Results by title

In this companion volume to his 2012 book Oregon Plans: The Making of an Unquiet Land-Use Revolution, Sy Adler offers readers a deep analysis of planning Portland’s Urban Growth Boundary. Required by one of Oregon’s nineteen statewide planning goals, a boundary in the Portland metropolitan area was intended to separate urban land and land that would be urbanized from commercially productive farmland. After adopting the goals, approving the Portland growth boundary in 1979 was the most significant decision the Oregon Land Conservation and Development Commission has ever made, and, more broadly, is a significant milestone in American land-use planning.
 
Planning the Portland Urban Growth Boundary primarily covers the 1970s. Innovative regional planning institutions were established in response to concerns about sprawl, but planners working for those institutions had to confront the reality that various plans being developed and implemented by city and county governments in metro Portland would instead allow sprawl to continue. Regional planners labeled these as “Trend City” plans, and sought to transform them during the 1970s and thereafter.
 
Adler discusses the dynamics of these partially successful efforts and the conflicts that characterized the development of the Portland UGB during the 1970s—between different levels of government, and between public, private, and civic sector advocates. When the regional UGB is periodically reviewed, these conflicts continue, as debates about values and technical issues related to forecasting future amounts of population, economic activity, and the availability of land for urban development over a twenty-year period roil the boundary planning process.
 
Planning the Portland Urban Growth Boundary is an authoritative history and an indispensable resource for anyone actively involved in urban and regional planning—from neighborhood associations and elected officials to organizations working on land use and development issues throughout the state.
 

As Southeast Asia’s cities continue to swell, this timely volume analyzes urban politics in the region.

Why have some Southeast Asian cities become laboratories of reform while others remain mired in old patterns of patronage politics and substandard public services? This has become an important question now that over half of Southeast Asia’s population lives in urban areas, transforming the politics of the region. Quintessentially urban problems—traffic congestion, sanitation, public transport, housing, and the like—increasingly preoccupy policymakers, while the region’s swelling urban middle classes expect their mayors and city governments to provide ever-better infrastructure and amenities.

Drawing on close case studies of a diverse set of seventeen urban areas across four Southeast Asian countries—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand—this volume offers fresh insights into how the region’s urban politics are changing. It provides a new framework for understanding why some cities are flourishing and others are not. Exploring the factors that shape distinct local governance regimes in these cities, Politics and Governance in Urban Southeast Asia also throws light on how urban residents use community associations, informal networks, and other political mechanisms to access the public services they want and need.

This book presents a conceptual framework that introduces architectural and urban researchers and practitioners to core ethical concepts and principles.

Grappling with ethics can disorient and disturb your peace of mind in the small hours of the night. Practising Ethics transforms ethics from an obstacle to an opportunity by offering a poethic infrastructure to guide the development of ethical practice in architectural and urban research.

Practising Ethics bridges the gap between research volume and textbook. The book’s two-part structure creates a dialogue between ethical concepts derived from decolonial, ecological, feminist, and queer theory and lived ethical experiences that are explored through specific situations. A series of opening essays present hotspots, touchstones, keystones, blindspots, moonshots, and milestones as different ethical orientations in a six-point methodology. This is followed by six case studies in which practitioners and researchers navigate these orientations through narrative figurations that describe ethical deliberations arising from social science, humanities, practice-led and participatory art, and architectural design research in El Salvador, India, Nigeria, Peru, and the United Kingdom.

The book acts as a companion to an award-winning online toolkit and is illustrated by Judit Ferencz, who offers creative exercises for readers to develop their own poethic infrastructures.

The first comprehensive look at an American conservation community, Prairie Crossing goes beyond windmills and nest boxes to examine an effort to connect adults to the land while creating a healthy and humane setting for raising a new generation attuned to nature. John Scott Watson places Prairie Crossing within the wider context of suburban planning, revealing how two first-time developers implemented a visionary new land ethic that saved green space by building on it. The remarkable achievements include a high rate of resident civic participation, the reestablishment of a thriving prairie ecosystem, the reintroduction of endangered and threatened species, and improved water and air quality. Yet, as Watson shows, considerations like economic uncertainty, lack of racial and class diversity, and politics have challenged, and continue to challenge, Prairie Crossing and its residents.

This book starts from the premise that each community chooses its future every day, through the incremental decisions made by planning and zoning boards and other citizen volunteers, as well as professional staff. The challenge is to ensure that these decisions support the preservation of what is special about the community, while still fostering necessary and appropriate growth.

In this volume, twenty-nine experts from a variety of fields describe in very practical terms the “community preservation” approach to these issues. As opposed to the top-down regulatory mechanisms that are sometimes used to manage growth, the contributors favor a more flexible, locally based approach that has proven successful in Massachusetts and elsewhere. They show how residents can be empowered to become involved in local decision-making, building coalitions and expressing their views on a wide range of issues, such as zoning, water and land protection, transportation, historic preservation, economic diversity, affordable housing, and reuse of brown-fields. When done properly, development can enhance the sense of place and provide needed homes and jobs. Done improperly, it can generate sprawl and a multitude of problems.

Preserving and Enhancing Communities will be particularly useful to members of planning and other regulatory boards, as well as students of community planning. The book covers not just typical ways of doing things, but also the full spectrum of innovative and emerging practices. Each chapter includes illustrations and case studies, some from Massachusetts and many from other states. The volume concludes with a set of indicators that communities can use to track their progress in community preservation and enhancement.