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During the past four decades Los Angeles and Hong Kong have come to play a critical role in the flow of goods, people, and capital; in the changes in production and consumption; and in the urban environmental issues that have taken root as a result of the changes they have experienced. The book evaluates the issues associated with those changes, including how LA and Hong Kong have become connected to China and its key urban regions such as Shenzhen and Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta. Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and several of China’s mega-cities have become global in their activities and reach through their financial, political and economic roles as well as the cultural, environmental, and demographic shifts that have taken place. The book documents the history and protracted nature of six urban environmental issues in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China. These include ports and freight traffic (or goods movement), air quality, water supply and water quality, the food environment, transportation, and open and public space. It identifies contrasting development patterns, important similarities, and comparative trends and strategies. The book further analyzes how urban environmental issues have risen to the top of the policy agendas in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China, where and how changes are being explored and where change is possible, and where and how such changes have been blocked or undermined.

Sweet Spots examines the dense meanings of interstitial spaces in New Orleans architecture and culture. “Interstitial space” refers not only to distinctive features of New Orleans’ houses—high ceilings, hidden passageways, balconies, courtyards and portes-de-cocheres, for example--but also to the relation of such features to the city’s streets and neighborhoods. Thirteen interdisciplinary contributors explore the roles played by “in-between” spaces in expressing and shaping intersections of race, class, gender, and environment in New Orleans. Sweet Spots is rich with visual materials, from maps, architectural renderings and surveys, to postcards, photographs, paintings and drawings.

For the first time available in English, Licia do Prado Valladares’s classic anthropological study of Brazil’s vast, densely populated urban living environments reveals how the idea of the favela became an internationally established—and even attractive and exotic—representation of poverty. The study traces how the term “favela” emerged as an analytic category beginning in the mid-1960s, showing how it became the object of immense popular debate and sustained social science research. But the concept of the favela so favored by social scientists is not, Valladares argues, a straightforward reflection of its social reality, and it often obscures more than it reveals. The established representation of favelas undercuts more complex, accurate, and historicized explanations of Brazilian development. It marks and perpetuates favelas as zones of exception rather than as integral to Brazil’s modernization over the past century. And it has had important repercussions for the direction of research and policy affecting the lives of millions of Brazilians. Valladares’s foundational book will be welcomed by all who seek to understand Brazil’s evolution into the twenty-first century.