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The Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class
by Edward ConardThe scourge of America’s economy isn't the success of the 1 percent—quite the opposite. The real problem is the government’s well-meaning but misguided attempt to reduce the payoffs for success. Four years ago, Edward Conard wrote a controversial bestseller, Unintended Consequences, which set the record straight on the financial crisis of 2008 and explained why U.S. growth was accelerating relative to other high-wage economies. He warned that loose monetary policy would produce neither growth nor inflation, that expansionary fiscal policy would have no lasting benefit on growth in the aftermath of the crisis, and that ill-advised attempts to rein in banking based on misplaced blame would slow an already weak recovery. Unfortunately, he was right. Now he’s back with another provocative argument: that our current obsession with income inequality is misguided and will only slow growth further. Using fact-based logic, Conard tracks the implications of an economy now constrained by both its capacity for risk-taking and by a shortage of properly trained talent—rather than by labor or capital, as was the case historically. He uses this fresh perspective to challenge the conclusions of liberal economists like Larry Summers and Joseph Stiglitz and the myths of “crony capitalism” more broadly. Instead, he argues that the growing wealth of most successful Americans is not to blame for the stagnating incomes of the middle and working classes. If anything, the success of the 1 percent has put upward pressure on employment and wages. Conard argues that high payoffs for success motivate talent to get the training and take the risks that gradually loosen the constraints to growth. Well-meaning attempts to decrease inequality through redistribution dull these incentives, gradually hurting not just the 1 percent but everyone else as well. Conard outlines a plan for growing middle- and working-class wages in an economy with a near infinite supply of labor that is shifting from capital-intensive manufacturing to knowledge-intensive, innovation-driven fields. He urges us to stop blaming the success of the 1 percent for slow wage growth and embrace the upside of inequality: faster growth and greater prosperity for everyone.From the Hardcover edition.
The Upside of US-Chinese Strategic Competition: Institutional Balancing and Order Transition in the Asia Pacific
by Kai He Huiyun FengUS–Chinese strategic competition is a defining factor in world politics. The prevailing narrative on US–China relations predicts inevitable conflicts between these two giants, potentially leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy. While fully acknowledging the inherent dangers of potential wars or military conflicts between the two powers, this book shows that competition is not necessarily detrimental. By systematically examining US–China institutional balancing across security, economic and political domains, particularly in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, this book highlights three positive externalities or unintended consequences: the revitalisation of regional institutions to address emerging challenges, unexpected collaborations between great powers (the US and China) and regional actors, and the provision of public goods by both nations. The book argues that constructive and institutionalised competition between the US and China, if managed with strategic foresight and restraint, could inadvertently lead to positive outcomes – institutional peace – in the Asia-Pacific region.
The Upstairs Wife
by Rafia ZakariaA memoir of Karachi through the eyes of its women An Indies Introduce Debut Authors Selection For a brief moment on December 27, 2007, life came to a standstill in Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto, the country's former prime minister and the first woman ever to lead a Muslim country, had been assassinated at a political rally just outside Islamabad. Back in Karachi--Bhutto's birthplace and Pakistan's other great metropolis--Rafia Zakaria's family was suffering through a crisis of its own: her Uncle Sohail, the man who had brought shame upon the family, was near death. In that moment these twin catastrophes--one political and public, the other secret and intensely personal--briefly converged. Zakaria uses that moment to begin her intimate exploration of the country of her birth. Her Muslim-Indian family immigrated to Pakistan from Bombay in 1962, escaping the precarious state in which the Muslim population in India found itself following the Partition. For them, Pakistan represented enormous promise. And for some time, Zakaria's family prospered and the city prospered. But in the 1980s, Pakistan's military dictators began an Islamization campaign designed to legitimate their rule--a campaign that particularly affected women's freedom and safety. The political became personal when her aunt Amina's husband, Sohail, did the unthinkable and took a second wife, a humiliating and painful betrayal of kin and custom that shook the foundation of Zakaria's family but was permitted under the country's new laws. The young Rafia grows up in the shadow of Amina's shame and fury, while the world outside her home turns ever more chaotic and violent as the opportunities available to post-Partition immigrants are dramatically curtailed and terrorism sows its seeds in Karachi. Telling the parallel stories of Amina's polygamous marriage and Pakistan's hopes and betrayals, The Upstairs Wife is an intimate exploration of the disjunction between exalted dreams and complicated realities.From the Hardcover edition.
The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again
by Robert D. PutnamAn eminent political scientist&’s brilliant analysis of economic, social, and political trends over the past century demonstrating how we have gone from an individualistic &“I&” society to a more communitarian &“We&” society and then back again, and how we can learn from that experience to become a stronger, more unified nation—from the author of Bowling Alone and Our Kids.Deep and accelerating inequality; unprecedented political polarization; vitriolic public discourse; a fraying social fabric; public and private narcissism—Americans today seem to agree on only one thing: This is the worst of times. But we&’ve been here before. During the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, America was highly individualistic, starkly unequal, fiercely polarized, and deeply fragmented, just as it is today. However as the twentieth century opened, America became—slowly, unevenly, but steadily—more egalitarian, more cooperative, more generous; a society on the upswing, more focused on our responsibilities to one another and less focused on our narrower self-interest. Sometime during the 1960s, however, these trends reversed, leaving us in today&’s disarray. In a sweeping overview of more than a century of history, drawing on his inimitable combination of statistical analysis and storytelling, Robert Putnam analyzes a remarkable confluence of trends that brought us from an &“I&” society to a &“We&” society and then back again. He draws inspiring lessons for our time from an earlier era, when a dedicated group of reformers righted the ship, putting us on a path to becoming a society once again based on community. Engaging, revelatory, and timely, this is Putnam&’s most ambitious work yet, a fitting capstone to a brilliant career.
The Urban Apparatus: Mediapolitics and the City
by Reinhold MartinUrbanization is a system of power and knowledge, and today&’s city functions through the expansive material infrastructures of the urban order. In The Urban Apparatus, Reinhold Martin analyzes urbanization and the contemporary city in aesthetic, socioeconomic, and mediapolitical terms. He argues that understanding the city as infrastructure reveals urbanization to be a way of imparting functional, aesthetic, and cognitive order to a contradictory, doubly bound neoliberal regime.Blending critical philosophy, political theory, and media theory, The Urban Apparatus explores how the aesthetics of cities and their political economies overlap. In a series of ten essays, with a detailed theoretical introduction, Martin explores questions related to urban life, drawn from a wide range of global topics—from the fiscal crisis in Detroit to speculative development in Mumbai to the landscape of Mars, from discussions of race and the environment to housing and economic inequality. Each essay proposes a particular &“mediator&” (or a material complex) that is shaped by imaginative practices, each answering the question &“What is a city, today?&” The Urban Apparatus serves as an &“urban&” bookend to the architectural questions explored by Martin in his earlier book Utopia&’s Ghost, and ultimately offers readers a way to think politically about urbanization.
The Urban Block: A Guide for Urban Designers, Architects and Town Planners
by Jonathan Tarbatt Chloe Street TarbattThe block is no more than the land and building area defined by streets. It is the nature of the interface between the two, which has a critical impact on the quality of the spaces between those buildings. The importance of the block to city life is well rehearsed, and in any case, we seldom find ourselves in the business of making cities from scratch. But we are in the business of making new houses, neighbourhoods and new local centres, and we need lots of them: 250,000 a year to be imprecise. Against the background of a burgeoning housing shortage in the UK, there are varied issues to be reconciled. The Urban Block charts the fall and rise of the perimeter block as the staple of urban form and structure from ancient times. It takes you through the process of understanding, defining, structuring and designing the block. Carefully selected urban and suburban case examples explain “do's and don'ts” of good block layout and will help you to produce better masterplans, while staying in touch with commercial realities.
The Urban Climate Challenge: Rethinking the Role of Cities in the Global Climate Regime (Cities and Global Governance)
by Craig Johnson Noah Toly Heike SchroederDrawing upon a variety of empirical and theoretical perspectives, The Urban Climate Challenge provides a hands-on perspective about the political and technical challenges now facing cities and transnational urban networks in the global climate regime. Bringing together experts working in the fields of global environmental governance, urban sustainability and climate change, this volume explores the ways in which cities, transnational urban networks and global policy institutions are repositioning themselves in relation to this changing global policy environment. Focusing on both Northern and Southern experience across the globe, three questions that have strong bearing on the ways in which we understand and assess the changing relationship between cities and global climate system are examined. How are cities repositioning themselves in relation to the global climate regime? How are cities being repositioned - conceptually and epistemologically? What are the prospects for crafting policies that can reduce the urban carbon footprint while at the same time building resilience to future climate change? The Urban Climate Challenge will be of interest to scholars of urban climate policy, global environmental governance and climate change. It will be of interest to readers more generally interested in the ways in which cities are now addressing the inter-related challenges of sustainable urban growth and global climate change. Chapter 9 and Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at www.tandfebooks.com/openaccess. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license.
The Urban Commons: How Data and Technology Can Rebuild Our Communities
by Daniel T. O'BrienThrough voicemail, apps, websites, and Twitter, Boston’s sophisticated 311 system allows citizens to report potholes, broken streetlights, graffiti, and vandalism that affect everyone’s quality of life. Drawing on Boston’s rich data, Daniel T. O’Brien offers a model of what smart technology can do for cities seeking both growth and sustainability.
The Urban Condition (Questioning Cities)
by Brendan GleesonThis book will speak to the new human epoch, the Urban Age. A majority of humanity now lives for the first time in cities. The city, the highest invention of the modern age, is now the human heartland. And yet the same process that brought us the city and its wonders, modernisation, has also thrown up challenges and threats, especially climate change, resource depletion, social division and economic insecurity. This book considers how these threats are encountered and countered in the urban age, focusing on the issue of human knowledge and self-awareness, just as Hannah Arendt’s influential The Human Condition did half a century ago. The Human Condition is now The Urban Condition. And it is this condition that will define human prospects in an age of default and risk. Gleeson expertly explores the concept through three main themes. The first is an exploration of what defines the current human condition, especially the expanding cities that are at the heart of an over-consumptive world economic order. The second exposes and reviews the reawakening of forms of knowledge (‘naturalism’) that are likely to worsen not improve our comprehension of the crisis. The new ‘science of urbanism’ in popular new literature exemplifies this dangerous trend. The third and last part of the book considers prospects for a new urban, and therefore human, dispensation, ‘The Good City’. We must first journey in our urban vessels through troubled times. But can we now start to plot the way to new shores, to a safer, more resilient city that provides for human flourishing? The Urban Condition attempts this ideal, conceiving a new urbanism based on the old idea of self-limitation. The Urban Condition is an original, timely book that reconsiders and redeploys Arendt’s famous notion of The Human Condition in an age of cities and risk. It brings together several important strands of human consideration, urbanisation, climate threat, resource depletion, economic default and critical knowledge and weaves them into a new analysis of the times. It also looks to a future that is nearly with us—of changed climate, resource scarcity and economic stress. The book journeys into these troubled times, proposing the idea of Lifeboat Cities as a way of thinking about the human journey to come
The Urban Experience: A People-Environment Perspective
by S. J. Neary M. S. Symes F. E. BrownThis book provides a representative selection of the highest quality papers submitted to the IAPS 13 conference held in Manchester in 1994. The papers are concerned with current research on the experience of living in cities and are drawn from developed, developing and under-developed countries in all parts of the world.
The Urban Fabric of Crime and Fear
by Vania CeccatoHow does the city's urban fabric relate to crime and fear, and how is that fabric affected by crime and fear? Does the urban environment affect one's decision to commit an offence? Is there a victimisation-related inequality within cities? How do crime and fear interrelate to inequality and segregation in cities of developing countries? What are the challenges to planning cities which are both safe and sustainable? This book searches for answers to these questions in the nature of the city, particularly in the social interactions that take place in urban space distinctively guided by different land uses and people's activities. In other words, the book deals with the urban fabric of crime and fear. The novelty of the book is to place safety and security issues on the urban scale by (1) showing links between urban structure, and crime and fear, (2) illustrating how different disciplines deal with urban vulnerability to (and fear of) crime (3) including concrete examples of issues and challenges found in European and North American cities, and, without being too extensive, also in cities of the Global South.
The Urban Fix: Resilient Cities in the War Against Climate Change, Heat Islands and Overpopulation
by Douglas KelbaughCities are one of the most significant contributors to global climate change. The rapid speed at which urban centers use large amounts of resources adds to the global crisis and can lead to extreme local heat. The Urban Fix addresses how urban design, planning and policies can counter the threats of climate change, urban heat islands and overpopulation, helping cities take full advantage of their inherent advantages and new technologies to catalyze social, cultural and physical solutions to combat the epic, unprecedented challenges humanity faces. The book fills a conspicuous void in the international dialogue on climate change and heat islands by examining both the environmental benefits in developed countries and the population benefit in developing countries. Urban heat islands can be addressed in incremental, manageable steps, such as planting trees and painting roofs white, which provide a more concrete and proactive sense of progress for policymakers and practitioners. This book is invaluable to anyone searching for a better understanding of the impact of resilient cities in the monumental and urgent fight against climate change, and provides the tools to do so.
The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way We Feed Cities
by Peter LadnerOur reliance on industrial agriculture has resulted in a food supply riddled with hidden environmental, economic and health care costs and beset by rising food prices. With only a handful of corporations responsible for the lion's share of the food on our supermarket shelves, we are incredibly vulnerable to supply chain disruption. The Urban Food Revolution provides a recipe for community food security based on leading innovations across North America. The author draws on his political and business experience to show that we have all the necessary ingredients to ensure that local, fresh sustainable food is affordable and widely available. He describes how cities are bringing food production home by:Growing community through neighborhood gardening, cooking and composting programsRebuilding local food processing, storage and distribution systemsInvesting in farmers markets and community supported agricultureReducing obesity through local fresh food initiatives in schools, colleges and universities.Ending inner-city food desertsProducing food locally makes people healthier, alleviates poverty, creates jobs, and makes cities safer and more beautiful. The Urban Food Revolution is an essential resource for anyone who has lost confidence in the global industrial food system and wants practical advice on how to join the local food revolution.
The Urban Gardens of Havana: Seeking Revolutionary Plants in Ideologized Spaces
by Ola Plonska Younes SaramifarThis book relates stories of everyday life revolving around small-scale urban gardens in Central Havana and focusing particularly on that of Marcelo, a seventy-four-year-old revolutionary and gardener. The urban gardens are contested spaces: though monitored and controlled by Cuban state institutions, they also offer possibilities of crafting life in resistance. The experiences the authors narrate are not ‘thick descriptions,’ linked to larger political issues, but rather rhizomatic observations that highlight the relationships between humans and non-humans within the nature-culture debate. Using these experiences, the authors argue that ‘the political’ reaches beyond the affairs of state and governance and should be seen as an all-encompassing part of life. The authors thereby invite the social sciences to focus on the microscopic and the day-to-day to illuminate how the political affairs of lives can be imagined differently.
The Urban Housing Handbook
by Eric Firley Victor DeupiTHE URBAN HOUSING HANDBOOK An insightful and revealing look at the intersection of housing and urban design In the newly revised Second Edition of The Urban Housing Handbook, Eric Firley and Victor Deupi deliver a vital design and analysis tool for housing practitioners, students, and researchers. The book outlines the characteristics of 30 of the most notable housing types from around the world, studied against a background of increasing densification. Each of the 30 chapters includes a fully-explored tradi tional example followed by one or two contemporary projects of similar spatial configuration that address changing trends in architecture and urban design. For this latest edition all contemporary examples have been updated and are now presented on two full spreads per chapter. Other features include: A rigorous analytical method that classifies the types according to four main categories (courtyard houses, row houses, compounds and apartment buildings) A thorough introduction to the relationship between an individual housing unit and the urban fabric that it creates through repetition A strong focus on dense metropolitan projects from around the world A set of key figures that translate visual information into metrics Unique, original drawings of illustrated housing accompanied by aerial and street-level context photos Conceived for architects and urban designers, The Urban Housing Handbook is also an ideal resource for urban planners, housing developers, builders, and housing trust professionals.
The Urban Housing Manual: Making Regulatory Frameworks Work for the Poor
by Geoffrey Payne Michael MajaleRed tape is a significant stumbling block to the provision of affordable shelter to the urban poor and, indeed, slums are largely the result of inappropriate regulatory frameworks. This practice-oriented manual tackles the issue of regulatory frameworks for urban upgrading and new housing development, and how they impact on access to adequate, affordable shelter and other key livelihood assets, in particular for the urban poor. It illustrates two methods for reviewing regulatory frameworks and expounds guiding principles for effecting change, informed by action research. The accompanying CD-Rom contains case studies, methods, exercises and tools, references and website links, and a video on reviewing regulatory frameworks.
The Urban Improvise: Improvisation-Based Design for Hybrid Cities
by Kristian KloecklA book for architects, designers, planners, and urbanites that explores how cities can embrace improvisation to improve urban life The built environment in today’s hybrid cities is changing radically. The pervasiveness of networked mobile and embedded devices has transformed a predominantly stable background for human activity into spaces that have a more fluid behavior. Based on their capability to sense, compute, and act in real time, urban spaces have the potential to go beyond planned behaviors and, instead, change and adapt dynamically. These interactions resemble improvisation in the performing arts, and this book offers a new improvisation-based framework for thinking about future cities. Kristian Kloeckl moves beyond the smart city concept by unlocking performativity, and specifically improvisation, as a new design approach and explores how city lights, buses, plazas, and other urban environments are capable of behavior beyond scripts. Drawing on research of digital cities and design theory, he makes improvisation useful and applicable to the condition of today’s technology-imbued cities and proposes a new future for responsive urban design.
The Urban Library: Creative City Branding in Spaces for All
by Julia NevárezThis book examines the role, history and function of public libraries in contemporary societies as motors that drive development. It analyses through case studies, how contemporary libraries have been redesigned to offer a new kind of public space while also reshaping neglected areas in cities. Broadly understood the book seeks to comprehend contemporary library design, urban development and the revitalization of specific urban areas.Important and world famous architects – star-architects – have designed signature architecture in the contemporary libraries selected for this volume. The examples to be showcased in the book include the main Seattle Public Library, Salt Lake City Public Library, New York Public Library, Spain Library Medellin, Colombia, Halifax Central Library Nova Scotia, Canada and Library of Alexandria in Egypt to offer examples of what constitute the approach to libraries and urban development in many cities around the world nowadays. Data in the form of interviews to library directors, librarians and users, tours of libraries, visual documentation and archival research have been collected for most public libraries included as case studies for the book.The impulse to archive has been framed and understood in the literature as a modern desire to control fleeting reality. Libraries as such respond to this desire by collecting, storing and circulating resources (books and other kinds of media). But more recently there has been an emphasis on the public character of library spaces in which people gather not only to obtain information and read by themselves but also to experience the very urban quality of proximity to others in more informal and less structured environments as public space. Community events characterize the programming of all the libraries included in the book. The design of these new libraries fit into urban development initiatives where libraries – like other iconic cultural spaces of cities – become central components to market cities for the consumption of culture. Libraries become sites to be visited and explored by tourists while providing services for residents. They are also machines to accelerate urban development especially in areas previously neglected by development.
The Urban Masterplanning Handbook
by Katharina Groen Eric FirleyA highly illustrated reference tool, this handbook provides comparative visual analysis of major urban extensions and masterplans around the world. It places an important new emphasis on the processes and structures that influence urban form, highlighting the significant impact that public or private landownership, management and funding might have on shaping a particular project. Each of the book's 20 subjects is rigorously analysed through original diagrams, scale drawings and descriptive texts, which are complemented by key statistics and colour photography. The case studies are presented in order of size rather than date or geographical location. This offers design professionals, developers and city planners, as well as students of architecture and urban design informed organisational and formal comparisons, leading to intriguing insights.A wide geographical range of contemporary and historic masterplans are featured. These encompass European projects from the 19th century to the present day: Belgravia in London, Sarphatipark in Amsterdam, Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, La Défense Seine Arche in Paris and Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm. In North America, the postwar development of Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan is also the subject of a case study. More recent and ongoing international urban schemes are included, such as Puerto Madero in Buenos Aires, Downtown Dubai and the New Central Business District in Beijing.
The Urban Political
by Ugo Rossi Theresa EnrightThis book examines the political and economic trajectories of cities following the 2008 financial crisis. The authors claim that in this era--which they dub "late neoliberalism"--urban spaces, institutions, subjectivities, and organizational forms are undergoing processes of radical transformation and recomposition. The volume deftly argues that the urban political horizon of late neoliberalism is ambivalent; marked by many progressive mobilizations for equality and justice, but also by regressive forces of austerity, exploitation, and domination.
The Urban Politics of Squatters' Movements
by Miguel A. Martínez LópezThis volume sheds light on the development of squatting practices and movements in nine European cities (Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Rome, Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, Rotterdam and Brighton) by examining the numbers, variations and significant contexts in their life course. It reveals how and why squatting practices have shifted and to what extent they engender urban movements. The book measures the volume and changes in squatting over various decades, mostly by focusing on Squatted Social Centres but also including squatted housing. In addition, it systematically compares the cycles, socio-spatial structures and the political implications of squatting in selected cities. This collection highlights how squatters’ movements have persisted over more than four decades through different trajectories and circumstances, especially in relation to broader protest cycles and reveals how political opportunities and constraints influence the conflicts around the legalisation of squats.p>
The Urban Sociology Reader (Routledge Urban Reader Series)
by Christopher Mele Jan LinThe urban world is an exciting terrain for investigating the central institutions, structures and problems of the social world and how they have transformed through the last 200 years. This Reader comprises sections on urban social theory, racial and social difference in the city, culture in everyday life, culture and the urban economy, globalization and transnational social relations and the regulation of urban space. Drawing together seminal selections covering the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, this Reader includes forty-three significant writings from eminent names such as Simmel, Wirth, Park, Burgess, DuBois, Zukin, Sassen, and Harvey. The 2nd edition illuminates more recent urban issues such as sprawl, sustainability, immigration and urban protest. Selections are predominantly sociological, but some readings cross disciplinary boundaries. Providing an essential resource for students of urban studies, this book brings together important but, till now, widely dispersed writings. Editorial commentaries precede each entry; introducing the text, demonstrating its significance, and outlining the issues surrounding its topic, whilst the associated bibliography enables deeper investigations.
The Urban Struggle for Economic, Environmental and Social Justice: Deepening their roots (Routledge Equity, Justice and the Sustainable City series)
by Malo André HutsonThis book discusses the current demographic shifts of blacks, Latinos, and other people of colour out of certain strong-market cities and the growing fear of displacement among low-income urban residents. It documents these populations' efforts to remain in their communities and highlights how this leads to community organizing around economic, environmental, and social justice. The book shows how residents of once-neglected urban communities are standing up to city economic development agencies, influential real estate developers, universities, and others to remain in their neighbourhoods, protect their interests, and transform their communities into sustainable, healthy communities. These communities are deploying new strategies that build off of past struggles over urban renewal. Based on seven years of research, this book draws on a wealth of material to conduct a case study analysis of eight low-income/mixed-income communities in Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. This timely book is aimed at researchers and postgraduate students interested in urban policy and politics, community development, urban studies, environmental justice, urban public health, sociology, community-based research methods, and urban planning theory and practice. It will also be of interest to policy makers, community activists, and the private sector.