The best cities become an ingrained part of their residents' identities.  Urban design is the key to this process, but all too often, citizens abandon it to professionals, unable to see a way to express what they love and value in their own neighborhoods. In this visually rich book, Alexandros Washburn, Chief Urban Designer of the New York Department of City Planning, redefines urban design. His book empowers urbanites and lays the foundations for a new approach to design that will help cities to prosper in an uncertain future. He asks his readers to consider how cities shape communities, for it is the strength of our communities, he argues, that will determine how we respond to crises like Hurricane Sandy, whose floodwaters he watched from his home in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Washburn draws heavily on his experience within the New York City planning system while highlighting forward-thinking developments in cities around the world. He grounds his book in the realities of political and financial challenges that hasten or hinder even the most beautiful designs. By discussing projects like the High Line and the Harlem Children's Zone as well as examples from Seoul to Singapore, he explores the nuances of the urban design process while emphasizing the importance of individuals with the drive to make a difference in their city.
Throughout the book, Washburn shows how a well-designed city can be the most efficient, equitable, safe, and enriching place on earth. The Nature of Urban Design provides a framework for participating in the process of change and will inspire and inform anyone who cares about cities.

The fate of Cleveland, Ohio, rides on a web of interdependencies on a regional scale. People and communities throughout that area of Ohio are being forced to adjust to new civic roles. The city of Cleveland must understand how it fits into Greater Cleveland. And suburbs must understand their dependence on the historic central city and be drawn into the Cleveland community.

In this sweeping study by local and national experts, these and more specific issues are raised and examined in depth. The New American City Faces Its Regional Future captures the dynamic thinking concerned with Cleveland and its surrounding region. The authors address questions of importance not only to Cleveland and its region but also to communities across the country that are facing similar issues. How does the city want to grow in the future? How can it become a more livable community? As the population of the region moves farther and farther out from the established urban areas, consuming more and more land, and as it enters its third century, these questions will need to be addressed. This book takes some first, important steps toward providing the answers.

For generations, visitors, journalists, and social scientists alike have asserted that Chicago is the quintessentially American city. Indeed, the introduction to The New Chicago reminds us that "to know America, you must know Chicago." The contributors boldly announce the demise of the city of broad shoulders and the transformation of its physical, social, cultural, and economic institutions into a new Chicago. In this wide-ranging book, twenty scholars, journalists, and activists, relying on data from the 2000 census and many years of direct experience with the city, identify five converging forces in American urbanization which are reshaping this storied metropolis. The twenty-six essays included here analyze Chicago by way of globalization and its impact on the contemporary city; economic restructuring; the evolution of machine-style politics into managerial politics; physical transformations of the central city and its suburbs; and race relations in a multicultural era. In elaborating on the effects of these broad forces, contributors detail the role of eight significant racial, ethnic, and immigrant communities in shaping the character of the new Chicago and present ten case studies of innovative governmental, grassroots, and civic action. Multifaceted and authoritative, The New Chicago offers an important and unique portrait of an emergent and new "Windy City."

The history of New York City’s urban development often centers on titanic municipal figures like Robert Moses and on prominent inner Manhattan sites like Central Park. New York Recentered boldly shifts the focus to the city’s geographic edges—the coastlines and waterways—and to the small-time unelected locals who quietly shaped the modern city. Kara Murphy Schlichting details how the vernacular planning done by small businessmen and real estate operators, performed independently of large scale governmental efforts, refigured marginal locales like Flushing Meadows and the shores of Long Island Sound and the East River in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The result is a synthesis of planning history, environmental history, and urban history that recasts the story of New York as we know it.