This is the third book in the series offering a new selection of the best urban planning scholarship from each of the world's planning school associations. The award winning papers presented illustrate the concerns and the discourse of planning scholarship communities and provide a glimpse into planning theory and practice by planning academics around the world. All those with an interest in urban and regional planning will find this collection valuable in opening new avenues for research and debate.

In this book Arturo Almandoz places the major episodes of Latin America’s twentieth and early twenty-first century urban history within the changing relationship between industrialization and urbanization, modernization and development. This relationship began in the early twentieth century, when industrialization and urbanization became significant in the region, and ends at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when new tensions between liberal globalization and populist nationalism challenge development in the subcontinent, much of which is still poverty stricken. Latin America’s twentieth-century modernization and development are closely related to nineteenth-century ideals of progress and civilization, and for this reason Almandoz opens with a brief review of that legacy for the different countries that are the focus of his book – Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela – but with references to others. He then explores the regional distortions, which resulted from the interaction between industrialization and urbanization, and how the imbalance between urbanization and the productive system helps to explain why ‘take-off’ was not followed by the ‘drive to maturity’ in Latin American countries. He suggests that the close yet troublesome relationship with the United States, the recurrence of dictatorships and autocratic regimes, and Marxist influences in many domains, are all factors that explain Latin America’s stagnation and underdevelopment up to the so-called ‘lost decade’ of 1980s. He shows how Latin America’s fate changed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, when neoliberal programmes, political compromise and constitutional reform dismantled the traditional model of the corporate state and centralized planning. He reveals how economic growth and social improvements have been attained by politically left-wing yet economically open-market countries while others have resumed populism and state intervention. All these trends make up the complex scenario for the new century – especially when considered against the background of vibrant metropolises that are the main actors in the book.

After the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, the Cuban government has been obliged to look outward to other economies of the developed world, specifically targeting tourism as a mechanism for economic growth and development. This book provides the most comprehensive, in-depth analysis of the economic, social, environmental and political realities which have emerged in Cuba as a result of the redevelopment of urban tourism since the early 1990s.

This book is the result of a research-action on the conditions of the citizen participation in the policies of urban regeneration in response to a survey ordered by the minister in charge of the "policy of the large cities" within the Belgian federal government. This research-action, coordinated by the team Habitat and Development of the unit of urbanism and territorial development of the UCL, was carried out in partnership with four associated members of the HaCER network (Habitants Citoyens d'Europe en Réseau), the Neighbours association of Trinitat Nova, Barcelona (Spain), the Estate Management Board of Bloomsbury, Birmingham (UK), the Stadttleilgruppe of Tenever, Bremen (Germany), the Unione Borgate, Rome (Italy) as well as the Maritime Quarter Committee in Molenbeek-St-Jean (Belgium). Beyond these 5 testimonies of participation’s experiments, research makes it possible to better seize the articulation between the practices and the institutional environment in which the participation evolves. As a results, a series of proposals are applicable to Belgium