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In twenty-first-century American cities, policy makers increasingly celebrate university-sponsored innovation districts as engines of inclusive growth. But the story is not so simple. In University City, Laura Wolf-Powers chronicles five decades of planning in and around the communities of West Philadelphia’s University City to illuminate how the dynamics of innovation district development in the present both depart from and connect to the politics of mid-twentieth-century urban renewal. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, Wolf-Powers concludes that even as university and government leaders vow to develop without displacement, what existing residents value is imperiled when inno...
Working Regions focuses on policy aimed at building sustainable and resilient regional economies in the wake of the global recession. Using examples of four ‘working regions’ — regions where research and design functions and manufacturing still coexist in the same cities — the book argues for a new approach to regional economic development. It does this by highlighting policies that foster innovation and manufacturing in small firms, focus research centers on pushing innovation down the supply chain, and support dynamic, design-driven firm networks. This book traces several key themes underlying the core proposition that for a region to work, it has to link research and manufacturing...
This book investigates self-build housing for low and middle-income groups in urbanized areas in three different continents: South America (Brazil and Ecuador), Europe (the Netherlands, Albany, and Turkey) and Africa (Ethiopia, Egypt and Burkina Faso). Although the levels of social and economic prosperity and the related housing and urban context across these three continents are vastly different, there is a recurring central field of tension of governmental regulation vis- -vis societal self-regulation. The following question will be at the center of the book: How is the capacity for self-regulation in practices of self-build housing and facilities related to formal domains of governance and regulation and how can this relationship be optimized to create more socially sustainable forms of urbanization?
This impressive book tracks the progress of twelve countries on five continents in moving resources from defense to civilian activity in the 1990's. Based on intensive field research, thanks to its truly international array of contributors, the book addresses each country with an impressive standard of scholarship. This accessible book is written i
The city that never sleeps also never stops changing. And while New Yorkers are renowned for their trendsetting, this thought-provoking book argues that New York City itself has become a follower rather than a leader. Once-distinctive streets and neighborhoods have become awash in generic stores, apartment boxes, and garish signs and billboards. Legendary neighborhoods (Little Italy, Hell's Kitchen, Harlem, the Lower East Side) have been smoothed over with cute monikers, remade for real-estate investment and for sale to the highest bidder.
This book provides an innovative perspective to consider contemporary urban challenges through the lens of urban vacancy. Centering urban vacancy as a core feature of urbanization, the contributors coalesce new empirical insights on the impacts of recent contestations over the re-use of vacant spaces in post-crisis cities across the globe. Using international case studies from the Global North and Global South, it sheds important new light on the complexity of forces and processes shaping urban vacancy and its re-use, exploring these areas as both lived spaces and sites of political antagonism. It explores what has and hasn't worked in re-purposing vacant sites and provides sustainable blueprints for future development.
"One of the most enduring American urban myths concerns the death of the Red Car Trolley, an extensive and equitable system in Los Angeles County that some say was weakened and then eradicated by US car manufacturers. Yet as Nicholas Dagen Bloom shows, an array of larger yet less tangible forces together interacted to practically murder public transportation of all kinds in cities nationwide. Most centrally, public transit collapsed because essentially we wanted it to-no conspiracy necessary. Detailing the histories of transportation in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco, Bloom seeks to set all of our transit myths to rest for the sake not only of accuracy but in order to enrich our conversations about public transportation funding today"--
This interdisciplinary volume provides a critical and multi-disciplinary review of current manufacturing processes, practices, and policies, and broadens our understanding of production and innovation in the world economy. Chapters highlight how firms
Farberville, Arkansas is playing host to its first ever mystery convention. Sponsored by the Thurber Farber Foundation and held at Farber College, Murder Comes to Campus is playing host to five major mystery writers representing all areas of the field. Dragooned into running the show when the original organizer is hospitalized, local bookseller Claire Malloy finds herself in the midst of a barely controlled disaster. Not only do each of the writers present their own set of idiosyncrasies and difficulties (including one who arrives with her cat Wimple in tow), the feared, distrusted, and disliked mystery editor of Paradigm House, Roxanne Small, puts in a surprise appearance at the conference. Added to Claire's own love-life woes with local police detective Peter Rosen, things have never been worse.Then when one of the attendees dies in a suspicious car accident, Wimple the cat disappears from Claire's home, and Roxanne Small is nowhere to be found, it becomes evident that the murder mystery is more than a literary genre.
From the 1970s on, Los Angeles was transformed into a center for entertainment, consumption, and commerce for the affluent. Mirroring the urban development trend across the nation, new construction led to the displacement of low-income and working-class racial minorities, as city officials targeted these neighborhoods for demolition in order to spur economic growth and bring in affluent residents. Responding to the displacement, there emerged a coalition of unions, community organizers, and faith-based groups advocating for policy change. In Building Downtown Los Angeles Leland Saito traces these two parallel trends through specific construction projects and the backlash they provoked. He us...