Everyone would agree that urban development, especially when involving the building of residential areas, should be accompanied by sufficient and good public infrastructure and facilities. We all want neighbourhoods with the necessary roads, green areas, social facilities, affordable housing and public spaces of high quality. At the same time, nowadays, governments are facing severe cuts in public expenditure. So who is going to pay for all that quality? In the Netherlands and in many other countries, achieving these public goals has become a problem, especially in the regeneration of deteriorated inner-city sites. This book offers insight in how the economic value increase that arises from urban development can serve to finance the quality we want, without the need for public subsidies. The findings and recommendations made in this book focus on Western Europe, mainly on successful and alternatively less successful recent experiences in Spain, England and the Netherlands. Public bodies can use the recommendations to create the necessary conditions to improve the involvement of property developers and landowners in the financing of infrastructure and facilities. Property developers and landowners can find formulas for private-public partnership that can lead to lower development costs and risks, allowing them to pay for good infrastructure and facilities while maintaining profitability. Scholars will find here the theoretical backgrounds for this relevant topic. The author has both an academic and a professional background in the practice of urban development.

Vacant urban land--the product of land market activity, the actions of private agents, and the policies of public agents--is an important challenge for policy makers. Vacant lots on the urban fringe and in central and interstitial areas have affected growth patterns in Latin America. Contributors to this book analyze the problems and opportunities related to vacant urban land in five cities: Buenos Aires, Argentina; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Quito, Ecuador; Lima, Perú; and San Salvador, El Salvador.

Cities of Tomorrow is a critical history of planning in theory and practice in the twentieth century, as well as of the social and economic problems and opportunities that gave rise to it. Trenchant, perceptive, global in coverage, this book is an unrivalled account of its crucial subject. The third edition of Cities of Tomorrow is comprehensively revised to take account of abundant new literature published since its original appearance, and to view the 1990s in historical perspective. This is the definitive edition, reviewing the development of the modern planning movement over the entire span of the twentieth century.

Western civilization is the Utopia of a better and higher life on Earth. The globalization of neo-liberalism proves that this project has failed. The paradigm of «Critical Theory of Patriarchy» explains this failure and discusses alternatives. By confronting the central civilizations in history, the egalitarian, life-oriented matriarchal one, and the hierarchical, nature and life dominating, hostile patriarchal one, we see that 5000 years of patriarchy have «replaced» matriarchies and nature itself by a «progressive» counter-world of «capital». This transformation characterizes «capitalist patriarchy» including «socialism». Its demise is due to the «alchemical» destruction of the world's resources, thought of, theologically legitimized and fetishized as «creation». This violence is not recognized. Elites have, instead, begun with a new «military alchemy», treating the whole Planet as weapon of mass destruction. Hence, the «Planetary Movement for Mother Earth».