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"For urban and environmental planners seeking to support sustainability-led change charting the task ahead remains complex, turbulent and unclear. Is it possible for planning to better serve, protect and nurture our human and non-human worlds? Many have serious doubts about the prospects for planning but there is a real opportunity for planning to better engage with how real places and spaces are produced and change. This book critically engages with the contemporary challenges of planning wild cities in a climate of change. Drawing on the international literature and case-study examples from the developed and developing country contexts, key issues around urban (in)security, critical infrastructure and the rights to the city for both humans and nature are highlighted. It is within this context that this book focuses on the need to better understand how contemporary cities have changed and the relational role of planning within it. Planning Wild Cities will be of particular interest to students and scholars of planning, urban studies and sustainable development"--

Global city-thinking has, in the past years, had a very real pull on society. Global cities seem an unavoidable fact of everyday world affairs. This volume gathers a forum that integrates the extensive set of disciplinary dimensions to which the interdisciplinary concept of the global city can help to tackle the policy challenges of today's metropolises. Its chapters are drawn from viewpoints including the cultural, economic, historical, postcolonial, virtual, architectural, literary, security and political dimensions of global cities. Tasked with providing a rejoinder to the global city scholarship from each of these perspectives, the authors illustrate what twin analytical and practical challenges emerge from juxtaposing these stances to the concept of the 'global city'. They rely not solely on theory but also on sample case studies either drawn from long-lived global cities such as New York, Shanghai and London, or emerging metropolises like Dubai, Cape Town and Sydney.

Urban Australia confronts numerous challenges in the 21st century: climate change, housing, transport, greenspace, social inequality, and governance, among them. While state and local governments wrestle with these issues, they are continent wide and require national leadership, direction and participation. As a highly urbanised country without a national approach to urban policy, Australia is an outlier. Contributors to this book argue that this policy gap needs to be addressed. They ask: How have productive, sustainable and liveable cities so far been enhanced? Where have aspirations fallen short or produced negative outcomes? And what approaches are emerging to challenge existing and devise new urban policy settings? In the face of ongoing crises and escalating change, the need for policy to quickly transform urban Australia is daunting. Problems, wicked in their complexity, require innovative, ethical solutions. This book offers new ideas that challenge policy orthodoxy.