Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities Are Changing the World

In cities around the world, individuals and groups are reclaiming and creating urban sites, temporary spaces and informal gathering places. These ‘insurgent public spaces’ challenge conventional views of how urban areas are defined and used, and how they can transform the city environment. No longer confined to traditional public areas like neighbourhood parks and public plazas, these guerrilla spaces express the alternative social and spatial relationships in our changing cities.

With nearly twenty illustrated case studies, this volume shows how instances of insurgent public space occur across the world. Examples range from community gardening in Seattle and Los Angeles, street dancing in Beijing, to the transformation of parking spaces into temporary parks in San Francisco.

Drawing on the experiences and knowledge of individuals extensively engaged in the actual implementation of these spaces, Insurgent Public Space is a unique cross-disciplinary approach to the study of public space use, and how it is utilized in the contemporary, urban world. Appealing to professionals and students in both urban studies and more social courses, Hou has brought together valuable commentaries on an area of urbanism which has, up until now, been largely ignored.

* Site identification, evaluation, and selection
* Site inventories of physical, biological, and cultural attributes
* Land use suitability analysis using Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
* Concept planning and design development
* Graphic communication with clients, government agencies, and other stakeholders

Filled with need-to-know information on the entire land planning and design process, Site Analysis is a vital addition to the library of students and professionals in landscape architecture, urban design and planning, and related areas.

This book will fill a void in the academic market by offering a comprehensive introduction to all stages of the site analysis process. The Second Edition of Site Analysis will detail each phase of the land planning and site design process, explain the influence of site and contextual conditions conditions on land use development and conservation decisions. It will also provide a valuable resource for professionals seeking design solutions for successful land use.

The ultimate step-by-step action plan guidebook for making communities resilient, resourceful, and healthy

Many of today's communities face an unprecedented struggle to adapt and maintain their environmental, economic, and social well-being in an era beleaguered by fiscal constraints, uncertainty about energy prices and supplies, rapid demographic shifts, and accelerated climate impacts. This step-by-step guidebook for urban planners and urban designers explains how to create and implement an actionable plan for making neighborhoods, communities, and regions more environmentally healthy, resource-conserving, and economically resilient. Sustainable and Resilient Communities delineates measures for repairing, retrofitting, and transforming our built environments and supporting systems-transportation, energy, water, natural environment, food production, solid waste, and economics-through:

• Methods for assessing a community's key sustainability quotient

• Deploying tools for establishing timely performance goals and metrics

• Developing strategies for evaluating, selecting, and implementing 'high-leverage' interventions

• Activating policies, codes, programs, plans, and practices, as well as monitoring and upgrading their performance

The book includes a range of targeted case studies, from New Orleans and South Carolina to Arizona and California, illustrating geographically diverse approaches for urban contexts large and small.

A resource for developing an ecological urbanism, Sustainable and Resilient Communities employs time-proven, broadly applicable strategies and actions that can be customized for specific environmental, energy, and economic conditions.

An eye-opening exploration of the intriguing and often counter-intuitive science of human navigation and experience of place.

In the age of GPS and iPhones, human beings it would seem have mastered the art of direction, but does the need for these devices signal something else—that as a species we are actually hopelessly lost. In fact we've filled our world with signs and arrows. We still get lost in the mall, or a maze of cubicles. What does this say about us? Drawing on his exhaustive research, Professor Collin Ellard illuminates how humans are disconnected from our world and what this means, not just for how we get from A to B, but also for how we construct our cities, our workplaces, our homes, and even our lives.