Neuman authors, co-edits
new urban planning books

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, 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.

- Posted: Apr. 4, 2011 -

Contact:   Phillip Rollfing, prollfing@archone.tamu.edu or 979.458.0442.