Cities are complex, sprawling, diverse places. They are organized, but disorganized; managed, but unmanaged; orderly, but disorderly. Modern metropolitan cities reproduce themselves and we are familiar with the common icons that are replicated in every part of the globe, but how should we understand cities? For the past five years, Professor Czarniawska has been leading a research project on globalization and the management of cities. Rather than seeing the city as a conurbation, or a location of economic activity, or in terms of governance and administration, Czarniawska explores the city as an action net. An action net of this sort includes various organizations-municipal, state, private, and voluntary-and non-organized individuals. Such an approach was designed to avoid the fallacy of viewing the big city as one big organization. The city is thus conceived as a particularly complex and disorderly action net; a seamless web of interorganizational networks, where the city administration proper constitutes just one point of entry and by no means provides a map of the entire terrain. The research focuses on three European capitals: Warsaw, Stockholm, and Rome. At the outset, leading politicians and officials in each city listed the major problems and projects that the city was engaged in, for example environmental reforms, improvement of public utilities, privatization, financial targets, etc. The author selected a number of these for more detailed study, reporting upon interesting similarities and differences between the approaches taken. The book aims to explore organizing processes in their local context while following the connections between such contexts.

The city of Belfast tends to be discussed in terms of its distinctiveness from the rest of Ireland, an industrial city in an agricultural country. However, when compared with another 'British' industrial port such as Bristol it is the similarities rather than the differences that are surprising. When these cities are compared with Dublin, the contrasts become even more painfully evident. This book seeks to explore these contrasting urban centres at the start of the twentieth century.

The text of the 1993 Rede Lecture with the final declarations of three major world conferences.

A central question for Judeo-Christian faithful is “Are we living in the age of antichristism or kingdom influence?” Can we salt and light entire cities and civilizations, as Martin Luther King Jr. hoped, or with D. L. Moody should we simply save as many as we can from our rapidly sinking planet? Over the years Christians have wrestled with the question and reached different conclusions. Augustine’s and Oliver O’Donovan’s answer to the question birthed The City of God and The Desire of Nations. Miguez Bonino’s and Grace Ji-Sun Kim’s Marxist-influenced liberationist answers produced Toward a Christian Political Ethics and the post-truth Intersectional Theology. Former socialist Michael Novak’s plea was to revive The [True] Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. Jonathan Cahn and Frank Peretti, by contrast, predicted that we have entered the age of This Present Darkness amidst The Return of the Gods. Peretti’s and Cahn’s wildly popular future-visions built upon Hal Lindsey’s dated assurance and false prediction that true believers would be raptured in the last decade of The Terminal Generation—1980s! Douglas Matthews offers a new route through the maze and discerningly answers this perennial question by boldly offering a “Third City” future-vision option for effective kingdom influence amidst accelerating global antichristism.

Nineteen sixty-two—it's been called “the end of innocence,” as America witnessed the Cuban Missile Crisis and the following year saw the Kennedy assassination and the early stirrings of Vietnam. In baseball, 1962 was a thrilling season. Five years prior the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants had migrated west to Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively, leaving New York to the Yankees. In 1962, those same Giants and Dodgers faced off to see who would advance to the World Series. Waiting to do battle were the Yankees, who were also battling for allegiance in New York with the Mets' debut. The old Subway Series had gone cross-country. Just as it was the end of innocence, it was an end of an era for the Yankees. Winners of eleven World Series titles in twenty years, they would go fifteen years— a record for the modern-era Bombers at the time—until their next championship. They appeared in the next two World Series, but by the end of the decade it was those upstart Mets amazin' fans. The Dodgers would break through the following year and again in 1965 while the Giants—convinced they'd be back many times— have yet to win a title on the West Coast. Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, Willie Mays and Willie McCovey, Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, Casey Stengel. Steven Travers details Hollywood's adoration of the Dodgers, San Francisco's battle between inferiority and superiority, and New York, rulers of sport and society, experiencing the beginnings of a changing of the guard. Three cities, five teams, and one great year are all here in A Tale of Three Cities.

Energy in America is undergoing a period of rapid change, driven by new technologies, consumer empowerment, and the imperative to reduce emissions that cause global warming. But many utilities are dragging their feet, or actively impeding progress. People who want to save energy or install solar panels are finding their efforts at odds with utilities seeking to preserve their profits. Seeing an existential threat to their business model, utilities across the country are pursuing policy changes that will make it less viable for customers to generate their own electricity. Impatient with the slow pace of change, an increasing number of cities are taking matters into their own hands as their citizens seek energy that is local, affordable, and clean. Empowered describes how city officials and activists in Boulder, Minneapolis, and Madison are fighting back against entrenched utilities, and taking charge of their energy future.