In the last few decades, many European and American cities and towns experienced economic, social and spatial structural change. Strategies for urban regeneration include investments in infrastructures for production, consumption and communication, as well as marketing and branding measures, and urban design schemes. Bringing together leading academics from across a range of disciplines, including Douglas Kelbaugh, Ali Madanipour, Saskia Sassen, Gregory Ashworth, Nan Elin, Emily Talen, and many others, Emergent Urbanism identifies the specific issues dominating today's urban planning and urban design discourse, arguing that urban planning and design not only results from deliberate planning and design measures, but how these combine with infrastructure planning, and derive from economic, social and spatial processes of structural change. Combining explorations from urban planning, urban theory, human geography, sociology, urban design and architecture, the volume provides a comprehensive and state-of-the-art overview, highlighting the complexities of these interactions in space and place, process and design.

Bringing together leading academics from across a range of disciplines, Emergent Urbanism identifies the specific issues dominating today's urban planning and urban design discourse, arguing that urban planning and design not only results from deliberate planning and design measures, but how these combine with infrastructure planning.

[T]here are a number of interesting chapters, and the issues pursued are of great interest. Urban planning and design is relatively weak in theoretical framing and in situating practice within a wider context. This book can help strengthen the debate in this space. - Robin Hickman, Journal of Transport Geography