Sunbelt cities like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Miami, with their international airports, have a transportation advantage that overwhelms global competition from other southern cities. Why? The short answer to this question seems to be intuitive, but the long answer lies at the intersection of built infrastructure policies, civic boosterism, and the changing nature of American cities. Simply put, Charlotte leaders invested in the future and took advantage of its opportunities. In the twentieth century Charlotte, North Carolina, underwent several generational changes in leadership and saw the emergence of a pro-growth coalition active in matters of the city’s ambience, race relations, business decisions, and use of state and federal government grants-in-aid. In The Transformative City, Wilbur C. Rich examines the complex interrelationships of these factors to illustrate the uniqueness of North Carolina’s most populous city and explores the ways in which the development and success of Charlotte Douglas International Airport has in turn led to development in the city itself, including the growth of both the financial industries and political sectors. Rich also examines the role the federal government had in airport development, banking, and race relation reforms. The Transformative City traces the economic transformation of Charlotte as a city and its airport as an agent of change.

The aim of the book is to examine the transformation of the city in the late 20th century and explore the ways in which city life is structured. The shift from modern-industrial to information/consumption-based 'post-modern' cities is traced through the text. The focus is not just on America and Europe but also explores cities in other parts of the world as city growth in the twenty first century will be predominantly outside of these regions.

How do cities transform over time? And why do some cities change for the better while others deteriorate? In articulating new ways of viewing urban areas and how they develop over time, Peter Bosselmann offers a stimulating guidebook for students and professionals engaged in urban design, planning, and architecture. By looking through Bosselmann’s eyes (aided by his analysis of numerous color photos and illustrations) readers will learn to “see” cities anew. Bosselmann organizes the book around seven “activities”: comparing, observing, transforming, measuring, defining, modeling, and interpreting. He introduces readers to his way of seeing by comparing satellite-produced “maps” of the world’s twenty largest cities. With Bosselmann’s guidance, we begin to understand the key elements of urban design. Using Copenhagen, Denmark, as an example, he teaches us to observe without prejudice or bias. He demonstrates how cities transform by introducing the idea of “urban morphology” through an examination of more than a century of transformations in downtown Oakland, California. We learn how to measure quality-of-life parameters that are often considered immeasurable, including “vitality,” “livability,” and “belonging.” Utilizing the street grids of San Francisco as examples, Bosselmann explains how to define urban spaces. Modeling, he reveals, is not so much about creating models as it is about bringing others into public, democratic discussions. Finally, we find out how to interpret essential aspects of “life and place” by evaluating aerial images of the San Francisco Bay Area taken in 1962 and those taken forty-three years later. Bosselmann has a unique understanding of cities and how they “work.” His hope is that, with the fresh vision he offers, readers will be empowered to offer inventive new solutions to familiar urban problems.

The Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize is a biennial international award that honours outstanding contributions to the creation of vibrant, liveable and sustainable urban communities around the world. Awarded jointly by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) and the Centre for Liveable Cities, both in Singapore, the 2012 prize went to the City of New York for its remarkable transformation in the decade since the 2001 World Trade Center attack. Cities in Transformation presents the award winners and special mentions for the 2010 and 2012 editions of the award and honours their efforts to create dynamic and sustainable urban communities. The cities featured are New York (2012 laureate) and Bilbao (2010 laureate), as well as special mentions, Ahmedabad, Brisbane, Copenhagen, Malmö, Vancouver, Melbourne, Curitiba (awarded to Jamie Lerner), Delhi (awarded to Sheila Dikshit) and Khayelitsha in Cape Town (awarded to AHT Group AG/SUN Development). Cities in Transformation includes a foreword by Lee Kuan Yew, the venerable Singapore statesman from whom the Prize is named, and insightful and fascinating chapters on each city that feature stunning photography that will give readers unique insights into the cities that are leading the way in inspired urban planning.

Cities on a Finite Planet: Transformative responses to climate change shows how cities can combine high quality living conditions, resilience to climate change, disaster risk reduction and contributions to mitigation/low carbon development. It also covers the current and potential contribution of cities to avoiding dangerous climate change and is the first book with an in-depth coverage of how cities and their governments, citizens and civil society organizations can combine these different agendas, based on careful city-level analyses. The foundation for the book is detailed city case studies on Bangalore, Bangkok, Dar es Salaam, Durban, London, Manizales, Mexico City, New York and Rosario. Each of these was led by authors who contributed to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment and are thus acknowledged as among the world’s top specialists in this field. This book highlights where there is innovation and progress in cities and how this was achieved. Also where there is little progress and no action and where there is no capacity to act. It also assesses the extent to which cities can address the Sustainable Development Goals within commitments to also dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In this, it highlights how much progress on these different agendas depends on local governments and their capacities to work with their low-income populations.

The contemporary regime of globalisation and neoliberalism is creating a far-reaching impact on different scales across the world. On the urban scale it has resulted in a huge transformation of the city space, land use and reorganisation of the urban governance. This book is a provocative examination of the contemporary urban scenario in several countries, offering South Asian, North American and European perspectives. Written by some of the most eminent theorists and social scientists of our time, the chapters cover critical empirical analyses of the contemporary transformation processes of s.

While designers possess the creative capabilities of shaping cities, their often-singular obsession with form and aesthetics actually reduces their effectiveness as they are at the mercy of more powerful generators of urban form. In response to this paradox, Designing Urban Transformation addresses the incredible potential of urban practice to radically change cities for the better. The book focuses on a powerful question, "What can urbanism be?" by arguing that the most significant transformations occur by fundamentally rethinking concepts, practices, and outcomes. Drawing inspiration from the philosophical movement known as Pragmatism, the book proposes three conceptual shifts for transformative urban practice: (a) beyond material objects: city as flux, (b) beyond intentions: consequences of design, and (c) beyond practice: urbanism as creative political act. Pragmatism encourages us to consider how we can make deeper and more systemic changes and how urbanism itself can be a design strategy for such transformations. To illuminate how these conceptual shifts operate in vastly different contexts through analysis of transformative urban initiatives and projects in Belo Horizonte, Boston, Cairo, Karachi, Los Angeles, New Delhi, and Paris. The book is a rare integration of theory and practice that proposes essential ways of rethinking city-design-and-building processes, while drawing critical lessons from actual examples of such processes.

Cities in the Third Wave surveys the remarkable transformation that is taking place in urban America. In the belief that technology is the force that has created and recast cities throughout history, this book addresses the important question of how the modern-day technology affects cities today and how it will shape cities in the future.

Over the past decade, cities have come into closer contact and conflict with new technologies. From reactive policymaking in response to platform economy firms to proactive policymaking in an effort to develop into smart cities, urban governance is transforming at an unprecedented speed and scale. Innovative technologies promise a brave new world of convenience and cost effectiveness – powered by cameras that monitor our movements, sensors that line our streets, and algorithms that determine our resource allocation – but at what cost? Exploring the relationship between technology and cities, this book brings together an outstanding group of authors in the field to provide a critical and necessary examination of the disruption that is under way. They look at how cities should understand and regulate novel technologies, what can be learned from proposed and failed smart city projects, and how innovative economies change the structure of cities themselves. Contributors dig deeply into these and similar subjects, contributing their voices to an important dialogue on the future of urban policy and governance. The first collection of its kind, this groundbreaking volume brings together social, economic, and cultural insights to enhance our understanding of the ongoing technological upheaval in cities around the world.

Annotation This volume is one in a series initiated by the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies on the inter-relationship between globalisation and urban transformation. It identifies and describes the inter- and intra-urban transformations of Central and Eastern European cities and considers their pre-1945 historic legacies, the socialist period, and their contemporary transition towards market oriented and democratic systems. The dramatic changes since 1989 including the collapse of Communist ideology, the break-up of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, the end of the Cold War and the impact of globalisation and European integration, have reconfigured this region and affected their re-integration into European and global networks. This book first examines the similarities and differences between significant Central and Eastern European cities, comparing the differing patterns of historical context and socialist legacies before 1990, and the impacts of internal and external forces on re-shaping these cities and their paths of transformation since 1990. It also examines the role of contemporary planning within the overall development of Central and Eastern European cities. The conclusion demonstrates the similarities and differences between Central and Eastern European cities and their re-integration into global networks.