Mobilization Politics reveals how activists in Philadelphia, working inside and outside the conventional political system, have effected important changes in criminal justice, immigrant rights, precarious labor, affordable housing, and community development while transforming how the city is governed.

Laura Wolf-Powers chronicles five decades of planning in and around West Philadelphia’s University City, advocating a reorientation of redevelopment practice around the recognition that, despite their negligible worth in real estate terms, the time, care, and energy people invest in their local environments are precious urban resources.

For Oren Yiftachel, the notion of ethnocracy suggests a political regime that facilitates expansion and control by a dominant ethnicity in contested lands. Ethnocracy traces the dynamics of territorial and ethnic conflicts between Jews and Palestinians and examines the consequences of settlement, land, development, and planning policies.

Enrique Peñalosa Londoño’s book describes how cities can become powerful means to achieve equality and inclusion. It provides democratic and practical criteria for conceiving and constructing different and better cities, describes the obstacles that are confronted when doing so, and identifies ways to overcome them.

This book gets to the bottom of the twenty-first-century city, literally. Underground details public and private efforts to gentrify and expand Bucharest’s subterranean Metro stations, basements, and cellars—amidst surging inequality—to expand the opportunities to live, work, and play in an overcrowded city for its new middle classes.

Community Benefits explores how, and to what end, community residents leverage large-scale development projects for local benefits. Rosen shows that, without accountability, project advocates can neglect their community commitments, leaving the residents responsible for benefits delivery, but with few viable avenues to produce outcomes.

Nation’s Metropolis describes how the national capital region functions as a metropolitan political economy, focusing on four themes: the federal government as the region’s basic industry; race as a core force in development; the mismatch between governance and the economy; and the conundrum of achieving democratic governance for Washington, DC.

China turned majority urban only in the recent decade, a dramatic leap given that less than 20 percent of its population lived in cities before 1980. The chapters in China Urbanizing, written by American and Chinese scholars, provide new perspectives to understand the transitions underway and the gravity of the progress, particularly in the context of demographic shifts and climate change.

Even as postindustrial cities have climbed from the depths of decline in the twenty-first century, they have witnessed a cruel paradox: with prosperity has come greater inequality. Tracing the origins and effects of uneven revitalization, this book examines the genesis of America's second urban crisis and prospects for its resolution.