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Given the rapid urbanization of the world’s population, the converse phenomenon of shrinking cities is often overlooked and not well understood. Yet, with almost one in ten post-industrial US cities shrinking in recent years, efforts by government and anchor institutions to regenerate them is increasingly salient. Of particular concern is the growing need for affordable housing in revitalizing neighborhoods. This book examines affordable housing experiences in five of the fastest shrinking cities in the US: Detroit, New Orleans, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. Applying quantitative and GIS analysis using data from the US Census, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and other sources the authors make recommendations for future place-based siting practices, stressing its importance of ensuring more equitable urban revitaliszation. These recommendations are particularly focused on the development of an affordable housing siting model that can be linked to anchor-based strategies for urban revitalization. The book will be a valuable resource for academic researchers and students in urban studies, housing and inequality, as well as policy makers.

Europe’s historic city centres look dense, busy, cared for, populated with cafes, small shops, monuments, churches, public squares and traffic. On the centre’s edge, even in smaller, poorer cities, there are often concrete towers, gestures to modernity, banking and internationalisation. However, there are also abandoned buildings and derelict spaces. It is easy to see the potential in Europe’s battle-worn cities and their multi-tongued people, just as it is easy to see the broad sweep of world-shaping history. However, many city cores around the centre have become run down, underinvested, unloved, with too many jobless youth and too few enterprising job creators. All of Europe’s cities were not long ago producers of goods. Today, most of those goods come from afar and too many hands, machines and spaces are idle. This international handbook draws together 10 years of ground-level research into the causes and consequences of Europe’s biggest urban challenge – the loss of industry, jobs and productive capacity. The handbook explores the potential of former industrial cities to offer a new and more sustainable future for a crowded continent under severe environmental constraints and extreme, economic and social pressures. It focuses on cities that not only were the most productive and wealth creating in the not too distant past, but the most reliant on major industries and therefore the hardest hit by their demise. These cities have lived through many phases of growth and decline, and they are experimenting in alternative futures. So they may show us new ways forward.

In this self-proclaimed Urban Age, the city is touted as the source of economic prosperity, a nurturer or social and cultural diversity, and a place primed for democracy. Its fertile ground gives rise to innovations that speed society along a path of progress. Without cities, human civilization, we are led to believe, will falter and decay. Not just hyperbolic, this is celebratory by half. While Cities in an Urban Age recognizes the value and wonder of cities, it rejects this view through rose-colored glasses. Instead, it argues that the city is a cauldron for the contradictions that haunt life on planet Earth. In this real place, we find wealth juxtaposed with poverty, environmental destructiveness in tension with environmental sustainability, oligarchy pushing against democracy, and tolerance fighting defensively against the onslaught of intolerance. Taking the U.S. city as its empirical ground, this book explores the ways in which these contradictions shape daily life for those who reside there.

In this sequel to Kingston, Jamaica: Urban Development and Social Change, 1692 to 1962 (1975) Colin Clarke investigates the role of class, colour, race, and culture in the changing social stratification and spatial patterning of Kingston, Jamaica since independence in 1962. He also assesses the strains - created by the doubling of the population - on labour and housing markets, which are themselves important ingredients in urban social stratification. Special attention is also given to colour, class, and race segregation, to the formation of the Kingston ghetto, to the role of politics in the creation of zones of violence and drug trading in downtown Kingston, and to the contribution of the arts to the evolution of national culture. A special feature is the inclusion of multiple maps produced and compiled using GIS (geographical information systems). The book concludes with a comparison with the post-colonial urban problems of South Africa and Brazil, and an evalution of the de-colonization of Kingston.

Cities, at their best, are cradles of diversity, opportunity, and citizenship. Why, then, do so many cities today seem scarred by divisions separating the powerful and privileged from the victims of deprivation and injustice? What is it like to live on the wrong side of the divide in Paris, London, New York, Sao Paolo, and other cities all over the world? In this book, based on the internationally renowned Oxford Amnesty Lectures, eight leading urban thinkers argue about why divisions arise in cities and about what could and should be done to bring those divisions to an end. The book features essays by Patrick Declerck, Stuart Hall, David Harvey, Richard Rogers, Patricia Williams, and James Wolfensohn, with commentaries from Peter Hall, Michael Likosky, and others. The many contemporary issues that the book addresses include the impact of globalization and migration on the urban environment, the consequences of the 'war on terror' for those living in cities, the new development paradigm being adopted by international institutions in the developing world, the need for a genuine urban renaissance in Britain and elsewhere, and the suffering of the homeless. These controversial and sometimes conflicting essays, linked by Richard Scholar's incisive introduction, aim to encourage and inform debate about the challenges to human rights in our increasingly urban world.

In the last quarter century, a new form of iconic architecture has appeared throughout the world's major cities. Typically designed by globe-trotting "starchitects" or by a few large transnational architectural firms, these projects are almost always funded by the private sector in the service of private interests. Whereas in the past monumental architecture often had a strong public component, the urban ziggurats of today are emblems and conduits of capitalist globalization. In The Icon Project, Leslie Sklair focuses on ways in which capitalist globalization is produced and represented all over the world, especially in globalizing cities. Sklair traces how the iconic buildings of our era-elaborate shopping malls, spectacular museums, and vast urban megaprojects--constitute the triumphal "Icon Project" of contemporary global capitalism, promoting increasing inequality and hyperconsumerism. Two of the most significant strains of iconic architecture--unique icons recognized as works of art, designed by the likes of Gehry, Foster, Koolhaas, and Hadid, as well as successful, derivative icons that copy elements of the starchitects' work--speak to the centrality of hyperconsumerism within contemporary capitalism. Along with explaining how the architecture industry organizes the social production and marketing of iconic structures, he also shows how corporations increasingly dominate the built environment and promote the trend towards globalizing, consumerist cities. The Icon Project, Sklair argues, is a weapon in the struggle to solidify capitalist hegemony as well as reinforce transnational capitalist control of where we live, what we consume, and how we think.

Living on the Margins offers a unique insight into the lives of undocumented migrants from China, Bangladesh and Turkey (including Kurds and Northern Cypriots) in London, and those who employ them. The experiences we present are not unique to undocumented migrants in London; their experiences are mirrored by undocumented migrants all over the world who are living and working in cities, on farms, in towns and villages. Drawing on qualitative interviews, the book offers insights into the reasons why undocumented migrants come to the UK, their journeys including the use of agents and smugglers and their routes into undocumented status, how they survive economically, experiences at work, the ways in which social networks are used and developed and how everyday exclusions are managed. While undocumented migrants can be vulnerable, exploited and isolated they can also be active agents in shaping their lives within the constraints of status. Breaking new ground, this topical book exposes the contradictions in policies, which marginalise and criminalise undocumented migrants, while promoting potentially exploitative labour market conditions. By presenting the employer perspective we are able to explore the possible impact of policy on the decision making of employers in relation to employment business practises, worker recruitment strategies and decisions to whether to employ undocumented migrants. The book takes an inter-disciplinary approach drawing on literature from a number of disciplines including: sociology, politics, social policy and socio-legal studies. This fascinating book offers an international context to the research and provides theoretical, policy and empirical analyses.

Long-term care (LTC) is a key policy priority for governments internationally. Most countries are faced with demographic and/or socio-economic changes that are resulting in a significant growth in the need for LTC services. The impact on LTC systems of higher demand is compounded by long-run increases in service unit costs, and by reductions in the availability of unpaid care, which still provides the lion share of the support for people with long-term care needs. In addition, the rising political voice of key LTC consumer groups and the mounting pressures on public service budgets mean that LTC is likely to remain for the foreseeable future at the forefront of the political agenda across OECD nations. Since the 90s, long-term care policies have undergone significant transformations across many countries. In some instances, these changes have been the outcome of major explicit policy goals. In others, new systems have come about through the accumulation of incremental changes. As a result, LTC policy reforms in the last decades across OECD countries offer a rich body of experience that should inform the design of strategies for improving equity and efficiency in the LTC systems of the future. The main purpose of this book is to analyse the range of solutions adopted internationally about how to organise, regulate and fund LTC services in the face of the growing needs of ageing societies.

This book presents a new conception of industrial practice and firm behavior. It explains how the cultures that shape the practices of firms and the trajectories of regional and national economies are actually produced. The analysis shows how the internal and inter-firm organization of production, use of technologies, and the industrial knowledge underpinning these practices are strongly influenced by their social and institutional context.

As cities have gentrified, educated urbanites have come to prize what they regard as "authentic" urban life: aging buildings, art galleries, small boutiques, upscale food markets, neighborhood old-timers, funky ethnic restaurants, and old, family-owned shops. These signify a place's authenticity, in contrast to the bland standardization of the suburbs and exurbs. But as Sharon Zukin shows in Naked City, the rapid and pervasive demand for authenticity--evident in escalating real estate prices, expensive stores, and closely monitored urban streetscapes--has helped drive out the very people who first lent a neighborhood its authentic aura: immigrants, the working class, and artists. Zukin traces this economic and social evolution in six archetypal New York areas--Williamsburg, Harlem, the East Village, Union Square, Red Hook, and the city's community gardens--and travels to both the city's first IKEA store and the World Trade Center site. She shows that for followers of Jane Jacobs, this transformation is a perversion of what was supposed to happen. Indeed, Naked City is a sobering update of Jacobs' legendary 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Like Jacobs, Zukin looks at what gives neighborhoods a sense of place, but argues that over time, the emphasis on neighborhood distinctiveness has become a tool of economic elites to drive up real estate values and effectively force out the neighborhood "characters" that Jacobs so evocatively idealized.

Sidewalk City re-maps public space in order to unveil contemporary spatial practices and to explore future possibilities. In the midst of historic migration and urbanization, our limited public spaces are being contested and re-conceptualized in cities around the world with innovative experiments in some places and bloody battles in others. This book uses the case of sidewalks in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam where a vibrant everyday urbanism takes place in flexible patterns that defy conventional conceptions of public space. The book makes three contributions to the literature: 1) It develops methods of spatial ethnography for collecting data about the spatial practices of overlooked members of the public who are embedded in local institutions in order to overcome assumptions about how space is used and conceived. 2) The book also develops visual arguments with a critical cartography primer, a progression of original maps to show how our ontology and cartographic conventions illuminate and foreclose knowledge about space. 3) The book’s spatial ethnography and critical cartography is based on applying a property rights theory framework to public space in order to integrate our understanding of both the social and physical aspects of how space is constructed and regulated in society. Using the example of a pilot pedestrian project that was developed for the city from the study’s findings, Sidewalk City discusses the potential of using maps to engage social discourse and urban planning and design institutions with new visual narratives in order to shape the social reconstruction of public space.

Worldwide, the urban development and disaster management arena finds itself at a critical crossroad. This is driven by rapid urbanization (and de-urbanization) as well as a growing volume of damage caused by natural (and un-natural) disasters, which are increasingly affecting urban and rural inhabitants. Bearing this in mind, experiences from disaster management and especially from disaster recovery have led to advances in the field and an increase in the importance of the role of spatial planning. This book brings together experiences and knowledge of spatial planning after significant disasters, and highlights on-going efforts to improve spatial resilience across the globe. One of the main goals is to understand the influence of significant disasters on spatial planning and spatial resiliency under different legal-administrative and cultural framework conditions. In part A of the book, experts from Japan, Indonesia, USA, Slovakia and Germany write about their experiences and efforts to rebuild their communities in a more resilient manner after major disasters and thus give an overview of the state of the art. Part B gives a cross-country analysis of five important topics: Transformation of spatial planning after significant disasters, efforts in building spatial resilience after disasters, coordination in building spatial resilience, participation in rebuilding space more resilient and spatial planning under uncertainty. Part B further identifies key factors that can be shared throughout the countries and can be used for building back better.