In the half century after World War II, California’s Santa Clara Valley transformed from a rolling landscape of fields and orchards into the nation’s most consequential high-tech industrial corridor. How Santa Clara Valley became Silicon Valley and came to embody both the triumphs and the failures of a new vision of the American West is the question Jason A. Heppler explores in this book. A revealing look at the significance of nature in social, cultural, and economic conceptions of place, the book is also a case study on the origins of American environmentalism and debates about urban and suburban sustainability. Between 1950 and 1990, business and community leaders pursued a new vision of the landscape stretching from Palo Alto to San Jose—a vision that melded the bucolic naturalism of orchards, pleasant weather, and green spaces with the metropolitan promise of modern industry, government-funded research, and technology. Heppler describes the success of a new, clean, future-facing economy, coupled with a pleasant, green environment, in drawing people to Silicon Valley. And in this overwhelming success, he also locates the rapidly emerging faults created by competing ideas about forming these idyllic communities—specifically, widespread environmental degradation and increasing social stratification. Cities organized around high-tech industries, suburban growth, and urban expansion were, as Heppler shows, crucibles for empowering elites, worsening human health, and spreading pollution. What do “nature” and “place” mean, and who gets to define these terms? Key to Heppler’s work is the idea that these questions reflect and determine what, and who, matters in any conversation about the environment. Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism vividly traces that idea through the linked histories of Silicon Valley and environmentalism in the West.

Urban High-Technology Zones offers essential planning insights for our increasingly high-tech economy and society, looking at the role the built environment plays, the policy factors that contribute to their formation and growth, quality-of-life impacts of high tech clusters on their surrounding communities, and economic geography. Using a combination of advanced geospatial data-driven techniques with evidence-based insights, the book provides quantitative measures on high tech cluster's social, environmental and economic impacts. While findings are from drawn cities in the US, the book's spatial analyses, methodology, research conclusions and literature reviews are generalizable to cities around the world. Users will find numerous insights and guidance on the role high-tech clusters play in how cities reach their economic growth and social equity goals, making it a useful resource for academic research and policy guidance. - Draws on disaggregated firm-level data to provide strong analytical granularity - Includes numerous and diverse case studies focusing economic externalities, policy implementation, and institutional barriers - Examines such issues as housing affordability and high-tech clusters' place attributes

Like many industrialized regions, the Philadelphia metro area contains pockets of environmental degradation: neighborhoods littered with abandoned waste sites, polluting factories, and smoke-belching incinerators. However, other neighborhoods within and around the city are relatively pristine. This eye-opening book reveals that such environmental inequalities did not occur by chance, but were instead the result of specific policy decisions that served to exacerbate endemic classism and racism. From Workshop to Waste Magnet presents Philadelphia’s environmental history as a bracing case study in mismanagement and injustice. Sociologist Diane Sicotte digs deep into the city’s past as a titan of American manufacturing to trace how only a few communities came to host nearly all of the area’s polluting and waste disposal land uses. By examining the complex interactions among economic decline, federal regulations, local politics, and shifting ethnic demographics, she not only dissects what went wrong in Philadelphia but also identifies lessons for environmental justice activism today. Sicotte’s research tallies both the environmental and social costs of industrial pollution, exposing the devastation that occurs when mass quantities of society’s wastes mix with toxic levels of systemic racism and economic inequality. From Workshop to Waste Magnet is a compelling read for anyone concerned with the health of America’s cities and the people who live in them.

The Nature of Hope focuses on the dynamics of environmental activism at the local level, examining the environmental and political cultures that emerge in the context of conflict. The book considers how ordinary people have coalesced to demand environmental justice and highlights the powerful role of intersectionality in shaping the on-the-ground dynamics of popular protest and social change. Through lively and accessible storytelling, The Nature of Hope reveals unsung and unstinting efforts to protect the physical environment and human health in the face of continuing economic growth and development and the failure of state and federal governments to deal adequately with the resulting degradation of air, water, and soils. In an age of environmental crisis, apathy, and deep-seated cynicism, these efforts suggest the dynamic power of a “politics of hope” to offer compelling models of resistance, regeneration, and resilience. The contributors frame their chapters around the drive for greater democracy and improved human and ecological health and demonstrate that local activism is essential to the preservation of democracy and the protection of the environment. The book also brings to light new styles of leadership and new structures for activist organizations, complicating assumptions about the environmental movement in the United States that have focused on particular leaders, agencies, thematic orientations, and human perceptions of nature. The critical implications that emerge from these stories about ecological activism are crucial to understanding the essential role that protecting the environment plays in sustaining the health of civil society. The Nature of Hope will be crucial reading for scholars interested in environmentalism and the mechanics of social movements and will engage historians, geographers, political scientists, grassroots activists, humanists, and social scientists alike.

Arguing that a new form of industrial organization is generating new patterns of inequality, the authors explore the relationship between growth in the high-tech sector and trends in inequality. While considering the promise of high-tech industries in light of the realities of high-tech work, the authors report considerable unevenness in the high-tech sector. Some high-tech industries fulfill optimistic expectations, but others are in decline. In some high-tech industries, work is organized in ways that generate inequality along gender, racial, and ethnic lines. The authors link these contrasts to different strategies of flexible production. Building upon the distinction between static flexibility, in which harsh measures are taken to control costs, and dynamic flexibility, in which production processes are constantly adapted to market conditions, they conclude that the most innovative and successful high-tech industries are those employing dynamic flexibility. Expansion of dynamically flexible production strategies is essential if high-tech industries are to fulfill their promise.

'The world has entered the urban millennium. Nearly half the world's people are now city dwellers and the rapid increase in urban population is expected to continue mainly in developing countries. This historic transition is being further propelled by the powerful forces of globalization. The central challenge for the international community is clear: to make both urbanization and globalization work for all people instead of leaving billions behind or on the margins ... Cities in a Globalizing World: Global Report on Human Settlements 2001 is a comprehensive review of conditions in the world's.

'The world has entered the urban millennium. Nearly half the world's people are now city dwellers, and the rapid increase in urban population is expected to continue, mainly in developing countries. This historic transition is being further propelled by the powerful forces of globalization. The central challenge for the international community is clear: to make both urbanization and globalization work for all people, instead of leaving billions behind or on the margins. Cities in a Globalizing World: Global Report on Human Settlements is a comprehensive review of conditions in the world's cities and the prospects for making them better, safer places to live in an age of globalization. I hope that it will provide all stakeholders - foremost among them the urban poor themselves - with reliable and timely information with which to set our policies right and get the machinery of urban life moving in a constructive direction.' From the Foreword by Kofi Annan, Secretary-General, United Nations. Cities in a Globalizing World presents a comprehensive review of the world's cities and analyses the positive and negative impacts on human settlements of the global trends towards social and economic integration and the rapid changes in information and communication technologies. In this Global Report, the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat) draws on specially commissioned and contributed background papers from more than 80 leading international specialists. The report focuses on recent trends in human settlements and their implications for poverty, inequity and social polarization. It develops advance knowledge for urban planning and management policies in support and promotion of inclusive cities and good urban governance. This major and influential report is the most authoritative and up-to-date assessment of human settlements conditions and trends. Written in clear, non-technical language and supported by informative graphics, case studies and extensive statistical data, it should be an essential tool and reference for academics, researchers, planners, public authorities and civil society organizations around the world.

In introducing this reader comprising three dozen articles and critiques in organizational sociology, Handel (sociology, U. of Wisconsin-Madison) overviews definitional issues over the term organization as viewed by rational theories and open systems theories. Starting with classic theories of bur

Smart technologies have advanced rapidly throughout our society (e.g. smart energy, smart health, smart living, smart cities, smart environment, and smart society) and across geographic spaces and places. Behind these "smart" developments are a number of seminal drivers, such as social media (e.g. Twitter), sensors (drones, wearables), smartphone apps, and computing infrastructure (e.g. cloud computing). These developments have captured the enthusiasm of the public, while inevitably present unprecedented challenges and opportunities for the geographic research community. When meeting the smart challenges, are there emerging theories, methods, and observations that reveal new spatial phenomena, produce new knowledge, and foster new policies? Smart Spaces and Places addresses questions such as how to make spaces and places "smart", how the "smartness" affects the way we think spaces and places, and what role geographies play in knowledge production and decision-making in a "smart" era. The collection of 21 chapters offers stimulating discussion over the meaning of spaces, places, and smartness; scientific insights into smartness; social-political views of smartness; and policy implications of smartness. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Annals of the American Association of Geographers.

"This report is based on data from UN-HABITAT's Global Urban Indicator Database, as well as surveys of, and focus group discussions with, selected representative groups of young people in five major cities located in four developing regions: Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Mumbai (India), Kingston (Jamaica), Nairobi (Kenya) and Lagos (Nigeria)"--p. ix.