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As Austin grew from a college and government town of the 1950s into the sprawling city of 2010, two ideas of Austin as a place came into conflict. Many who promoted the ideology of growth believed Austin would be defined by economic output, money, and wealth. But many others thought Austin was instead defined by its quality of life. Because the natural environment contributed so much to Austin's quality of life, a social movement that wanted to preserve the city's environment became the leading edge of a larger movement that wanted to retain a unique sense of place. The "environmental movement" in Austin became the political and symbolic arm of the more general movement for place.

This is a history of the environmental movement in Austin—how it began; what it did; and how it promoted ideas about the relationships between people, cities, and the environment. It is also about a deeper movement to retain a sense of place that is Austin, and how that deeper movement continues to shape the way Austin is built today. The city it helped to create is now on the forefront of national efforts to rethink how we build our cities, reduce global warming, and find ways that humans and the environment can coexist in a big city.

In Politics in the Crevices, Sarah El-Kazaz takes readers into the world of urban planning and design practices in Istanbul and Cairo. In this transnational ethnography of neighborhoods undergoing contested rapid transformations, she reveals how the battle for housing has shifted away from traditional political arenas onto private crevices of the city. She outlines how multiple actors—from highly capitalized international NGOs and corporations to city dwellers, bureaucrats, and planning experts—use careful urban design to empower conflicting agendas, whether manipulating property markets to protect affordable housing or corner luxury real estate. El-Kazaz shows that such contemporary politicizations of urban design stem from unresolved struggles at the heart of messy transitions from the welfare state to neoliberalism, which have shifted the politics of redistribution from contested political arenas to design practices operating within market logics, ultimately relocating political struggles onto the city’s most intimate crevices. In so doing, she raises critical questions about the role of market reforms in redistributing resources and challenges readers to rethink neoliberalism and the fundamental ways it shapes cities and polities.

An intriguing look at what printed materials tell us about daily life and public space in seventeenth-century Rome. Focusing on images and descriptions of movement and spectacle-everyday street activities, congregations in market piazzas, life in the Jewish ghetto and the plague hospital, papal and other ceremonial processions, public punishment, and pilgrimage routes-Rose Marie San Juan uncovers the social tensions and conflicts within seventeenth century Roman society that are both concealed within and prompted by mass-produced representations of the city. These depictions of Rome-guidebooks, street posters, broadsheets and brochures, topographic and thematic maps, city views, and collectible images of landmarks and other famous sights-redefined the ways in which public space was experienced, controlled, and utilized, encouraging tourists, pilgrims, and penitents while constraining the activities and movements of women, merchants, dissidents, and Jews. San Juan contends that the representations of urban space afforded by new print technologies were appropriated by a wide variety of people in the city for purposes that ranged from regulation to opposition. A sophisticated analysis of the contested relations between people, print culture, and urban modernity, Rome: A City Out of Print also offers a rich portrait of the life of the street and the city. Rose Marie San Juan is associate professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia.

Los Angeles's experience in managing urban growth and change

America's first truly twenty-first-century metropolis, Los Angeles is often depicted as diverse, fragmented, polarized, and ungovernable, a city without a unifying geographic center or civic culture. The sprawling evolution of the city and its infamous problems—traffic, pollution, growing inequality—are usually attributed to a Wild West version of capitalism—the triumph of an unregulated free market over comprehensive urban planning. But market choices and lack of planning did not set the terrain of Southern California: Los Angeles has been profoundly shaped by a wide range of local, state, and federal public policies and programs.

Up Against the Sprawl details how governmental policies and public agencies have dictated many aspects of the region’s growth: infrastructure, transportation, housing, immigration, finances, civic and regional administration, the environment. The authors also argue that since public policy set the landscape, it can help forge the future. They explore countermovements by progressive activists to use innovative policies—from smart growth initiatives to the actions of living wage advocates—for greater social, economic, and environmental justice. This book is a major contribution to our understanding of past and present urban processes and policy, and highlights practical lessons for urban and regional policy makers and activists in Los Angeles and beyond.Contributors: Carolyn B. Aldana, California State U, San Bernadino; Carol S. Armstrong; Michael Dear, U of Southern California; Gary Dymski, U of California Riverside; Steven P. Erie, USC; Gregory Freeman; William Fulton; Elizabeth Gearin, USC; Genevieve Giuliano, USC; Pascale Joassart-Marcelli, U of Massachusetts, Boston; Enrico A. Marcelli; Myra A. Marks, Loyola Marymount U; Juliet Musso, USC; Stephanie Pincetl, USC; Laura Pulido; Christine M. Ryan; John P. Wilson.

Divided into three sections, this edition of Urban Land Use Planning deftly balances an authoritative, up-to-date discussion of current practices with a vision of what land use planning should become. It explores the societal context of land use planning and proposes a model for understanding and reconciling the divergent priorities among competing stakeholders; it explains how to build planning support systems to assess future conditions, evaluate policy choices, create visions, and compare scenarios; and it sets forth a methodology for creating plans that will influence future land use change.

Discussions new to the fifth edition include how to incorporate the three Es of sustainable development (economy, environment, and equity) into sustainable communities, methods for including livability objectives and techniques, the integration of transportation and land use, the use of digital media in planning support systems, and collective urban design based on analysis and public participation.