"Two decades ago, Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin's series "Reinventing the Lakefront" documented the stark disparities between the shoreline parks bordering the city's mostly white, affluent North Side neighborhoods and those along its largely Black, poor South Side. The series, which spurred new civic investments in the south lakefront, won a Pulitzer Prize and signaled Kamin's commitment to activist criticism. That commitment continued through his last column for the Tribune in January 2021. This book collects 55 of Kamin's columns from the past decade, organized around questions of equity that loomed over the built environment as over American society generally: Who benefits from urban development? Are new private and public buildings good citizens? Which historic buildings get saved and why? And how did the polarizing US presidents and Chicago mayors who ruled over this decade play into the larger drama of the city's public realm? Covering major new structures--from the Trump Tower sign to the Obama Presidential Center, the Riverwalk to The 606--as well as the bridges, CTA stations, hospitals, skyscrapers, and other buildings that constitute the everyday fabric of the city, the columns are illustrated with photographs by Lee Bey, former architecture critic of the Chicago Sun-Times. The epilogue, featuring Kamin's farewell column, marks the end of an era in the nation's architectural capital"--

Once America's capitalist dream town, Detroit is our country's greatest urban failure, having fallen the longest and the farthest. But the city's worst crisis yet (and that's saying something) has managed to do the unthinkable: turn the end of days into a laboratory for the future. Urban planners, land speculators, neopastoral agriculturalists, and utopian environmentalists—all have been drawn to Detroit's baroquely decaying, nothing-left-to-lose frontier. With an eye for both the darkly absurd and the radically new, Detroit-area native Mark Binelli has chronicled this convergence. Throughout the city's "museum of neglect"—its swaths of abandoned buildings, its miles of urban prairie—he tracks both the blight and the signs of its repurposing, from the school for pregnant teenagers to a beleaguered UAW local; from metal scrappers and gun-toting vigilantes to artists reclaiming abandoned auto factories; from the organic farming on empty lots to GM's risky wager on the Volt electric car; from firefighters forced by budget cuts to sleep in tents to the mayor's realignment plan (the most ambitious on record) to move residents of half-empty neighborhoods into a viable, new urban center. Sharp and impassioned, Detroit City Is the Place to Be is alive with the sense of possibility that comes when a city hits rock bottom. Beyond the usual portrait of crime, poverty, and ruin, we glimpse a longshot future Detroit that is smaller, less segregated, greener, economically diverse, and better functioning—what could be the boldest reimagining of a post-industrial city in our new century. Detroit City Is the Place to Be is one of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Best Books of 2012

The City is Ours accounts how urban politics mediated the rise of Kurdish nationhood and mobilization in Diyarbakır, Turkey. Muna Güvenç elucidates how urban and architectural forms are not merely the backdrop of the cityscape where political struggles unfold; they constitute the very essence of these conflicts. Güvenç posits that urban spaces offer "wiggle room", turning oppression into chances for dissent and resilience and offering opportunities for vulnerable minority groups to create sociopolitical blocs and mobilizations. Güvenç takes readers from municipal halls to the streets and illustrates how, in the early 2000s, pro-Kurdish parties harnessed urban planning to resist coercion and foster Kurdish mobilization in Turkey. Güvenç challenges readers to rethink urban neoliberalism, new forms of nationalisms and mobilizations, and the ways they shape cities and politics. The City is Ours is a profound awakening, an invitation to all architects and urban planners, urging them to rise above the confines of their blueprints and embrace the vast tapestry of the politics of space.

'Lively, irreverent and insightful.' Lauren Elkin 'Like Jon Ronson on town planners ... E ndlessly funny, s eriously smart.' John Grindrod Cities are bad for us: polluted, noisy and fundamentally unnatural. We need green space, not concrete. Trees, not tower blocks. So goes the argument. But is it true? What would the city of the future look like if we tried to build a better life from the ground up? And would anyone want to live there? Here, Des Fitzgerald takes us on an urgent, unforgettable journey into the future of urban life, from shimmering edifices in the Arizona desert to forest-bathing in deepest Wales, and from rats in mazes to neuroscientific studies of the effects of our surroundings. Along the way, he reveals the deep-lying and often controversial roots of today's green city movement, and offers an argument for celebrating our cities as they are - in all their raucous, constructed and artificial glory.

UC Berkeley English professor Robert Hass - winner the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Awards - has written that "Alex Patterson is a very gifted young writer." ¿The book is about how children, in a heavenly state, begin to know the earthly world. How much of an illusion are both. How our vital instincts create these illusions. How our subjectivity reigns upon our lives. The book is a remarkable piece of art.¿ -- Marian Apostol. Professor, Department of Theoretical Physics, Institute of Atomic Physics, Magurele-Bucharest. July, 2009. ¿This essay is not a term paper on prisons in America. Rather, it is a document of personal disclosure. Mr. Patterson has engaged passionately with his American tradition. This is to the degree of an exceptionality that is remarkably exposed in this work. He has wrestled so intensely with America that he has taken to exile in Europe. This is the second exceptionality remarked here. I write criticism of academic physics, and do it with some flair. But Alex addresses a bigger culture and hierarchy, writing with such passion, poetry and structure as to make the third exceptionality of this work. I think that this all amounts to a ponderance worthy of your time.¿ -- Michael J. Burns. October 30, 2009

This book deals with practical ways to reach a more sustainable state in urban areas through such tools as strategic environmental assessment, sustainability assessment, direction analysis, baseline setting and progress measurement, sustainability targets, and ecological footprint analysis.

Whose City is That? shows that Istanbul is produced not only by strong and systematic efforts, corporate influences and/or marketing activities, but also by individual contributions and coincidences. As such, the primary purpose of this book is to find the answer of to whom Istanbul does belong, presenting the reader with the richness of human experience and the practice of everyday life. The chapters in this book are therefore focused on the physical and economic dimensions, as well as the imaginary, fictional and hyper-real dimensions, expressing the concern of bringing the real and imaginary borders of the city together. The book provides an understanding that for each inhabitant there is another city, another Istanbul. Each person living in the city creates or lives in another city which is made of their own personal and particular experiences. In addition, the Istanbul the authors understand and describe turns into something different moment by moment, which cannot be defined or identified because of its very nature as a megacity. However, its flow is not aimless and non-directional, and each sign is not causeless or dateless. In this context, in order to make the possibilities of the city visible, the contributors to this volume ask: “Istanbul, whose city is it?” The title of the book enables different academics to ask the same question using different methodologies and subjects. The question “Whose City is That?” and the necessity of studying Istanbul using multidisciplinary perspectives brought many researchers from different fields together, because the city is larger than one approach and the constraints of one “unique” field. Gathering researchers and academics from various disciplines, such as communication studies, cultural studies, cinema/media studies, literature, the fine arts, city and regional planning, political science, social and economic geography, anthropology, and architecture enables each to think about the city alone and together, so as to create new forms of thought and discourse about Istanbul.

For anyone grappling with why they do the things they do, feel the way they feel, and think the thoughts they think, Your Heart Is a City is an answer to those questions and more from a unique perspective on the human mind. Prepare to be seen and see yourself more clearly than you ever have as you embrace the revelation of just how active and alive you are mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. You are vast and intricate, a metropolis of intent and experience. This book is your invitation and guide to understanding who you are, how and why you are, and who you may become.

Portland, Oregon, is one of the most beautiful, livable cities in the United States. It has walkable neighborhoods, bike lanes, low-density housing, public transportation, and significant green space -- not to mention craft-beer bars and locavore food trucks. But liberal Portland is also the whitest city in the country. This is not circumstance; the city has a long history of officially sanctioned racialized displacement that continues today. Over the last two and half decades, Albina -- the one major Black neighborhood in Portland -- has been systematically uprooted by market-driven gentrification and city-renewal policies. African Americans in Portland were first pushed into Albina and then contained there through exclusionary zoning, predatory lending, and racist real estate practices. Since the 1990s, they've been aggressively displaced -- by rising housing costs, developers eager to get rid of low-income residents, and overt city policies of gentrification. Displacement and dispossessions are convulsing cities across the globe, becoming the dominant urban narratives of our time. In What a City Is For, Matt Hern uses the case of Albina, as well as similar instances in New Orleans and Vancouver, to investigate gentrification in the twenty-first century. In an engaging narrative, effortlessly mixing anecdote and theory, Hern questions the notions of development, private property, and ownership. Arguing that home ownership drives inequality, he wants us to disown ownership. How can we reimagine the city as a post-ownership, post-sovereign space? Drawing on solidarity economics, cooperative movements, community land trusts, indigenous conceptions of alternative sovereignty, the global commons movement, and much else, Hern suggests repudiating development in favor of an incrementalist, non-market-driven unfolding of the city.