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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.

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.

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.