For decades the suburbs have been where art happens despite: despite the conformity, the emptiness, the sameness. Time and again, the story is one of gems formed under pressure and that resentment of the suburbs is the key ingredient for creative transcendence. But what if, contrary to that, the suburb has actually been an incubator for distinctly American art, as positively and as surely as in any other cultural hothouse? Mixing personal experience, cultural reportage, and history while rejecting clichés and pieties and these essays stretch across the country in an effort to show that this uniquely American milieu deserves another look.

This book addresses a central dilemma of the urban age: how to make the vast suburban landscapes that ring the globe safe and sustainable in the face of planetary ecological crisis. The authors argue that degrowth, a planned contraction of economic overshoot, is the only feasible principle for suburban renewal. They depart from the anti-suburban sentiment of much environmentalism to show that existing suburbia can be the centre-ground of transition to a new social dispensation based on the principle of self-limitation. The book offers a radical new urban imaginary, that of degrowth suburbia, which can arise Phoenix like from the increasingly stressed cities of the affluent Global North and guide urbanisation in a world at risk. This means dispensing with much contemporary green thinking, including blind faith in electric vehicles and high-density urbanism, and accepting the inevitability and the benefits of planned energy descent. A radical but necessary vision for the times.

Originally published in hardcover in 2013.

This is an up-to-date and topical treatment of how six major cities in Europe, North America and Asia are coping with the new demands on urban government. Population expansion, the migration of new peoples and disparities between cities and suburbs are longstanding features of the urban crisis. Today, city governments also face demands for popular participation and better public services while they struggle to position themselves in the new world economy. While each of the cities is located in its unique historical setting, the emphasis of the book is upon the common dilemmas raised by major planning problems and the search for more suitable approaches to governance and citizen involvement. A principal theme is the re-engineering of institutional structures designed to foster local responsiveness and popular participation. The discussion is set in the context of the globalizing forces that have impacted to different degrees, at different times, upon London, Tokyo, Toronto, Berlin, Hyderabad and Atlanta. Cities in Transition is a major and original addition to the comparative literature on urban governance.

Live...Suburbia! is a collection of stories and images of the post-1960s subcultures that define America. It's kids taking their urethane wheels to empty pools, picking British Punk in broad downstrokes and creating Hardcore, it's skinheads wearing sneakers and moshing in Connecticut warehouses. Live...Suburbia! is dedicated to denim devils twirling butterfly knives and hasty tags thrown down with Rust-Oleum touch-up paint stolen from your parent's garage. Most importantly Live...Suburbia! is a new approach in compiling a book. We have Tumblr, Facebook, Flickr and thousands of blogs documenting subcultures, but we're interested in the other side: real people's archives and memories, the ones that haven't been passed around so many times that we have no idea where they came from. The book begins with Kiss. From there Live...Suburbia! rushes through years packed with ninjas, long metal hair, BMX dirt jumps, karate, seven-ply skateboards, bathroom mohawks, skinheads, jockey hardcore kids, basement DJs, graffiti murals behind supermarkets, and finally we arrive in the 1990s where it all collides.