In Driving toward Modernity, Jun Zhang ethnographically explores the entanglement between the rise of the automotive regime and emergence of the middle class in South China. Focusing on the Pearl River Delta, one of the nation's wealthiest regions, Zhang shows how private cars have shaped everyday middle-class sociality, solidarity, and subjectivity, and how the automotive regime has helped make the new middle classes of the PRC. By carefully analyzing how physical and social mobility intertwines, Driving toward Modernity paints a nuanced picture of modern Chinese life, comprising the continuity and rupture as well as the structure and agency of China's great transformation.

On March 26th, 1923, in a formal ceremony, construction of the Milan–Alpine Lakes autostrada officially began, the preliminary step toward what would become the first European motorway. That Benito Mussolini himself participated in the festivities indicates just how important the project was to Italian Fascism. Driving Modernity recounts the twisting fortunes of the autostrada, which—alongside railways, aviation, and other forms of mobility—Italian authorities hoped would spread an ideology of technological nationalism. It explains how Italy ultimately failed to realize its mammoth infrastructural vision, addressing the political and social conditions that made a coherent plan of development impossible.

"Published to accompany the exhibition 'Cars: accelerating the modern world' at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, from 23 November 2019 to 19 April 2020"--Title page verso

Levine, Grengs, and Merlin marshal a compelling case to shift to accessibility-oriented planning, providing much needed conceptual clarity as to what accessibility is and is not. But their book also represents a major step toward transforming accessibility from a vaguely defined aspiration into concrete measures that can guide planning decisions. ― Journal of the American Planning Association In From Mobility to Accessibility, an expert team of researchers flips the tables on the standard models for evaluating regional transportation performance. Jonathan Levine, Joe Grengs, and Louis A. Merlin argue for an "accessibility shift" whereby transportation planning, and the transportation dimensions of land-use planning, would be based on people's ability to reach destinations, rather than on their ability to travel fast. Existing models for planning and evaluating transportation, which have taken vehicle speeds as the most important measure, would make sense if movement were the purpose of transportation. But it is the ability to reach destinations, not movement per se, that people seek from their transportation systems. While the concept of accessibility has been around for the better part of a century, From Mobility to Accessibility shows that the accessibility shift is compelled by the fundamental purpose of transportation. The book argues that the shift would be transformative to the practice of both transportation and land-use planning but is impeded by many conceptual obstacles regarding the nature of accessibility and its potential for guiding development of the built environment. By redefining success in transportation, the book provides city planners, decisionmakers, and scholars a path to reforming the practice of transportation and land-use planning in modern cities and metropolitan areas.

Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity is a study of the emergence and development of the cultural image of the Iberian peninsula’s foremost modern city.

This panoramic analysis of the condition of Western societies has been hailed as a classic. This first English edition has taken its place as a core text of contemporary sociology alongside earlier typifications of society as postindustrial and current debates about the social dimensions of the postmodern. Underpinning the analysis is the notion of the `risk society'. The changing nature of society's relation to production and distribution is related to the environmental impact as a totalizing, globalizing economy based on scientific and technical knowledge becomes more central to social organization and social conflict.

The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.