Feral Cities


Book Description

We tend to think of cities as a realm apart, somehow separate from nature, but nothing could be further from the truth. In Feral Cities, Tristan Donovan digs below the urban gloss to uncover the wild creatures that we share our streets and homes with, and profiles the brave and fascinating people who try to manage them. Along the way readers will meet the wall-eating snails that are invading Miami, the boars that roam Berlin, and the monkey gangs of Cape Town. From feral chickens and carpet-roaming bugs to coyotes hanging out in sandwich shops and birds crashing into skyscrapers, Feral Cities takes readers on a journey through streets and neighborhoods that are far more alive than we often realize, shows how animals are adjusting to urban living, and asks what messages the wildlife in our metropolises have for us.







Criminal Insurgents in Mexico and Latin America


Book Description

The 4th Small Wars JournalEl Centro anthology comes at a pivotal time, roughly a third of the way through the term, for the Enrique Pea Nieto administration in Mexico. The mass kidnapping and execution of 43 rural student teachers in Iguala, Guerrero in late September 2014 has only served to further highlight the corruptive effects of organized crime on the public institutions in that country. In addition, many other states in Latin America are now suffering at the hands of criminal insurgents who are threatening their citizens and challenging their sovereign rights. Dave Dilegge, SWJ Editor-in-Chief




Ethical Cities


Book Description

Combining elements of sustainable and resilient cities agendas, together with those from social justice studies, and incorporating concerns about good governance, transparency and accountability, the book presents a coherent conceptual framework for the ethical city, in which to embed existing and new activities within cities so as to guide local action. The authors’ observations are derived from city-specific surveys and urban case studies. These reveal how progressive cities are promoting a diverse range of ethically informed approaches to urbanism, such as community wealth building, basic income initiatives, participatory budgeting and citizen assemblies. The text argues that the ethical city is a logical next step for critical urbanism in the era of late capitalism, characterised by divisive politics, burgeoning inequality, widespread technology-induced disruptions to every aspect of modern life and existential threats posed by climate change, sustainability imperatives and pandemics. Engaging with their communities in meaningful ways and promoting positive transformative change, ethical cities are well placed to deliver liveable and sustainable places for all, rather than only for wealthy elites. Likewise, the aftermath of shocks such as the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic reveals that cities that are not purposeful in addressing inequalities, social problems, unsustainability and corruption face deepening difficulties. Readers from across physical and social sciences, humanities and arts, as well as across policy, business and civil society, will find that the application of ethical principles is key to the pursuit of socially inclusive urban futures and the potential for cities and their communities to emerge from or, at least, ameliorate a diverse range of local, national and global challenges.




Many Urbanisms


Book Description

Winner, 2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Now, for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s population lives in cities. But urbanization is accelerating in some places and slowing down in others. The sprawling megacities of Asia and Africa, as well as many other smaller and medium-sized cities throughout the “Global South,” are expected to continue growing. At the same time, older industrial cities in wealthier countries are experiencing protracted socioeconomic decline. Nonetheless, mainstream urban studies continues to treat a handful of superstar cities in Europe and North America as the exemplars of world urbanism, even though current global growth and development represent a dramatic break with past patterns. Martin J. Murray offers a groundbreaking guide to the multiplicity, heterogeneity, and complexity of contemporary global urbanism. He identifies and traces four distinct pathways that characterize cities today: tourist-entertainment cities with world-class aspirations; struggling postindustrial cities; megacities experiencing hypergrowth; and “instant cities,” or master-planned cities built from scratch. Murray shows how these different types of cities respond to different pressures and logics rather than progressing through the stages of a predetermined linear path. He highlights new spatial patterns of urbanization that have undermined conventional understandings of the city, exploring the emergence of polycentric, fragmented, haphazard, and unbounded metropolises. Such cities, he argues, should not be seen as deviations from a norm but rather as alternatives within a constellation of urban possibility. Innovative and wide-ranging, Many Urbanisms offers ways to understand the disparate forms of global cities today on their own terms.




Concrete Reveries


Book Description

An analysis of the relationship between urbanism and personal identity evaluates the ways in which people are shaped by their spaces and vice versa, in an account that explores such topics as the disparities between structural interiors and exteriors, the moral obligations of citizens, and the role of a city's atmosphere in molding its residents' beliefs. 10,000 first printing.




After Black Lives Matter


Book Description

"After Black Lives Matter should be commended both for the clarity of its message and the bravery of its convictions." –Jay Caspian Kang, New Yorker Why did a movement as powerful as the one inspired by the murder of George Floyd fall short of securing its most militant demands? The murder of George Floyd prompted a historic uprising that transformed the way Americans and the world think about race and policing. Why did that movement fall short of the most militant demands to defund and dismantle police departments? After Black Lives Matter argues that the failure to make institutional changes was not a simple result of the mercurial and reactive character of the protests. Rather, the core of the movement itself failed to locate the central racial injustice that underpins the crisis of policing:socioeconomic inequality. The anticapitalist and downwardly redistributive politics of many Black Lives Matter activists has too often been drowned out in the flood of black wealth creation, the fetishism of Jim Crow black entrepreneurship, corporate diversity initiatives, and a quixotic reparations demand. Contemporary policing reflects the turn from welfare to domestic warfare as the chief means of controlling the most dispossessed elementsof the working class. The way forward lies in building popular democratic power to advance redistributive policies and social welfare.




Architectures of the Near Future


Book Description

In this highly pertinent issue, guest-editor Nic Clear questions received notions of the future. Are the accepted norms of economic growth and expansion the only means by which society can develop and prosper? Should the current economic crisis be making us call into question a future of unlimited growth? Can this moment of crisis – economic, environmental and technological – enable us to make more informed choices about the type of future that we want and can actually achieve? Architectures of the Near Future offers a series of alternative voices, developing some of the neglected areas of contemporary urban life and original visions of what might be to come. Rather than providing simplistic and seductive images of an intangible shiny future, it rocks the cosy world of architecture with polemical blasts. Draws on topics as diverse as synthetic space, psychoanalysis, Postmodern geography, post-economics, cybernetics and developments in neurology. Includes an exploration of the work of JG Ballard. Features the work of Ben Nicholson.










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