Tao of Urban Rejuvenation

Building livable, creative, equitable, and sustainable cities is a common community goal, but drawing from several disciplines to achieve it may pose considerable challenge. Public/private partnership is popular today, but making it work in a complex world is difficult. In The Tao of Urban Rejuvenation, Weiming Lu shares his experience in creating a vision, in marketing an area that has suffered decades of disinvestment, in taking calculated risks to attract new investment, in negotiating complex loans and guarantees, and in leveraging resources. Lu explains how to form complex partnerships with those in the public and private sectors, avoid competition while fostering collaboration, share common goals, and marshal diverse resources. He applies his multidisciplinary approach to guiding diverse project design and creating a sense of place. He shares the difficulties of, and his own successes and failures in, working to advance the long-term interest of a community. Having seen the destruction caused by "urban renewal" in which some cities have become formless and their people rootless-Lu strives for urban rejuvenation without gentrification, for balancing economic development with social advancement, for preserving the old while welcoming the new, and above all, for building livable, creative, equitable, and sustainable cities. The Tao of Urban Rejuvenation is the result of a storied career that has taken Weiming Lu around the globe working to improve our cities. From Saint Paul to Taipei, Dallas to Beijing, and Seattle to Winnipeg, residents have thanked Weiming for helping them building a more sustainable and livable city.