In Managing Urban America, Eighth Edition, the authors guide students through the politics of urban management—doing less with more while managing conflict, delivering goods and services, responding to federal and state mandates, adapting to changing demographics, and coping with economic and budgetary challenges. This revision: highlights the difficulties cities confront as they deal with the lingering economic challenges of the 2008 Recession evaluates the concept of e-government, and offers numerous examples in both theory and practice considers environmental issues and the implications for urban government management includes new case studies, including some with a global perspective as the authors examine the management of international cities thoroughly updates all data and scholarship.

Urban mobility is a major problem all over the world. This book addresses the problem of managing urban mobility systems in a novel way by considering the complexity and diversity of the conurbation and agents involved in a UMS, putting forward the evidence that urban mobility must be managed at system level.

Urbanization is one of the most powerful forces influencing global sustainability. It is dominated by three factors: population growth, rural-urban migration and subsequent urban expansion. Perhaps nowhere are these factors more dominant than in developing countries. This volume brings together leading experts including Alan Gilbert, John Friedmann, Saskia Sassen and Janice Perlman to explore the conflicting challenges of rapid urbanization in developing countries. While all have to contend with key issues such as social segregation, poverty, and loss of governability, the ongoing forces of urban growth vary from country to country. By comparing the challenges of urbanization in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific, this book puts forward a new way of thinking about mega- and million-cities in developing countries - one that promotes their vital function in society as engines of ideas, technologies, societal change, democratic transformation and loci of political will to build a new regime of global sustainability.

Managing a vastly diverse population, often stratified by economic status, education, culture, language, ideology, and political party, is no picnic. It never has been, nor is it likely to be. Managing Urban America has become the standard guide offering sage advice as to how to approach the formidable task. In a comprehensive, balanced manner, the authors discuss a wide range of structural, financial, and political problems confronting today s urban managers. They also review the successes and failures of policies aimed at solving those problems. In an era of tough budget choices this book is written with the practical urban public official in mind.

Supersizing Urban America reveals how the US government has been, and remains, a major contributor to America s obesity epidemic. Government policies, targeted food industry advertising, and other factors helped create and reinforce fast food consumption in America s urban communities. Historian Chin Jou uncovers how predominantly African-American neighborhoods went from having no fast food chains to being deluged. She lays bare the federal policies that helped to subsidize the expansion of the fast food industry in America s cities and explains how fast food companies have deliberately and relentlessly marketed to urban, African-American consumers. These developments are a significant factor in why Americans, especially those in urban, low-income, minority communities, have become disproportionately affected by the obesity epidemic."

According to David Rusk, focusing on programs aimed at improving inner-city neighborhoods--playing the " inside game" --is a losing strategy. Achieving real improvement requires matching the " inside game" with a strong " outside game" of regional strategies to overcome growing fiscal disparities, concentrated poverty, and urban sprawl.

What if scrapping one flawed policy could bring US cities closer to addressing debilitating housing shortages, stunted growth and innovation, persistent racial and economic segregation, and car-dependent development? It’s time for America to move beyond zoning, argues city planner M. Nolan Gray in Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. With lively explanations and stories, Gray shows why zoning abolition is a necessary—if not sufficient—condition for building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. The arbitrary lines of zoning maps across the country have come to dictate where Americans may live and work, forcing cities into a pattern of growth that is segregated and sprawling. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Reform is in the air, with cities and states across the country critically reevaluating zoning. In cities as diverse as Minneapolis, Fayetteville, and Hartford, the key pillars of zoning are under fire, with apartment bans being scrapped, minimum lot sizes dropping, and off-street parking requirements disappearing altogether. Some American cities—including Houston, America’s fourth-largest city—already make land-use planning work without zoning. In Arbitrary Lines, Gray lays the groundwork for this ambitious cause by clearing up common confusions and myths about how American cities regulate growth and examining the major contemporary critiques of zoning. Gray sets out some of the efforts currently underway to reform zoning and charts how land-use regulation might work in the post-zoning American city. Despite mounting interest, no single book has pulled these threads together for a popular audience. In Arbitrary Lines, Gray fills this gap by showing how zoning has failed to address even our most basic concerns about urban growth over the past century, and how we can think about a new way of planning a more affordable, prosperous, equitable, and sustainable American city.