"Explores urban issues closely linked to land policy: growing and changing populations, expanding cities, changing climates, funding municipalities, housing affordability and access, changing housing markets, social impacts, and effects of reform, in post-recession U.S. cities and in rapidly-developing Chinese cities. Product of the 9th Annual Land Policy Conference in 2014, hosted by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy"--

First Published in 2004. Presents a broad analysis of land use patterns and processes in urban areas. Land has the greatest significance for the spatial patterning and functioning of modern urban settlements and societies - providing the basic morphological elements of the city, it is a source of social and economic power, is intimately bound up with environmental issues and lies at the heart of planning. This book examines the way in which land is allocated and used in both theoretical and practical senses. The author examines the empirical data to reveal the sources and nature of land, how land is used and how those uses are changing in the contemporary city. Particular attention is paid to the misuse of land through vacancy or dereliction. He also explores the importance of land ownership and the principles of land policy using case studies. Finally, he assesses the land use implications of major urban change - deindustrialization, counter-urbanization and new technology. For the first time the overall significance of land use and ownership are examined in an urban geographical and planning context.

Written especially for survivalists and retreaters, this book reveals a totally practical survival program unlike any other. Old Indian secrets and advice on survival medicine, firearms, preserving food, diesel generation and much more are included.

Land Fictions explores the common storylines, narratives, and tales of social betterment that justify and enact land as commodity. It interrogates global patterns of property formation, the dispossessions property markets enact, and the popular movements to halt the growing waves of evictions and land grabs. This collection brings together original research on urban, rural, and peri-urban India; rapidly urbanizing China and Southeast Asia; resource expropriation in Africa and Latin America; and the neoliberal urban landscapes of North America and Europe. Through a variety of perspectives, Land Fictions finds resonances between local stories of land's fictional powers and global visions of landed property's imagined power to automatically create value and advance national development. Editors D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake unpack the dynamics of land commodification across a broad range of political, spatial, and temporal settings, exposing its simultaneously contingent and collective nature. The essays advance understanding of the politics of land while also contributing to current debates on the intersections of local and global, urban and rural, and general and particular. Contributors Erik Harms, Michael Watts, Sai Balakrishnan, Brett Christophers, David Ferring, Sarah Knuth, Meghan Morris, Benjamin Teresa, Mi Shih, Michael Levien, Michael L. Dwyer, Heather Whiteside

This collection of essays examines underutilized, abandoned, and vacant urban land within political, economic, institutional, and policy contexts. The 11 chapters raise the essential questions: Is vacant land an opportunity or an obstacle? Are brownfields a legacy of prior industrial wealth, or of illegal and dangerous contamination? Is a land inventory vital to community needs for future growth, or the symbol of political shortsightedness? Is the reclamation of land the first step in an urban turnaround, or a giveaway of local assets?

Short and accessible, this book interweaves a discussion of the geography of property in one global city, Vancouver, with a more general analysis of property, politics, and the city.

With its extraordinary uniform street grid, its magnificent lake-side park, and innovative architecture and public sculpture, Chicago is one of the most planned cities of the modern era. Yet over the past few decades Chicago has come to epitomize some of the worst evils of urban decay: widespread graft and corruption, political stalemates, troubled race relations, and economic decline. Broad-shouldered boosterism can no longer disguise the city's failure to keep pace with others, its failure to attract new "sunrise" industries and world-class events. For Chicago, as for other rust-belt cities, new ways of planning and managing the urban environment are now much more than civic beautification; they are the means to survival. Gerald D. Suttles here offers an irreverent, highly critical guide to both the realities and myths of land-use planning and development in Chicago from 1976 through 1987.