Suburban Governance: A Global View is a groundbreaking set of essays by leading urban scholars that assess how governance regulates the creation of the world's suburban spaces and everyday life within them.

This book shows how suburban sprawl is at least partially a consequence of government spending and regulation, and suggests anti-sprawl policies that can make government smaller and/or less intrusive. Thus, the book responds to the widely held view that automobile-dependent suburban development (also known as “suburban sprawl”) is a natural result of the free market and of affluence, and accordingly cannot be altered without massive government regulation.

According to the 2000 Census, fifty percent of Americans live in suburbs, signifying a dramatic reversal of patterns since the 1920s. This work collects the best writings on such suburbs and includes scholarly essays, documents, and magazine and newspaper articles.

The Routledge Companion to the Suburbs provides one of the most comprehensive examinations available to date of the suburbs around the world. International in scope and interdisciplinary in nature, this volume will serve as the definitive reference for scholars and students of the suburbs. This volume brings together the leading scholars of the suburbs researching in different parts of the world to better understand how and why suburbs and their communities grow, decline, and regenerate. The volume sets out four goals: 1) to provide a synthesis and critical appraisal of the historical and current state of understanding about the development of suburbs in the world; 2) to provide a forum for a comprehensive examination into the conceptual, theoretical, spatial, and empirical discontents of suburbanization; 3) to engage in a scholarly conversation about the transformation of suburbs that is interdisciplinary in nature and bridges the divide between the Global North and the Global South; and 4) to reflect on the implications of the socioeconomic, cultural, and political transformations of the suburbs for policymakers and planners. The Routledge Companion to the Suburbs is composed of original, scholarly contributions from the leading scholars of the study of how and why suburbs grow, decline, and transform. Special attention is paid to the global nature of suburbanization and its regional variations, with a focus on comparative analysis of suburbs through regions across the world in the Global North and the Global South. Articulated in a common voice, the volume is integrated by the very nature of the concept of a suburb as the unit of analysis, offering multidisciplinary perspectives from the fields of economics, geography, planning, political science, sociology, and urban studies.

The urban century manifests itself at the peripheries. While the massive wave of present urbanization is often referred to as an 'urban revolution', most of this startling urban growth worldwide is happening at the margins of cities. This book is about the process that creates the global urban periphery – suburbanization – and the ways of life – suburbanisms – we encounter there. Richly detailed with examples from around the world, the book argues that suburbanization is a global process and part of the extended urbanization of the planet. This includes the gated communities of elites, the squatter settlements of the poor, and many built forms and ways of life in-between. The reality of life in the urban century is suburban: most of the earth's future 10 billion inhabitants will not live in conventional cities but in suburban constellations of one kind or another. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre's demand not to give up urban theory when the city in its classical form disappears, this book is a challenge to urban thought more generally as it invites the reader to reconsider the city from the outside in.

Combining scholarly literature with elected experience at the local governmental level, Barry E. Truchil addresses the inner workings and politics of local government in small town and suburban settings in The Politics of Local Government. This book explores issues involving development and implementation of budgets, regulation, and control of development (including conversion of open space to housing and business buildings), as well as the initiation of progressive changes such as the use of green energy and control of corruption. Given the limited available research in this area, this book fills a void for scholars in the field, undergraduate and graduate students as well as those interested in the politics of local government.

Infinite Suburbia is the culmination of the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism's yearlong study of the future of suburban development. Extensive research, an exhibition, and a conference at MIT's Media Lab, this groundbreaking collection presents fifty-two essays by seventy-four authors from twenty different fields, including, but not limited to, design, architecture, landscape, planning, history, demographics, social justice, familial trends, policy, energy, mobility, health, environment, economics, and applied and future technologies. This exhaustive compilation is richly illustrated with a wealth of photography, aerial drone shots, drawings, plans, diagrams, charts, maps, and archival materials, making it the definitive statement on suburbia at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Metropolitan government and metropolitan governance have been ongoing issues for more than sixty years in the United States. Based on an extensive survey and a review of existing literature, this book offers a comprehensive overview of these debates. It discusses how the centrifugal forces in local government, and in particular local government autonomy, have produced a highly fragmented governmental landscape throughout America. It argues that in order for 'governance' to occur in metropolitan areas (or anywhere else, for that matter), there has to be some form of an actual governmental institution that possesses the power and ability to compel compliance. Everything else is just some form of cooperation, and while cooperation is not trivial, it does not enable metropolitan areas to address the really tough and controversial issues that divide rather than unite governments in those areas. The book examines the principal factors that prevent the development of either metropolitan government or metropolitan governance in the USA. Norris looks at several examples where some form of metropolitan government or governance can be said to exist, from voluntary cooperation (the weakest) to government (the strongest). He also examines each type of arrangement for its ability to address metropolitan-wide problems and whether each type is or is not in use in the USA. In sum, the book uncovers the extent of metropolitan government and governance, the possibility for its existence, what attempts (if any) have been made in the past, and the problems and issues that have arisen due to the lack of adequate metropolitan governance.

Interest and research on regionalism has soared in the last decade. Local governments in metropolitan areas and civic organizations are increasingly engaged in cooperative and collaborative public policy efforts to solve problems that stretch across urban centers and their surrounding suburbs. Yet there remains scant attention in textbooks to the issues that arise in trying to address metropolitan governance. Governing Metropolitan Areas describes and analyzes structure to understand the how and why of regionalism in our global age. The book covers governmental institutions and their evolution to governance, but with a continual focus on institutions. David Hamilton provides the necessary comprehensive, in-depth description and analysis of how metropolitan areas and governments within metropolitan areas developed, efforts to restructure and combine local governments, and governance within the polycentric urban region. This second edition is a major revision to update the scholarship and current thinking on regional governance. While the text still provides background on the historical development and growth of urban areas and governments' efforts to accommodate the growth of metropolitan areas, this edition also focuses on current efforts to provide governance through cooperative and collaborative solutions. There is also now extended treatment of how regional governance outside the United States has evolved and how other countries are approaching regional governance.