history of world's fairs and universal expositions...read more

Product Description: Just how resilient are our urban societies to social, energy, environmental and/or financial shocks, and how does this vary among cities and nations? Can our cities be made more sustainable, and can environmental, economic and social collapse be staved off through changes in urban form and travel behaviour?  How might rising indebtedness and the recent series of financial crises be related to automobile dependence and patterns of urban automobile use? To what extent does the system and economy of automobility factor in the production of urban socio-spatial inequalities, and how might these inequalities in mobility be understood and measured? What can we learn from the politics of mobility and social movements within cities? What is the role of automobility, and auto-dependence, in differentiating groups, both within cities and rural areas, and among transnational migrants moving across international borders? These are just some of the questions this book addresses...read more

Product Description: Join Bernie and his faithful dog Ben on a wild worldwide journey! They'll explore beautiful architecture in Paris, Sidney, and Algiers; towering wonders in New York, Dubai, and Shanghai; age-old treasures in Babylon, Machu Picchu, and Rome—and beyond...read more

Product Description: Memories of Cities is a collection of essays that explore different ways of writing about the political and economic history of the built environment. Drawing upon fiction and non-fiction, and illustrated by original photographs, the essays employ a variety of narrative forms including memoirs, letters, and diary entries...read more

Product Description: World Cities, City Worlds is about how we make sense of cities, those extraordinary places where half the world's population now lives. It explores ways of seeing, experiencing and thinking about how cities work, how they change and what makes city life tick...read more

Product Description: The contributors illustrate what twin analytical and practical challenges emerge from juxtaposing cultural, economic, historical, postcolonial, virtual, architectural, literary, security and political stances to the concept of the 'global city'.

Product Description: This book considers the state of the city and contemporary urbanisation from a range of intellectual and international perspectives. The most interdisciplinary collection of its kind Provides a contemporary update on urban thinking that builds on well established debates in the field Uses the city to explore economic, social, cultural, environmental and political issues more broadly Includes contributions from non Western perspectives and cities...read more

There are many different places and people that make up a town. Through colorful images and easy to read text, early readers learn the important aspects of town communities and are encouraged to look for some of the similarities in their own towns!

Product Description: Cities are where the twenty-first century is really going to happen. Already at the beginning of the century, we became 50% urban as a global population, and by 2050 we're going to be up to 70% urban. So cities could either be our coffin or our ark...read more

Product Description: With a historical and theoretical view, the author here explores the intricate relationships between people and the public spaces they create and use, and shows how the planning of gardens is reflected in the planning of entire cities.

Product Description: How do political ideologies and urban landscapes intersect in the context of globalization? This volume illuminates the production of ideologies as both discursive and spatial phenomena in distinct contributions that ground their analysis in cities of the Global North and South...read more

'Peter J. Taylor has produced a sweeping, empirically grounded, defense of cities as fundamental building blocks of long-term, large scale social structures; a way of freeing social science from state-centric bias; and indeed, mankind's hope. However, the single greatest strength of this complex, seductive, argument is the insistence on treating cities relationally, as process. Here the key to understanding the significance of cities is by studying them in terms of the dynamic networks they form and in their relations to states.'- Richard E. Lee, Binghamton University, US'The founding father of the famous Globalization and World Cities Research Network and think-tank on worldwide links between cities presents this fascinating overview on cities in geohistory. By moving cities to the centre stage, Peter Taylor proposes that concern for states tell only part of the macro-social story of humanity. Cities have been, and are, the engines of innovation. This impressive new book provides new insights into why cities succeed or fail. The book is in the class with broadminded presentations like Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel.'- Christian Matthiessen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark and President, International Geographical Union s Commission on Urban Geography'This is a 'big' book by Peter Taylor. It tells of the extraordinary world-making powers of cities across the ages, it explains why a state-centric social science has constrained recognition of these powers over the last two centuries, and it outlines a new 'indisciplinarity' to help us make sense of a human condition increasingly forged out of the urban. Anyone troubled by the social sciences as we know them, ought to read this book.'- Ash Amin, Cambridge University, UK and author, Land of StrangersAccepting that cities are extraordinary, this book provides an original city-centred narrative of human creativity, past, present and future.In this innovative, ambitious and wide-ranging book, Peter Taylor demonstrates that cities are the epicenters of human advancement. In exploring cities as sites through which economies flourish, by harnessing the creative potential of myriad communication networks, the author considers cities from varying temporal and spatial perspectives. Four stories of cities are told: the origins of city networks; the domination of cities by world-empires; the genesis of a singular modern creative interval in which innovation culminates in today s globalised cities; and finally, the need for cities to act as centres for human creativity to produce a more resilient global society in the current crisis century.Providing a long-term view through which to consider the role of cities in attending to incipient crises of the twenty-first century, this closely argued thesis will prove essential for students and scholars of urban studies, geography and sociology, and all those with a professional interest in, or personal fascination for, cities.Contents: Preface Part I: Setting Down and Setting Up 1. A Cities' Perspective 2. Conceptual Toolkits Part II: Narrative I: Beginning Conjectures 3. City and State Beginnings: Western Asia's Great Creative Interlude 4. Geographies of Beginning Creative Interludes Part III: Narrative II: World-systems 5. Normal History 6. Making the Modern World-system: Western Europe's Great Creative Interlude Part IV: Narrative III: Prospective Conjectures - Where Are We and Where Are We Going? 7. Working in an Urban World 8. Towards Green Networks of Cities for the Twenty-first Century References Index

Product Description: In Communities and Networks, Katherine Giuffre takes the science of social network analysis and applies it to key issues of living in communities, especially in urban areas, exploring questions such as: How do communities shape our lives and identities? How do they foster either conformity or innovation? What holds communities together and what happens when they fragment or fall apart? How is community life changing in response to technological advances? Refreshingly accessible and built on fascinating case examples, this unique book provides not only the theoretical grounding necessary to understand how and why the burgeoning area of social network analysis can be useful in studying communities, but also clear technical explanations of the tools of network analysis and how to gather and analyze real-world network data...read more