Suburbs deserve a better, more resilient future. June Williamson shows that suburbs aren't destined to remain filled with strip malls and excess parking lots; they can be reinvigorated through inventive design. Today, dead malls, aging office parks, and blighted apartment complexes are being retrofitted into walkable, sustainable communities. Williamson provides a broad vision of suburban reform based on the best schemes submitted in Long Island's highly successful "Build a Better Burb" competition. Many of the design ideas and plans operate at a regional scale, tackling systems such as transit, aquifer protection, and power generation. While some seek to fundamentally transform development patterns, others work with existing infrastructure to create mixed-use, shared networks. Designing Suburban Futures offers concrete but visionary strategies to take the sprawl out of suburbia, creating a vibrant new, suburban form.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. We all know what suburbia is, indeed the majority of us live in it. Yet, despite this ubituity, with no formal definition of the contept, the suburbs have developed in our collective imagination through representations in popular culture, from Terry and June to Desparate Housewives. Rupa Huq examines how suburbia has been depicted in novels, cinema, popular music and on television, charting changing trends both in the suburbs and popular media consumption and production. She looks at the differences in defining suburbia in the US and UK and how characteristics associated with it have shifted in meaning and form.

A lively and provocative history of the contested landscapes where the majority of Americans now live. From rustic cottages reached by steamboat to big box stores at the exit ramps of eight-lane highways, Dolores Hayden defines seven eras of suburban development since 1820. An urban historian and architect, she portrays housewives and politicians as well as designers and builders making the decisions that have generated America’s diverse suburbs. Residents have sought home, nature, and community in suburbia. Developers have cherished different dreams, seeking profit from economies of scale and increased suburban densities, while lobbying local and federal government to reduce the risk of real estate speculation. Encompassing environmental controversies as well as the complexities of race, gender, and class, Hayden’s fascinating account will forever alter how we think about the communities we build and inhabit.

Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel "There was one copy going round our school like contraband. I read it in one sitting ... I'd never read a book about anyone remotely like me before."-- Zadie Smith "My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost..." The hero of Hanif Kureishi's debut novel is dreamy teenager Karim, desperate to escape suburban South London and experience the forbidden fruits which the 1970s seem to offer. When the unlikely opportunity of a life in the theatre announces itself, Karim starts to win the sort of attention he has been craving - albeit with some rude and raucous results. With the publication of Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi landed into the literary landscape as a distinct new voice and a fearless taboo-breaking writer. The novel inspired a ground-breaking BBC series featuring a soundtrack by David Bowie.

Investment has flooded back to cities because dense, walkable, mixed-use urban environments offer choices that support diverse dreams. Auto-oriented, single-use suburbs have a hard time competing. Suburban Remix brings together experts in planning, urban design, real estate development, and urban policy to demonstrate how suburbs can use growing demand for urban living to renew their appeal as places to live, work, play, and invest. The case studies and analysis show how compact new urban places are being created in suburbs to produce health, economic, and environmental benefits, and contribute to solving a growing equity crisis.

This book explores how notions of suburbia have developed in our collective imagination, examining novels, cinema, popular music and television in the US and UK.

For decades the suburbs have been where art happens despite: despite the conformity, the emptiness, the sameness. Time and again, the story is one of gems formed under pressure and that resentment of the suburbs is the key ingredient for creative transcendence. But what if, contrary to that, the suburb has actually been an incubator for distinctly American art, as positively and as surely as in any other cultural hothouse? Mixing personal experience, cultural reportage, and history while rejecting clichés and pieties and these essays stretch across the country in an effort to show that this uniquely American milieu deserves another look.

The urban century manifests itself at the peripheries. While the massive wave of present urbanization is often referred to as an 'urban revolution', most of this startling urban growth worldwide is happening at the margins of cities. This book is about the process that creates the global urban periphery – suburbanization – and the ways of life – suburbanisms – we encounter there. Richly detailed with examples from around the world, the book argues that suburbanization is a global process and part of the extended urbanization of the planet. This includes the gated communities of elites, the squatter settlements of the poor, and many built forms and ways of life in-between. The reality of life in the urban century is suburban: most of the earth's future 10 billion inhabitants will not live in conventional cities but in suburban constellations of one kind or another. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre's demand not to give up urban theory when the city in its classical form disappears, this book is a challenge to urban thought more generally as it invites the reader to reconsider the city from the outside in.