For the past 150 years, architecture has been a significant tool in the hands of city planners and leaders. In Creating Cities/Building Cities, Peter Karl Kresl and Daniele Ietri illustrate how these planners and leaders have utilized architecture to achieve a variety of aims, influencing the situation, perception and competitiveness of their cities.

The book shows examples of small things -- City Comforts -- that make urban life pleasant: places where people can meet, methods to tame cars and to make buildings good neighbors, art that infuses personality into locations and makes them into places. Many of these small details are so obvious as to be invisible.

Most of the world's population now lives in cities. So if we are to address the problems of environmental deterioration and peak oil adequately, the city has to be a major focus of attention. EcoCities is about re-building cities and towns based on ecological principles for the long term sustainability, cultural vitality and health of the Earth's biosphere. Unique in the literature is the book's insight that the form of the city really matters-and that it is within our ability to change it, and crucial that we do. Further, that the ecocity within its bioregion is comprehensible and do-able, and can produce a healthy and potentially happy future. EcoCities describes the place of the city in evolution, nature and history. It pays special attention to the key question of accessibility and transportation, and outlines design principles for the ecocity. The reader is encouraged to plunge in to its economics and politics: the kinds of businesses, planning and leadership required. The book then outlines the tools by which a gradual transition to the ecocity could be accomplished. Throughout, this new edition is generously illustrated with the author's own inspired visions of what such rebuilt cities might actually look like.

Building Cities to LAST presents the myriad issues of sustainable urbanism in a clear and concise system, and supports holistic thinking about sustainable development in urban environments by providing four broad measures of urban sustainability that differ radically from other, less long-lived patterns: these are Lifecycle, Aesthetics, Scale, and Technology (LAST). This framework for understanding the relationship between these four measures and the essential types of infrastructure—grouped according to the basic human needs of Food, Shelter, Mobility, and Water—is laid out in a simple and easy-to-understand format. These broad measures and infrastructures address the city as a whole and as a recognizable pattern of human activity and, in turn, increase the ability of cities—and the human race—to LAST. This book will find wide readership particularly among students and young practitioners in architecture, urban planning, and landscape architecture.

Examines the social and environmental problems of our time, offering a holistic way of thinking about human interaction and its relationship to the built environment. The book outlines how traditional principles of urbanism support and sustain human cultures in cities, bringing together the issues of how we build and live together from architectural, political and technical perspectives. It contains eight essays and 62 projects.

Ecocity Berkeley offers innovative city planning solutions that would work anywhere, but the book offers a vision of what the future can be like with a fair amount of planning beforehand. This book is very inspirational, and could be used to advocate similar planning improvements in any large city. This book is meant for anyone interested in environmental activism, and anyone looking for serious innovations in their city.

In How to Build a Global City, Michele Acuto considers the rise of a new generation of so-called global cities—Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai—and the power that this concept had in their ascent, in order to analyze the general relationship between global city theory and its urban public policy practice. The global city is often invoked in theory and practice as an ideal model of development and a logic of internationalization for cities the world over. But the global city also creates deep social polarization and challenges how much local planning can achieve in a world economy. Presenting a unique elite ethnography in Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai, Acuto discusses the global urban discourses, aspirations, and strategies vital to the planning and management of such metropolitan growth. The global city, he shows, is not one single idea, but a complex of ways to imagine a place to be global and aspirations to make it so, often deeply steeped in politics. His resulting book is a call to reconcile proponents and critics of the global city toward a more explicit engagement with the politics of this global urban imagination.