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Building a Better Chicago explores the complex ecosystem of nonprofits within Chicago and highlights the tensions between formal nonprofits and informal grassroots organizations. As scholars of urban neighborhoods argue, such field-level analysis allows one to more fully understand how relationships between community members within the neighborhoods and external agencies and groups frame neighborhood dynamics. Throughout the text, the author analyzes how urban elites, nonprofit staff, and residents use interorganizational trust and mistrust to respond to large-scale redevelopment initiatives. As part of this, the author analyzes the New Communities Program, a ten-year, multimillion-dollar urban redevelopment initiative that was led by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a national community development intermediary. Problematizing normative understandings of organizational trust and mistrust, the author examines the ways that Chicago’s poor Black and Mexican American communities leveraged collective skepticism as a tactical tool in order to ensure more equitable redevelopment occurred in their neighborhoods. Organizational trust is not always a positive force—rather, it can be co-opted as a mode of control, used to minimize dissent and to socialize members into a homogenous organizational culture. This book demonstrates how organizational mistrust, or collective skepticism, can yield a number of positive outcomes.

The premise of the book is that building and construction practices are insensitive to the needs of many people, and implicated in the widespread despoliation and degradation of ecological systems and the environment. From the construction of transport networks and major commercial and residential property in rapidly urbanising countries, to the popularisation of self-build and home improvements, we are living in a period of incessant and unprecedented building. Few places are untouched by construction and infrastructure projects that are part of an ideology of building that has little regard to what is needed and, instead, are shaped by political and economic values that regard building and construction as ‘a good thing’. Using examples from around the world, the book identifies the mentalities of construction and building that are failing people and places in many different ways, and calls for radical changes to city living and environments by building less, but better.

Who makes decisions that shape the housing, policies, and social programs in urban neighborhoods? Who, in other words, governs? This book offers a rich ethnographic portrait of the individuals who implement community development projects in the Fairmount Corridor, one of Boston's poorest areas. The book uncovers a network of nonprofits and philanthropic foundations making governance decisions alongside public officials—a public–private structure that has implications for democratic representation and neighborhood inequality. The book's author spent four years following key players in Boston's community development field. While state senators and city councilors are often the public face of new projects, and residents seem empowered through opportunities to participate in public meetings, the author found a shadow government of nonprofit leaders and philanthropic funders, nonelected neighborhood representatives with their own particular objectives, working behind the scenes. Tying this system together were political performances of “community”—government and nonprofit leaders, all claiming to value the community. The author argues that there is no such thing as a singular community voice, meaning any claim of community representation is, by definition, illusory. The author shows how community development is as much about constructing the idea of community as it is about the construction of physical buildings in poor neighborhoods. The book demonstrates how the nonprofit sector has become integral to urban policymaking, and the tensions and trade-offs that emerge when private nonprofits take on the work of public service provision.

This book considers the rise of a new generation of so-called global cities—Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai—and the power that this concept had in their ascent, in order to analyze the general relationship between global city theory and its urban public policy practice. The global city is often invoked in theory and practice as an ideal model of development and a logic of internationalization for cities the world over. But the global city also creates deep social polarization and challenges how much local planning can achieve in a world economy. Presenting a unique elite ethnography in Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai, the book discusses the global urban discourses, aspirations, and strategies vital to the planning and management of such metropolitan growth. The global city, the book shows, is not one single idea, but a complex of ways to imagine a place to be global and aspirations to make it so, often deeply steeped in politics. The book is a call to reconcile proponents and critics of the global city toward a more explicit engagement with the politics of this global urban imagination.

The machinic city investigates the role of performance art to help us reflect on contemporary urban living, as human and machine agency become increasingly intermingled and digital media is overlaid onto the urban fabric. This is illustrated by several case studies on performance art interventions from artists such as Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Rimini Protokoll, which draw from a rich history of avant-garde art movements to create spaces for deliberation and reflection on urban life and to speculate on its future. As cities are increasingly controlled by autonomous processes mediated by technical machines, the performative potential of the aesthetic machine is analysed, as it assembles with media, Capitalist, human and urban machines. The aesthetic machine of performance art in urban space is analysed through its different – design, city and technology actants. This unveils the unpredictable nature and emerging potential of performance art as it unfolds in the machinic city, which consists of assemblages of efficient and not-so-efficient machines. The machinic city pays particular attention to participation, describing how digitally mediated performance art interventions in urban space foreground different modes of subjectivity emerging from human and machine hybrids. This highlights the importance of dissensus as a constitutive factor of urban life and as a means of countering machinist determinism in present and future conceptualisations of city life.

As lights come on in the streets and darkness descends on cities, most ‘call it a day’. The night is rarely a popular issue for news headlines, local governments or urban researchers. Yet what in our cities happens afterhours, and how city leaders manage it, is far from inconsequential. Managing Cities at Night intervenes in this landscape with an accessible, evidence-based and internationally minded volume capable of inspiring a greater appreciation of the night-time economy in research and practice. It offers a useful guide to urban governance after hours with a unique stock-take of this reality with an eye at questions of urban equality, not least by taking into account the momentous impact of COVID-19 on night-time activity. The book presents an updated review of night-time governance across five continents, with insights from realities as different as London, New York, Valparaiso, Sydney, Tokyo, Berlin, Bogota and Melbourne. It does so to explicitly broaden the imagination of what it means to manage cities ‘after hours’, as an explicitly ‘scholarly’ guide for practitioners and novices of the night-time economy. It presents a distinctive focus on night governance, the role of night mayors and night commissions, and does so in an informative case-based way that sketches one of the widest variety of vignettes and case studies currently available on night-time economies of cities the world over.

This book provides an innovative lens to consider contemporary urban challenges, taking as its point of departure two overlapping claims. The first is that although the topics of ruins and vacant spaces have been widely discussed in the urban studies literature, their role in the production of both urban landscapes and the economic, social and cultural geographies of cities is not adequately understood. The second is that urban vacancy will play an even greater role in urban development, politics and experimentation in the future. Spaces officially designated as ‘vacant’ are the sites of contested activity, use, and representation. Centring urban vacancy as a core feature of urbanisation, the contributors develop new empirical insights that rethink ruination, urban development and political contestation over the re-use of vacant spaces in (post-)crisis cities across the globe. Chapters are organised into three thematic sections. The first section, ‘Rethinking ruination in the post-crisis context’, advances the conceptual linkages between the literatures on ruins and vacant space. The second, ‘The political economy of urban vacant spaces’, centres urban vacancy as a core feature of cities, constituting the interface between urban land markets and cultural understandings of use/exchange value. The third section, ‘Re-appropriating urban vacant spaces’, explores vacant spaces as an important point of political antagonism. Using international case studies from the Global North and Global South, the book sheds important new light on the complexity of forces and processes shaping urban vacancy and its re-use, exploring these as both lived spaces and sites of political antagonism.

This book traces the response of local communities to the shale gas revolution. Rather than cast communities as powerless to respond to oil and gas companies and their landmen, it shows that communities have adapted their local rules and regulations to meet the novel challenges accompanying unconventional gas extraction through fracking. The multidisciplinary perspectives of the book's chapters tie together insights from planners, legal scholars, political scientists, and economists. What emerges is a more nuanced perspective of shale gas development and its impacts on municipalities and residents. Unlike many political debates that cast fracking in black-and-white terms, this book embraces the complexity of local responses to fracking. States adapted legal institutions to meet the new challenges posed by this energy extraction process while under-resourced municipal officials and local planning offices found creative ways to alleviate pressure on local infrastructure and reduce harmful effects of fracking on the environment. The book tells a story of community resilience with the rise and decline of shale gas production.

Why travel? What motivations underpin the journeys we make? And how can we make decisions that improve our travel experiences? Arguing that the desire to move is a purpose in itself, this book brings together leading experts to provide insights from multiple viewpoints across the sciences, arts and humanities. Together, they examine key travel motivations, including the importance of travel for human well-being, as well as how this can reconciled with challenges such as reducing our carbon footprint, adapting new mobility technologies, and improving the quality of our journeys. The book shows how our travel choices are shaped by a wide range of social, physical, psychological and cultural factors, which have profound implications for the design of future transport policies. Offering thought-provoking and practical new perspectives, this fascinating book will be essential for all those who have ever wondered why we travel and how it relates to our fundamental needs.