This illustrated guide to making the most of an urban living space profiles 25 homes in major metropolitan areas. 35 illustrations. 240 color photos.

It is said that the history of modern architecture can be observed through the evolution of the single-family home. Over generations, each has hoped to improve on the last, rethinking and reinventing this seemingly simple building type. At certain historic moments in the discourse, new ideas about domesticity have given form to radically different configurations of home and community. Current emphasis on sustainability presents a unique opportunity to design affordable houses that respond to specific economic, social, and environmental challenges. In From the Ground Up editor Peggy Tully presents the results of an international competition to create new models for affordable high-performance green homes in urban residential neighborhoods. Developed for a vacant infill site in Syracuse's Near Westside, these ambitious projects offer an array of innovative designs that provide a new vision for once-vital urban residential neighborhoods and well-designed energy-efficient homes throughout the United States.

As a girl in Mexico City and a boy in New York City ponder moving to each other’s locale, it becomes clear that the two cities — and the two children — are more alike than they might think. But I’m not sure I want to leave my home. I’m going to miss so much. Moving to a new city can be exciting. But what if your new home isn’t anything like your old home? Will you make friends? What will you eat? Where will you play? In a cleverly combined voice — accompanied by wonderfully detailed illustrations depicting parallel urban scenes — a young boy conveys his fears about moving from New York City to Mexico City while, at the same time, a young girl expresses trepidation about leaving Mexico City to move to New York City. Tania de Regil offers a heartwarming story that reminds us that home may be found wherever life leads. Fascinating details about each city are featured at the end.

Modern American Housing brings together the most enlightened thinkers from the worlds of architecture, social practice, and real estate development to present the latest developments in the design and construction of new housing stock in re-urbanizing cities throughout the United States. New housing is grouped into three sections—housing towers, reused historical structures, and urban infill—and documented with photographs, pre-construction renderings, floor plans, and maps indicating location in urban settings. An accompanying essay and a discussion with urban planners, architects, and policymakers round out this fresh look at the past and future of the American house.

Since its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century as the nation's "metropolis," New York has faced the most challenging housing problems of any American city, but it has also led the nation in innovation and reform. Plunz traces New York's housing development from 1850 to the present, exploring the housing of all classes, discussing the development of types ranging from the single-family house to the high-rise apartment tower.

A thought-prooking thriller and a literate page-turner, Stephen Amidon's The New City takes aim at the suburban American dream and captures the real nightmare behind it. It is 1973, the Vietnam War is winding down and the Senate Watergate hearings are heating up. But Newton, Maryland, is a model community, an enclave of harmony and prosperity. Through years of cunning legal maneuvering and smooth real-estate deals, the white lawyer Austin Swope has made the dream of this new city a reality. His best friend is Earl Wooten, the black master builder who raised Newton from its foundations. Their teenaged sons, Teddy and Joel, each the repository of his father's deepest hopes for the future, are inseparable buddies. But cracks begin to appear in this pristiine and meticulously planned community, and an innocent misunderstanding is about to set the two men who control its quiet streets on a fateful collision course.

Chiang Mai (literally, “new city”) suffered badly in the 1997 Asian financial crisis as the Northern Thai real estate bubble collapsed along with the Thai baht, crushing dreams of a renaissance of Northern prosperity. Years later, the ruins of the excesses of the 1990s still stain the skyline. In Ghosts of the New City, Andrew Alan Johnson shows how the trauma of the crash, brought back vividly by the political crisis of 2006, haunts efforts to remake the city. For many Chiang Mai residents, new developments harbor the seeds of the crash, which manifest themselves in anxious stories of ghosts and criminals who conceal themselves behind the city’s progressive veneer. Hopes for rebirth and fears of decline have their roots in Thai conceptions of progress, which draw from Buddhist and animist ideas of power and sacrality. Cities, Johnson argues, were centers where the charismatic power of kings and animist spirits were grounded; these entities assured progress by imbuing the space with sacred power that would avert disaster. Johnson traces such magico-religious conceptions of potency and space from historical records through present-day popular religious practice and draws parallels between these and secular attempts at urban revitalization. Through a detailed ethnography of the contested ways in which academics, urban activists, spirit mediums, and architects seek to revitalize the flagging economy and infrastructure of Chiang Mai, Johnson finds that alongside the hope for progress there exists a discourse about urban ghosts, deadly construction sites, and the lurking anxiety of another possible crash, a discourse that calls into question history’s upward trajectory. In this way, Ghosts of the New City draws new connections between urban history and popular religion that have implications far beyond Southeast Asia.