One of the most troubling consequences of the 2008 global financial collapse was the midstream abandonment of several large-scale speculative urban and suburban projects. The resulting scars on the landscape, large subdivisions with only marked-out plots and half-finished roads, are the subject of The City That Never Was, an eye-opening look at what happens when development, particularly what the author calls "speculative urbanization" is out of sync with financial reality. Presenting historical and recent examples from around the world—from the sprawl of the US Sun Belt and the unoccupied towns of western China, to the "ghost estates" of Ireland—and focusing on case studies in Spain, Marcinkoski proposes an ecologically based model in place of the capricious economic and political factors that typically drive development today.

"The City That Was" by Stephen Smith. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

The old San Francisco is dead. The gayest, lightest hearted, most pleasure loving city of the western continent, and in many ways the most romantic, is a horde of refugees living among ruins. It may rebuild; it probably will; but those who have known that peculiar city by the Golden Gate, have caught its flavor of the Arabian Nights, feel that it can never be the same. -from The City That Was A hundred years ago, San Francisco was devastated by earthquake and fire, and immediately after, reporter Will Irwin of the New York Sun, and formerly of the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote an elegy for that shattered city that is suddenly heartbreaking anew, as the United States as a nation comes to terms again with the loss of another fabled metropolis. Reprinted from the Sun, where it appeared on April 21, 1906, this unabashedly loving and tender essay celebrates the food, the fashion, the weather, the nightlife of the foggy city by the bay. But most poignantly, Irwin laments for the people for whom "hospitality was nearly a vice" and to whom the city itself "a gateway to adventure." In the wake of the destruction of New Orleans, this century-old essay is tragically fresh. American journalist WILL IRWIN (1873-1948) is also the author of The House of Mystery: An Episode in the Career of Rosalie Le Grange, Clairvoyant (1910).

ASTRO CITY returns with an all-new special! Who were the Jayhawks? How did they inspire five teen sidekicks looking for answers to hit the road in a rickety crime mobile in 1969? And how will this affect Astro City in the present? This one-shot special features new and existing heroes and launches a mystery that will drive the forthcoming ASTRO CITY series. And don’t miss the ASTRO CITY METROBOOK, collecting the first three years of the acclaimed series!

The city's development from ancient times to the modern age. Winner of the National Book Award. "One of the major works of scholarship of the twentieth century" (Christian Science Monitor). Index; illustrations.