Patchwork in times of plurality encompasses the multitude of actions as a revealing symbol of ethos, actors, organisms, and manifestations of preservation and dialogue frontiers. This plural metaphor, almost like a patchwork, aggregates and yet segregates, conforms, but disfigures, and boosts the meanings which represent this new field that international relations have been recently crossing. Just like the mirror metaphor - that reflects everything to all and, sometimes, intervenes in distortions - the patchwork analogy allowed the book to take responsibility for the disclosure of preservation actions on a global scale. The book has a pioneering role insofar since it is the only publication with such characteristics, concerns, and coverage. The work studies the interconnection between cultural properties and international relations by understanding them as a mosaic before the bridges that intertwine people and borders. The main goal of this work is to illustrate in what way intergovernmental relations have been privileging heritage and culture as acting fields for its broader needs. Therefore, the book addresses topics related to the international agenda, focusing on its less debated themes. Two examples of these undervalued matters are the link between actors, preservationist actions, and the universe of world cultural heritage. The book also pursuits a critical dialogue between interdisciplinary fields that narrow heritage frontiers in search to contribute with a spectrum of academic perspectives and (inter)national study cases. To serve distinct economic, social, or political purposes, institutionalized heritage (embodied by different values) becomes instrumentalized in a top-down direction. In a development frame, when we perceive culture as indispensable to human life, the past is transformed into exchange currency. Through the creation of alternative fields of action, usually in a bottom-up logic, the present builds new heritage connections. Digital heritage's preservation, dissemination, and appreciation have been representing these same nets.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the European Commission (EC) are convinced that strengthening cities is a key factor in promoting sustainable development at global, regional and local levels. Their action plans therefore include expanding cities' participation in sustainable development and social cohesion policies and developing more dynamic cooperation among them through the organisation of networks.

An excellent photographic and textual history of physical disasters in El Salvador during the past century, with focus on how inattention to ecological factors have increased the impact of disasters. The work includes numerous photos on quality stock.

An Introduction to Political Geography provides a broad-based introduction to how power interacts with space; how place influences political identities; and how policy creates and remoulds territory. By pushing back the boundaries of what we conventionally understand as political geography, the book emphasizes the interactions between power, politics and policy, space, place and territory in different geographical contexts. This is both an essential text for political geographers and also a valuable resource for students of related fields with an interest in politics and geography.

This book takes a new approach on understanding causes of extreme poverty and promising actions to address it. Its focus is on marginality being a root cause of poverty and deprivation. “Marginality” is the position of people on the edge, preventing their access to resources, freedom of choices, and the development of capabilities. The book is research based with original empirical analyses at local, national, and local scales; book contributors are leaders in their fields and have backgrounds in different disciplines. An important message of the book is that economic and ecological approaches and institutional innovations need to be integrated to overcome marginality. The book will be a valuable source for development scholars and students, actors that design public policies, and for social innovators in the private sector and non-governmental organizations.​

In 1996, Guillermo O’Donnell taught a seminar at the University of Notre Dame on democratic theory. One of the questions explored in this class was whether it is possible to define and determine the “quality” of democracy. Jorge Vargas Cullell, a student in this course, returned to his native country of Costa Rica, formed a small research team, and secured funding for undertaking a “citizen audit” of the quality of democracy in Costa Rica. This pathbreaking volume contains O’Donnell’s qualitative theoretical study of the quality of democracy and Vargas Cullell’s description and analysis of the empirical data he gathered on the quality of democracy in Costa Rica. It also includes twelve short, scholarly reflections on the O’Donnell and Cullell essays. The primary goal of this collection is to present the rationale and methodology for implementing a citizen audit of democracy. This book is an expression of a growing concern among policy experts and academics that the recent emergence of numerous democratic regimes, particularly in Latin America, cannot conceal the sobering fact that the efficacy and impact of these new governments vary widely. These variations, which range from acceptable to dismal, have serious consequences for the people of Latin America, many of whom have received few if any benefits from democratization. Attempts to gauge the quality of particular democracies are therefore not only fascinating intellectual exercises but may also be useful practical guides for improving both old and new democracies. This book will make important strides in addressing the increasing practical and academic concerns about the quality of democracy. It will be required reading for political scientists, policy analysts, and Latin Americanists.

In 1996, the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, a grassroots advocacy organization, won a historic legal victory against the city’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. The resulting consent decree forced the MTA for a period of ten years to essentially reorient the mass transit system to better serve the city’s poorest residents. A stunning reversal of conventional governance and planning in urban America, which almost always favors wealthier residents, this decision is also, for renowned urban theorist Edward W. Soja, a concrete example of spatial justice in action. In Seeking Spatial Justice, Soja argues that justice has a geography and that the equitable distribution of resources, services, and access is a basic human right. Building on current concerns in critical geography and the new spatial consciousness, Soja interweaves theory and practice, offering new ways of understanding and changing the unjust geographies in which we live. After tracing the evolution of spatial justice and the closely related notion of the right to the city in the influential work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and others, he demonstrates how these ideas are now being applied through a series of case studies in Los Angeles, the city at the forefront of this movement. Soja focuses on such innovative labor–community coalitions as Justice for Janitors, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and the Right to the City Alliance; on struggles for rent control and environmental justice; and on the role that faculty and students in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning have played in both developing the theory of spatial justice and putting it into practice. Effectively locating spatial justice as a theoretical concept, a mode of empirical analysis, and a strategy for social and political action, this book makes a significant contribution to the contemporary debates about justice, space, and the city.