With style and humor, the author writes of special places in everyday Seattle. The author takes us to popular, high-profile landmarks like Pike Place Market as well as tucked-away gems — cozy cottages, trendy pubs, gracious apartment buildings, and vibrant urban villages — that flavor and enliven the city. The author shares his eye for unique, humanizing details of design, architecture, and function, bringing this colorful metropolis to life so vividly you'll practically smell the coffee they brew and sell on (almost) every street corner. Along the way, the author explains the public and private decisions that helped Seattle avoid the urban desolation that plagues other American cities. The author introduces many of Seattle's movers and shakers — mayors, developers, artists, and urban pioneers — who took it upon themselves to guide metropolitan Seattle along a different path.

With style and humor, the author writes of special places in everyday Seattle. The author takes us to popular, high-profile landmarks like Pike Place Market as well as tucked-away gems — cozy cottages, trendy pubs, gracious apartment buildings, and vibrant urban villages — that flavor and enliven the city. The author shares his eye for unique, humanizing details of design, architecture, and function, bringing this colorful metropolis to life so vividly you'll practically smell the coffee they brew and sell on (almost) every street corner. Along the way, the author explains the public and private decisions that helped Seattle avoid the urban desolation that plagues other American cities. The author introduces many of Seattle's movers and shakers — mayors, developers, artists, and urban pioneers — who took it upon themselves to guide metropolitan Seattle along a different path.

"Based on a study of the differing legal structures of Boston, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, and Seattle, City Bound explores how state law determines what cities can and cannot do to raise revenue, control land use, and improve city schools. Frug and Barron show that state law can make it much easier for cities to pursue a global-city or a tourist-city agenda than to respond to the needs of middle-class residents or to pursue regional alliances. But they also explain that state law is often so outdated, and so rooted in an unjustified distrust of local decision making, that the legal process makes it hard for successful cities to develop and implement any coherent vision of their future. Their book calls not for local autonomy but for a new structure of state-local relations that would enable cities to take the lead in charting the future course of urban development.

Consisting of presented papers from the 15th International Conference on Urban Regeneration and Sustainability, the included works address various aspects of the urban environment and provide solutions leading towards sustainability. Urban areas result in a series of environmental challenges varying from the consumption of natural resources and the subsequent generation of waste and pollution, contributing to the development of social and economic imbalances. As cities continue to grow all over the world, these problems tend to become more acute and require the development of new solutions. The challenge of planning sustainable contemporary cities lies in considering the dynamics of urban systems, exchange of energy and matter, and the function and maintenance of ordered structures directly or indirectly supplied and maintained by natural systems. The task of researchers is to improve the capacity to manage human activities, pursuing welfare and prosperity in the urban environment. Any investigation or planning on a city ought to consider the relationships between the parts and their connections with the living world. The dynamics of its networks (flows of energy matter, people, goods, information and other resources) are fundamental for an understanding of the evolving nature of today’s cities. Large cities represent a fertile ground for architects, engineers, city planners, social and political scientists, and other professionals able to conceive new ideas and time them according to technological advances and human requirements. Coastal areas and coastal cities are an important area covered in this volume as they have some specific features. Their strategic location facilitates transportation and the development of related activities, but this requires the existence of large ports, with the corresponding increase in maritime and road traffic and all its inherent negative effects. This requires the development of well-planned and managed urban environments, not only for reasons of efficiency and economics but also to avoid inflicting environmental degradation that causes the deterioration of natural resources, quality of life and human health. These research papers put a focus on sustainability across the multidisciplinary components of urban planning, the challenges presented by the increasing size of cities, the number of resources required and the complexity of modern society.

Repairing the American Metropolis is based on Douglas Kelbaugh’s Common Place: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design, first published in 1997. It is more timely and significant than ever, with new text, charts, and images on architecture, sprawl, and New Urbanism, a movement that he helped pioneer. Theory and policies have been revised, refined, updated, and developed as compelling ways to plan and design the built environment. This is an indispensable book for architects, urban designers and planners, landscape architects, architecture and urban planning students and scholars, government officials, developers, environmentalists, and citizens interested in understanding and shaping the American metropolis.

This book examines both successful and unsuccessful efforts at revitalizing low-income neighborhoods and features case studies on a wide range of American cities.