City Rules offers a challenge to students and professionals in urban planning, design, and policy to change the rules of city-building, using regulations to reinvigorate, rather than stifle, our communities. Emily Talen demonstrates that regulations are a primary detriment to the creation of a desirable urban form. While many contemporary codes encourage sprawl and even urban blight, that hasn't always been the case-and it shouldn't be in the future. Talen provides a visually rich history, showing how certain eras used rules to produce beautiful, walkable, and sustainable communities, while others created just the opposite. She makes complex regulations understandable, demystifying city rules like zoning and illustrating how written codes translate into real-world consequences. Most importantly, Talen proposes changes to these rules that will actually enhance communities' freedom to develop unique spaces.

This book reconsiders the fundamental principles of zoning and city planning over the course of the past one-hundred years, and the lessons that can be learned for the future of cities. Bringing together the contributions of leading scholars, representing diverse methodologies and academic disciplines, this book studies core questions about the functionality of cities and the goals that should be promoted via zoning and planning. It considers the increasing pace of urbanization and growth of mega cities in both developed and developing countries; changing concepts on the role of mixed-use and density zoning; new policies on inclusionary zoning as a way to facilitate urban justice and social mobility; and the effects of current macrophenomena, such as mass immigration and globalization, on the changing landscape of cities. The book’s twelve chapters are divided into four parts, each addressing different aspects of zoning and planning by combining theoretical analysis with a close observation of diverse case studies from North America and Europe to the Middle East and developing economies. Part I offers a critical analysis of the conventional account of zoning as a top-down form of land-use regulation starting with the 1916 NYC code. Part II studies how contemporary concepts of zoning, both substantive and procedural, impact the built environment across today’s cities. Part III revisits the economic foundations of zoning and urban policy in the context of domestic markets, as compared with the regulatory and market effects of interstate agreements on cross-border real estate investments. Part IV analyzes the dominant, yet often implicit social and political motives that are driving zoning policies across different countries. This volume’s focus on the ties between zoning policy and economics, politics, socioeconomic conditions, and the local-to-global scope of governance will appeal to scholars and students of political science, economics, law, planning, sustainability, geography, sociology, and architecture, as well as policy-makers and practitioners, especially those in developing countries and transitional and emerging economies.

Over the last half century, "smartness"—the drive for ubiquitous computing—has become a mandate: a new mode of managing and governing politics, economics, and the environment. Smart phones. Smart cars. Smart homes. Smart cities. The imperative to make our world ever smarter in the face of increasingly complex challenges raises several questions: What is this "smartness mandate"? How has it emerged, and what does it say about our evolving way of understanding—and managing—reality? How have we come to see the planet and its denizens first and foremost as data-collecting instruments? In The Smartness Mandate, Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell radically suggest that "smartness" is not primarily a technology, but rather an epistemology. Through this lens, they offer a critical exploration of the practices, technologies, and subjects that such an understanding relies upon—above all, artificial intelligence and machine learning. The authors approach these not simply as techniques for solving problems of calculations, but rather as modes of managing life (human and other) in terms of neo-Darwinian evolution, distributed intelligences, and "resilience," all of which have serious implications for society, politics, and the environment. The smartness mandate constitutes a new form of planetary governance, and Halpern and Mitchell aim to map the logic of this seemingly inexorable and now naturalized demand to compute, to illuminate the genealogy of how we arrived here and to point to alternative imaginaries of the possibilities and potentials of smart technologies and infrastructures.