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Native to Nowhere
Sustaining Home And Community In A Global Age
Timothy Beatley
Island Press, 2005

Meaningful places offer a vital counterbalance to the forces of globalization and sameness that are overtaking our world, and are an essential element in the search for solutions to current sustainability challenges. In Native to Nowhere, author Tim Beatley draws on extensive research and travel to communities across North America and Europe to offer a practical examination of the concepts of place and place-building in contemporary life. Tim Beatley reviews the many current challenges to place, considers trends and factors that have undermined place and place commitments, and discusses in detail a number of innovative ideas and compelling visions for strengthening place.


Native to Nowhere brings together a wide range of new ideas and insights about sustainability and community, and introduces readers to a host of innovative projects and initiatives. Native to Nowhere is a compelling source of information and ideas for anyone seeking to resist place homogenization and build upon the unique qualities of their local environment and community.


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Nature-Friendly Communities
Habitat Protection And Land Use Planning
Chris Duerksen and Cara Snyder
Island Press, 2005

Nature-Friendly Communities presents an authoritative and readable overview of the successful approaches to protecting biodiversity and natural areas in America's growing communities. Addressing the crucial issues of sprawl, open space, and political realities, Chris Duerksen and Cara Snyder explain the most effective steps that communities can take to protect nature.

The book: documents the broad range of benefits, including economic impacts, resulting from comprehensive biodiversity protection efforts; identifies and disseminates information on replicable best community practices; establishes benchmarks for evaluating community biodiversity protection programs.

Nine comprehensive case studies of communities explain how nature protection programs have been implemented. From Austin and Baltimore to Tucson and Minneapolis, the authors explore how different cities and counties have taken bold steps to successfully protect natural areas. Examining program structure and administration, land acquisition strategies and sources of funding, habitat restoration programs, social impacts, education efforts, and overall results, these case studies lay out perfect examples that other communities can easily follow. Among the case study sites are Sanibel Island, Florida; Austin, Texas; Baltimore County, Maryland; Charlotte Harbor, Florida; and Teton County, Wyoming.

Nature-Friendly Communities offers a useful overview of the increasing number of communities that have established successful nature protection programs and the significant benefits those programs provide. It is an important new work for public officials, community activists, and anyone concerned with understanding or implementing local or regional biodiversity protection efforts.

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A Negotiated Landscape
The Transformation of San Francisco’s Waterfront since 1950
Jasper Rubin
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
A Negotiated Landscape examines the transformation of San Francisco’s iconic waterfront from the eve of its decline in 1950 to the turn of the millennium. What was once a major shipping port is now best known for leisure and entertainment.
            To understand this landscape Jasper Rubin not only explores the built environment but also the major forces that have been at work in its redevelopment. While factors such as new transportation technology and economic restructuring have been essential to the process and character of the waterfront’s transformation, the impact of local, grassroots efforts by planners, activists, and boosters have been equally critical.
            The first edition of A Negotiated Landscape won the 2012 prize for best book in planning history from the International Planning History Society. Much has changed in the five years since that edition was published. For this second edition, Rubin provides a new concluding chapter that updates the progress of planning on San Francisco’s waterfront and examines debates over the newest visions for its development.
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Neighbourhoods for the City in Pacific Asia
Kong Chong Ho
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
The largest cities in Pacific Asia are the engines of their countries’ economic growth, seats of national and regional political power, and repositories of the nation’s culture and heritage. The economic changes impacting large cities interact with political forces along with social cultural concerns, and in the process also impact the neighbourhoods of the city. Neighbourhoods for the City in Pacific Asia looks at local collective action and city government responses and its impact on the neighbourhood and the city. A multi-sited comparative approach is taken in studying local action in five important cities (Bangkok, Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore and Taipei) in Pacific Asia. With site selection in these five cities guided by local experts, neighbourhood issues associated with the fieldsites are explored through interviews with a variety of stakeholders involved in neighourhood building and change. The book enables comparisons across a number of key issues confronting the city: heritage (Bangkok and Taipei), local community involved provisioning of amenities (Seoul and Singapore), placemaking versus place marketing (Bangkok and Hong Kong). Cities are becoming increasingly important as centers for politics, citizen engagement and governance. The collaborative efforts city governments establish with local communities become an important way to address the liveability of cities.
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Neoliberal Chicago
Edited by Larry Bennett, Roberta Garner, and Euan Hague
University of Illinois Press, 2017
The neoliberal philosophy of fiscal austerity aligned with reduced regulation has transformed Chicago. As pursued by mayor Rahm Emanuel and his predecessor Richard M. Daley, neoliberalism led officials to privatize everything from parking meters to schools, gut regulations and social services, and promote gentrification wherever possible. The essayists in Neoliberal Chicago explore an essential question: how does neoliberalism work on the ground in today's Chicago? Contextual chapters explore race relations, physical development, and why Chicago embraced neoliberalism. Other contributors delve into aspects of the neoliberal vision, neoliberalism's impact on three iconic city spaces, and how events like the 2008 foreclosure crisis and the bid to attract the Olympic Games reveal the workings of neoliberalism. Contributors: Stephen Alexander, Larry Bennett, Michael Bennett, Carrie Breitbach, Sean Dinces, Kenneth Fidel, Roberta Garner, Euan Hague, Black Hawk Hancock, Christopher Lamberti, Michael J. Lorr, Martha Martinez, Brendan McQuade, Alex G. Papadopoulos, Rajiv Shah, Costas Spirou, Carolina Sternberg, and Yue Zhang.
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The New American City Faces its Regional Future
A Cleveland Perspective
David C. Sweet
Ohio University Press, 1999

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.

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New Brunswick, New Jersey
The Decline and Revitalization of Urban America
Listokin, David
Rutgers University Press, 2016
While many older American cities struggle to remain vibrant, New Brunswick has transformed itself, adapting to new forms of commerce and a changing population, and enjoying a renaissance that has led many experts to cite this New Jersey city as a model for urban redevelopment. Featuring more than 100 remarkable photographs and many maps, New Brunswick, New Jersey explores the history of the city since the seventeenth century, with an emphasis on the dramatic changes of the past few decades.
 
Using oral histories, archival materials, census data, and surveys, authors David Listokin, Dorothea Berkhout, and James W. Hughes illuminate the decision-making and planning process that led to New Brunswick’s dramatic revitalization, describing the major redevelopment projects that demonstrate the city’s success in capitalizing on funding opportunities. These projects include the momentous decision of Johnson & Johnson to build its world headquarters in the city, the growth of a theater district, the expansion of Rutgers University into the downtown area, and the destruction and rebuilding of public housing. But while the authors highlight the positive effects of the transformation, they also explore the often heated controversies about demolishing older neighborhoods and ask whether new building benefits residents. Shining a light on both the successes and failures in downtown revitalization, they underscore the lessons to be learned for national urban policy, highlighting the value of partnerships, unwavering commitment, and local leadership. 
 
Today, New Brunswick’s skyline has been dramatically altered by new office buildings, residential towers, medical complexes, and popular cultural centers. This engaging volume explores the challenges facing urban America, while also providing a specific case study of a city’s quest to raise its economic fortunes and retool its economy to changing needs.
 
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The New Chicago Way
Lessons from Other Big Cities
Ed Bachrach and Austin Berg
Southern Illinois University Press, 2019
For all the wrong reasons, a national spotlight is shining on Chicago. The city has become known for its violence, police abuse, parent and teacher unrest, population decline, and mounting municipal and pension debt. The underlying problem, contend Ed Bachrach and Austin Berg, is that deliberative democracy is dead in the city. Chicago is home to the last strongman political system in urban America. The mayor holds all the power, and any perceived checks on mayoral control are often proven illusory. Rash decisions have resulted in poor outcomes. The outrageous consequences of unchecked power are evident in government failures in elections, schools, fiscal discipline, corruption, public support for private enterprise, policing, and more.
 
Rather than simply lament the situation, criticize specific leaders, or justify an ideology, Bachrach and Berg compare the decisions about Chicago’s governance and finances with choices made in fourteen other large U.S. cities. The problems that seem unique to Chicago have been encountered elsewhere, and Chicagoans, the authors posit, can learn from the successful solutions other cities have embraced.
 
Chicago government and its citizens must let go of the past to prepare for the future, argue Bachrach and Berg. A future filled with demographic, technological, and economic change requires a government capable of responding and adapting. Reforms can transform the city. The prescriptions for change provided in this book point toward a hopeful future: the New Chicago Way.
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New Global Cities in Latin America and Asia
Welcome to the Twenty-First Century
Pablo Baisotti, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2022

New Global Cities in Latin America and Asia: Welcome to the Twenty-First Century proposes new visions of global cities and regions historically considered “secondary” in the international context. The arguments are not only based on material progress made by these metropolises, but also on the growing social difficulties experienced  (e.g., organized crime, drug trafficking, slums, economic inequalities). The book illustrates the growth of cities according to these problems arising from the modernity of the new century, comparing Latin American and Asian cities.

This book analyzes the complex relationships within cities through an interdisciplinary approach, complementing other research and challenging orthodox views on global cities. At the same time, the book provides new theoretical and methodological tools to understand the progress of “Third World” cities and the way of understanding “globality” in the 21st century by confronting the traditional views with which global cities were appreciated since the 1980s. Pablo Baisotti brings together researchers from various fields who provide new interpretative keys to certain cities in Latin America and Asia.

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New Islamic Urbanism
The Architecture of Public and Private Space in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Stefan Maneval
University College London, 2019
New Islamic Urbanism traces the changing relationship between public and private space in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, over the past seventy years, from the dawn of the oil era to the present, paying particular attention to the role architecture plays in defining public and private spaces.
Combining Michael Warner’s concepts of publics and counterpublics with theories of space and sociological approaches to architecture, Stefan Maneval explores the concept of New Islamic Urbanism in Saudi Arabia, arguing that this architectural trend, which is characterized by an emphasis on privacy protection through high enclosures, gates, blinds, and tinted windows, constitutes for some an important element of piety. At the same time, it enables different conceptions of privacy, banned social practices, as well as the formation of publics and counterpublics.
Based on rich ethnographic data collected by the author, New Islamic Urbanism challenges normative assumptions on gender segregation in Muslim societies and provides a nuanced account of the meaning of publicness and privacy in Muslim contexts in general. It will be of particular interest to an academic readership in Middle East and Islamic studies, as well as in architecture, urban planning and anthropology.
 
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New Jerusalem
The Good City and the Good Society
Ken Worpole
Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2015
Utopian thinking as to how people might live together more harmoniously—the dream of the perfect city, the New Jerusalem—has been revived in different forms and at different times, from early medieval monasteries to contemporary alternative communities.

In 1902, Ebenezer Howard, renowned social reformer and founder of the garden movement, published Garden Cities of To-Morrow, a book originally to be called New Jerusalem and a work that became one of the most influential town planning documents of the twentieth century.

In New Jerusalem: The Good City and the Good Society, Ken Worpole reveals that utopian and visionary thinking, especially in relation to new forms of settlement and livelihood, has not gone away, even if it has gone underground.

With an unprecedented growth in the population of older people, along with increasing cultural and demographic change elsewhere in society, there is renewed interest in more convivial forms of urban design, as well as shared living. This interest draws on a long history of elective communities, including those influenced by the thought and works of Emanuel Swedenborg—a fascinating history with much to offer the architects and policymakers of today. 
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The New Urban Renewal
The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville
Derek S. Hyra
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Two of the most celebrated black neighborhoods in the United States—Harlem in New York City and Bronzeville in Chicago—were once plagued by crime, drugs, and abject poverty. But now both have transformed into increasingly trendy and desirable neighborhoods with old buildings being rehabbed, new luxury condos being built, and banks opening branches in areas that were once redlined. In The New Urban Renewal, Derek S. Hyra offers an illuminating exploration of the complicated web of factors—local, national, and global—driving the remarkable revitalization of these two iconic black communities.
 
How did these formerly notorious ghettos become dotted with expensive restaurants, health spas, and chic boutiques? And, given that urban renewal in the past often meant displacing African Americans, how have both neighborhoods remained black enclaves? Hyra combines his personal experiences as a resident of both communities with deft historical analysis to investigate who has won and who has lost in the new urban renewal. He discovers that today’s redevelopment affects African Americans differentially: the middle class benefits while lower-income residents are priced out. Federal policies affecting this process also come under scrutiny, and Hyra breaks new ground with his penetrating investigation into the ways that economic globalization interacts with local political forces to massively reshape metropolitan areas.

As public housing is torn down and money floods back into cities across the United States, countless neighborhoods are being monumentally altered. The New Urban Renewal is a compelling study of the shifting dynamics of class and race at work in the contemporary urban landscape.
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Newcomers
Gentrification and Its Discontents
Matthew L. Schuerman
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Gentrification is transforming cities, small and large, across the country. Though it’s easy to bemoan the diminished social diversity and transformation of commercial strips that often signify a gentrifying neighborhood, determining who actually benefits and who suffers from this nebulous process can be much harder. The full story of gentrification is rooted in large-scale social and economic forces as well as in extremely local specifics—in short, it’s far more complicated than both its supporters and detractors allow.

In Newcomers, journalist Matthew L. Schuerman explains how a phenomenon that began with good intentions has turned into one of the most vexing social problems of our time. He builds a national story using focused histories of northwest Brooklyn, San Francisco’s Mission District, and the onetime site of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project, revealing both the commonalities among all three and the place-specific drivers of change. Schuerman argues that gentrification has become a too-easy flashpoint for all kinds of quasi-populist rage and pro-growth boosterism. In Newcomers, he doesn’t condemn gentrifiers as a whole, but rather articulates what it is they actually do, showing not only how community development can turn foul, but also instances when a “better” neighborhood truly results from changes that are good. Schuerman draws no easy conclusions, using his keen reportorial eye to create sharp, but fair, portraits of the people caught up in gentrification, the people who cause it, and its effects on the lives of everyone who calls a city home.
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Nonprofit Neighborhoods
An Urban History of Inequality and the American State
Claire Dunning
University of Chicago Press, 2022
An exploration of how and why American city governments delegated the responsibility for solving urban inequality to the nonprofit sector.
 
Nonprofits serving a range of municipal and cultural needs are now so ubiquitous in US cities, it can be difficult to envision a time when they were more limited in number, size, and influence. Turning back the clock, however, uncovers both an illuminating story of how the nonprofit sector became such a dominant force in American society, as well as a troubling one of why this growth occurred alongside persistent poverty and widening inequality. Claire Dunning’s book connects these two stories in histories of race, democracy, and capitalism, revealing how the federal government funded and deputized nonprofits to help individuals in need, and in so doing avoided addressing the structural inequities that necessitated such action in the first place.

Nonprofit Neighborhoods begins after World War II, when suburbanization, segregation, and deindustrialization inaugurated an era of urban policymaking that applied private solutions to public problems. Dunning introduces readers to the activists, corporate executives, and politicians who advocated addressing poverty and racial exclusion through local organizations, while also raising provocative questions about the politics and possibilities of social change. The lessons of Nonprofit Neighborhoods exceed the bounds of Boston, where the story unfolds, providing a timely history of the shift from urban crisis to urban renaissance for anyone concerned about American inequality—past, present, or future.
 
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Nuclear Suburbs
Cold War Technoscience and the Pittsburgh Renaissance
Patrick Vitale
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

From submarines to the suburbs—the remaking of Pittsburgh during the Cold War

During the early Cold War, research facilities became ubiquitous features of suburbs across the United States. Pittsburgh’s eastern and southern suburbs hosted a constellation of such facilities that became the world’s leading center for the development of nuclear reactors for naval vessels and power plants. The segregated communities that surrounded these laboratories housed one of the largest concentrations of nuclear engineers and scientists on earth. In Nuclear Suburbs, Patrick Vitale uncovers how the suburbs shaped the everyday lives of these technology workers. 

Using oral histories, Vitale follows nuclear engineers and scientists throughout and beyond the Pittsburgh region to understand how the politics of technoscience and the Cold War were embedded in daily life. At the same time that research facilities moved to Pittsburgh’s suburbs, a coalition of business and political elites began an aggressive effort, called the Pittsburgh Renaissance, to renew the region. For Pittsburgh’s elite, laboratories and researchers became important symbols of the new Pittsburgh and its postindustrial economy. Nuclear Suburbs exposes how this coalition enrolled technology workers as allies in their remaking of the city.

Offering lessons for the present day, Nuclear Suburbs shows how race, class, gender, and the production of urban and suburban space are fundamental to technoscientific networks, and explains how the “renewal” of industrial regions into centers of the tech economy is rooted in violence and injustice. 

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