Peter Geoffrey Hall

The complex challenges of environmental governance depend in no small part on issues of spatial scale, whether the problem being addressed is local environmental health burdens typically associated with urban poverty, urban-regional pollution and resource depletion typically associated with motorization and industrialization, or the global ecological footprints typically associated with affluence. Marcotullio (research fellow, United Nations U. Institute of Advanced Studies, Japan) and McGranaham (director of the Human Settlements Programme at the International Institute for Environment and Development, UK) present 13 papers examining these complexities of scale by addressing trends in the spatial characteristics of urban environmental burdens, socio-economic and political causes and consequences of these trends, and implication for urban environmental policy. Specific topics include Asian-Pacific urban environmental transitions, improving urban water and sanitation services, poverty and environmental health in urban Ghana, dynamics of growth and degenerated peripheralization in urban India, and comparative analysis of urban transport and emerging environmental problems in middle-income countries.

"Urban Future 21 addresses the challenges of this urban explosion in the century to come. Produced for the World Commission on 21st-Century Urbanization as basic input to their report, presented at the Conference URBAN 21 held in Berlin in July 2000, it demonstrates graphically where present trends will lead the world's cities - and presents a realistic blueprint for meeting the problems that will result."--BOOK JACKET.

"Peter Hall and Colin Ward wrote Sociable Cities to celebrate the centenary of publication of Ebenezer Howard's To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform in 1998--an event they then marked by co-editing (with Dennis Hardy) the magnificent annotated facsimile edition of Howard's original, long lost and very scarce, in 2003. In this revised edition of Sociable Cities, sadly now without Colin Ward, Peter Hall writes: 'the sixteen years separating the two editions of this book seem almost like geological time. Revisiting the 1998 edition is like going back deep into ancient history'. The glad confident morning following Tony Blair's election has been followed by political disillusionment, the fiscal crash, widespread austerity and a marked anti-planning stance on the part of the Coalition government. But--closely following the argument of Good Cities, Better Lives: How Europe discovered the Lost Art of Urbanism (Routledge 2013), to which this book is designed as a companion--Hall argues that the central message is now even stronger: we need more planning, not less. And this planning needs to be driven by broad, high-level strategic visions--national, regional--of the kind of country we want to see. Above all, Hall shows in the concluding chapters, Britain's escalating housing crisis can be resolved only by a massive programme of planned decentralization from London, at least equal in scale to the great Abercrombie plan seventy years ago. He sets out a picture of great new city clusters at the periphery of South East England, sustainably self-sufficient in their daily patterns of living and working, but linked to the capital by new high-speed rail services.This is a book that every planner, and every serious student of policy-making, will want to read. Published at a time when the political parties are preparing their policy manifestos, it is designed to make a major contribution to a major national debate"-- "Peter Hall and Colin Ward wrote Sociable Cities to celebrate the centenary of publication of Ebenezer Howard's To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform in 1998 - an event they then marked by co-editing (with Dennis Hardy) the magnificent annotated facsimile edition of Howard's original, long lost and very scarce, in 2003. In this revised edition of Sociable Cities, sadly now without Colin Ward, Peter Hall writes: 'the sixteen years separating the two editions of this book seem almost like geological time. Revisiting the 1998 edition is like going back deep into ancient history'. The glad confident morning following Tony Blair's election has been followed by political disillusionment, the fiscal crash, widespread austerity and a marked anti-planning stance on the part of the Coalition government. But - closely following the argument of Good Cities, Better Lives: How Europe discovered the Lost Art of Urbanism (Routledge 2013), to which this book is designed as a companion - Hall argues that the central message is now even stronger: we need more planning, not less. And this planning needs to be driven by broad, high-level strategic visions - national, regional - of the kind of country we want to see. Above all, Hall shows in the concluding chapters, Britain's escalating housing crisis can be resolved only by a massive programme of planned decentralization from London, at least equal in scale to the great Abercrombie plan seventy years ago. He sets out a picture of great new city clusters at the periphery of South East England, sustainably self-sufficient in their daily patterns of living and working, but linked to the capital by new high-speed rail services. "--

Drawing on the contributions of economists and geographers, of cultural, technological, and social historians, Sir Peter Hall examines twenty-one cities at their greatest moments. Hall describes the achievements of these golden ages and outlines the precise combinations of forces - both universal and local - that led to each city's belle epoque. Hall identifies four distinct expressions of civic innovation: artistic growth, technological progress, the marriage of culture and technology, and solutions to evolving problems. Descriptions of Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Elizabethan London, and nineteenth-century Vienna bring to life those seedbeds of artistic and intellectual creativity. Explorations of Manchester during the Industrial Revolution, of Henry Ford's Detroit, and of Palo Alto at the dawn of the computer age highlight centers of technological advances. Tales of the creation of Los Angeles' movie industry and the birth of the blues and rock 'n' roll in Memphis depict the marriage of culture and technology. Finally, Hall celebrates cities that have been forced to solve problems created by their very size.

x, 308 pages : 23 cm