Neuman pens and co-edits books about past, future urbanization

Michael Neuman

Michael Neuman

Texas A&M urban planning professor Michael Neuman has authored a new book examining the city of Madrid’s 20-year urban planning cycle and co-edited another that eyes the future of urbanization.

In his new book, “The Imaginative Institution: Planning and Governance in Madrid,” Neuman explores how Madrid’s planners, mostly trained as architects, invented new images — tools that coordinated planning and urban policy — that were a cohesive force around which plans, policies and investments were shared in a complex, fragmented institutional millieu.

“Every 20 years since 1920, Madrid has undergone an urban planning cycle in which a city plan was prepared, adopted by law, and implemented,” said Neuman. “The planning institution itself played a lead role in maintaining continuity, traumatic history notwithstanding.”

In his book, available at [amazon.com] (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=The+Imaginative+Institution%3A+Planning+and+Governance+in+Madrid&x=0&y=0) , Neuman examines why and how this was the case.

The second book, “The Futures of the City Region,” co-edited by Neuman and Angela Hull, professor of spatial planning at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, United Kingdom, offers a collection of essays by leading planners focusing on two themes:

  • socio-spatial constructs and their relationship to the empirical evidence of change in the physical and functional aspects of urban form, and
  • their implications for the spatial scales of governance.

The book asks if the “city region” constitutes a new departure in urbanization, identifies the key elements of that evolution, and examines the resulting intellectual and practical consequences: first, in helping us grasp rapidly changing realities; and second in facilitating the flow of resources, ideas and learning to enhance the quality of life of citizens.

The book also available at [amazon.com] (http://www.amazon.com/Futures-City-Region-Regions-Cities/dp/0415588030/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1301947704&sr=8-4) .

posted April 4, 2011