"The biggest Minecraft resource!"--Cover.

This book discusses environmental management and construction management approaches to the environmental problems that can emerge in construction projects. It sets a brand new standard for environmental management in mega construction projects in China and helps all construction project stakeholders establish a more compliant and efficient environmental management system. The authors systematically explore management systems and team management, offering managerial methods and tips based on international and Chinese practices. Outlining all the environmental challenges that can arise during construction, it is a valuable resource for company owners, construction contractors, and construction management consultants and companies. It also offers useful insights for engineers, project managers and project executives.

Community Character provides a design-oriented system for planning and zoning communities but accounts for how people who participate in a community live, work, and shop there. The relationships that Lane Kendig defines here reflect the complexity of the interaction of the built environment with its social and economic uses, taking into account the diverse desires of municipalities and citizens. Among the many classifications for a community’s “character” are its relationship to other communities, its size and the resulting social and economic characteristics. According to Kendig, most comprehensive plans and zoning regulations are based entirely on density and land use, neither of which effectively or consistently measures character or quality of development. As Kendig shows, there is a wide range of measures that define character and these vary with the type of character a community desires to create. Taking a much more comprehensive view, this book offers “community character” as a real-world framework for planning for communities of all kinds and sizes. A companion book, A Practical Guide to Planning with Community Character, provides a detailed explanation of applying community character in a comprehensive plan, with chapters on designing urban, sub-urban, and rural character types, using character in comprehensive plans, and strategies for addressing characteristic challenges of planning and zoning in the 21st century.

Our Lot tells how an entire nation got swept up in real estate mania, and it casts the business story--the collapse of the subprime empire and the global impact it had on the economy--as part of a project of social engineering beginning in the 1930s by the U.S. government to make homeownership available to those who had never been able to attain it before. Based on original reporting, Our Lot does not dwell on the foibles of executives. It looks at the boom as experienced by ordinary Americans, and examines how our own economic anxieties and realities helped fuel the real estate bubble. Conveyed in accessible language and through narrative reporting, the book looks to help homeowners and would-be homeowners understand what really happened, how it has affected our homes and communities, and how we can move on into a future we'll want to live in.