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The premise of the book is that building and construction practices are insensitive to the needs of many people, and implicated in the widespread despoliation and degradation of ecological systems and the environment. From the construction of transport networks and major commercial and residential property in rapidly urbanising countries, to the popularisation of self-build and home improvements, we are living in a period of incessant and unprecedented building. Few places are untouched by construction and infrastructure projects that are part of an ideology of building that has little regard to what is needed and, instead, are shaped by political and economic values that regard building and construction as ‘a good thing’. Using examples from around the world, the book identifies the mentalities of construction and building that are failing people and places in many different ways, and calls for radical changes to city living and environments by building less, but better.

As lights come on in the streets and darkness descends on cities, most ‘call it a day’. The night is rarely a popular issue for news headlines, local governments or urban researchers. Yet what in our cities happens afterhours, and how city leaders manage it, is far from inconsequential. Managing Cities at Night intervenes in this landscape with an accessible, evidence-based and internationally minded volume capable of inspiring a greater appreciation of the night-time economy in research and practice. It offers a useful guide to urban governance after hours with a unique stock-take of this reality with an eye at questions of urban equality, not least by taking into account the momentous impact of COVID-19 on night-time activity. The book presents an updated review of night-time governance across five continents, with insights from realities as different as London, New York, Valparaiso, Sydney, Tokyo, Berlin, Bogota and Melbourne. It does so to explicitly broaden the imagination of what it means to manage cities ‘after hours’, as an explicitly ‘scholarly’ guide for practitioners and novices of the night-time economy. It presents a distinctive focus on night governance, the role of night mayors and night commissions, and does so in an informative case-based way that sketches one of the widest variety of vignettes and case studies currently available on night-time economies of cities the world over.

This book provides an innovative lens to consider contemporary urban challenges, taking as its point of departure two overlapping claims. The first is that although the topics of ruins and vacant spaces have been widely discussed in the urban studies literature, their role in the production of both urban landscapes and the economic, social and cultural geographies of cities is not adequately understood. The second is that urban vacancy will play an even greater role in urban development, politics and experimentation in the future. Spaces officially designated as ‘vacant’ are the sites of contested activity, use, and representation. Centring urban vacancy as a core feature of urbanisation, the contributors develop new empirical insights that rethink ruination, urban development and political contestation over the re-use of vacant spaces in (post-)crisis cities across the globe. Chapters are organised into three thematic sections. The first section, ‘Rethinking ruination in the post-crisis context’, advances the conceptual linkages between the literatures on ruins and vacant space. The second, ‘The political economy of urban vacant spaces’, centres urban vacancy as a core feature of cities, constituting the interface between urban land markets and cultural understandings of use/exchange value. The third section, ‘Re-appropriating urban vacant spaces’, explores vacant spaces as an important point of political antagonism. Using international case studies from the Global North and Global South, the book sheds important new light on the complexity of forces and processes shaping urban vacancy and its re-use, exploring these as both lived spaces and sites of political antagonism.