Acclaimed author and independent scholar P. D. Smith explores what it was like to live in the first cities, how they have evolved, and why in the future, cities will play an even greater role in human life. "For the first time in the history of our planet, more than half the population-3.3 billion people-is now living in cities. City is the ultimate guidebook to our urban centers-the signature unit of human civilization. With erudite prose and carefully...

This is a biography of Earthopolis, the only Urban Planet we know of. It is a history of how cities gave humans immense power over Earth, for good and for ill. Carl Nightingale takes readers on a sweeping six-continent, six-millennia tour of the world's cities, culminating in the last 250 years, when we vastly accelerated our planetary realms of action, habitat, and impact, courting dangerous new consequences and opening prospects for new hope. In...

"American suburbs are not the homogeneous places we sometimes take them for. Today's suburbs are racially, ethnically, and economically diverse with as many Democratic as Republican voters, a growing population of renters, and rising poverty. The cliché of white picket fences is well past its expiration date. The history of suburbia is equally surprising: American suburbs were once fertile ground for utopian planning, communal living, socially-conscious...

" Environmental Activism and the Urban Crisis focuses on the wave of environmental activism and grassroots movements that swept through America's older, industrial cities during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Robert Gioielli offers incisive case studies of Baltimore, St. Louis, and Chicago to show how urban activism developed as an impassioned response to a host of racial, social, and political conflicts. As deindustrialization, urban renewal, and...

A presentation of key findings and insights from over two decades of research, education, and community engagement in the acclaimed Baltimore Ecosystem Study. In a world of over seven billion people-who mostly reside in cities and their suburbs and exurbs-the Baltimore Ecosystem Study is recognized as a pioneering program for modern urban social-ecological science, critical to the emerging theory of urban ecology. After two decades of research, education,...

A survey of Jacobs's career in forty short pieces that have never been collected in a single volume: essays, articles, speeches, interviews, and lectures, covering her work in urban and economic planning as well as globalization, feminism, and universal health care.

"Jane Jacobs is universally recognized as one of the key figures in American urbanism. The author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she uncovered the complex and intertwined physical and social fabric of the city and excoriated the urban renewal policies of the 1950s. As the legend goes, Jacobs, a housewife, single-handedly stood up to Robert Moses, New York City's powerful master builder, and other city planners who sought first to...