Vital Little Plans

A new book by influential urbanist Jane Jacobs, released in Jacobs' centenary, and showing her evolution as a writer and thinker. Vital Little Plans will bring together for the first time a selection of essays, articles, speeches and interviews by the late Jane Jacobs. These works shed light on the development of the ideas she made famous in her best-known works, The Death and Life of Great American Cities and The Economy of Cities, while expanding upon familiar themes with new insights. Some works also explore topics rarely directly addressed in her major works, from skyscrapers to feminism to universal health care to gentrification. Readers will find classics like her breakout article "Downtown Is for People" and a host of previously unpublished or obscure articles, speeches, and lectures that follow her entire career, from her early journalistic investigations into the specialty industries of New York City and the neighbourhoods that harboured them, to her critiques of the urban renewal regime, to her iconoclastic takes on economics, separatism, regulation, and the environment. Most importantly, it will reveal Jacobs as she herself wished to be understood: as a writer who tried to observe human life as closely as she could. The book showcases the rhythm of Jacobs' career. "A City Naturalist" collects articles from her early years in New York, where she honed her distinctive style and her interest in the commercial and everyday life of cities. "City Building" critiques contemporary architecture, city planning and urban renewal. In "How New Work Begins," she explores the economic foundations of flourishing city life, and the environmental and political implications of city growth. "The Ecology of Cities" weaves ethics, government regulation and social justice into her system of thought, and gives her integrated approach a name: "the ecology of cities." In "The Unfinished Business of Jane Jacobs," she revisits ideas from throughout her career in the context of current challenges, and turns her gaze to the uncertain future of human life.

This urgent book brings our cities to the fore in understanding the human input into climate change. The demands we are making on nature by living in cities has reached a crisis point and unless we make significant changes to address it, the prognosis is terminal consumption. Providing a radical new argument that integrates global understandings of making nature and making cities, the authors move beyond current policies of mitigation and adaption and pose the challenge of urban stewardship to tackle the crisis. Their new way of thinking re-orients possibilities for environmental policy and calls for us to reinvent our cities as spaces for activism.

This book is the first in which current societal themes revolving around urbanism, architecture, and city planning are put forth solely through female perspectives. It reveals the importance of having female lenses on certain societal debates.

An examination of how the (hyper)local is the locus of real change Many of America’s downtowns, waterfronts, and innovation districts have experienced significant revitalization and reinvestment in recent years, but concentrated poverty and racial segregation remain persistent across thousands of urban, suburban, and rural neighborhoods. The coronavirus pandemic magnified this sustained and growing landscape of inequality. Uneven patterns of economic growth and investment require a shift in how communities are governed and managed. This shift must take into account the changing socioeconomic realities of regions and the pressing need to bring inclusive economic growth and prosperity to more people and places. In this context, place-based (“hyperlocal”) governance structures in the United States and around the globe have been both part of the problem and part of the solution. These organizations range from community land trusts to business improvement districts to neighborhood councils. However, very little systematic research has documented the full diversity and evolution of these organizations as part of one interrelated field. Hyperlocal helps fill that gap by describing the challenges and opportunities of “place governance.” The chapters in Hyperlocal explore both the tensions and benefits associated with governing places in an increasingly fragmented—and inequitable—economic landscape. Together they explore the potential of place governance to give stakeholders a structure through which to share ideas, voice concerns, advocate for investments, and co-design strategies with others both inside and outside their place. They also discuss how place governance can serve the interests of some stakeholders over others, in turn exacerbating wealth-based inequities within and across communities. Finally, they highlight innovative financing, organizing, and ownership models for creating and sustaining more effective and inclusive place governance structures. The authors hope to provoke new thinking among place governance practitioners, policymakers, private sector leaders, urban planners, scholars, students, and philanthropists about how, why, and for whom place governance matters. The book also provides guidance on how to improve place governance practice to benefit more people and places.

In the context of mounting challenges stemming from a rapid transformation of the urban-regional landscapes in many Asian countries, this book highlights a multifaceted array of issues that increasingly engage the academic and planning communities in search of viable solutions to complex problems facing us. Even though cities continue to dominate development studies, urbanization of Asia is evolving toward a hybrid urban-rural nexus beyond the cities. This volume considers these shifting dynamics of Asian urbanization, including urban spatial transformations and their ramifications in the context of sustainability and planning. Through the lens of a set of empirical studies across diverse disciplines, geographies and methodologies. yet with an overarching concern for sustainability in varied (but interconnected) areas such as climate change, land use planning, infrastructure and urban mobility, and quality of life, these studies examine a range of important topics (e.g., flooding, transportation, housing, open space/ green space, urban garden and such) in city/regional settings. Together, they add insights into varied transformational processes or patterns at work on the urban-regional landscapes in a number of Asian countries while offering innovative approaches or alternatives. The proposed volume fills a gap in urban/regional studies in context of South and Southeast Asia that will be of interest to all stakeholders (e.g., planners, administrators, academicians and the citizenry), particularly those interested in sustainability and planning paradigms. It should be a timely and valuable addition to the Asian urbanization literature.

How to make a fairer, more just city From the grandiose histories of monumental state building projects to the minutiae of street signs and corner cafés, from the rebuilding of capital cities to the provision of the humble public toilet, Clean Living under Difficult Circumstances argues for the city as a socialist project. This essay collection spans a period from immediately before the 2008 financial crash to the year of the pandemic. Against the business-as-usual responses to both crises, Owen Hatherley outlines a vision of the city as both a venue for political debate and dispute as well as a space of everyday experience, one that we shape as much as it shapes us. Incorporated here are the genres of memoir, history, music and film criticism, as well as portraits of figures who have inspired new ways of looking at cities, such as the architect Zaha Hadid, the activist and urbanist Jane Jacobs, and thinkers such as Mark Fisher and Adam Curtis. Throughout these pieces, Hatherley argues that the only way out of our difficult circumstances is to imagine and try to construct a better modernity.

This book addresses the complex relationship between architecture and public life. It’s a study of architecture and urbanism as cultural activity that both reflects and gives shape to our social relations, public institutions and political processes. Written by an international range of contributors, the chapters address the intersection of public life and the built environment around the themes of authority and planning, the welfare state, place and identity and autonomy. The book covers a diverse range of material from Foucault’s evolving thoughts on space to land-scraping leisure centres in inter-war Belgium. It unpacks concepts such as ‘community’ and ‘collectivity’ alongside themes of self-organisation and authorship. Architecture and Collective Life reflects on urban and architectural practice and historical, political and social change. As such this book will be of great interest to students and academics in architecture and urbanism as well as practicing architects.

The shock of Donald Trump’s election caused many observers to ask whether the liberal international order—the system of institutions and norms established after World War II—was coming to an end. The victory of Joe Biden, a committed institutionalist, suggested that the liberal order would endure. Even so, important questions remained: Was Trump an aberration? Is Biden struggling in vain against irreparable changes in international politics? What does the future hold for the international order? The essays in Chaos Reconsidered answer those questions. Leading scholars assess the domestic and global effects of the Trump and Biden presidencies. The historians put the Trump years and Biden’s victory in historical context. Regional specialists evaluate U.S. diplomacy in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Others foreground topics such as global right-wing populism, the COVID-19 pandemic, racial inequality, and environmental degradation. International relations theorists reconsider the nature of international politics, pointing to deficiencies in traditional IR methods for explaining world events and Trump’s presidency in particular. Together, these experts provide a comprehensive analysis of the state of U.S. alliances and partnerships, the durability of the liberal international order, the standing and reputation of the United States as a global leader, the implications of China’s assertiveness and Russia’s aggression, and the prospects for the Biden administration and its successors.