Best defined as the art of shaping the built environment, urban design seeks to understand and analyze the variety of forces—social, economic, cultural, legal, ecological, and aesthetic—that affect how we live. The complex challenges facing cities today—scarcity of resources, growing economic divisions, and rampant sprawl, among others—are forcing a reconsideration of urban design. New Urbanism, a leading movement within urban design, advocates a return to small-town urban forms: human-scale, pedestrian-friendly streets, a reinvigoration of cities, and a stop to suburban sprawl. This new volume, drawing on a conference and debates at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, comprehensively examines New Urbanism today and speculates about it’s future. With contributions from Christopher Alexander, Leon Krier, Peter Hall, Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck, William McDonough, Peter Calthorpe, Jan Gehl, Lars Lerup, Edward Soja, and Saskia Sassen, among others, New Urbanism and Beyond is both a comprehensive primer on urban design and a provocation for practitioners, historians, and citizens everywhere.

The city in the twenty-first century faces major challenges, including social and economic stratification, wasteful consumption of resources, transportation congestion, and environmental degradation. More than half of the world’s population lives in cities and major metropolitan areas, and in the next two decades the number of city dwellers is estimated to reach five billion. This puts enormous pressures on transportation systems, housing stock, and infrastructure such as energy, waste, and water, which directly influences the emissions of greenhouse gases. As the long emergency awaits us, urgent questions remain: How will our cities survive? How can we combat and reconcile urban growth with sustainable use of resources for future generations to thrive? Where and how urbanism comes into the picture and what “sustainable” urban forms can do in light of these events are some of the issues Sustainable Urbanism and Beyond explores. With more than sixty essays, including contributions by Andrés Duany, Saskia Sassen, Peter Newman, Douglas Farr, Henry Cisneros, Peter Hall, Sharon Zukin, Peter Eisenman, and others, this book is a unique perspective on architecture, urban planning, environmental and urban design, exploring ways for raising quality of life and the standard of living in a new modern era by creating better and more viable places to live.

During the last decade, the South American continent has seen a strong push for transnational integration, initiated by the former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who (with the endorsement of eleven other nations) spearheaded the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA), a comprehensive energy, transport, and communications network. The most aggressive transcontinental integration project ever planned for South America, the initiative systematically deploys ten east-west infrastructural corridors, enhancing economic development but raising important questions about the polarizing effect of pitting regional needs against the colossal processes of resource extraction. Providing much-needed historical contextualization to IIRSA’s agenda, Beyond the City ties together a series of spatial models and offers a survey of regional strategies in five case studies of often overlooked sites built outside the traditional South American urban constructs. Implementing the term “resource extraction urbanism,” the architect and urbanist Felipe Correa takes us from Brazil’s nineteenth-century regional capital city of Belo Horizonte to the experimental, circular, “temporary” city of Vila Piloto in Três Lagoas. In Chile, he surveys the mining town of María Elena. In Venezuela, he explores petrochemical encampments at Judibana and El Tablazo, as well as new industrial frontiers at Ciudad Guayana. The result is both a cautionary tale, bringing to light a history of societies that were “inscribed” and administered, and a perceptive examination of the agency of architecture and urban planning in shaping South American lives.

"William H. Whyte's curiosity compelled him to question the status quo--whether helping to make Fortune Magazine essential reading for business leaders, warning of "groupthink" in his bestseller The Organization Man, or standing up for Jane Jacobs as she advocated for the vitality of city life and public space. This compelling biography sheds light on Whyte's bold way of thinking, ripe for rediscovery at a time when we are reshaping our communities into places of opportunity and empowerment for all citizens" -- Backcover.

Americans are voting with their feet to abandon strip malls and suburban sprawl, embracing instead a new type of community where they can live, work, shop, and play within easy walking distance. In The Option of Urbanism visionary developer and strategist Christopher B. Leinberger explains why government policies have tilted the playing field toward one form of development over the last sixty years: the drivable suburb. Rooted in the driving forces of the economy—car manufacturing and the oil industry—this type of growth has fostered the decline of community, contributed to urban decay, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and contributed to the rise in obesity and asthma. Highlighting both the challenges and the opportunities for this type of development, The Option of Urbanism shows how the American Dream is shifting to include cities as well as suburbs and how the financial and real estate communities need to respond to build communities that are more environmentally, socially, and financially sustainable.

The advent of the 21st century marks the unfolding of a new urbanism, of a new urban fabric in the making. Bringing together a range of leading scholars from a wide range of disciplines, this edited collection examines innovative urban redevelopment projects around Europe and North America which are at the forefront of this new urbanism and which are here termed 'New Downtowns'. It introduces this term and concept and addresses major questions such as: What does a sustained urbanity for the 21st century look like? Which strategies do politicians and planners deploy to create new synergies between planning for the public good and private interest? Can market forces be co-opted for collective interests? Does the imagination of a European city continue to inspire new urbanism within and beyond Europe? And can a future urbanity for the 21st century be planned at all? In particular, it focuses on Hamburg's HafenCity", which, at around 155 hectares, is one of the most prominent city centre development projects in Europe and will increase the size of Hamburg's city centre by 40 percent. The project HafenCity serves as a starting point for a conceptually wide ranging debate on the character, shape, function and meaning of New Downtowns.

Urbanism Beyond 2020 explores numerous questions triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic: Why is city making a health project? How are ecological and human wellbeing interrelated? How can leadership and governance help bridge gaps in our unjust cities? How might we renew our relationship with dwellings and neighborhoods? How resilient and adaptable are our cities during uncertain times? Amidst climate change and global warming, is the pandemic a prelude to the challenges to come? Addressed to anyone invested in the well-being of our cities, this collection of essays by an accomplished urban designer and city planner reminds us why the pointers to our future will not emerge exclusively from affluent nations or less developed societies alone, why we live in an interconnected world, and why this pandemic is a crucial period to reexamine the impact of our cities on our planet's future.

Josh Stephens grew up in Los Angeles knowing that it was a perfectly pleasant place, with enviable weather, an impressive natural environment, and Hollywood glamour. But, still, he wondered whether a great city shouldn't be something ... more. With a title inspired by Betty Friedan's account of life in the suburbs, The Urban Mystique is equal part lamentation and celebration. It collects some of Josh's work from the California Planning & Development Report and elsewhere, covering everything from the minutiae of setbacks, the regional impacts of transit investments, the promise of smart growth and sustainability, the precariousness of urban politics in the 21st century, and the ineffable complexities that make all cities, be they in California or anywhere else, wondrous, maddening, and fascinating.