"A love song for the city . . . [this] volume, attractivelypackaged and richly illustrated, is really a cookbook for downtownrevitalization." --Wall Street Journal In this pioneering book on successful urban recovery, two urbanexperts draw on their firsthand observations of downtown changeacross the country to identify a flexible, effective approach tourban rejuvenation. From transportation planning and sprawlcontainment to the threat of superstore retailers, they address ahost of key issues facing our cities today. Roberta Brandes Gratz (New York, NY), an award-winning journalistand urban critic, is author of the urban design classic The LivingCity. A former staff reporter for the New York Post, Gratz haswritten for the New York Times Magazine and other publications.Norman Mintz (New York, NY) has played a leading role in the fieldof downtown revitalization for more than twenty-five years. He isDesign Director at the 34th Street Partnership in New York City anda consultant on downtown revitalization across the country.

Why do people stay in a struggling city? City on the Edge explores this question through the lives of five people in Syracuse, New York, a quintessential rust-belt metropolis. Once a booming industrial center with a dynamic civic life and prominence on the world stage, Syracuse has endured decades of crime, drugs, economic depression, absent-minded political leadership, and population decline. Michael Streissguth spent more than three years interviewing a young survivor of the streets, a refugee from Cuba, an urban farmer, a community activist, and a city elder, who shared their stories as they found ways to make life work against sometimes formidable odds. He also contextualizes their extended commentary and storytelling with secondary characters and various episodes, such as a tragic Father's Day riot and the trial that followed. The result is an eye-opening look at life in America in the twenty-first century, where people strive to turn their ideas, frustrations, and disadvantages into new hope for themselves and the city where they live.

A timely study of Hong Kong's politics and society since the 1997 handover that explores the city's long history of resistance.

First there was downtown. Then there were suburbs. Then there were malls. Then Americans launched the most sweeping change in 100 years in how they live, work, and play. The Edge City.

This “generous, vigorous, and enlightening look at class and space in New York” examines the human side of gentrification—“a joy to read” (The Paris Review).For years, journalists, policymakers, critics, and historians have tried to explain just what happens when new money and new residents flow into established neighborhoods. But now, “Mr. Gibson lets the city speak for itself, and it speaks with charm, swagger and heartening resilience” (The New York Times). The Edge Becomes the Center captures, in their own words, the stories of people?brokers, buyers, sellers, renters, landlords, artists, contractors, politicians, and everyone in between?who are shaping and being shaped by the new New York City. In this extraordinary oral history, Gibson shows us what urban change looks and feels like by exposing us to the voices of the people living through it. Drawing on the plainspoken, casually authoritative tradition of Jane Jacobs and Studs Terkel, The Edge Becomes the Center is an inviting and essential portrait of the way we live now.

Through an insightful look at projects from around the world and at the current design proposals for New York itself, the author paints a portrait of redevelopment that is both pragmatic and visionary, one that holds the promise of reconnecting New Yorkers to their waterfront as a vital place of work and of public life."--BOOK JACKET.

This new volume in the GCI's Readings in Conservation series brings together a selection of seminal writings on the conservation of historic cities. This book, the eighth in the Getty Conservation Institute’s Readings in Conservation series, fills a significant gap in the published literature on urban conservation. This topic is distinct from both heritage conservation and urban planning despite the recent growth of urbanism worldwide, no single volume has presented a comprehensive selection of these important writings until now. This anthology, profusely illustrated throughout, is organized into eight parts, covering such subjects as geographic diversity, reactions to the transformation of traditional cities, reading the historic city, the search for contextual continuities, the search for values, and the challenges of sustainability. With more than sixty-five texts, ranging from early polemics by Victor Hugo and John Ruskin to a generous selection of recent scholarship, this book thoroughly addresses regions around the globe. Each reading is introduced by short prefatory remarks explaining the rationale for its selection and the principal matters covered. The book will serve as an easy reference for administrators, professionals, teachers, and students faced with the day-to-day challenges confronting the historic city under siege by rampant development.

This series of essays outlines a number of case studies from Europe, North America, Australia and Asia and provides first hand accounts of the experiences that planners, architects and politicians have had in reshaping cities. These insights provide a pragmatic assessment of the challenges and constraints posed by changing patterns of urban growth in a broad spectrum of urban environments. The reader will discover, through these multiple voices and views, the diverse forms of global cities, and will have a grasp of where the debate on urban design stands today, and where it may be going in the future.

An American teen living abroad discovers the truth about himself and his family in this thrilling novel from "one of the best dialogue hounds in the business" (New York Times Book Review). 1972, Beirut, Lebanon. Young American Matthew lives with his father, a rising foreign service attache, and mother, in an exclusive community of ex-patriots. It is the summer Matthew becomes a teenager, falls in love, nearly dies, and watches his family, and the city, fall apart. It is in this world of Western schemers and local merchants, of hoodlums and politicians, that Matthew begins to solve the mystery of who his father really is, and what role he is really playing in the upheaval that is shaking the city loose of its old, civilized and way and ushering in a new and frightening radicalism. This is the story of a boy and a family, besieged. Intimate in scope and wrenching in its vision of lost innocence, City on the Edge is a mystery and spy story from the past, and a coming of age story for our time.

The Aesthetics of Human Environments is a companion volume to Carlson’s and Berleant’s The Aesthetics of Natural Environments. Whereas the earlier collection focused on the aesthetic appreciation of nature, The Aesthetics of Human Environments investigates philosophical and aesthetics issues that arise from our engagement with human environments ranging from rural landscapes to urban cityscapes. Our experience of public spaces such as shopping centers, theme parks, and gardens as well as the impact of our personal living spaces on the routine activities of our everyday life are discussed in terms of their aesthetic value and the nature of our aesthetic appreciation. This volume will appeal to any reader concerned about the aesthetic quality of the world in which we live.