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How could Northern California, the wealthiest and most politically progressive region in the United States, become one of the earliest epicenters of the foreclosure crisis? How could this region continuously reproduce racial poverty and reinvent segregation in old farm towns one hundred miles from the urban core? This is the story of the suburbanization of poverty, the failures of regional planning, urban sprawl, NIMBYism, and political fragmentation between middle-class white environmentalists and communities of color. As this book shows, the responsibility for this newly segregated geography lies in institutions from across the region, state, and political spectrum, even as the Bay Area has never managed to build common purpose around the making and remaking of its communities, cities, and towns. The book closes by presenting paths toward a new politics of planning and development that weave scattered fragments into a more equitable and functional whole.

Over the last quarter of a century, no other city like Miami has rapidly transformed into a global city. This book charts the social tensions and unexpected consequences of this remarkable process of change. Acting as a follow-up to City on the Edge, this book examines Miami in the context of globalization and scrutinizes its newfound place as a stellar international city. The book examines Miami's rise as a finance and banking center without parallel in the US South to the simultaneous emergence of a highly diverse but contentious ethnic mosaic. The book serves as a case study of Miami's present cultural, economic, and political transformation, and describes how its future course can provide key lessons for other metropolitan areas throughout the world.

Like Carey McWilliams, Reyner Banham, and Mike Davis, Ed Soja fights against the distorted imagery so adhesively attached to Los Angeles, and he uses Los Angeles to rekindle our urban imagination about major issues affecting the world today. Here is a Los Angeles worthy to be learned from, an exemplary city region consisting of a network of at least forty cities with populations greater than one hundred thousand. This polycentric regional city, once the least dense American metropolis, is now the country’s densest urbanized area. Traditionally seen as one of the most business-centered environments, Los Angeles has become a major focus for the American labor movement and a generator of some of the most innovative urban social movements in the country. A model in the past of unrooted “placeless” urbanism, it has become a hive of neighborhood organizations practicing sophisticated forms of location-based politics. Once the most WASP metropolis in the country, Los Angeles is now among the most culturally heterogeneous cities the world has ever seen. Soja takes us through his evolving interpretations of this urban metamorphosis, combining varying doses of radical political economy, critical postmodernism, comparative urban studies, and the new regionalism. He reaches the confident conclusion that over the past thirty years, Los Angeles has been experiencing a profound deconstruction and reconstitution, a breakdown of the familiar model of metropolitan growth and the formation of a new mode of regional urbanization, which is spreading to many other megacities in the world. Soja’s highly personal and assertively spatial look at Los Angeles inspires, informs, challenges, and entertains.

The sprawling cities of the developing world are vibrant hubs of economic growth, but they are also increasingly ecologically unsustainable and, for ordinary citizens, increasingly unlivable. Pollution is rising, affordable housing is decreasing, and green space is shrinking. Since three-quarters of those joining the world's population during the next century will live in Third World cities, making these urban areas more livable is one of the key challenges of the twenty-first century. This book explores the linked issues of livelihood and ecological sustainability in major cities of the developing and transitional world. This book identifies important strategies for collective solutions by showing how political alliances among local communities, nongovernmental organizations, and public agencies can help ordinary citizens live better lives.

This book proposes a new theoretical framework for the study of cities and urban life. Finding the contemporary urban scene too complex to be captured by radical or conventional approaches, the book offers a threefold, interdisciplinary approach linking agency, space, and structure. First, it says, urban identities cannot be understood through individualistic, communitarian, or class perspectives but rather through the shifting spectrum of cultural, political, and economic influences. Second, the layered, unfinished city spaces we inhabit and within which we create meaning are best represented not by the image of bounded physical spaces but rather by overlapping and shifting boundaries. And third, the macro forces shaping urban society include bureaucratic and governmental interventions not captured by a purely economic paradigm. The book examines these dimensions in the work of three major critical urban theorists of recent decades: Manuel Castells, David Harvey, and Ira Katznelson. It shows why the answers offered by Marxian urban theory to the questions of identity, space, and structure are unsatisfactory and why the perspectives of other intellectual traditions such as post-structuralism, feminism, Habermasian Critical Theory, and pragmatism can help us better understand the challenges facing contemporary cities.