Building Together: Case Studies in Participatory Planning and Community Building offers a comprehensive exploration of neighborhood developments across various regions including North and South America, Europe, and Africa, covering a span of over forty years. This book is a seminal work on the community-based design practices of participatory planning and advocacy architecture.

Through a series of case studies, the authors, Roger Katan and Ron Shiffman, illustrate the challenges, opportunities, and rewards that come with grassroots collaboration. These case studies are carefully selected for their practical lessons and range in scale from regional urban planning to smaller architectural projects, covering areas as diverse as Harlem, Greenpoint, and the greater New York Metropolitan region to sites in coastal Colombia, southern France, and Burkina Faso, Africa.

Designed to appeal to a wide audience, including community development specialists, faculty and students of planning, architecture, community health, and the social sciences, as well as practicing professionals and decision-makers in economic development and community-based organizations, Building Together is a crucial resource for those interested in creating a more humane and healthy city through participatory democracy.

Poor Economics presents an insightful and disruptive portrait of how poor people actually live, challenging the most common assumptions about economics. Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Nobel Prize-winning economists and MIT professors, delve into the real-life decisions and dilemmas faced by the poor based on extensive field research conducted worldwide.

Poor Economics demonstrates that to create a world free of poverty, it is crucial to understand the everyday choices confronting those living on less than a dollar a day. This book offers a profound rethinking of the economics of poverty, providing readers with a closer look at life through the lens of economic decisions, and suggesting that the battle against poverty starts with proper comprehension of these daily struggles.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott, is an essential work that delves into the reasons behind the failure of states to execute large-scale social planning successfully. It presents an analysis of various disasters, from Russia to Tanzania, probing why such efforts often result in calamity.

The book argues that disasters occur when states impose oversimplified visions on complex realities that they cannot fully comprehend. Scott emphasizes the importance of recognizing local, practical knowledge alongside formal, systematic knowledge. He critiques 'development theory' and state planning that ignores the values and wishes of the people it affects. This persuasive narrative identifies four conditions common to all planning disasters: the state's administrative ordering of nature and society; a 'high-modernist ideology' that overestimates the role of science in improving human life; the use of authoritarian power to implement broad interventions; and the inability of a weakened civil society to resist such plans.

Written with clarity, Seeing Like a State brings to light the intricate nature of the world we inhabit and serves as a cautionary tale about the limits of grand societal engineering.

Based on the biography of Lucio Agustine Rosenkreutz Crăciunescu and Thérèse Joselynn Aubrière.

Development period from 02-2002 to 04-20-2004.