Future City (2004) Edited by Stephen Read, Job van Eldijk en Jurgen Rosemann While we struggle to find ways to understand its new shape, increasing mobility and connectivity and the expanding patterns of people's lives are dismantling many of those subtle orders founded in proximity which articulated our surroundings and which made them intelligible in their mix and diversity. These processes, driven by technological change and by globalising social and economic relations, affect access to power and advantage - and are polarising urban communities into pockets of rich and poor whose respective lives are increasingly disengaged from each other. The contemporary city presents parallel universes where public space tends towards the buffer between inhabited and defended capsules of likeness rather than the site of a rich mingling of difference. At the same time though, contradictions within the accelerating processes of urbanisation create interstitial spaces where emancipatory possibilities can flourish. The Future City book aims at introducing the issues to students and takes a broad sweep, both geographically and conceptually, over the terrain; highlighting issues by asking urbanists in different parts of the world to write about how globalisation and change is impacting on their city at this moment in time. Order your copy at: taylor & francis (routledge) Order your copy at: amazon.co.uk Order your copy at: amazon.com Order your copy at: superbookdeals.com Proceedings for the 5th Space Syntax Conference (2005) Edited by Akkelies van Nes These proceedings truly reflect the current issues that the field of Space Syntax currently is involved in. It contains contributions from all over the world and from key researchers in the Space Syntax community. This level of comprehensiveness makes these contributions worthwhile reference material for libraries and researchers in spatial planning issues. Order your copy at: technepress.nl Order your copy at: amazon.com Order your copy at: amazon.co.uk Visualizing the Invisible (2006) Edited by Stephen Read and Camilo Pinilla We can, it seems, orchestrate and manage huge urban statements and stagings ... but we find it difficult to sustain a continuous production of ordinary urban places that settle into and enrich the lives and doings of ordinary people. We find it difficult to produce an ordinary urbanism, capable of supporting ordinary everyday lives as well as engendering new life patterns and livelihoods in the ways urban environments did at many points in our past. ... The urban is today often characterized as a place of disintegration, segregation and violence but it is also built according to a technocratic rationality which divides in order to control. Meanwhile, some of the best places of our cities are also characterized by a diversity, connectedness and openness which generates enlivening spaces and socially lubricating juxtapositions of dissimilars. These spaces are often a source of novelty and stimulation, challenging fixities of ideas and disposition, and providing an anchor for alternative performances of lives, livelihoods and identities. It is yet possible, we feel, that an urban situation, embedded in dynamic contemporary processes, may signal pathways to sustaining and sustainable and open social futures. Order your copy at: technepress.nl Order your copy at: amazon.co.uk Urban Life (forthcoming 2009) Stephen Read We live in a world that in reality as well as increasingly in our imaginations is becoming steadily more fluid, transformative and mobile. This is not another book about these processes or about how they are destabilizing our presuppositions (creating chaos). This is rather about the city and the way it, today as well as in the past, grounds and stabilizes processes of fluidity and circulation. There is an assumption throughout that this grounding and stabilizing has always been a - if not the - primary function of the city. This is a book therefore primarily aimed at those who are concerned about the city as it is encountered at the level of a local that cannot be separated from, indeed is largely constituted by, processes taking place at higher scale levels and levels of visibility or abstraction. I see this book therefore as being aimed primarily at urban designers and design educators, but also at administrators and policy makers interested in how we may conceive and reconceive urban areas and centers today in the light of massive changes in these higher level processes - and it is concerned with how we do this without systematically fragmenting the 'continuous local' of the urban . | 
