This series offers a unique window on the creation of the modern environment. Designed for an international readership, the emphasis is on:
Within this framework the books address three themes:
Edited
By John Gold, Margaret M Gold
April 08, 2024
The first edition of Olympic Cities, published in 2007, provided a pioneering overview of the changing relationship between cities and the modern Olympic Games. This substantially revised and much enlarged fourth edition builds on the success of its predecessors. The first of its three parts ...
By Yasser Elsheshtawy
May 31, 2023
Riyadh has set its sights on becoming a world city befitting the twenty-first century. To that end it has embarked on a massive construction drive evidenced in the proliferation of proposals for high-end districts, giga-developments and elaborate infrastructures. An urban vision seemingly dedicated...
Edited
By Simon Goldhill
January 09, 2023
In Being Urban, Simon Goldhill and his team of outstanding urbanists explore the meaning of the urban condition, with particular reference to the Middle East. As Goldhill explains in his introduction, ‘What is a good city?’, five questions motivate the book: How can a city be systematically planned...
By Nick Green
June 08, 2022
In writing The Settlement Patterns of Britain Nick Green was inspired by the short story genre. His book is a collection of eight non-fiction short stories or essays, where the characters are the places, some of which appear more than once, usually as bit-part players, occasionally as the main ...
By Cecilia L. Chu
April 15, 2022
In the 1880s, Hong Kong was a booming colonial entrepôt, with many European, especially British, residents living in palatial mansions in the Mid-Levels and at the Peak. But it was also a ruthless migrant city where Chinese workers shared bedspaces in the crowded tenements of Taipingshan. Despite ...
By John R. Gold, Margaret M. Gold
December 04, 2020
Festivals have always been part of city life, but their relationship with their host cities has continually changed. With the rise of industrialization, they were largely considered peripheral to the course of urban affairs. Now they have become central to new ways of thinking about the challenges ...
Edited
By Stephen Hamnett, Robert Freestone
March 23, 2020
Australia has long been a highly (sub)urbanized nation, but the major distinctive feature of its contemporary settlement pattern is that the great majority of Australians live in a small number of large metropolitan areas focused on the state capital cities. The development and application of ...
By Ian Wray
June 18, 2019
Is planning for America anathema to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness? Is it true, as ideologues like Friedrich Von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand have claimed, that planning leads to dictatorship, that the state is wholly destructive, and that prosperity is owed entirely to the ...
Edited
By Stephen Hamnett, Belinda Yuen
May 20, 2019
Two hundred years ago, Sir Stamford Raffles established the modern settlement of Singapore with the intent of seeing it become ‘a great commercial emporium and fulcrum’. But by the time independence was achieved in 1965, the city faced daunting problems of housing shortage, slums and high ...
By Yasser Elsheshtawy
April 23, 2019
Are Arab Gulf cities, the likes of Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Doha, on their way to extinction? Is their fate obsolescence? Or, are they the model for our urban future? Can a city whose very existence is predicated on an imported labour force who build and operate these gleaming urban centres remain a ...
By Alamira Reem Bani Hashim
October 25, 2018
Abu Dhabi’s urban development path contrasts sharply with its exuberant neighbour, Dubai. As Alamira Reem puts it, Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates since 1971, ‘has been quietly devising its own plans … to manifest its role and stature as a capital city’. Alamira Reem, a native Abu ...
By Yael Allweil
September 19, 2016
On 29 March 2016 the New York based online journal, Realty Today reported ‘Israel is facing a housing crisis with …[the] home inventory lacking 100,000 apartments… House prices, which have more than doubled in less than a decade, resulted in a mass protest back in 2011’. As Yael Allweil reveals in...