The Image of the City


Book Description

The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.




The Sustainable Dead


Book Description

While eco-lightbulbs, tiny homes and bans on single-use plastic bags nibble at the edges of our profligate ways, ecological and social sustainability is beginning to profoundly challenge long-standing death styles. This collection brings together new scholarship on multiple and innovative changes to managing the dead from around the world, including the USA, Poland, the Netherlands, Britain, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, to argue for a new perspective in theorising this shift to more sustainable death ways. This is a perspective that moves on from a top-down approach to social change, viewing the perceived gulf between cultural and space management as more a fabrication than a reality.




Planning for Community


Book Description

Planning for Community A comprehensive exploration of community planning that integrates today’s social and economic issues with policy and governance considerations In Planning for Community, distinguished regional and local planner Phil Heywood delivers an insightful examination of the accelerating impacts of social, environmental, and economic changes on community life and organization. He explores the ways in which these changes can be anticipated, planned for, and managed as he reviews and evaluates the nature and challenges of place and interaction faced by traditional and emerging local communities. The book includes discussions of the values, aims, and methods of community planning and the key operations in each of the fields of housing, work, transport, health, and environment. It should also inspire and assist readers to become more involved and influential in the lives of their local and wider communities. Readers will also find: A thorough introduction to methods of inclusion and empowerment enabling effective community management Comprehensive explorations of the ways the values of prosperity, liberty, social justice, and sustainability link to practical community problem-solving Practical discussions of the values, methods, activities, design, and governance shaping community planning Comprehensive, well-grounded, and effective treatments of policy development and practice Planning for Community is an excellent resource for professionals, activists, academics, and students seeking a comprehensive and readable guide to community planning.




Landed Internationals


Book Description

2022 On the Brinck Book Award, University of New Mexico School of Architecture + Planning Special Mention, First Book Prize, International Planning History Society Landed Internationals examines the international culture of postwar urban planning through the case of the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey. Today the center of Turkey's tech, energy, and defense elites, METU was founded in the 1950s through an effort jointly sponsored by the UN, the University of Pennsylvania, and various governmental agencies of the United States and Turkey. Drawing on the language of the UN and its Technical Assistance Board, Erdim uses the phrase "technical assistance machinery" to encompass the sprawling set of relationships activated by this endeavor. Erdim studies a series of legitimacy battles among bureaucrats, academics, and other professionals in multiple theaters across the political geography of the Cold War. These different factions shared a common goal: the production of nationhood—albeit nationhood understood and defined in multiple, competing ways. He also examines the role of the American architecture firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill; the New York housing policy guru Charles Abrams; the UN and the University of Pennsylvania; and the Turkish architects Altuğ and Behruz Çinici. In the end, METU itself looked like a model postwar nation within the world order, and Erdim concludes by discussing how it became an important force in transnational housing, planning, and preservation in its own right.




Political Warfare


Book Description

"Political Warfare provides a well-researched and wide-ranging overview of the nature of the People's Republic of China (PRC) threat and the political warfare strategies, doctrines, and operational practices used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The author offers detailed and illuminating case studies of PRC political warfare operations designed to undermine Thailand, a U.S. treaty ally, and Taiwan, a close friend"--




Defence Planning for Small and Middle Powers


Book Description

This book examines the processes, practices and principles of defence planning in small and middle powers. Small and middle powers are recalibrating their force postures in this age of disruption. They are adapting their defence planning and military innovation processes to protect the security of their nations. The purpose of this book is to explore defence planning and military innovation in 11 contemporary case studies of small and middle powers in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Oceania. Employing a structured focused comparison framework, it traces patterns in the choices of small and middle powers across the following themes: (1) alliances, dependencies and national ambitions; (2) approaches, processes, methods and techniques; and (3) military innovation strategies and outcomes. Breaking new theoretical ground, it offers a three-pronged typology distinguishing between the strategic defence planner, the transactional defence planners and the complacent defence planner. The book offers a rich array of insights into cases that fall across different geographies, strategic cultures and governance systems. These insights can help guide discussions on how to structure decision-making structures, arrive at ambition levels, formulate priorities, select partners and design defence planning and military innovation processes. This book will be of much interest to students of defence studies, security studies, public policy and international relations, as well as to professionals in defence planning.




Planning for Protraction


Book Description

As Sino-US relations have deteriorated, concerns have grown in Washington over its ability to defeat China in a major conflict. A conflict between such peer competitors would likely become a protracted war of attrition drawing on all dimensions of national power, but this reality has yet to receive a sufficient degree of analytical attention. In this Adelphi book, Iskander Rehman provides a historically informed and empirically grounded study of protracted great-power war, its core drivers and characteristics, and an examination of the elements that have most often determined a competitor’s long-term strategic performance. Final victory in a protracted conflict, this book argues, rests on a combination of three core factors: a state’s military effectiveness and adaptability, its socio-economic power and resiliency, and the soundness of its alliance management and grand strategy. A detailed analysis of the contemporary Sino-US rivalry assesses how both parties might fare in the event of a protracted war, while highlighting some of its key differentiating aspects – most notably its nuclear and cyber dimensions.




Moulding the Socialist Subject


Book Description

What role did cinema play in the Chinese Communist Party’s political project of shaping ideal socialist citizens in the early People’s Republic? In Moulding the Socialist Subject, Xiaoning Lu deploys case studies from popular film genres, movie star culture and rural film exhibition practices to argue that Chinese cinema in 1949–1966, at once an important political instrument, an enjoyable yet instructive form of entertainment, and a specific manifestation of the socialist society of the spectacle, was an everyday site where the moulding of the new socialist person unfolded. While painting a broad picture of Chinese socialist cinema, Lu credits the human agency of film professionals, whose self-reflexivity and individual adaptability played an intrinsic role in the Party’s political project.




Great Minds in Regional Science, Vol. 2


Book Description

This book is the second volume in a new series on 'Great Minds in Regional Science,' which seeks to present a contemporary view on the scientific relevance of the work done by great thinkers in regional science. This volume presents, among others, Adam Smith, Johann Heinrich von Thünen, and Alan Wilson. Each chapter combines factual biographical information about the ‘Great Mind,’ a description of their major contributions, and a discussion of the broader context of their work, as well as an assessment of its current relevance, scientific recognition, and policy impact. The book attempts to fill a gap in our knowledge and to respond to the growing interest in the formation and development of the field of regional science and its key influential figures.




Timing the Future Metropolis


Book Description

Timing the Future Metropolis—an intellectual history of planning, urbanism, design, and social science—explores the network of postwar institutions, formed amid specters of urban "crisis" and "renewal," that set out to envision the future of the American city. Peter Ekman focuses on one decisive node in the network: the Joint Center for Urban Studies, founded in 1959 by scholars at Harvard and MIT. Through its sprawling programs of "organized research," its manifold connections to universities, foundations, publishers, and policymakers, and its years of consultation on the planning of a new city in Venezuela—Ciudad Guayana—the Joint Center became preoccupied with the question of how to conceptualize the urban future as an object of knowledge. Timing the Future Metropolis ultimately compels a broader reflection on temporality in urban planning, rethinking how we might imagine cities yet to come—and the consequences of deciding not to.