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Urban Ecosystem Justice: Strategies for Equitable Sustainability and Ecological Literacy in the City (Routledge Equity, Justice and the Sustainable City series)
by Scott KelloggMerging together the fields of urban ecology, environmental justice, and urban environmental education, Urban Ecosystem Justice promotes building fair, accessible, and mutually beneficial relationships between citizens and the soils, water, atmospheres, and biodiversity in their cities. This book provides a framework for re-centering issues of justice and fairness in sustainability discourse while challenging the profound ecological alienation experienced by urban residents. While the urban sustainability movement has had many successes in the past few decades, there remain areas for it to grow. For one, the benefits of sustainability have disproportionately benefited wealthier city residents, with concerns over equity, justice, and social sustainability frequently taking a back seat to economic and environmental considerations. Additionally, many city dwellers remain estranged from and unfamiliar with ecological processes, with urban environments often thought of as existing outside of nature or as hopelessly degraded. Through a citizen-centered lens, the book offers a guide to reconciling these issues by demonstrating how questions of equity, access, and justice apply to the biophysical dimensions of the urban ecosystem: soil, water, air, waste, and biodiversity. Drawing heavily from the fields of urban ecology, environmental justice, and ecological design, this book lays out a science of cities for people: a pedagogical platform that can be used to promote ecological literacy in underrepresented urban communities through affordable and decentralized means. This book provides both a theoretical and practical field guide to students and researchers of urban sustainability, city planners, architects, policymakers, and activists wishing to develop reciprocal relationships with urban ecologies.
Urban Ecosystems
by Frederick R. Adler Colby J. TannerAs humans have come to dominate the earth, the ideal of studying and teaching ecology in pristine ecosystems has become impossible to achieve. Our planet is now a mosaic of ecosystems ranging from the relatively undisturbed to the completely built, with the majority of people living in urban environments. This accessible introduction to the principles of urban ecology provides students with the tools they need to understand these increasingly important urban ecosystems. It builds upon the themes of habitat modification and resource use to demonstrate how multiple ecological processes interact in cities and how human activity initiates chains of unpredictable unintended ecological consequences. Broad principles are supported throughout by detailed examples from around the world and a comprehensive list of readings from the primary literature. Questions, exercises and laboratories at the end of each chapter encourage discussion, hands-on study, active learning, and engagement with the world outside the classroom window.
Urban Environment
by Sébastien Rauch Gregory Morrison Stefan Norra Nina SchleicherOver half of the global population now lives in cities. This ongoing urbanisation is making it increasingly important to adequately manage urban systems and preserve urban environments. This book is the outcome of the 11th Urban Environment Symposium (UES) held on 16-19 September 2012 in Karlsruhe, Germany. The UES aims at providing a forum on the sciences and practices needed to promote a sustainable future in urban environments. Papers by leading experts are presented in sections on Urban Management and Spatial Planning, Green Cities and Urban Ecosystems, Urban Planning and Development, Air Quality and Noise, Urban Climate Change and Adaptation, and Contamination of Urban Waters and its Effects.
Urban Environment and Smart Cities in Asian Countries: Insights for Social, Ecological, and Technological Sustainability (Human Dynamics in Smart Cities)
by Uday Chatterjee Anzhelika Antipova Shovan Ghosh Sushobhan Majumdar Martiwi Diah SetiawatiThis book offers a thorough description of the challenges posed by increasing global urbanization. In addition, comprehensive perspectives are offered on how the contemporary urban challenges of our time are tackled by existing designers, architects, urban planners, and landscape architects thereby considering climate change, migration, resilience, politics, and environmental degradation. It includes insights from environmental design, geography, strategic planning, and engineering design. It goes beyond the jargon of technical innovation, and exposes the political, social and physical effects of digitalizing the world in smart cities. The book focuses on the application of geospatial technology of smart cities – including system design for basic services, real-time control and the Internet of Things. It highlights the planning of land use, strategic development, and ecosystem-based knowledge to enhance economic growth and healthy urban environment and smart city management. The book also shows the contradictory aspects of smart city studies, and provides useful insights into the creation and execution of policies to strengthen decision-making processes in smart cities. This book leads the reader to a greater understanding of smart city growth, both theoretical and realistic and as such it provides an interesting read for urban geographers, urban designers and planners, environmental specialists, practitioners, students.
Urban Environmental Education Review (Cornell Series in Environmental Education)
Urban Environmental Education Review explores how environmental education can contribute to urban sustainability. Urban environmental education includes any practices that create learning opportunities to foster individual and community well-being and environmental quality in cities. It fosters novel educational approaches and helps debunk common assumptions that cities are ecologically barren and that city people don't care for, or need, urban nature or a healthy environment.Topics in Urban Environmental Education Review range from the urban context to theoretical underpinnings, educational settings, participants, and educational approaches in urban environmental education. Chapters integrate research and practice to help aspiring and practicing environmental educators, urban planners, and other environmental leaders achieve their goals in terms of education, youth and community development, and environmental quality in cities.The ten-essay series Urban EE Essays, excerpted from Urban Environmental Education Review, may be found here: naaee.org/eepro/resources/urban-ee-essays. These essays explore various perspectives on urban environmental education and may be reprinted/reproduced only with permission from Cornell University Press.
Urban Environmental Stewardship and Civic Engagement: How planting trees strengthens the roots of democracy (Routledge Explorations in Environmental Studies)
by Dana R. Fisher Erika S. Svendsen James ConnollyOnce considered the antithesis of a verdant and vibrant ecosystem, cities are now being hailed as highly efficient and complex social ecological systems. Emerging from the streets of the post-industrial city are well-tended community gardens, rooftop farms and other viable habitats capable of supporting native flora and fauna. At the forefront of this transformation are the citizens living in the cities themselves. As people around the world increasingly relocate to urban areas, this book discusses how they engage in urban stewardship and what civic participation in the environment means for democracy. Drawing on data collected through a two-year study of volunteer stewards who planted trees as part of the MillionTreesNYC initiative in the United States, this book examines how projects like this can make a difference to the social fabric of a city. It analyses quantitative survey data along with qualitative interview data that enables the volunteers to share their personal stories and motivations for participating, revealing the strong link between environmental stewardship and civic engagement. As city governments in developed countries are investing more and more in green infrastructure campaigns to change the urban landscape, this book sheds light on the social importance of these initiatives and shows how individuals’ efforts to reshape their cities serve to strengthen democracy. It draws out lessons that are highly applicable to global cities and policies on sustainability and civic engagement.
Urban Ethics: Conflicts Over the Good and Proper Life in Cities (Routledge Studies in Urbanism and the City)
by Moritz Ege Johannes MoserThis book delves into the ethical dimension of urban life: how should one live in the city? What constitutes a ‘good’ life under urban condition? Who gets to live a ‘good’ life, and whose ideas of morality, propriety and ‘good’ prevail? What is the connection between the ‘good’ and the ‘just’ in urban life?Rather than philosophizing the ‘good’ and proper life in cities, the book considers what happens when urban conflicts and urban futures are carried out as conflicts over the good and proper life in cities. It offers an understanding of how ethical discourses, ideals and values are harmonized with material interests of different groups, taking up cases studies about environmental protection, co-housing schemes, political protest, heritage preservation, participatory planning, collaborative art production, and other topics from different eras and parts of the globe. This book offers multidisciplinary insights, ethnographic research and conceptual tools and resources to explore and better understand such conflicts. It questions the ways in which urban ethics draw on tacit moral economies of urban life and the ways in which such moral economies become explicit, political and programmatic.
Urban Ethics as Research Agenda: Outlooks and Tensions on Multidisciplinary Debates (Routledge Studies in Urbanism and the City)
by Raúl Acosta Eveline Dürr Moritz Ege Ursula Prutsch Clemens Van Loyen Gordon M. WinderThis book provides an outline for a multidisciplinary research agenda into urban ethics and offers insights into the various ways urban ethics can be configured. It explores practices and discourses through which individuals, collectives and institutions determine which developments and projects may be favourable for dwellers and visitors traversing cities. Urban Ethics as Research Agenda widens the lens to include other actors apart from powerful individuals or institutions, paying special attention to activists or civil society organizations that express concerns about collective life. The chapters provide fresh perspectives addressing the various scales that converge in the urban. The uniqueness of each city is, thus, enriched with global patterns of the urban. Local sociocultural characteristics coexist with global flows of ideas, goods and people. The focus on urban ethics sheds light on emerging spaces of human development and the ways in which ethical narratives are used to mobilize and contest them in terms of the good life. This timely book analyses urban ethical negotiations from social and cultural studies, particularly drawing on anthropology, geography, and history. This volume will be of interest to scholars, researchers and practitioners interested in ethics and urban studies.
Urban Ethnic Encounters: The Spatial Consequences (Routledge Research in Population and Migration #5)
by Aygen Erdentug Freek ColombijnUrban Ehtnic Encounters attempts to answer the two leading questions of how urban space structures the life of ethnic groups and how ethnic diversity helps to shape urban space. A multidisciplinary team of authors searches the various dimensions of the spatial organization of inter-ethnic relations in cities and countries around the globe. Unlike most ethnographies in which authors write about the 'other' in faraway places, the majority of the contributors have studied their own society.The case studies are from four different continents. Material is presented from diverse locations such as the cities of Toronto, Philadelphia, Vienna, Beirut, Jakarta, Tehran, Osaka and Albuquerque, and the countries of Israel, Brazil and Taiwan, presents a unique opportunity for comparative analysis of ethnicity and spatial patterns. From this wealth of material important inter-cultural conclusions can be made about urban ethnic diversity.
Urban Expansion and Food Security in New Zealand: The Collapse of Local Horticulture (Routledge Studies in Food, Society and the Environment)
by Benjamin Felix RichardsonThis book examines suburban development in New Zealand and its conflict with and impact on local horticulture and food security. Drawing on an ethnographic study of Auckland’s rapidly expanding urban periphery, combined with comparative case studies from California in the USA and Victoria in Australia, the book examines how the profit-making strategies of property developers and landowners drastically reshapes work and life at the edge of cities. With a significant portion of the world's croplands lying adjacent to cities, the accelerating pace of urban sprawl across the planet places unprecedented pressure on the productivity and even existence of these vital food bowl regions. The book examines how the demand for more land for development at the urban periphery collides with concerns over local food security and the protection of ecosystem services. It analyses land use policy, historical records, and physical patterns of development, alongside participant observation of local events. It combines this with interviews with government officials, property developers, landowners, local residents and horticulturists. By combining these narratives of the hectic and lucrative business of suburban property development with the collapse of local horticulture, this book shows how the realignment of the New Zealand's interests of financial profitability over other concerns led to the transformation of urban peripheries from a productive food bowl to an investment vehicle. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of urban food and agriculture, urban planning and development and rural-urban studies.
Urban Expansion, Land Cover and Soil Ecosystem Services (Routledge Studies in Urban Ecology)
by Ciro GardiMore than half of the world population now lives in cities, and urban expansion continues as rural people move to cities. This results in the loss of land for other purposes, particularly soil for agriculture and drainage. This book presents a review of current knowledge of the extension and projected expansion of urban areas at a global scale. Focusing on the impact of the process of 'land take' on soil resources and the ecosystem services that they provide, it describes approaches and methodologies for detecting and measuring urban areas, based mainly on remote sensing, together with a review of models and projected data on urban expansion. The most innovative aspect includes an analysis of the drivers and especially the impacts of soil sealing and land take on ecosystem services, including agriculture and food security, biodiversity, hydrology, climate and landscape. Case studies of cities from Europe, China and Latin America are included. The aim is not only to present and analyse this important environmental challenge, but also to propose and discuss solutions for the limitation, mitigation and compensation of this process.
The Urban Farmer
by Curtis Allen StoneThere are twenty million acres of lawns in North America. In their current form, these unproductive expanses of grass represent a significant financial and environmental cost. However, viewed through a different lens, they can also be seen as a tremendous source of opportunity. Access to land is a major barrier for many people who want to enter the agricultural sector, and urban and suburban yards have huge potential for would-be farmers wanting to become part of this growing movement.The Urban Farmer is a comprehensive, hands-on, practical manual to help you learn the techniques and business strategies you need to make a good living growing high-yield, high-value crops right in your own backyard (or someone else's). Major benefits include: Low capital investment and overhead costs Reduced need for expensive infrastructure Easy access to marketsGrowing food in the city means that fresh crops may travel only a few blocks from field to table, making this innovative approach the next logical step in the local food movement. Based on a scalable, easily reproduced business model, The Urban Farmer is your complete guide to minimizing risk and maximizing profit by using intensive production in small leased or borrowed spaces.Curtis Stone is the owner/operator of Green City Acres, a commercial urban farm growing vegetables for farmers markets, restaurants, and retail outlets. During his slower months, Curtis works as a public speaker, teacher, and consultant, sharing his story to inspire a new generation of farmers.
Urban Flood Management
by Chris Zevenbergen Adrian Cashman Niki Evelpidou Erik Pasche Stephen Garvin Richard AshleyAlong with windstorms, floods are the most common and widespread of all natural disasters. Although they can often be predicted, they cause loss of life, damage and destruction, as many urban communities are located near coasts and rivers. In terms of victims, floods are responsible for more than half the deaths caused by natural catastrophes. As f
Urban Flood Mitigation Strategies Using Geo Spatial Tools: A Practical Approach for Cities and Towns of Developing World
by Narendar KumarThe disastrous effects of floods in urban areas of various Indian cities have been increasing in severity and extent over the past decade. This book explores flood disasters, their impact in world and Indian contexts, assessing vulnerability and risks involved, and systematic use of (GIS)-enabled platforms to map mitigation measures sustainably, with special reference to the metropolitan flood mitigation endeavors. This book balances the theoretical with empirical approaches to form a unique standpoint on the various challenges and possible solutions to urban flooding in India. Through a study of major urban flood incidents, this book analyzes the factors which contribute to the rising risk of flooding with increasing urbanization, population dynamics, growth, and urban sprawl, with particular focus on the cities of Chennai, Mumbai, and Hyderabad in India. It also examines disaster governance on urban floods and legislative prospects of flood disasters through discussions on standing acts, United Nations (UN) directives, and internationally adopted practices and actions, which are applicable in the Indian context. An interdisciplinary study, this book brings together tools and research from various disciplines including geography, urban and regional planning, and GIS. It will be an invaluable resource for researchers, scholars, engineers, students, planners, academicians, and professionals of cross-disciplines to help them resolve the problem of urban flooding. It will also be of interest to the general reader seeking to learn more about disasters, urban flooding, engineering, and GIS.
Urban Flooding in Brazil
by Francisco Mendonça Ariadne Farias Elaiz BuffonThis contributed volume analyzes flooding scenarios in Brazilian cities using a geographic and spatiotemporal approach to explore impacts and ways to mitigate future disasters. The problem of urban flooding is growing in Brazilian cities due to the increasing number of natural disasters in the context of global climate change; this is a topic that poses challenges to urban planners and academics. Through three sections, this volume offers theoretical-conceptual, methodological and technical case studies, as well as cases that explore urban socio-environmental problems associated with flooding. Throughout the book, the concepts of risk, vulnerability and adaptation are used to explore future flood scenarios in Brazil.The integrated vision offered in this volume covers the floods themselves, evaluation of flood impacts, and the management process before, during, and after the flood event. The case studies presented here elucidate the concept of comprehensive urban flood management, offering a technical and diagnostic basis for the problem in different cities in Brazil. The present and future challenges presented by these chapters offer widely-transferable lessons that can be applied to making cities around the world more sustainable and disaster-resilient.
Urban Focus
by Mark HewlettThis project is aimed the 16+ age range inside or outside any kind of educational institution. It is for courses concerned with general education - either in general studies programmes or as aspects of specialist teaching. Narrative has been kept to a minimum. Instead, the books are more a collection of different items of teaching and learning materials: for example, the collection of key concepts, and the list of key questions connected withe the study. The books are compact in content and flexible in use. This book was first published in 1974.
Urban Food Planning: Seeds of Transition in the Global North (Routledge Studies in Food, Society and the Environment)
by Rositsa T. IlievaThis highly original work examines the rise of the urban food planning movement in the Global North and provides insights into the new relationship between cities and food which has started developing over the past decade. It sheds light on cities as new spaces for food system innovation and on food as a tool for sustainable urban development. Drawing insights from the literature on socio-technical transitions, the book presents examples of pioneering urban food planning endeavours from North America and Western Europe (especially the Netherlands and the UK). These are integrated into a single mosaic helping to uncover the conceptual, analytical, design, and organizational innovations emerging at the interface of food and urban policy and planning. The author shows how promising "seeds of transition" to a shared urban food planning agenda are in the making, though the urban food planning niche as a whole still lacks the necessary maturity to lastingly influence mainstream planning practices and the dominant agri-food system regime. Some of the strategic levers to cope with the current instability and limitations of urban food planning and effectively transition it from a marginal novelty to a normalized domain of policy, research, and practice are systematically examined to this end. The conclusions and recommendations put forward have major implications for scholars, activists, and public officials seeking to radically transform the co-evolution of food, cities, and the environment.
Urban Food Production for Ecosocialism: Cultivating the City
by Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro George MartinThis book explores the critical role of urban food production in strengthening communities and in building ecosocialism. It integrates theory and practice, drawing on several local case studies from seven countries across four continents: China, Cuba, Ghana, Italy, Tanzania, the UK, and the US. Research shows that the term "urban agriculture" overstates the limited food-growing potential in cities due to a shortage of land required for growing grains, the basic human food staple. For this reason, the book suggests "urban cultivation" as an appropriate term which indicates social and political progress achieved through combined labours of urbanites to produce food. It examines how these collaborative food-growing efforts help raise local social capital, foster community organisation, and create ecological awareness in order to promote urban food production while also ensuring environmental sustainability. This book illustrates how urban cultivation constitutes a potentially important aspect of urban ecosystems, as well as offers solutions to current environmental problems. It recentres attention to the global South and debunks Eurocentric narratives, challenging capitalist commercial food-growing regimes and encouraging ecosocialist food-growing practices. Written in an accessible style, this book is recommended reading about an emergent issue which will interest students and scholars of environmental studies, geography, sociology, urban studies, politics, and economics.
Urban Forestry and Arboriculture in Malaysia: An Interdisciplinary Research Perspective
by Sreetheran Maruthaveeran Wendy Y. Chen Justin MorgenrothThis book represents the latest research on urban forestry in a Malaysian context. It demonstrates that urban forestry is concerned not only with environmental enhancement, but also other aspects, such as recreation, health and well-being, and government policies. This edited collection provides a comprehensive overview of urban forestry studies from various researchers in Malaysia, and includes rich historical perspectives of urban forestry in the country. It also tackles related issues in policy. The greening of urban Malaysia in the 1970s focused primarily on beautification and was primarily the province of horticulturists, landscapers, nursery workers, town planners, and architects, with negligible inputs from foresters, particularly urban foresters. Perhaps for that reason, the term “landscaping” has been used more widely than “urban forestry” by government and private institutions, politicians, stakeholders, academicians, and the public. Nevertheless, the authors show that the concept of urban forestry is not new for developing countries such as Malaysia, where urbanization is increasing at a rapid rate. The book unpacks this demographic shift from a predominantly rural to a principally urban society. As the only unified body of work on urban forestry and arboricultural studies in Malaysia, this volume presents an important interdisciplinary reference for students, researchers, and scholars in physical geography, forestry and urban forestry, arboriculture and landscape architecture, both in Malaysia, and in other developing urbanizing countries, particularly in Southeast Asia. It is also an important resource for those working in environmental policy and practice, excavating the vital connection between the environment and well-being.
Urban Forests, Climate Change and Environmental Pollution: Physio-Biochemical and Molecular Perspectives to Enhance Urban Resilience
by Hukum SinghThis book contributes significantly to the international literature by bringing forth a novel and comprehensive exploration of urban resilience in the face of climate change and environmental pollution. Its focus on integrating physiological, biochemical, and molecular dimensions distinguishes it from existing literature. The book offers several key contributions, including an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the complex interactions within urban ecosystems. It includes cutting-edge insights that have not been extensively explored in existing literature, practical applications, and evidence-based strategies to enhance urban sustainability and resilience. The book has a global relevance to a diverse international readership and provides strategic guidance to policymakers and urban planners when making decisions to develop evidence-based strategies that cater to the specific challenges of cities. Urban forests play a critical role in enhancing the resilience of cities by providing numerous benefits, including improved air quality, reduced urban heat island effect, and enhanced biodiversity, ultimately improving urban health. Besides, urban forests are a crucial natural-based solution (NbS) to mitigate air pollution and climate change impacts in cities. However, in the face of climate change and environmental pressures, urban forests face significant challenges to their survival and functionality. This book explores the complex morpho-physio-biochemical and molecular changes that enable urban forests to flourish amidst climate change and environmental pollution. It examines how urban trees modulate their morphological structures, including root systems and physiological and biochemical functioning, and molecular alterations to withstand changing urban climatic and environmental conditions.
Urban France (Routledge Library Editions: Urban Planning #19)
by Ian ScargillOriginally published in 1983, Urban France examines the rapid growth in French cities between 1950-1980, and the serious consequences that have followed this rapid growth. This volume examines the nature of this urban explosion and the efforts of planners and others to find solutions to the resultant problems of the post-war period. The book addresses the debates surrounding the urban system, urban planning, housing and land use, retailing, and the inception of new towns.
Urban Futures: Critical Commentaries on Shaping Cities
by Malcolm Miles Tim HallUrban Futures brings together commentaries from a wide range of contemporary disciplines and fields relevant to urban culture, form and society. The book concerns cities in the broadest sense, not just as buildings and spaces, but also as processes and events or sites of occupation, in which meanings are constructed in many ways. The contributors draw on their specialist areas of research to inform current debate, but they also speculate as to how cities will be shaped in the 21st century.Specific areas of research include homeless people's organisations and restoration ecology in brownfield sites in the USA, post-industrial urban landscapes, post-industrial economics, tourism and cultural planning. The book allows each writer to state their own conclusions, but together they suggest that tomorrow's cities will, while remaining locations of difference and contestation, be rapidly evolving systems in which dwellers assume increasing responsibilities and power.
Urban Galapagos: Transition to Sustainability in Complex Adaptive Systems (Social and Ecological Interactions in the Galapagos Islands)
by Thomas Kvan Justyna KarakiewiczThis book addresses the future of urbanisation on the Galapagos Islands from a systems, governance and design perspective with the competing parameters of liveability, economic and ecological, using the Galapagos as a laboratory for the theoretical and postulative understanding of evolving settlement and habitation. The Galapagos islands are one of the world’s most examined and reported examples of a series of naturally evolving ecosystems. The biodiversity of these island ecosystems are the focus of tourism and the image across the world yet human settlement are part of the local ecology. While human intervention is limited, the islands are a distinctive context in which to consider the impact of human habitation as a part of our ecosystems. In this book, authors take the framework of complex adaptive systems (CAS) in which to model systems that grow and evolve, the relations between these various sectors change; systems that get more complex as they evolve. Tested and applied discretely in the two realms of natural and urban, for the first time this text will bring the two together in understanding options for the future of urban settlements on the Galapagos Islands and, by extension, consider how the approach can be used globally in other contexts.
Urban Gardening as Politics (Routledge Equity, Justice and the Sustainable City series)
by Chiara Tornaghi Chiara CertomàWhile most of the existing literature on community gardens and urban agriculture share a tendency towards either an advocacy view or a rather dismissive approach on the grounds of the co-optation of food growing, self-help and voluntarism to the neoliberal agenda, this collection investigates and reflects on the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of these initiatives. It questions to what extent they address social inequality and injustice and interrogates them as forms of political agency that contest, transform and re-signify ‘the urban’. Claims for land access, the right to food, the social benefits of city greening/community conviviality, and insurgent forms of planning, are multiplying within policy, advocacy and academic literature; and are becoming increasingly manifested through the practice of urban gardening. These claims are symptomatic of the way issues of social reproduction intersect with the environment, as well as the fact that urban planning and the production of space remains a crucial point of an ever-evolving debate on equity and justice in the city. Amid a mushrooming over positive literature, this book explores the initiatives of urban gardening critically rather than apologetically. The contributors acknowledge that these initiatives are happening within neoliberal environments, which promote –among other things - urban competition, the dismantling of the welfare state, the erasure of public space and ongoing austerity. These initiatives, thus, can either be manifestation of new forms of solidarity, political agency and citizenship or new tools for enclosure, inequality and exclusion. In designing this book, the progressive stance of these initiatives has therefore been taken as a research question, rather than as an assumption. The result is a collection of chapters that explore potentials and limitations of political gardening as a practice to envision and implement a more sustainable and just city.
Urban Geography: An Introductory Guide (Routledge Revivals)
by David ClarkThis book, first published in 1982, addressed the need for a fresh and comprehensive guide to the rapidly expanding area of urban geography. Drawing on examples from cities in a number of countries, including the U.S.A., David Clark outlines the contribution of geographers to the understanding of the city and urban society, and analyses the growth of the urban environment alongside planning and policy. A thorough and unique study, this title will be of particular value to undergraduate students, as well as laying the foundations for a more advanced study in urban geography and planning.