In A Country of Cities, author Vishaan Chakrabarti argues that well-designed cities are the key to solving America's great national challenges: environmental degradation, unsustainable consumption, economic stagnation, rising public health costs and decreased social mobility. If we develop them wisely in the future, our cities can be the force leading us into a new era of progressive and prosperous stewardship of our nation. In compelling chapters, Chakrabarti brings us a wealth of information about cities, suburbs and exurbs, looking at how they developed across the 50 states and their roles in prosperity and globalization, sustainability and resilience, and heath and joy. Counter to what you might think, American cities today are growing faster than their suburban counterparts for the first time since the 1920s. If we can intelligently increase the density of our cities as they grow and build the transit systems, schools, parks and other infrastructure to support them, Chakrabarti shows us how both job opportunities and an improved, sustainable environment are truly within our means. In this call for an urban America, he illustrates his argument with numerous infographics illustrating provocative statistics on issues as disparate as rising childhood obesity rates, ever-lengthening automobile commutes and government subsidies that favor highways over mass transit. The book closes with an eloquent manifesto that rallies us to build "a Country of Cities," to turn a country of highways, houses and hedges into a country of trains, towers and trees. Vishaan Chakrabarti is an architect, scholar and founder of PAU. PAU designs architecture that builds the physical, cultural, and economic networks of cities, with an emphasis on beauty, function and user experience. PAU simultaneously advances strategic urbanism projects in the form of master planning, tactical project advice and advocacy.

Britain is abandoning its cities and sprawling over green fields. Crime, congestion and inequality are getting worse. Is there an alternative?After two years' work for the Urban Task Force, architect Richard Rogers and Professor Anne Power set out the problems of cities and propose radical solutions. Suburban sprawl, over-use of energy, environmental damage, depleted inner cities and marginalised communities will force us to waste less and live more compactly. We need cites for a small country.This book follows the celebrated Cities for a Small Planet, weaving together architectural and social perspectives. Future generations will inherit our cities and land: we must make them work.

As a brilliant survey of English literature in terms of changing attitudes towards country and city, Williams' highly-acclaimed study reveals the shifting images and associations between these two traditional poles of life throughout the major developmental periods of English culture.

As Australian cities face uncertain water futures, what insights can the history of Aboriginal and settler relationships with water yield? Residents have come to expect reliable, safe, and cheap water, but natural limits and the costs of maintaining and expanding water networks are at odds with forms and cultures of urban water use. Cities in a Sunburnt Country is the first comparative study of the provision, use, and social impact of water and water infrastructure in Australia's five largest cities. Drawing on environmental, urban, and economic history, this co-authored book challenges widely held assumptions, both in Australia and around the world, about water management, consumption, and sustainability. From the 'living water' of Aboriginal cultures to the rise of networked water infrastructure, the book invites us to take a long view of how water has shaped our cities, and how urban water systems and cultures might weather a warming world.

We live in a self-proclaimed Urban Age, where we celebrate the city as the source of economic prosperity, a nurturer of social and cultural diversity, and a place primed for democracy. We proclaim the city as the fertile ground from which progress will arise. Without cities, we tell ourselves, human civilization would falter and decay. In Cities in the Urban Age, Robert A. Beauregard argues that this line of thinking is not only hyperbolic—it is too celebratory by half. For Beauregard, the city is a cauldron for four haunting contradictions. First, cities are equally defined by both their wealth and their poverty. Second, cities are simultaneously environmentally destructive and yet promise sustainability. Third, cities encourage rule by political machines and oligarchies, even as they are essentially democratic and at least nominally open to all. And fourth, city life promotes tolerance among disparate groups, even as the friction among them often erupts into violence. Beauregard offers no simple solutions or proposed remedies for these contradictions; indeed, he doesn’t necessarily hold that they need to be resolved, since they are generative of city life. Without these four tensions, cities wouldn’t be cities. Rather, Beauregard argues that only by recognizing these ambiguities and contradictions can we even begin to understand our moral obligations, as well as the clearest paths toward equality, justice, and peace in urban settings.

Over the next 20 years, most low-income countries will, for the first time, become more urban than rural. Understanding demographic trends in the cities of the developing world is critical to those countries - their societies, economies, and environments. The benefits from urbanization cannot be overlooked, but the speed and sheer scale of this transformation presents many challenges. In this uniquely thorough and authoritative volume, 16 of the world's leading scholars on urban population and development have worked together to produce the most comprehensive and detailed analysis of the changes taking place in cities and their implications and impacts. They focus on population dynamics, social and economic differentiation, fertility and reproductive health, mortality and morbidity, labor force, and urban governance. As many national governments decentralize and devolve their functions, the nature of urban management and governance is undergoing fundamental transformation, with programs in poverty alleviation, health, education, and public services increasingly being deposited in the hands of untested municipal and regional governments. Cities Transformed identifies a new class of policy maker emerging to take up the growing responsibilities. Drawing from a wide variety of data sources, many of them previously inaccessible, this essential text will become the benchmark for all involved in city-level research, policy, planning, and investment decisions. The National Research Council is a private, non-profit institution based in Washington, DC, providing services to the US government, the public, and the scientific and engineering communities. The editors are members of the Council's Panel on Urban Population Dynamics.