The world of 16-year-old Niara Saunders just reached maximum overload. If one more family secret revealed itself, she just might scream. How much reality could one girl take? She wasn't starring in her own teen documentary where drama guaranteed high ratings and unlimited Access Hollywood exposure.This was her life and it had been very ordinary until recently-- bad things just didn’t happen to her. She listened to her elders. She avoided the catastrophes of peer-pressure. And, the ...

How Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China deal with such urban environmental issues as ports, goods movement, air pollution, water quality, transportation, and public space.Over the past four decades, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and key urban regions of China have emerged as global cities—in financial, political, cultural, environmental, and demographic terms. In this book, Robert Gottlieb and Simon Ng trace the global emergence of these urban areas and compare their respo...

It is well known that the world is transitioning to an irrevocable urban future whose epicentre has moved into the cities of Asia and Africa. What is less clear is how this will be managed and deployed as a multi-polar world system is being born. The full implications of this challenge cry out to be understood because city building (and retrofitting) cannot but be an undertaking entangled in profound societal and cultural shifts.In this highly original account, renowned urban socio...

Urban Theory and the Urban Experience brings together classic and contemporary approaches to urban research in order to reveal the intellectual origins of urban studies and the often unacknowledged debt that empirical and theoretical perspectives on the city owe one another.From the foundations of modern urban theory in the work of Weber, Simmel, Benjamin and Lefebbvre to the writings of contemporary urban theorists such as David Harvey and Manuel Castells and the Los Angeles schoo...

Accession to the EU in May 2004 was a historic milestone for the spatial and urban development of the new member states. Meanwhile, the social and economic transition during the pre-accession phase already brought about radical changes in national urban systems and new challenges for regional development. In this edited volume, a carefully selected and specially commissioned set of articles, written by experts from both the new and the old EU member states, presents a comprehensive assessm...

Local Governments’ Financial Vulnerability presents a conceptual framework developed to examine how vulnerable local finances were before and in the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis by mapping and systematising its dimensions and sources.The model is then applied to eight countries with different administrative models and traditions: Australia, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the United States. Comparative results re...

In October 2019, unprecedented mobilizations in Chile took the world by surprise. An outburst of protests plunged a stable democracy into the deepest social and political crisis since its dictatorship in the 1980s. Although the protests involved a myriad of organizations, the organizational capabilities provided by underprivileged urban dwellers proved essential in sustaining collective action in an increasingly repressive environment. Based on a comparative ethnography and over six years ...

Splintering Urbanism makes an international and interdisciplinary analysis of the complex interactions between infrastructure networks and urban spaces. It delivers a new and powerful way of understanding contemporary urban change, bringing together discussions about:*globalization and the city*technology and society*urban space and urban networks*infrastructure and the built environment*developed, developing and post-communist worlds.With...

The role of real estate in our cities is crucial to building sustainable and resilient urban futures. Smart Urban Regeneration brings together institutional, planning and real estate insights into an innovative regeneration framework for academics, students and property professionals.Starting by identifying key urban issues within the historical urban and planning backdrop, the book goes on to explore future visions, the role of institutions and key mechanisms for smart ur...

Achieving sustainable energy and resource use is vital if cities are to thrive or even function in the long term. Focusing on cities in the United Kingdom, Germany and Denmark, this book examines the mounting pressures for changes in the management style of utility services in Europe, pressures that stem from a wide range of sources such as liberalization and privatization of markets, tighter environmental standards, new economic incentives, competing technologies and changing consumption ...

Winner of the 2023 Brian McConnell Book Award from the International Society for Contemporary Legend ResearchIn the last fifty years, folklorists have amassed an extraordinary corpus of contemporary legends including the “Choking Doberman,” the “Eaten Ticket,” and the “Vanishing Hitchhiker.” But what about the urban legends of the past? These legends and tales have rarely been collected, and when they occasionally appear, they do so as ancestors or...

During the first half of the twentieth century, Atlantic City was the nation's most popular middle-class resort--the home of the famed Boardwalk, the Miss America Pageant, and the board game Monopoly. By the late 1960s, it had become a symbol of urban decay and blight, compared by journalists to bombed-out Dresden and war-torn Beirut. Several decades and a dozen casinos later, Atlantic City is again one of America's most popular tourist spots, with thirty-five million visitors a year. Yet ...