"A presentation of micro-scaled contemporary residences that demonstrate domesticity can be both compact and beautiful. Urban areas across the globe are experiencing a renaissance, with once-forgotten downtowns and neighborhoods becoming increasingly popular for redevelopment. The houses, apartments, and multifamily buildings and developments included make great architecture out of challenging locations and narrow sites. The projects range from a...

Growth has been both an unspoken and an explicit aim of our individual and collective striving. It governs the lives of microorganisms and galaxies; it shapes the capabilities of our extraordinarily large brains and the fortunes of our economies. Growth is manifested in annual increments of continental crust, a rising gross domestic product, a child's growth chart, the spread of cancerous cells. In this magisterial book, Vaclav Smil offers systematic...

""David Bandurski is a modern-day Marco Polo taking us into theheart of new China." --Kevin Sites, author of In the Hot Zone China's explosive modernization has led to a unique phenomenon: voraciously-growing cities absorbing formerly distant villages that become tenement communities. Dragons in Diamond Village is about the plight--and the courage--of the village-dwellers caught in this tide of urbanization: Huang Minpeng, a semi-literate farmer turned...

"From the penthouse to the sewers--the political geography of the vertical city Vertical is a brilliant re-imagining of the world we live in. Today we live in a world that can no longer be read as a two-dimensional map. In Vertical Stephen Graham rewrites the city at every level, calling for a new understanding of our surroundings that takes into account above and below: why Dubai has been built to be seen from GoogleEarth; how the superrich in Sao...

A pointed argument that cities-not nation-states-can and must take the lead in fighting climate change. Climate change is the most urgent challenge we face in an interdependent world where independent nations have grown increasingly unable to cooperate effectively, even on the urgent issue of sustainability. Can cities do better? Benjamin R. Barber argues that with more than half the world's population, 80 percent of both its GDP and its greenhouse...