Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Penguin Press HC, The $29.95
A pioneering urban economist offers fascinating, even inspiring proof that the city is humanity's greatest invention and our best hope for the future. America is an urban nation. More than two thirds of us live on the 3 percent of land that contains our cities. Yet cities get a bad rap: they're dirty, poor, unhealthy, crime ridden, expensive, environmentally unfriendly... Or are they? As Edward...
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (50th Anniversary Edition) (Modern Library) by Jason Epstein $23.00
Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of its initial publication, this special edition of Jane Jacobs’s masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, features a new Introduction by Jason Epstein, the book’s original editor, who provides an intimate perspective on Jacobs herself and unique insights into the creation and lasting influence of this classic. The Death and...
The Works: Anatomy of a City by Penguin (Non-Classics) $22.00
Read Kate Ascher's posts on the Penguin Blog. A fascinating guided tour of the ways things work in a modern city Have you ever wondered how the water in your faucet gets there? Where your garbage goes? What the pipes under city streets do? How bananas from Ecuador get to your local market? Why radiators in apartment buildings clang? Using New York City as its point of reference, The...
Image of the City by MIT Press
What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion--imageability--and shows its...
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) by Yale University Press $60.00
Compulsory "ujamaa" villages in Tanzania, collectivization in Russia, Le Corbusier's urban planning theory realized in Brasilia, the Great Leap Forward in China, agricultural "modernization" in the Tropics - the 20th century has been racked by grand utopian schemes that have inadvertently brought death and disruption to millions. Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go...
Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life by Vintage Canada $22.00
International BestsellerAll places are not created equal. In this groundbreaking book, Richard Florida shows that where we live is increasingly a crucial factor in our lives, one that fundamentally affects our professional and personal prospects. As well as explaining why place matters now more than ever, Who’s Your City? provides indispensable tools to help you choose the right place for you....
Introduction to Emergency Management, Fourth Edition by Butterworth-Heinemann $59.95
Learn about the discipline of emergency management as it has developed over the past six decades, including the rapid evolution of the field since the turn of the century. Haddow, Bullock, and Coppola bring the ideal combination of practical and academic experience to their presentation of disaster preparedness, mitigation, response, recovery and communications. Extensive case studies cover the...
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by North Point Press $19.00
A manifesto by America's most controversial and celebrated town planners, proposing an alternative model for community design.There is a growing movement in North America to put an end to suburban sprawl and to replace the automobile-based settlement patterns of the past fifty years with a return to more traditional planning principles. This movement stems not only from the realization that...
Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City by Oxford University Press, USA $27.95
Phoenix, Arizona is one of America's fastest growing metropolitan regions. It is also its least sustainable one, sprawling over a thousand square miles, with a population of four and a half million, minimal rainfall, scorching heat, and an insatiable appetite for unrestrained growth and unrestricted property rights. In Bird on Fire, eminent social and cultural analyst Andrew Ross focuses on the...
Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles by Broadway $30.00
Michael Gross is the preeminent chronicler of America’s rich and powerful, most recently in 740 Park and Rogues’ Gallery.Now, he goes west to uncover the very secret history of Los Angeles, specifically those wealthiest and most private of enclaves— Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Holmby Hills, and Beverly Park—through their most mind-boggling estates, and the fascinating, fabulous folks who...