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A New Index for Public Space explores the condition of contemporary publicness, with a focus on public space in urban settings. It contributes to a renewed understanding of publicness by revisiting and reworking the vocabulary used to discuss it. A New Index argues that publicness cannot be dissociated from a series of acts of imagination – hence, also, the vocabulary and categories through which it is read. Click here to order the book online.

Technological innovation is changing rapidly, and with it our life. Technological innovation is also expected to further change our labor markets, institutions, and production of goods. There are two acute core issues here. First, how to invest in workers and their skills, bringing to bear the full weight of modern teaching methods and training technology, as well as new institutions, to help them drive the jobs of the future (Autor et al., 2020). Second, how these specialized changes will be supported by the spatial and physical development of our cities and regions. Today’s policy discourse focuses on the importance of manufacturing for economies as well as for the resilience of society. Scholars argue that manufacturing remains vital to local, regional, and national economic growth and comprises “‘the ‘flywheel of growth’ because the rate of growth of manufacturing output tends to drive the rate of productivity growth in manufacturing and in services” (Pike, 2009: 59). This approach is gaining recognition, particularly with the development of technology, which requires specialized, skilled labor (Pisano and Shih, 2012; Plant, 2014). But while the economic arguments for urban manufacturing and the policies that support it are maturing, the social and spatial strategies for supporting manufacturing in cities are still embryonic. Indeed, economic strategies are vital to the development of manufacturing; yet if these are not correlated with social and spatial policies, their chances of maturing are low.. Click here to order the book online.