London is one of the world’s leading cities. It is home to an extraordinary concentration and diversity of people, industries, politics, religions and ideas, and plays an important role in our highly globalised and tightly networked modern world. What does the future hold for London? Investigating any aspect of the city’s future reveals a complex picture of interrelations and dependencies. …
This open access book focuses on the formation and later socio-spatial trajectories of large housing estates in the Baltic countries—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. It also explores claims that a distinctly “westward-looking orientation” in their design produced housing estates that were superior in design to those produced elsewhere in the Soviet Union (between 1944 and 1991, Estonia was…
By drawing together widely dispersed yet central writings, the Berlin Reader is an essential resource for everyone interested in urban development in one of the most interesting and important metropolises in Europe. It provides scholars as well as students, journalists and visitors with an overview of the most central discussions on the tremendous changes Berlin experienced since the fall of th…
The postwar histories of Paris and Amsterdam have been significantly defined by the notion of the “underground” as both a material and metaphorical space. Examining the underground traffic between the two cities, this book interrogates the countercultural histories of Paris and Amsterdam in the mid to late-twentieth century. Shuttling between Paris and Amsterdam, as well as between postwar …
The ongoing crisis in Europe has dramatic impact on the life in many Southern European cities: Unemployment, social deprivation, poverty, political instability, severe cuts in the welfare state budgets and a wide spread feeling of despair have eroded much of the social foundation of the cities. In this book, contributors from Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy provide an insight into the complex…
This book provides a comparative perspective on housing and planning policies affecting the future of cities, focusing on people- and place-based outcomes using the nexus of planning, design and policy. A rich mosaic of case studies features good practices of city-led strategies for affordable housing provision, as well as individual projects capitalising on partnerships to build mixed-income h…
The study of universities’ role in regional engagement has traditionally been focusing on exceptional cases. This book presents a reconceptualision which embraces its underlying complexity, and proposes a roadmap for a renewed research agenda. Starting from the grassroots level of universities’ "everyday" engagements, the book delves into the manifold ways in which university knowledge agen…
Intense attention has been paid to Detroit as a site of urban crisis. This crisis, however, has not only yielded the massive devaluation of real estate that has so often been noted; it has also yielded an explosive production of seemingly valueless urban property that has facilitated the imagination and practice of alternative urbanisms. The first sustained study of Detroit’s alternative urba…
This book on water and climate change goes beyond the usual and predictable analyses, by bringing religion and values into a discussion that is often dominated by technocratic solutions. The three case studies of Jakarta, Cape Town, and Amsterdam demonstrate the challenges of water management in urban areas and the role religion can play in addressing them. With representatives from science, po…
In modern, policy-heavy democracies, blame games about policy controversies are commonplace. Despite their ubiquity, blame games are notoriously difficult to study. This book elevates them to the place they deserve in the study of politics and public policy. Blame games are microcosms of conflictual politics that yield unique insights into democracies under pressure. Based on an original framew…