
Co-Cities
Innovative Transitions Toward Just and Self-Sustaining Communities
MIT Press
Published on 13. December 2022
Book
Paperback/Softback
280 pages
978-0-262-53998-2 (ISBN)
Description
A new model of urban governance, mapping the route to a more equitable management of a city’s infrastructure and services.
The majority of the world’s inhabitants live in cities, but even with the vast wealth and resources these cities generate, their most vulnerable populations live without adequate or affordable housing, safe water, healthy food, and other essentials. And yet, cities also often harbor the solutions to the inequalities they create, as this book makes clear. With examples drawn from cities worldwide, Co-Cities outlines practices, laws, and policies that are presently fostering innovation in the provision of urban services, spurring collaborative economies as a driver of local sustainable development, and promoting inclusive and equitable regeneration of blighted urban areas.
Identifying core elements of these diverse efforts, Sheila R. Foster and Christian Iaione develop a framework for understanding how certain initiatives position local communities as key actors in the production, delivery, and management of urban assets or local resources. Within this framework, they explain the forms such initiatives increasingly take, like community land trusts, new kinds of co-housing, neighborhood cooperatives, community-shared broadband and energy networks, and new local offices focused on citizen science and civic imagination.
The “Co-City” framework is uniquely rooted in the authors’ own decades-long research and first-hand experience working in cities around the world. Foster and Iaione offer their observations as “design principles”—adaptable to local context—to help guide further experimentation in building just and self-sustaining urban communities.
The majority of the world’s inhabitants live in cities, but even with the vast wealth and resources these cities generate, their most vulnerable populations live without adequate or affordable housing, safe water, healthy food, and other essentials. And yet, cities also often harbor the solutions to the inequalities they create, as this book makes clear. With examples drawn from cities worldwide, Co-Cities outlines practices, laws, and policies that are presently fostering innovation in the provision of urban services, spurring collaborative economies as a driver of local sustainable development, and promoting inclusive and equitable regeneration of blighted urban areas.
Identifying core elements of these diverse efforts, Sheila R. Foster and Christian Iaione develop a framework for understanding how certain initiatives position local communities as key actors in the production, delivery, and management of urban assets or local resources. Within this framework, they explain the forms such initiatives increasingly take, like community land trusts, new kinds of co-housing, neighborhood cooperatives, community-shared broadband and energy networks, and new local offices focused on citizen science and civic imagination.
The “Co-City” framework is uniquely rooted in the authors’ own decades-long research and first-hand experience working in cities around the world. Foster and Iaione offer their observations as “design principles”—adaptable to local context—to help guide further experimentation in building just and self-sustaining urban communities.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge (Massachusetts)
United States
Publishing group
MIT Press Ltd
Dimensions
Height: 225 mm
Width: 150 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
412 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-262-53998-2 (9780262539982)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Sheila R. Foster | Christian Iaione
Co-Cities
Innovative Transitions toward Just and Self-Sustaining Communities
E-Book
12/2022
MIT Press
€39.49
Available for download
Persons
Sheila R. Foster and Christian Iaione
Content
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 Rethinking the City 33
2 The Urban Commons 61
3 The City as a Commons 103
4 Urban Co-Governance 149
5 The Co-City Design Principles 191
Conclusion: New Co-City Horizons and Challenges 219
Appendix 239
Notes 255
References 257
Index 293
Introduction 1
1 Rethinking the City 33
2 The Urban Commons 61
3 The City as a Commons 103
4 Urban Co-Governance 149
5 The Co-City Design Principles 191
Conclusion: New Co-City Horizons and Challenges 219
Appendix 239
Notes 255
References 257
Index 293