Today, we celebrate Book Launch Day for Sustaining a City’s Culture and Character. This book focuses on the culture and character of one city compared to another, how we distinguish and change urban places, and the actors involved. Please join collaborator Dr. Tigran Haas and me as we discuss the book’s background and evolution.

Tigran is the Director of the Centre for the Future of Places at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Since 2017, the Centre has been my home away from home, and a venue to merge and contrast practical experiences with complex, interdisciplinary points of view.

In the video, we discuss how, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, an interdisciplinary and contextual view of place (far beyond the physical and architectural) is more relevant than ever before. We also discuss the many valuable contributions made by the Centre over the past several years.

With this retrospective, I’m excited to share the book’s immersive, critical thinking about changing environments. Chapter 3 explains many ways to understand cities and places. Chapter 5 asks how to apply ideas and tools proven elsewhere in localities that deserve a community voice. Finally, Chapter 6 provides a range of examples, of corporate success and failure, community empowerment, and the magic of listening and working with the expertise of local residents.

Review the special “landing page” for Sustaining a City’s Culture and Character here. The book–in both hardback and e-book editions–is available now internationally on Amazon and local bookstores (with customary delays for books still arriving at warehouses worldwide).

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