The world is rediscovering the bicycle as a multi-pronged solution to acute, 21st-century problems, including affordability, obesity, congestion, climate change, inequity, and social isolation. The Netherlands has built an accessible cycling culture that cities around the world can learn from.

Chris and Melissa Bruntlett share the incredible success of the Netherlands through engaging interviews with local experts and stories of their own delightful experiences riding in five Dutch cities. Building the Cycling City examines the triumphs and challenges of the Dutch while also presenting stories of North American cities already implementing lessons from across the Atlantic. Discover how Dutch cities inspired Atlanta to look at its transit-bike connection in a new way and showed Seattle how to teach its residents to realize the freedom of biking, along with other encouraging examples.

Structures of Coastal Resilience presents new strategies for creative and collaborative approaches to coastal planning for climate change. In the face of sea level rise and an increased risk of flooding from storm surge, we must become less dependent on traditional approaches to flood control that have relied on levees, sea walls, and other forms of hard infrastructure. Instead, authors Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, Guy Nordenson, and Julia Chapman reimagine how coastal planning might better serve communities grappling with a future of uncertain environmental change. They offer inspiring insights into new approaches to design, engineering, and planning, envisioning an ecological approach to developing adaptive and resilient futures for coastal areas.

In Resilience for All Barbara Brown Wilson looks at community engagement methods that are less conventional, but often more effective than traditional approaches to make communities more resilient. She takes an in‑depth look at what equitable, positive change through community‑driven design looks like in four communities—East Biloxi, Mississippi; the Lower East Side of Manhattan; the Denby neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan; and the Cully neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. These vulnerable communities have prevailed in spite of serious urban stressors such as climate change, gentrification, and disinvestment. Wilson looks at how the lessons in the case studies and other examples might more broadly inform future practice. She shows how community‑driven design projects in underserved neighborhoods can not only change the built world, but also provide opportunities for residents to build their own capacities. 
 

Urban designer Mikael Colville-Andersen draws from his experience working for dozens of cities around the world on bicycle planning, strategy, infrastructure design, and communication. In Copenhagenize he shows cities how to effectively and profitably re-establish the bicycle as a respected, accepted, and feasible form of transportation. 
 
Building on his popular blog of the same name, Copenhagenize offers entertaining stories, vivid project descriptions, and best practices, alongside beautiful and informative visuals to show how to make the bicycle an easy, preferred part of everyday urban life. 
 

The contributors to Istanbul focus on the city’s connection to massive migration and globalization over the last two centuries, exploring the rise, collapse, and rebirth of cosmopolitan thinking and behaviors, and trying to sort out what functions as cosmopolitanism and what fails to live up to that term.  

The contributors to Istanbul focus on the city’s connection to massive migration and globalization over the last two centuries, exploring the rise, collapse, and rebirth of cosmopolitan thinking and behaviors, and trying to sort out what functions as cosmopolitanism and what fails to live up to that term.  

Investment has flooded back to cities because dense, walkable, mixed-use urban environments offer choices that support diverse dreams. Auto-oriented, single-use suburbs have a hard time competing.

Suburban Remix brings together experts in planning, urban design, real estate development, and urban policy to demonstrate how suburbs can use growing demand for urban living to renew their appeal as places to live, work, play, and invest. The case studies and analysis show how compact new urban places are being created in suburbs to produce health, economic, and environmental benefits, and contribute to solving a growing equity crisis.

In Resilient Cities, Second Edition, Peter Newman, Timothy Beatley, and Heather Boyer explore what it means to be resilient in an age of changing climate and growing inequity. Since the first edition was published in 2009, interest in resilience has surged, in part due to increasingly frequent and deadly natural disasters, and in part due to the contribution of our cities to climate change. The new initiatives and approaches from citizens and all levels of government show the promise as well as the challenges of creating cities that are truly resilient.
 
Resilient Cities, Second Edition reveals how cities around the world are working  to become more resilient. The authors offer stories, insights, and inspiration for urban planners, policymakers, and professionals interested in creating more sustainable, equitable, and, eventually, regenerative cities. Most importantly, the book is about overcoming fear and generating hope in our cities. The challenge of resilient cities is to claim a different future that helps us regenerate the whole planet.

In Within Walking Distance, journalist and urban critic Philip Langdon looks at why and how Americans are shifting toward a more human-scale way of building and living. He shows how people are creating, improving, and caring for walkable communities. To draw the most important lessons, Langdon spent time in six communities that differ in size, history, wealth, diversity, and education, yet share crucial traits: compactness, a mix of uses and activities, and human scale. To improve conditions and opportunities for everyone, Langdon argues that places where the best of life is within walking distance ought to be at the core of our thinking. This book is for anyone who wants to understand what can be done to build, rebuild, or improve a community while retaining the things that make it distinctive.

In order to understand and improve cities today, personal observation remains as important as ever.  While big data, digital mapping, and simulated cityscapes are valuable tools for understanding urban space, using them without on-the-ground, human impressions risks creating places that do not reflect authentic local context. Seeing the Better City brings our attention back to the real world right in front of us, focusing it once more on the sights, sounds, and experiences of place in order to craft policies, plans, and regulations to shape better urban environments.