Books, Nonfiction, Urban Planning & Development

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Rose George
The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters
by Metropolitan Books (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2008-10-14)

An utterly original exploration of the world of human waste that will surprise, outrage—and entertainProduced behind closed doors, disposed of discreetly, and hidden by euphemism, bodily waste is something common to all and as natural as breathing, yet we prefer not to talk about it. But we should—even those of us who take care of our business in pristine, sanitary conditions. For it’s not only in developing countries that human waste is a major public health threat: population growth is taxing even the most advanced sewage systems, and the disease spread by waste kills more people worldwide every year than any other single cause of death. Even in America, 1.95 million people have no access to an indoor toilet. Yet the subject remains unmentionable.The Big Necessity takes aim at the taboo, revealing everything that matters about how people do—and don’t—deal with their own waste. Moving from the deep underground sewers of Paris, London, and New York—an infrastructure ...

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series)
by Modern Library (Hardcover) (Release Date: 1993-02-09)

Thirty years after its publication, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning....[It] can also be seen in a much larger context.  It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments."  Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners.  Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities.  It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable.  The author has written a new foreword for this Modern Library edition.

Peter M. Senge, Bryan Smith, Sara Schley, Joe Laur, ...
The Necessary Revolution: How individuals and organizations are working together to create a sustainable world.
by US Green Building Council (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2008-06-10)

Imagine a world in which the excess energy from one business would be used to heat another. Where buildings need less and less energy around the world, and where “regenerative” commercial buildings – ones that create more energy than they use – are being designed. A world in which environmentally sound products and processes would be more cost-effective than wasteful ones. A world in which corporations such as Costco, Nike, BP, and countless others are forming partnerships with environmental and social justice organizations to ensure better stewardship of the earth and better livelihoods in the developing world. Now, stop imagining – that world is already emerging.A revolution is underway in today’s organizations. As Peter Senge and his co-authors reveal in The Necessary Revolution, companies around the world are boldly leading the change from dead-end “business as usual” tactics to transformative strategies that are essential for creating a flourishing, ...

Jerome R. Corsi
The Late Great U.S.A.: The Coming Merger With Mexico and Canada
by WND Books (Hardcover)

In the New York Times bestseller The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger with Mexico and Canada, Jerome Corsi proves that the benignly-named "Security and Prosperity Partnership," created at a meeting between George W. Bush, Stephen Harper and Vincente Fox, is in fact the same kind of regional integration plan that led Europe to form the EU. According to Corsi, the elites in Europe who wanted to create a European nation knew that "it would be necessary to conceal from the peoples of Europe just what was being done in their name until the process was so far advanced that it had become irreversible." Could the same thing be happening here? Is American sovereignty doomed? Using dozens of documents secured through the Freedom of Information Act and his trademark hard-hitting interviews, Jerome Corsi sets out a chilling view of America's possible "harmonized" future -- one being created covertly, without voter input or Congressional oversight. Could our ...

Scott Kellogg, Stacy Pettigrew
Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A do-it-Ourselves Guide
by South End Press (Paperback)

The tools you need to create self-sufficient, ecologically sustainable cities “A surprisingly effective model for connecting people with dreams to the resources they need.” —Austin Chronicle With more than half the world’s population now residing—and struggling to survive—in cities, we can no longer afford to think of sustainability as something that applies only to forests and fields. We need sustainable living right where so many of us are: in urban neighborhoods. But how do we do it? That’s where Toolbox for Sustainable City Living comes in. In 2000 the dynamic Rhizome Collective transformed an abandoned warehouse in Austin, Texas, into a sustainability training center. Here, with their first book, Scott and Stacy, two of Rhizome’s founders, provide city dwellers—those who have never foraged or gardened along with those who dumpster-dive and belong to CSAs—with step-by- step instructions for producing our own food, collecting water, managing waste, ...

Michael Meyer
The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed
by Walker & Company (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2008-06-24)

A fascinating, intimate portrait of Beijing through the lens of its oldest neighborhood, facing destruction as the city, and China, relentlessly modernizes.Soon we will be able to say about old Beijing that what emperors, warlords, Japanese invaders, and Communist planners couldn’t eradicate, the market economy has.  Nobody has been more aware of this than Michael Meyer. A long-time resident, Meyer has, for the past two years, lived as no other Westerner—in a shared courtyard home in Beijing’s oldest neighborhood, Dazhalan, on one of its famed hutong (lanes). There he volunteers to teach English at the local grade school and immerses himself in the community, recording with affection the life stories of the Widow, who shares his courtyard; coteacher Miss Zhu and student Little Liu; and the migrants Recycler Wang and Soldier Liu; among the many others who, despite great differences in age and profession, make up the fabric of this unique neighborhood.Their bond is rapidly ...

Mike Davis
Planet of Slums
by Verso (Paperback)

Celebrated urban historian's bestselling account of the global explosion of slums, with a major new introduction.According to the United Nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and influential book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world. From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, even economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly unforeseen development and asks whether the great slums are, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, volcanoes waiting to erupt.

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
by North Point Press (Paperback)

A manifesto by America's most controversial and celebrated town planners, proposing an alternative model for community design.There is a growing movement in North America to put an end to suburban sprawl and to replace the automobile-based settlement patterns of the past fifty years with a return to more traditional planning principles. This movement stems not only from the realization that sprawl is ecologically and economically unsustainable but also from a growing awareness of sprawl's many victims: children, utterly dependent on parental transportation if they wish to escape the cul-de-sac; the elderly, warehoused in institutions once they lose their driver's licenses; the middle class, stuck in traffic for two or more hours each day.Founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk are at the forefront of this movement, and in Suburban Nation they assess sprawl's costs to society, be they ecological, economic, aesthetic, or social. It is ...

Kate Ascher
The Works: Anatomy of a City
by Penguin (Non-Classics) (Paperback)

Ricky Burdett, Deyan Sudjic
The Endless City
by Phaidon Press Inc. (Hardcover)

More and more people are moving into towns and cities to live and work, which is altering the urban/rural balance of countries worldwide. THE ENDLESS CITY is an unparalleled study of the growth of six of the world's international cities (New York, Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg, and Berlin), exploring key structural, social, and economic factors. This book was overseen by the London School of Economics, and features extensive research and coherent texts by world-renowned professionals in the field of urban planning and development. The information is presented in a comprehensive and visually compelling sequence, enabling quick and efficient reference as well as offering material that is exciting to study. Each city is examined individually in its own chapter as well as being analyzed comparatively in an observational chapter. THE ENDLESS CITY is authoritatively edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic in collaboration with the London School of Economics and the Urban ...

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