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We live in a self-proclaimed Urban Age, where we celebrate the city as the source of economic prosperity, a nurturer of social and cultural diversity, and a place primed for democracy. We proclaim the city as the fertile ground from which progress will arise. Without cities, we tell ourselves, human civilization would falter and decay. In Cities in the Urban Age, Robert A. Beauregard argues that this line of thinking is not only hyperbolic--it is too celebratory by half. For Beauregard, the city is a cauldron for four haunting contradictions. First, cities are equally defined by both their wealth and their poverty. Second, cities are simultaneously environmentally destructive and yet promise sustainability. Third, cities encourage rule by political machines and oligarchies, even as they are essentially democratic and at least nominally open to all. And fourth, city life promotes tolerance among disparate groups, even as the friction among them often erupts into violence. Beauregard offers no simple solutions or proposed remedies for these contradictions; indeed, he doesn't necessarily hold that they need to be resolved, since they are generative of city life. Without these four tensions, cities wouldn't be cities. Rather, Beauregard argues that only by recognizing these ambiguities and contradictions can we even begin to understand our moral obligations, as well as the clearest paths toward equality, justice, and peace in urban settings.

City and regional planners talk constantly about the things of the world - from highway interchanges and retention ponds to zoning documents and conference rooms - yet most seem to have a poor understanding of the materiality of the world in which they're immersed. Too often planners treat built forms, weather patterns, plants, animals, or regulatory technologies as passively awaiting commands rather than actively involved in the workings of cities and regions. In the ambitious and provocative 'Planning Matter', Beauregard sets out to offer a new materialist perspective on planning practice that reveals the many ways in which the non-human things of the world mediate what planners say and do.

Robert A. Beauregard examines the intersection of urban decline, suburbanization, domestic prosperity, and U.S. global aspirations as it unfolded from 1945 to the mid-1970s. Placing the decline of America's cities and the rise of the suburbs into a cultural, political, and global context, Beauregard illuminates how these phenomena contributed to a changing notion of America's identity at home and abroad

Drawing on the pronouncements of public commentators, this book portrays the 20th century history of U.S. cities, focusing specifically on how commentators crafted a discourse of urban decline and prosperity peculiar to the post-World War II era. The efforts of these commentators spoke to the foundational ambivalence Americans have toward their cities and, in turn, shaped the choices Americans made as they created and negotiated the country's changing urban landscape.

In this essay, I extend Lieven Ameel's narrative approach to planning by adding a material perspective that treats planning documents as actors in planning practice. As actors, documents have consequences for planning beyond the stories that they convey. Among others, these consequences include providing the transparency essential for democratic planning, allowing planners to act at a distance, and strengthening institutional memory. I also reflect on the private stories that the public does not hear or read about and which are as important as the stories that Ameel deftly analyzes.

Abstract
In this article, I reflect on how urban scholars negotiate between the general and the particular not by turning to sampling strategies or statistical techniques but by situating the city in a favourable rhetorical space. In effect, they attempt to close the gap theoretically. My substantive and specific focus is urban scholarship that addresses individual cities and that frames that city either as a laboratory in which to do urban research, a lens through which to see other cities, or as the archetype for a school of urban studies. I concentrate mainly on the work of US urban scholars.