A city's infrastructure influences the daily life of residents, neighborhoods, and businesses. But uniting the hard infrastructure of roads and bridges with the soft infrastructure of parks and public art creates significant political challenges. Planners at all stages must work at an intersection of public policy, markets, and aesthetics--while also accounting for how a project will work in both the present and the future. The latest volume in the Urban Agenda series looks at pressing infrastructure issues discussed at the 2017 UIC Urban Forum. Topics include: competing notions of the infrastructure ideal; what previous large infrastructure programs can teach the Trump Administration; how infrastructure influences city design; the architecture of the cities of tomorrow; who benefits from infrastructure improvements; and evaluations of projects like the Chicago Riverwalk and grassroots efforts to reclaim neighborhood parks from gangs. Contributors: Philip Ashton, Beverly S. Bunch, Bill Burton, Charles Hoch, Sean Lally, and Sanjeev Vidyarthi

American cities continue to experience profound fiscal crises. Falling revenues cannot keep pace with the increased costs of vital public services, infrastructure development and improvement, and adequately funded pensions. Chicago presents an especially vivid example of these issues, as the state of Illinois's rocky fiscal condition compounds the city's daunting budget challenges. In The People's Money, Michael A. Pagano curates a group of essays that emerged from discussions at the 2018 UIC Urban Forum. The contributors explore fundamental questions related to measuring the fiscal health of cities, including how cities can raise revenue, the accountability of today's officials for the future financial position of a city, the legal and practical obstacles to pension reform and a balanced budget, and whether political collaboration offers an alternative to the competition that often undermines regional governance.Contributors: Jered B. Carr, Rebecca Hendrick, Martin J. Luby, David Merriman, Michael A. Pagano, David Saustad, Casey Sebetto, Michael D. Siciliano, James E. Spiotto, Gary Strong, Shu Wang, and Yonghong Wu

Can today's city govern well if its citizens lack modern technology? How important is access to computers for lowering unemployment? What infrastructure does a city have to build in order to attract new business? In this new collection, Michael A. Pagano curates engagement with such questions by public intellectuals, stakeholders, academics, policy analysts, and citizens. Each essay explores issues related to the impact and opportunities technology provides in government and citizenship, health care, workforce development, service delivery to citizens, and metropolitan growth. As the authors show, rapidly emerging technologies and access to such technologies shape the ways people and institutions interact in the public sphere and private marketplace. The direction of metropolitan growth and development, in turn, depends on access to appropriate technology scaled and informed by the individual, household, and community needs of the region. Contributors include Randy Blankenhorn, Bénédicte Callan, Jane Fountain, Sandee Kastrul, Karen Mossberger, Dan O'Neil, Michelle Russell, Alfred Tatum, Stephanie Truchan, Darrel West, and Howard Wial.

The Latest Tools and Techniques for Managing Infrastructure Assets Fully updated throughout, this practical resource provides a proven, cost-effective infrastructure asset management framework that integrates planning, design, construction, maintenance, rehabilitation, and renovation. Public Infrastructure Asset Management, Second Edition, describes the most current methodologies for effectively managing roads, bridges, airports, utility services, water and waste facilities, parks, public buildings, and sports complexes. This comprehensive guide covers information management and decision support systems, including proprietary solutions and new technological developments such as cloud storage. The book discusses total quality management, economics, life-cycle analysis, and maintenance, rehabilitation, and reconstruction programming. Up-to-date examples and real-world case studies illustrate the practical applications of the concepts presented in this thoroughly revised reference. This new edition features: Planning, needs assessment, and performance indicators Database management, data needs, and analysis Inventory, historical, and environmental data In-service monitoring and evaluation data Performance modeling and failure analysis Design for infrastructure service life Construction Maintenance, rehabilitation, and reconstruction strategies, policies, and treatment alternatives Dealing with new or alternate concepts Prioritization, optimization, and work programs Integrated infrastructure asset management systems Visual IMS: an illustrative infrastructure management system and applications Available asset management system and commercial off-the-shelf providers Benefits of implementing an asset management system Sustainability, environmental stewardship, and asset management Future directions for infrastructure asset management

“A comprehensive, entertaining, and compelling argument for how rebuilding social infrastructure can help heal divisions in our society and move us forward.”—Jon Stewart NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • “Engaging.”—Mayor Pete Buttigieg, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) We are living in a time of deep divisions. Americans are sorting themselves along racial, religious, and cultural lines, leading to a level of polarization that the country hasn’t seen since the Civil War. Pundits and politicians are calling for us to come together and find common purpose. But how, exactly, can this be done? In Palaces for the People, Eric Klinenberg suggests a way forward. He believes that the future of democratic societies rests not simply on shared values but on shared spaces: the libraries, childcare centers, churches, and parks where crucial connections are formed. Interweaving his own research with examples from around the globe, Klinenberg shows how “social infrastructure” is helping to solve some of our most pressing societal challenges. Richly reported and ultimately uplifting, Palaces for the People offers a blueprint for bridging our seemingly unbridgeable divides. LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION “Just brilliant!”—Roman Mars, 99% Invisible “The aim of this sweeping work is to popularize the notion of ‘social infrastructure'—the ‘physical places and organizations that shape the way people interact'. . . . Here, drawing on research in urban planning, behavioral economics, and environmental psychology, as well as on his own fieldwork from around the world, [Eric Klinenberg] posits that a community’s resilience correlates strongly with the robustness of its social infrastructure. The numerous case studies add up to a plea for more investment in the spaces and institutions (parks, libraries, childcare centers) that foster mutual support in civic life.”—The New Yorker “Palaces for the People—the title is taken from the Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie’s description of the hundreds of libraries he funded—is essentially a calm, lucid exposition of a centuries-old idea, which is really a furious call to action.”—New Statesman “Clear-eyed . . . fascinating.”—Psychology Today

Contains critical essays in which the authors, having visited Disney World as individuals and as a group, offer their perspectives on various aspects of the amusement park and its appeal.

From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment. A School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Dominic Boyer, Akhil Gupta, Penny Harvey, Brian Larkin, Christina Schwenkel, Antina von Schnitzler