Urbanization is a system of power and knowledge, and today’s city functions through the expansive material infrastructures of the urban order. In The Urban Apparatus, Reinhold Martin analyzes urbanization and the contemporary city in aesthetic, socioeconomic, and mediapolitical terms. He argues that understanding the city as infrastructure reveals urbanization to be a way of imparting functional, aesthetic, and cognitive order to a contradictory, doubly bound neoliberal regime. Blending critical philosophy, political theory, and media theory, The Urban Apparatus explores how the aesthetics of cities and their political economies overlap. In a series of ten essays, with a detailed theoretical introduction, Martin explores questions related to urban life, drawn from a wide range of global topics—from the fiscal crisis in Detroit to speculative development in Mumbai to the landscape of Mars, from discussions of race and the environment to housing and economic inequality. Each essay proposes a particular “mediator” (or a material complex) that is shaped by imaginative practices, each answering the question “What is a city, today?” The Urban Apparatus serves as an “urban” bookend to the architectural questions explored by Martin in his earlier book Utopia’s Ghost, and ultimately offers readers a way to think politically about urbanization.

The NACTO Urban Street Design Guide shows how streets of every size can be reimagined and reoriented to prioritize safe driving and transit, biking, walking, and public activity. Unlike older, more conservative engineering manuals, this design guide emphasizes the core principle that urban streets are public places and have a larger role to play in communities than solely being conduits for traffic. The well-illustrated guide offers blueprints of street design from multiple perspectives, from the bird’s eye view to granular details. Case studies from around the country clearly show how to implement best practices, as well as provide guidance for customizing design applications to a city’s unique needs. Urban Street Design Guide outlines five goals and tenets of world-class street design: • Streets are public spaces. Streets play a much larger role in the public life of cities and communities than just thoroughfares for traffic. • Great streets are great for business. Well-designed streets generate higher revenues for businesses and higher values for homeowners. • Design for safety. Traffic engineers can and should design streets where people walking, parking, shopping, bicycling, working, and driving can cross paths safely. • Streets can be changed. Transportation engineers can work flexibly within the building envelope of a street. Many city streets were created in a different era and need to be reconfigured to meet new needs. • Act now! Implement projects quickly using temporary materials to help inform public decision making. Elaborating on these fundamental principles, the guide offers substantive direction for cities seeking to improve street design to create more inclusive, multi-modal urban environments. It is an exceptional resource for redesigning streets to serve the needs of 21st century cities, whose residents and visitors demand a variety of transportation options, safer streets, and vibrant community life.

Originally published in 1970, The Urban Revolution marked Henri Lefebvre’s first sustained critique of urban society, a work in which he pioneered the use of semiotic, structuralist, and poststructuralist methodologies in analyzing the development of the urban environment. Although it is widely considered a foundational book in contemporary thinking about the city, The Urban Revolution has never been translated into English—until now. This first English edition, deftly translated by Robert Bononno, makes available to a broad audience Lefebvre’s sophisticated insights into the urban dimensions of modern life.Lefebvre begins with the premise that the total urbanization of society is an inevitable process that demands of its critics new interpretive and perceptual approaches that recognize the urban as a complex field of inquiry. Dismissive of cold, modernist visions of the city, particularly those embodied by rationalist architects and urban planners like Le Corbusier, Lefebvre instead articulates the lived experiences of individual inhabitants of the city. In contrast to the ideology of urbanism and its reliance on commodification and bureaucratization—the capitalist logic of market and state—Lefebvre conceives of an urban utopia characterized by self-determination, individual creativity, and authentic social relationships.A brilliantly conceived and theoretically rigorous investigation into the realities and possibilities of urban space, The Urban Revolution remains an essential analysis of and guide to the nature of the city.Henri Lefebvre (d. 1991) was one of the most significant European thinkers of the twentieth century. His many books include The Production of Space (1991), Everyday Life in the Modern World (1994), Introduction to Modernity (1995), and Writings on Cities (1995).Robert Bononno is a full-time translator who lives in New York. His recent translations include The Singular Objects of Architecture by Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel (Minnesota, 2002) and Cyberculture by Pierre Lévy (Minnesota, 2001).

The Global Street Design Guide is a timely resource that sets a global baseline for designing streets and public spaces and redefines the role of streets in a rapidly urbanizing world. The guide will broaden how to measure the success of urban streets to include: access, safety, mobility for all users, environmental quality, economic benefit, public health, and overall quality of life. The first-ever worldwide standards for designing city streets and prioritizing safety, pedestrians, transit, and sustainable mobility are presented in the guide. Participating experts from global cities have helped to develop the principles that organize the guide. The Global Street Design Guide builds off the successful tools and tactics defined in NACTO's Urban Street Design Guide and Urban Bikeway Design Guide while addressing a variety of street typologies and design elements found in various contexts around the world.

Why technology is most transformative when it is playful, and innovative spatial design happens only when designers are both tinkerers and dreamers. In Urban Play, Fábio Duarte and Ricardo Álvarez argue that the merely functional aspects of technology may undermine its transformative power. Technology is powerful not when it becomes optimally functional, but while it is still playful and open to experimentation. It is through play--in the sense of acting for one's own enjoyment rather than to achieve a goal--that we explore new territories, create new devices and languages, and transform ourselves. Only then can innovative spatial design create resonant spaces that go beyond functionalism to evoke an emotional response in those who use them. The authors show how creativity emerges in moments of instability, when a new technology overthrows an established one, or when internal factors change a technology until it becomes a different technology. Exploring the role of fantasy in design, they examine Disney World and its outsize influence on design and on forms of social interaction beyond the entertainment world. They also consider Las Vegas and Dubai, desert cities that combine technology with fantasies of pleasure and wealth. Video games and interactive media, they show, infuse the design process with interactivity and participatory dynamics, leaving spaces open to variations depending on the users' behavior. Throughout, they pinpoint the critical moments when technology plays a key role in reshaping how we design and experience spaces.

A new wave of enthusiasm for smart cities, urban data, and the Internet of Things has created the impression that computation can solve almost any urban problem. Subjecting this claim to critical scrutiny, in this book, Andrés Luque-Ayala and Simon Marvin examine the cultural, historical, and contemporary contexts in which urban computational logics have emerged. They consider the rationalities and techniques that constitute emerging computational forms of urbanization, including work on digital urbanism, smart cities, and, more recently, platform urbanism. They explore the modest potentials and serious contradictions of reconfiguring urban life, city services, and urban-networked infrastructure through computational operating systems—an urban OS. Luque-Ayala and Marvin argue that in order to understand how digital technologies transform and shape the city, it is necessary to analyze the underlying computational logics themselves. Drawing on fieldwork that stretches across eleven cities in American, European, and Asian contexts, they investigate how digital products, services, and ecosystems are reshaping the ways in which the city is imagined, known, and governed. They discuss the reconstitution of the contemporary city through digital technologies, practices, and techniques, including data-driven governance, predictive analytics, digital mapping, urban sensing, digitally enabled control rooms, civic hacking, and open data narratives. Focusing on the relationship between the emerging operating systems of the city and their traditional infrastructures, they shed light on the political implications of using computer technologies to understand and generate new urban spaces and flows.