This book presents a selection of the most exciting building projects in London since the year 2000. The first decade of the twenty-first century has marked out London as arguably the pre-eminent international city for innovative and ambitious architecture, with the design and construction of imaginative buildings of all types. Projects range in size and budget from such landmark structures as the 'Gherkin’ (30 St Mary Axe) and the forthcoming 'Shard’ (London Bridge Tower) to such cultural projects as the Young Vic theatre and the new Tate Modern extension; from offices, schools and hospitals to shops and private houses. With more than 650 stunning photographs, drawings and renderings, and critical texts by well-known architecture writer Kenneth Powell, this is a detailed and authoritative portrait - indispensable to professionals and the public alike - of a world city avid to embrace the best of the new.

The green belt has been one of the UK’s most consistent and successful planning policies. Over the past century, it has limited urban sprawl and preserved the countryside around our cities, but is it still fit for purpose in a world of unprecedented urban growth and potentially catastrophic climate change? Repurposing the Green Belt in the 21st Century examines the history of the green belt in the UK and how it has influenced planning regimes in other countries. Despite its undoubted achievements, it is time to review the green belt as an instrument of urban planning and landscape design. The problem of the ecological impact of cities and the mitigation measures of major climate changes are at the top of the urban agenda across the world. Urban agriculture, blue and green infrastructures, and forestation are the new ecological design imperatives driving urban policymaking.

“Brilliant, wise, profound and persuasive. Common Sense for the 21st Century will come to be recognized as a classic of political theory.”—George Monbiot, via Twitter An urgent, essential, and practical call to action from a cofounder of Extinction Rebellion What can we all do to avert catastrophe and avoid extinction? Roger Hallam has answers. In Common Sense for the 21st Century, Roger Hallam, cofounder of Extinction Rebellion, outlines how movements around the world need to come together now to start doing what works: engaging in mass civil disobedience to make real change happen. The book gives people the tools to understand not only why mass disruption, mass arrests, and mass sacrifice are necessary but also details how to carry out acts of civil disobedience effectively, respectfully and nonviolently. It bypasses contemporary political theory, and instead is inspired by Thomas Paine, the pragmatic 18th-century revolutionary whose pamphlet Common Sense sparked the American Revolution. Common Sense for the 21st Century urges us to confront the truth about climate change and argues forcefully that only a revolution of society and the state, similar to the turn that Paine urged the Americans to take into the political unknown, can save us now.

This year, London's elected mayor and assembly turn twenty. But has London's mayoralty lived up to the expectations that were set for it? Have its three mayors been able to get to grips with the city's challenges? How have they responded to crises in the past – and what does the future hold? This important new book marks the twentieth anniversary of London's mayor and assembly and investigates the relative successes and challenges of the mayoralty to date, before asking what comes next for London. It combines analysis by experts with reflections from those closely involved in setting up, running and working with the Greater London Authority, alongside those who have held the position of Mayor of London themselves.

With a new introduction for the paperback. London is a supreme achievement of civilization. It offers fulfilments of body and soul, encourages discovery and invention. It is a place of freedom, multiplicity and co-existence. It is a Liberal city, which means it stands for values now in peril. London has also become its own worst enemy, testing to destruction the idea that the free market alone can build a city, a fantastical wealth machine that denies too many of its citizens a decent home or living. In this thought-provoking, fearless, funny and subversive book, Rowan Moore shows how London’s strength depends on the creative and mutual interplay of three forces: people, business and state. To find responses to the challenges of the twenty-first century, London must rediscover its genius for popular action and bold public intervention. The global city above all others, London is the best place to understand the way the world’s cities are changing. It could also be, in the shape of a living, churning city of more than eight million people, the most powerful counter-argument to the extremist politics of the present.

The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City focuses on the dynamics and disruptions of the contemporary city in relation to capricious processes of global urbanisation, mutation and resistance. An international range of scholars engage with emerging urban conditions and inequalities in experimental ways, speaking to new ideas of what constitutes the urban, highlighting empirical explorations and expanding on contributions to policy and design. The handbook is organised around nine key themes, through which familiar analytic categories of race, gender and class, as well as binaries such as the urban/rural, are readdressed. These thematic sections together capture the volatile processes and intricacies of urbanisation that reveal the turbulent nature of our early twenty-first century: Hierarchy: Elites and Evictions Productivity: Over-investment and Abandonment Authority: Governance and Mobilisations Volatility: Disruption and Adaptation Conflict: Vulnerability and Insurgency Provisionality: Infrastructure and Incrementalism Mobility: Re-bordering and De-bordering Civility: Contestation and Encounter Design: Speculation and Imagination This is a provocative, inter-disciplinary handbook for all academics and researchers interested in contemporary urban studies.

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

Historic London 1922!Jose Raul Capablanca was the superstar of chess in 1922 and London was his first serious chess in the 15 months since he had won the championship title from Emanuel Lasker. Capa was the chessplayer whom even non-players could identify. But the tournament signified not only Capa's return to the game, it was also something of a revival of international chess after four years of war and four more of recovery.The new world champion would ease into first place undefeated ahead of future world champion Alexander Alekhine. The young Dutchman Max Euwe was honing his skills that would also eventually take him to the top of the chess world. And Richard R(c)ti was about to unveil his â oeOpening of the Futureâ â " 1.Nf3!.London 1922 is important for all these reasons, but it also served as the setting for the creation of the famous â oeLondon Rules which would for years govern the way in which prospective challengers to the title would have the right to play the champion.As an added bonus, all fourteen games of the 1921 Capablanca-Lasker title match with annotations by Capa himself have been added to this new 21st-century edition. Complemented by more than a dozen archival photographs and a Foreword by Andy Soltis, London 1922 belongs in the library of every chessplayer!

Britain and Africa in the twenty-first century offers the first book-length study of how Britain's relationship with Africa has fared since the fall of the 1997-2010 New Labour government.