Product Description: The book develops a new approach to urban development in which leisure, pleasure or experiences are seen as key drivers. History, authenticity, urban qualities, local culture and leisure offerings or a vibrant retail sector are thus assets in local development also outside of the big cities...read more

There are an estimated 600,000,000 passenger cars in the world, and that number is increasing every day. So too is Earth's supply of parking spaces. In some cities, parking lots cover more than one-third of the metropolitan footprint. It's official: we have paved paradise and put up a parking lot. In ReThinking a Lot, Eran Ben-Joseph shares a different vision for parking's future. Parking lots, he writes, are ripe for transformation. After all, their design and function has not been rethought since the 1950s. With this book, Ben-Joseph pushes the parking lot into the twenty-first century. Ben-Joseph shows that parking lots can be aesthetically pleasing, environmentally and architecturally responsible, and used for something other than car storage. He introduces us to some of the many alternative and nonparking purposes that parking lots have served -- from RV campgrounds to stages for "Shakespeare in the Parking Lot." He shows us parking lots that are lushly planted with trees and flowers and beautifully integrated with the rest of the built environment. With purposeful design, Ben-Joseph argues, parking lots could be significant public places, contributing as much to their communities as great boulevards, parks, or plazas. For all the acreage they cover, parking lots have received scant attention. It's time to change that; it's time to rethink the lot.

Product Description: When Henri Lefebvre published The Urban Revolution in 1970, he sketched a research itinerary on the emerging tendency towards planetary urbanization. Today, when this tendency has become reality, Lefebvre’s ideas on everyday life, production of space, rhythmanalysis and the right to the city are indispensable for the understanding of urbanization processes at every scale of social practice...read more

Product Description: A unique variety of approaches to all aspects of urban culture in the ancient world can be found in Urban Dreams and Realities in Antiquity, a collection of 19 essays addressing ancient cities from an interdisciplinary perspective...read more

Product Description: Cities are home to over fifty percent of the world's population, a figure which is expected to increase enormously by 2050. Despite the growing demand on urban resources and infrastructure, food is still often overlooked as a key factor in planning and designing cities...read more

Product Description: "What emerges as common features of these cities mark their unique contribution to an understanding of cosmopolitanism as ideal and practice, raising crucial questions about who is or can be cosmopolitan and where cosmopolitanism is in the world...read more

Product Description: Infrastructural Lives is the first book to describe the everyday experience and politics of urban infrastructures. It focuses on a range of infrastructures in both the global South and North. The book examines how day-to-day experience and perception of infrastructure provides a new and powerful lens to view urban sustainability, politics, economics, cultures and ecologies...read more

Product Description: This book is an interdisciplinary cultural examination of twenty-first century boxing as a professional sport, a bodily labor, a lucrative business, a popular entertainment, and an instrument of ideology. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted with Latino boxers, women boxers, and boxing insiders in Texas, it discusses boxing from the vantage point of the sundry players, who are involved with it: the labor force, promoters, handlers, ringside officials, medical professionals, media, and the audiences...read more

Product Description: Drawing upon the smart experiences of "world class" cities in North America, Canada and Europe, this book provides the evidence to show how entrepreneurship-based and market-dependent representations of knowledge production are now being replaced with a community of policy makers, academic leaders, corporate strategists and growth management alliances, with the potential to liberate cities from the stagnation which they have previously been locked into by offering communities: the freedom to develop polices, with the leadership and strategies capable of reaching beyond the idea of "creative slack"; a process of reinvention, whereby cities become "smarter," in using intellectual capital to not only meet the efficiency requirements of wealth creation, but to become centres of creative slack; the political leadership capable of not only being economically innovative, or culturally creative, but enterprising in opening-up, reflexively absorbing and discursively shaping the democratic governance of such developments; the democratic governance to sustain such developments...read more

Product Description: Contemporary city and suburban dwellers are constantly on the move. Does this mean they lack a sense of belonging to their neighbourhoods, or does enhanced mobility co-exist with feelings of community and belonging? This collection examines these questions through a unique series of neighbourhood-based global case studies...read more

Product Description: This concise yet comprehensive overview of the political and economic development of the world's cities offers a unique emphasis on its cultural impacts. The book emphasizes the transition from modern (industrial) to post-modern (post-industrial) eras and its effect on established and developing global cities, and arguments are supported with case studies for each of the main concepts of urban theory and research...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: This insightful collection of papers on the contemporary cityscape explores the rhythms of urban flows, temporalities and interactions. It interprets the city as a complex whole, interwoven with networks and constant movement, and offers case studies of global metropolises from Manchester to Rio de Janeiro, Cardiff to Jakarta...read more

This book is an investigation of the cultural phenomenon of branding and its transformational effects on the contemporary spatial – and urban – reality. It develops a novel understanding of the rationale behind the construction of large-scale architectural complexes that relate to corporate brands, and of its tremendous cultural effects. The author suggests that what we see today is the creation of "global mass ornaments", of a thorough ornamentalization of the entire globe. The origins of this are discussed with regard to examples of corporate brand-building from Europe and China (Autostadt Wolfsburg, BMW Welt Munich and Anting New Town). Additional cases are several simulated spaces in Berlin and the space-branding activities of companies like Apple or Prada. Theoretically, the author develops an innovative poststructuralist framework, combining ideas from Gilles Deleuze with the space philosophy of Peter Sloterdijk. He analyzes how the corporate redefinition of space makes the city enter into a mode of virtual urbanity. This idea leads to a notion of a "global urban" and, ultimately, the "global mass ornament". This concept of a global mass ornament is developed here with reference to Sloterdijk’s concept of a world of "spheres". The latter is used to understand the new mode of spatiality of mediatized spaces. The book makes the point that our world is involved in a process of mass ornamentalization that has only just begun. The concept of the global mass ornament is the first to come to grips with a culture in which branding is effectively changing the physiognomy of the earth. The global mass ornament is a banner for a cultural transformation that employs architecture, sign theory and mechanisms borrowed from traditional advertising and from social media, as well as social processes – and that we have yet to properly understand. This book is a significant step forward in this respect.

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

Product Description: Captured by the City: Perspectives in Urban Culture Studies is a collection of eighteen essays on urban places, people, and phenomena. In it, cities in North America, Europe, and Asia offer themselves as dynamic encounters to those who study them and to those who live in them on a daily basis...read more

What has happened to cities after the global economic recession? Sustaining Cities answers this question by explaining how failed governmental policies contributed to urban problems and offering best practices for solving them.From social scientists and urban planners to architects and literary and film critics, the authors of this unique collection suggest real responses to this crisis. Could the drastic declines in housing markets have been avoided? Yes, if we reframe our housing values. Do you want to attract corporate investment to your town? You might want to think twice about doing so. The extinction of the “Celtic Tiger” may be charted in statistics, but the response in popular Irish mystery novels is much more compelling. China, while not immune to market vicissitudes, still booms, but at a considerable cost to its urban identities.Whether constructing a sustainable social framework for Mexican mega-cities or a neighborhood in London, these nine essays consider some strikingly similar strategies. And perhaps, as the contributors suggest, it’s time to look beyond the usual boundaries of urban, suburban, and exurban to forge new links among these communities that will benefit all citizens. Accessible to anyone with an interest in how cities cope today, Sustaining Cities presents a cautionary tale with a hopeful ending.