The "livable city," the "creative city," and more recently the "pop-up city" have become pervasive monikers that identify a new type of urbanism that has sprung up globally, produced and managed by the business improvement district and known colloquially by its acronym, BID. With this case study, Susanna F. Schaller draws on more than fifteen years of research to present a direct, focused engagement with both the planning history that shaped Washington, D.C.'s landscape and the intricacies of everyday life, politics, and planning practice as they relate to BIDs. Schaller offers a critical unpacking of the BID ethos, which draws on the language of economic liberalism (individual choice, civic engagement, localism, and grassroots development), to portray itself as color blind, democratic, and equitable. Schaller reveals the contradictions embedded in the BID model. For the last thirty years, BID advocates have engaged in effective and persuasive storytelling; as a result, many policy makers and planners perpetuate the BID narrative without examining the institution and the inequities it has wrought. Schaller sheds light on these oversights, thus fostering a critical discussion of BIDs and their collective influence on future urban landscapes.

Capital Dilemma: Growth and Inequality in Washington, DC uncovers and explains the dynamics that have influenced the contemporary economic advancement of Washington, DC. This volume's unique interdisciplinary approach using historical, sociological, anthropological, economic, geographic, political, and linguistic theories and approaches, captures the comprehensive factors related to changes taking place in one of the world's most important cities. Capital Dilemma clarifies how preexisting urban social hierarchies, established mainly along race and class lines but also along national and local interests, are linked with the city's contemporary inequitable growth. While accounting for historic disparities, this book reveals how more recent federal and city political decisions and circumstances shape contemporary neighborhood gentrification patterns, highlighting the layered complexities of the modern national capital and connecting these considerations to Washington, DC's past as well as to more recent policy choices. As we enter a period where advanced service sector cities prosper, Washington, DC's changing landscape illustrates important processes and outcomes critical to other US cities and national capitals throughout the world. The Capital Dilemma for DC, and other major cities, is how to produce sustainable equitable economic growth. This volume expands our understanding of the contradictions, challenges and opportunities associated with contemporary urban development.

A new taxonomy of placemaking is needed; concerns have been expressed about the professionalization of placemaking through the proliferation of standards, zoning codes, and restrictive covenants. "Place matters" has become a mantra in many disciplines - architecture, urban planning and urban design, geography, and sociology to name a few. While conceptualized narrowly by individual disciplines, a holistic framework of placemaking is sorely missing. Mahyar Arefi seeks to fill this gap by exploring these questions: how are places physically created, socially mobilized, and politically contested? This book explores three competing approaches to placemaking: need-based, opportunity-based, and asset-based. Using a case study approach, the book delves into each paradigm and its stages of physical formation, social mobilization, and political contestation.

This introduction to the field of urban design offers a comprehensive survey of the processes necessary to implement urban design work, explaining the vocabulary, the rules, the tools, the structures, and the resources in clear and accessible style. Providing a comprehensive framework for understanding urban design principles and strategies, the author argues that urban design is both a process and a collaboration in which the different forces involved are knit together. Moving from the regional scale down to the scale of places, the book examines the goals and strategies of the urban designer from the viewpoints of the private sector, public sector, and community. The text is illustrated throughout with photographs and drawings that make theory and practice relevant and alive.

This book is about the practices and politics of place and identity formation - the slippery ways in which who we are becomes wrapped up with where we are. Drawing on the social theories of Deleuze and Bourdieu, the book analyzes the sense of place as socio-spatial assemblage and as embodied habitus, through a broad range of case studies from nationalist monuments and new urbanist suburbs to urban laneways and avant garde interiors.

In this open access publication, the social cohesion of urban neighborhoods and their residents is examined, which is often viewed as vulnerable since increased mobility, individualization, wider socio-economic and demographic changes have fundamentally altered the basis for everyday social interaction in urban neighborhoods. Anna Steigemann gives scholarly attention to the concrete places where neighborly interactions still take place and to how these interactions affect local community building. She illuminates and explores the ordinary everyday interactions and social practices in and around shops and gastronomic facilities on a shopping street in Berlin-Neukölln, revealing how these businesses are important places where community is practiced, but also why they are increasingly threatened by commercial and residential gentrification.

As Place Branding has become a widely established but contested practice, there is a dire need to rethink its theoretical foundations and its contribution to development and to re-assert its future. This important new book advances understanding of place branding through its holistic, critical and evidence-based approach. Contributions by world-leading specialists explore a series of crucially significant issues and demonstrate how place branding will contribute more to cultural, economic and social development in the future. The theoretical analysis and illustrative practical examples in combination with the accessible style make the book an indispensable reading for anyone involved in the field.​