Eugenie L. Birch - Böcker

Disasters-natural ones, such as hurricanes, floods, or earthquakes, and unnatural ones such as terrorist attacks-are part of the American experience in the twenty-first century. The challenges of preparing for these events, withstanding their impact, and rebuilding communities afterward require strategic responses from different levels of government in partnership with the private sector and in accordance with the public will.Disasters have a disproportionate effect on urban places. Dense by definition, cities and their environs suffer great damage to their complex, interdependent social, environmental, and economic systems. Social and medical services collapse. Long-standing problems in educational access and quality become especially acute. Local economies cease to function. Cultural resources disappear. The plight of New Orleans and several smaller Gulf Coast cities exemplifies this phenomenon.This volume examines the rebuilding of cities and their environs after a disaster and focuses on four major issues: making cities less vulnerable to disaster, reestablishing economic viability, responding to the permanent needs of the displaced, and recreating a sense of place. Success in these areas requires that priorities be set cooperatively, and this goal poses significant challenges for rebuilding efforts in a democratic, market-based society. Who sets priorities and how? Can participatory decision-making be organized under conditions requiring focused, strategic choices? How do issues of race and class intersect with these priorities? Should the purpose of rebuilding be restoration or reformation? Contributors address these and other questions related to environmental conditions, economic imperatives, social welfare concerns, and issues of planning and design in light of the lessons to be drawn from Hurricane Katrina.

Nineteenth-century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted described his most famous project, the design of New York's Central Park, as "a democratic development of highest significance." Over the years, the significance of green in civic life has grown. In twenty-first-century America, not only open space but also other issues of sustainability-such as potable water and carbon footprints-have become crucial elements in the quality of life in the city and surrounding environment. Confronted by a U.S. population that is more than 70 percent urban, growing concern about global warming, rising energy prices, and unabated globalization, today's decision makers must find ways to bring urban life into balance with the Earth in order to sustain the natural, economic, and political environment of the modern city.In Growing Greener Cities, a collection of essays on urban sustainability and environmental issues edited by Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter, scholars and practitioners alike promote activities that recognize and conserve nature's ability to sustain urban life. These essays demonstrate how partnerships across professional organizations, businesses, advocacy groups, governments, and individuals themselves can bring green solutions to cities from London to Seattle. Beyond park and recreational spaces, initiatives that fall under the green umbrella range from public transit and infrastructure improvement to aquifer protection and urban agriculture.Growing Greener Cities offers an overview of the urban green movement, case studies in effective policy implementation, and tools for measuring and managing success. Thoroughly illustrated with color graphs, maps, and photographs, Growing Greener Cities provides a panoramic view of urban sustainability and environmental issues for green-minded city planners, policy makers, and citizens.

Growing urbanization affects women and men in fundamentally different ways, but the relationship between gender and city environments has been ignored or misunderstood. Women and men play different roles, frequent different public areas, and face different health risks. Women suffer disproportionately from disease, injury, and violence because their access to resources is often more limited than that of their male counterparts. Yet, when women are healthy and safe, so are their families and communities. Urban policy makers and public health professionals need to understand how conditions in densely populated places can help or harm the well-being of women in order to serve this large segment of humanity.Women's Health and the World's Cities illuminates the intersection of gender, health, and urban environments. This collection of essays examines the impact of urban living on the physical and psychological states of women and girls in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the United States. Urban planners, scholars, medical practitioners, and activists present original research and compelling ideas. They consider the specific needs of subpopulations of urban women and evaluate strategies for designing spaces, services, and infrastructure in ways that promote women's health. Women's Health and the World's Cities provides urban planners and public health care providers with on-the-ground examples of projects and policies that have changed women's lives for the better.

Does the place where you lived as a child affect your health as an adult? To what degree does your neighbor's success influence your own potential? The importance of place is increasingly recognized in urban research as an important variable in understanding individual and household outcomes. Place matters in education, physical health, crime, violence, housing, family income, mental health, and discrimination-issues that determine the quality of life, especially among low-income residents of urban areas.Neighborhood and Life Chances: How Place Matters in Modern America brings together researchers from a range of disciplines to present the findings of studies in the fields of education, health, and housing. The results are intriguing and surprising, particularly the debate over Moving to Opportunity, an experiment conducted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, designed to test directly the effects of relocating individuals away from areas of concentrated poverty. Its results, while strong in some respects, showed very different outcomes for boys and girls, with girls more likely than boys to experience positive outcomes. Reviews of the literature in education and health, supplemented by new research, demonstrate that the problems associated with residing in a negative environment are indisputable, but also suggest the directions in which solutions may lie.The essays collected in this volume give readers a clear sense of the magnitude of contemporary challenges in metropolitan America and of the role that place plays in reinforcing them. Although the contributors suggest many practical immediate interventions, they also recognize the vital importance of continued long-term efforts to rectify place-based limitations on lifetime opportunities.

For the first time in history, the majority of the world's population lives in urban areas. Much of this urbanization has been fueled by the rapidly growing cities of the developing world, exemplified most dramatically by booming megacities such as Lagos, Karachi, and Mumbai. In the coming years, as both the number and scale of cities continue to increase, the most important matters of social policy and economic development will necessarily be urban issues. Urbanization, across the world but especially in Asia and Africa, is perhaps the critical issue of the twenty-first century.Global Urbanization surveys essential dimensions of this growth and begins to formulate a global urban agenda for the next half century. Drawing from many disciplines, the contributors tackle issues ranging from how cities can keep up with fast-growing housing needs to the possibilities for public-private partnerships in urban governance. Several essays address the role that cutting-edge technologies such as GIS software, remote sensing, and predictive growth models can play in tracking and forecasting urban growth. Reflecting the central importance of the Global South to twenty-first-century urbanism, the volume includes case studies and examples from China, India, Uganda, Kenya, and Brazil.While the challenges posed by large-scale urbanization are immense, the future of human development requires that we find ways to promote socially inclusive growth, environmental sustainability, and resilient infrastructure. The timely and relevant scholarship assembled in Global Urbanization will be of great interest to scholars and policymakers in demography, geography, urban studies, and international development.

Large numbers of people in urbanizing regions in the developing world live and work in unplanned settlements that grow through incremental processes of squatting and self-building. Slums: How Informal Real Estate Markets Work shows that unauthorized settlements in rapidly growing cities are not divorced from market forces; rather, they must be understood as complex environments where state policies and market actors still do play a role. In this volume, contributors examine how the form and function of informal real estate markets are shaped by legal systems governing property rights, by national and local policy, and by historical and geographic particularities of specific neighborhoods. Their essays provide detailed portraits of individuals and community organizations, revealing in granular detail the working of informal real estate markets, and they review programs that have been implemented in unconventional settlements to provide lessons about the effectiveness and implementation challenges of different approaches.Chapters explore the relationships between informality, state policies, and market forces from a range of disciplinary perspectives and on different scales, from an analysis of the relationship between regulations and housing in 600 developing world cities to an ethnographic account of the buying and selling of houses in Rio de Janeiro's favelas. While many of the book's contributors focus on the emerging economies of India and Brazil, the conclusions drawn illustrate dynamics relevant to developing countries throughout the Global South. The diversity of perspectives combines to create a rich understanding of an important, complex, and understudied topic.Contributors: Arthur Acolin, Sai Balakrishnan, Eugenie L. Birch, JosÉ Brakarz, Shahana Chattaraj, Sebastian Galiani, David Gouverneur, Yvonne Mautner, Paavo Monkkonen, Vinit Mukhija, Janice E. Perlman, Lucas Ronconi, Bish Sanyal, Ernesto Schargrodsky, PatrÍcia CezÁrio Silva, Susan M. Wachter.