The expanding Los Angeles metropolitan area is an early example of suburbanization.^[1]

Urbanization, urbanisation or urban drift is the physical growth of urban areas as a result of global change or the increasing proportion of the total population becomes concentrated in towns. The United Nations projected that half of the world's population would live in urban areas at the end of 2008.^[2]

Urbanization is closely linked to modernization, industrialization, and the sociological process of rationalization. Urbanization can describe a specific condition at a set time, i.e. the proportion of total population or area in cities or towns, or the term can describe the increase of this proportion over time. So the term urbanization can represent the level of urban relative to overall population, or it can represent the rate at which the urban proportion is increasing.

Movement[link]

As more and more people leave villages and farms to live in cities, urban growth results. The rapid growth of cities like Chicago in the late 19th century and Mumbai a century later can be attributed largely to rural-urban migration. This kind of growth is especially commonplace in developing countries. This growth can also be attributed to new job opportunities.

The rapid urbanization of the world’s population over the twentieth century is described in the 2005 Revision of the UN World Urbanization Prospects report. The global proportion of urban population rose dramatically from 13% (220 million) in 1900, to 29% (732 million) in 1950, to 49% (3.2 billion) in 2005. The same report projected that the figure is likely to rise to 60% (4.9 billion) by 2030.^[3]

Percentage of World Population: Urban vs. Rural.^[4]

According to the UN State of the World Population 2007 report, sometime in the middle of 2007, the majority of people worldwide will be living in towns or cities, for the first time in history; this is referred to as the arrival of the "Urban Millennium" or the 'tipping point'. In regard to future trends, it is estimated 93% of urban growth will occur in developing nations, with 80% of urban growth occurring in Asia and Africa.^[5][6]

Urbanization rates vary between countries. The United States and United Kingdom have a far higher urbanization level than China, India, Swaziland or Niger, but a far slower annual urbanization rate, since much less of the population is living in a rural area.

• Urbanization in the United States never reached the Rocky Mountains in locations such as Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Telluride, Colorado; Taos, New Mexico; Douglas County, Colorado and Aspen, Colorado. The state of Vermont has also been affected, as has the coast of Florida, the Birmingham-Jefferson County, AL area, the Pacific Northwest and the barrier islands of North Carolina.
• In the United Kingdom, two major examples of new urbanization can be seen in Swindon, Wiltshire and Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire.^[7] These two towns show some of the quickest growth rates in Europe.

Center of São Paulo, one of the largest metropolises in the world.

Causes[link]

Population age comparison between rural Pocahontas County, Iowa and urban Johnson County, Iowa, illustrating the flight of young adults (red) to urban centers in Iowa.^[8]

The City of Chicago, Illinois is an example of the early American grid system of development. The grid is enforced even on uneven topography.

Urbanization in Makati, Philippines

Urbanization occurs naturally from individual and corporate efforts to reduce time and expense in commuting and transportation while improving opportunities for jobs, education, housing, and transportation. Living in cities permits individuals and families to take advantage of the opportunities of proximity, diversity, and marketplace competition.

People move into cities to seek economic opportunities. A major contributing factor is known as "rural flight". In rural areas, often on small family farms, it is difficult to improve one's standard of living beyond basic sustenance. Farm living is dependent on unpredictable environmental conditions, and in times of drought, flood or pestilence, survival becomes extremely problematic. In modern times, industrialization of agriculture has negatively affected the economy of small and middle-sized farms and strongly reduced the size of the rural labor market.

Cities, in contrast, are known to be places where money, services and wealth are centralized. Cities are where fortunes are made and where social mobility is possible. Businesses, which generate jobs and capital, are usually located in urban areas. Whether the source is trade or tourism, it is also through the cities that foreign money flows into a country. It is easy to see why someone living on a farm might wish to take their chance moving to the city and trying to make enough money to send back home to their struggling family.

There are better basic services as well as other specialist services that aren't found in rural areas. There are more job opportunities and a greater variety of jobs. Health is another major factor. People, especially the elderly are often forced to move to cities where there are doctors and hospitals that can cater for their health needs. Other factors include a greater variety of entertainment (restaurants, movie theaters, theme parks, etc.) and a better quality of education, namely universities. Due to their high populations, urban areas can also have much more diverse social communities allowing others to find people like them when they might not be able to in rural areas.

These conditions are heightened during times of change from a pre-industrial society to an industrial one. It is at this time that many new commercial enterprises are made possible, thus creating new jobs in cities. It is also a result of industrialization that farms become more mechanized, putting many labourers out of work. This is currently occurring fastest in India.^{[citation needed]}

Economic effects[link]

One of the last housebuildings in the growing city of Kstovo, such as the one in the background

As cities develop, effects can include a dramatic increase and change in costs, often pricing the local working class out of the market, including such functionaries as employees of the local municipalities. For example, Eric Hobsbawm's book The age of revolution: 1789–1848 (published 1962 and 2005) chapter 11, stated "Urban development in our period [1789–1848] was a gigantic process of class segregation, which pushed the new labouring poor into great morasses of misery outside the centres of government and business and the newly specialised residential areas of the bourgeoisie. The almost universal European division into a 'good' west end and a 'poor' east end of large cities developed in this period." This is likely due the prevailing south-west wind which carries coal smoke and other airborne pollutants downwind, making the western edges of towns preferable to the eastern ones. Similar problems now affect the developing world, rising inequality resulting from rapid urbanisation trends. The drive for rapid urban growth and often efficiency can lead to less equitable urban development, think tanks such as the Overseas Development Institute have even proposed policies that encourage labour intensive growth as a means of absorbing the influx of low skilled and unskilled labour.^[9]

Urbanization is often viewed as a negative trend, but can in fact, be perceived simply as a natural occurrence from individual and corporate efforts to reduce expense in commuting and transportation while improving opportunities for jobs, education, housing, and transportation. Living in cities permits individuals and families to take advantage of the opportunities of proximity, diversity, and marketplace competition.^{[10][11][12][13]}

Environmental effects[link]

The urban heat island has become a growing concern and is increasing over the years. The urban heat island is formed when industrial and urban areas are developed and heat becomes more abundant. In rural areas, a large part of the incoming solar energy is used to evaporate water from vegetation and soil. In cities, where less vegetation and exposed soil exists, the majority of the sun’s energy is absorbed by urban structures and asphalt. Hence, during warm daylight hours, less evaporative cooling in cities allows surface temperatures to rise higher than in rural areas. Additional city heat is given off by vehicles and factories, as well as by industrial and domestic heating and cooling units.^[14] This effect causes the city to become 2 to 10 °F (1 to 6 °C) warmer than surrounding landscapes.^[15] Impacts also include reducing soil moisture and intensification of carbon dioxide emissions.^[16]

In his book Whole Earth Discipline, Stewart Brand argues that the effects of urbanization are on the overall positive for the environment. Firstly, the birth rate of new urban dwellers falls immediately to replacement rate, and keeps falling. This can prevent overpopulation in the future. Secondly, it puts a stop to destructive subsistence farming techniques, like slash and burn agriculture. Finally, it minimizes land use by humans, leaving more for nature.^[11]

Changing forms[link]

Different forms of urbanization can be classified depending on the style of architecture and planning methods as well as historic growth of areas.

In cities of the developed world urbanization traditionally exhibited a concentration of human activities and settlements around the downtown area, the so-called in-migration. In-migration refers to migration from former colonies and similar places. The fact that many immigrants settle in impoverished city centres led to the notion of the "peripheralization of the core", which simply describes that people who used to be at the periphery of the former empires now live right in the centre.

Recent developments, such as inner-city redevelopment schemes, mean that new arrivals in cities no longer necessarily settle in the centre. In some developed regions, the reverse effect, originally called counter urbanisation has occurred, with cities losing population to rural areas, and is particularly common for richer families. This has been possible because of improved communications, and has been caused by factors such as the fear of crime and poor urban environments. It has contributed to the phenomenon of shrinking cities experienced by some parts of the industrialized world.

When the residential area shifts outward, this is called suburbanization. A number of researchers and writers suggest that suburbanization has gone so far to form new points of concentration outside the downtown both in developed and developing countries such as India.^[17] This networked, poly-centric form of concentration is considered by some an emerging pattern of urbanization. It is called variously exurbia, edge city (Garreau, 1991), network city (Batten, 1995), or postmodern city (Dear, 2000). Los Angeles is the best-known example of this type of urbanization.

Rural migrants are attracted by the possibilities that cities can offer, but often settle in shanty towns and experience extreme poverty. In the 1980s, this was attempted to be tackled with the urban bias theory which was promoted by Michael Lipton who wrote: "...the most important class conflict in the poor countries of the world today is not between labour and capital. Nor is it between foreign and national interests. It is between rural classes and urban classes. The rural sector contains most of the poverty and most of the low-cost sources of potential advance; but the urban sector contains most of the articulateness, organization and power. So the urban classes have been able to win most of the rounds of the struggle with the countryside...".^[18] Most of the urban poor in developing countries able to find work can spend their lives in insecure, poorly paid jobs. According to research by the Overseas Development Institute pro-poor urbanisation will require labour intensive growth, supported by labour protection, flexible land use regulation and investments in basic services.' ^[19]

Urbanization can be planned urbanization or organic. Planned urbanization, i.e.: planned community or the garden city movement, is based on an advance plan, which can be prepared for military, aesthetic, economic or urban design reasons. Examples can be seen in many ancient cities; although with exploration came the collision of nations, which meant that many invaded cities took on the desired planned characteristics of their occupiers. Many ancient organic cities experienced redevelopment for military and economic purposes, new roads carved through the cities, and new parcels of land were cordoned off serving various planned purposes giving cities distinctive geometric designs. UN agencies prefer to see urban infrastructure installed before urbanization occurs. Landscape planners are responsible for landscape infrastructure (public parks, sustainable urban drainage systems, greenways etc.) which can be planned before urbanization takes place, or afterward to revitalize an area and create greater livability within a region. Concepts of control of the urban expansion are considered in the American Institute of Planners.^[20]

See also[link]

• Counter urbanization
• Division of labour
• Megalopolis (city type)
• People Flow
• Pseudo-urbanization
• Suburban colonization
• Suburban sprawl
• Urban morphology
• Political demography

Contributors to urbanization:

• British Agricultural Revolution
• Industrial Revolution
• Industrialisation
• Neolithic Revolution
• Rural flight

Regional:

• Urbanization by country
• Urbanization in Africa
• Urbanization in China

References[link]

External links[link]

• United Nations World Urbanization Prospects, the 2009 Revision, Web Site of the United Nations Population Division
• Geopolis: research group, University of Paris-Diderot, France
• Tomorrow's Crises Today - the humanitarian dimension of urbanization, by IRIN
• The Natural History of Urbanization, by Lewis Mumford
• The World System urbanization dynamics, by Andrey Korotayev
• Brief review of world socio-demographic trends includes review of global urbanization trends

Tom Vasel (born on September 8, 1976) is a well known podcaster and reviewer of board games.^[1][2] Vasel co-hosts a long-running and popular^[3] gaming podcast titled The Dice Tower, and as of 2011^[update] has posted over 1200 reviews on the internet database BoardGameGeek.^[4]

As of August 2003^[update], Vasel taught mathematics at the International Christian School in Uijeongbu. He assumed the role of Pastor of Uijongbu Baptist Church, succeeding Pastor Rick Kelley in March 2007. After leaving South Korea, he has worked as a teacher in Florida.

The Dice Tower[link]

Since May 2005, Vasel has co-hosted The Dice Tower, a podcast about board games and wargames. Originally, Vasel represented players who prefer designer games, while Joe Steadman advocated for those who prefer wargames. Steadman left the show in May 2006 after the 50th episode. Vasel, hosting alone with occasional input from Sam Healey for a few shows, rearranged the format to include recorded segments by guest reviewers and players. Gradually Healey began to take a larger role and was eventually promoted to co-host. Healey has since left the show and been replaced by the show's voice-over man, Eric Summerer.

Each episode of the podcast includes several regular segments and several occasional segments. The core of every episode is the "Gaming Top Ten", where Vasel and Summerer provide their top ten games in a particular category. Most shows start with Vasel and Summerer discussing the games that they have recently played. News from the boardgaming world usually follows, which is in turn followed by a segment from German contributor Moritz Eggert. The podcast also features frequent contests, where listeners can enter to win one or more games from a sponsoring company.

The Dice Tower web site features past top-ten lists and Vasel's in-depth reviews of boardgames. Vasel's reviews are also used by board game publishers and retailers for promotion of their games.^[5][6]

The Jack Vasel Memorial Fund[link]

Following the loss of his infant son Jack Vasel at the end of 2010, Tom Vasel established the Jack Vasel Memorial Fund, at www.jackvasel.org. The fund is a not-for-profit with a simple goal: raising and distributing funds to help gamers in their hour of need.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Tom Vasel's blog at The Dice Tower
• Tom Vasel at BoardGameGeek

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Murray Bookchin

Born	January 14, 1921 New York City, New York
Died	July 30, 2006(2006-07-30) (aged 85) Burlington, Vermont
Era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Anarchist communism; later, social ecology, libertarian municipalism, Communalism
Main interests	Social hierarchy, dialectics, post-scarcity anarchism, libertarian socialism, ethics, environmental sustainability, conservationism, history of popular revolutionary movements
Notable ideas	social ecology, Communalism, libertarian municipalism, dialectical naturalism
Influenced by Aristotle,[1] Baruch Spinoza,[1] G.W.F. Hegel,[1] Karl Marx,[1] Peter Kropotkin,[1] Hans Jonas,[2] Denis Diderot,[3] Frankfurt School[4]

Murray Bookchin (January 14, 1921 – July 30, 2006)^[5] was an American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher. A pioneer in the ecology movement,^[6] Bookchin was the founder of the social ecology movement within anarchist, libertarian socialist and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books on politics, philosophy, history, and urban affairs as well as ecology. In the late 1990s he became disenchanted with the strategy of political Anarchism and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called Communalism.^[7]

Bookchin was an anti-capitalist and vocal advocate of the decentralisation of society along ecological and democratic lines. His writings on libertarian municipalism, a theory of face-to-face, assembly democracy, had an influence on the Green movement and anti-capitalist direct action groups such as Reclaim the Streets.

Life and writings[link]

Bookchin was born in New York City to Russian Jewish immigrants^[8][9] Nathan Bookchin and Rose (Kaluskaya) Bookchin. He grew up in the Bronx, where his grandmother, Zeitel, a Socialist Revolutionary, imbued him with Russian populist ideas. After her death in 1930, he joined the Young Pioneers, the Communist youth organization (for children 9 to 14) ^[10] and the Young Communist League (for older children) in 1935. He attended the Workers School near Union Square, where he studied Marxism. In the late 1930s he broke with Stalinism and gravitated toward Trotskyism, joining the Socialist Workers Party. In the early 1940s he worked in a foundry in Bayonne, New Jersey where he was an organizer and shop steward for the United Electrical Workers as well as a recruiter for the SWP. Within the SWP he adhered to the Goldman-Morrow faction, which broke away after the war ended. He was an auto worker and UAW member at the time of the great General Motors strike of 1945-46.

From 1947 he collaborated with a fellow lapsed Trotskyist, the German expatriate Josef Weber, in New York in the Movement for a Democracy of Content, a group of 20 or so post-Trotskyists who collectively edited the periodical Contemporary Issues - A Magazine for a Democracy of Content. Contemporary Issues embraced utopianism. The periodical believed that previous attempts to create utopia had foundered on the necessity of toil and drudgery; but now modern technology had obviated the need for human toil, a liberatory development. To achieve this "post-scarcity" society, Bookchin developed a theory of ecological decentralism. The magazine published Bookchin's first articles, including the pathbreaking "The Problem of Chemicals in Food" (1952). In 1958, Bookchin defined himself as an anarchist,^[10] seeing parallels between anarchism and ecology. His first book, Our Synthetic Environment, was published under the pseudonym Lewis Herber in 1962, a few months before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.^[11] The book described a broad range of environmental ills but received little attention because of its political radicalism.

In 1964, Bookchin joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and protested racism at the 1964 World's Fair. During 1964-67, while living on Manhattan's Lower East Side, he cofounded and was the principal figure in the New York Federation of Anarchists. His groundbreaking essay "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" introduced ecology as a concept in radical politics.^[12] In 1968 he founded another group that published the influential Anarchos magazine, which published that and other innovative essays on post-scarcity and on ecological technologies such as solar and wind energy, and on decentralization and miniaturization. Lecturing throughout the United States, he helped popularize the concept of ecology to the counterculture. His widely republished 1969 essay Listen, Marxist!^[13] warned Students for a Democratic Society (in vain) against an impending takeover by a Marxist group. "Once again the dead are walking in our midst," he wrote, "ironically, draped in the name of Marx, the man who tried to bury the dead of the nineteenth century. So the revolution of our own day can do nothing better than parody, in turn, the October Revolution of 1917 and the civil war of 1918-1920, with its 'class line,' its Bolshevik Party, its 'proletarian dictatorship,' its puritanical morality, and even its slogan, 'soviet power'".^[14] These and other influential 1960s essays are anthologized in Post Scarcity Anarchism (1971)

In 1969-70 he taught at Alternate U, a countercultural radical school based on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. He was hired by Goddard College in the fall of 1973 to lecture on technology; his lectures led to a teaching position and to the creation of the Social Ecology Studies program in 1974 and the Institute for Social Ecology soon thereafter, of which he became the director. In 1974 he was hired by Ramapo College in Mahwah, New Jersey, where he quickly became a full professor. The ISE was a hub for experimentation and study of appropriate technology in the 1970s. In 1977-78 he was a member of the Spruce Mountain Affinity Group of the Clamshell Alliance. Also in 1977, he published The Spanish Anarchists, a history of the Spanish anarchist movement up to the revolution of 1936. During this period, Bookchin forged some ties with the nascent libertarian movement. "He spoke at a Libertarian Party convention and contributed to a newsletter edited by Karl Hess. In 1976, he told a Libertarian activist that 'If I were a voting man, I'd vote for MacBride' — LP nominee Roger MacBride, that is."^[14]

In 1980, he resigned as ISE director, and upon his retirement from Ramapo in early 1983, he moved to Burlington, Vermont. There, while continuing to write, he put his political ideas into practice by working with groups that opposed a wood chip plant, a trash incinerator, a condo development on the Lake Champlain waterfront, and a luxury marina. To foster face-to-face democracy, he helped create Burlington's neighborhood assemblies. In 1982, his book The Ecology of Freedom had a profound impact on the emerging ecology movement, both in the United States and abroad. His lectures in Germany influenced some of the founders of the German Greens. He was a principal figure in the Burlington Greens in 1986-90, an ecology group that ran candidates for city council on a program to create neighborhood democracy.

In From Urbanization to Cities (originally published in 1986 as The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship), Bookchin traced the democratic traditions that influenced his political philosophy and defined the implementation of the libertarian municipalism concept. A few years later The Politics of Social Ecology, written by his partner of 20 years, Janet Biehl, briefly summarized these ideas.

In 1987, as the keynote speaker at the first gathering of the U.S. Greens in Amherst, Massachusetts, Bookchin initiated a critique of deep ecology, indicting it for misanthropy, neo-Malthusianism, biocentricism, and irrationalism. A high-profile deep ecologist Dave Foreman of Earth First! had recently said that famine in Ethiopia represented "nature taking its course," nature self-correcting for human "overpopulation."^{[citation needed]}

In 1995, Bookchin lamented the decline of American anarchism into primitivism, anti-technologism, neo-situationism, individual self-expression, and "ad hoc adventurism," at the expense of forming a social movement. Arthur Verslius said, "Bookchin... describes himself as a 'social anarchist' because he looks forward to a (gentle) societal revolution.... Bookchin has lit out after those whom he terms 'lifestyle anarchists.'"^[15] The publication of "Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism" in 1995, criticizing this tendency, was startling to anarchists. Thereafter Bookchin concluded that American anarchism was essentially individualistic and broke with anarchism publicly in 1999. He placed his ideas into a new political ideology: Communalism (spelled with a capital "C" to differentiate it from other forms of communalism), a form of libertarian socialism that retains his ideas about assembly democracy and the necessity of decentralization of settlement, power/money/influence, agriculture, manufacturing, etc.

In addition to his political writings, Bookchin wrote extensively on philosophy, calling his ideas dialectical naturalism.^[16] The dialectical writings of Hegel, which articulate a developmental philosophy of change and growth, seemed to him to lend themselves to an organic, even ecological approach.^[17] Although Hegel "exercised a considerable influence" on Bookchin, he was not, in any sense, a Hegelian.^[18] His later philosophical writings emphasize humanism, rationality, and the ideals of the Enlightenment.^[19] His last major published work was The Third Revolution, a four-volume history of the libertarian movements in European and American revolutions.

He continued to teach at the ISE until 2004. Bookchin died of congestive heart failure on July 30, 2006, at his home in Burlington at the age of 85.^[20]

Thought[link]

Social ecology[link]

In the essay “What is Social Ecology?” Bookchin summarizes the meaning of social ecology as follows:

Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. It follows, from this view, that these ecological problems cannot be understood, let alone solved, without a careful understanding of our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it. To make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today—apart, to be sure, from those that are produced by natural catastrophes.^[21]

.

Libertarian municipalism[link]

Starting in the 1970s, Bookchin argued that the arena for libertarian social change should be the municipal level. In a 2001 interview he summarized his views this way: "The overriding problem is to change the structure of society so that people gain power. The best arena to do that is the municipality — the city, town, and village — where we have an opportunity to create a face-to-face democracy."^[22] In 1980 Bookchin used the term "libertarian municipalism", to describe a system in which libertarian institutions of directly democratic assemblies would oppose and replace the state with a confederation of free municipalities.^[23] Libertarian municipalism intends to create a situation in which the two powers—the municipal confederations and the nation-state—cannot coexist.^[22] Its supporters—Communalists—believe it to be the means to achieve a rational society, and its structure becomes the organization of society.

On Israel[link]

In a 1986 article, Bookchin criticized what he characterized as the left's focus on Israel and its ignoring of human rights elsewhere in the region, as well as Arab atrocities against Jews and Palestinian calls for the "annihilation" of Jews. He mentions one incident in which Israelis tried to discourage the Palestinian Arabs from fleeing Jaffa during the Israeli War of Independence. However, he also claimed to be critical of Israel, especially under Likud.^[24]

DOCUMENTARY'

BOOKCHIN ON BOOKCHIN (BOOKCHIN ON BOOKCHIN) is an independent feature-length documentary about the life and times of American political thinker Murray Bookchin, who made history as the founder of the social ecology movement. Our aim is to make a film that deeply explores the influences and experiences that have helped shape one of the most unique and distinctive voices in modern political thinking. The documentary will explore the development of Murray's politics through his personal experiences, drawing off hours and hours of filming. We have been granted unparalleled access to Bookchin, including exclusive interview footage at his home in Vermont and his final public appearance in Montreal. Murray was reticent to engage in anything that smacked of the personality cult but his biography covers key points in the development of radical politics and sets in context the "Social Ecology" of his later life. We are in the process of making the film, but need your help in order to complete it. Thanks for visiting our page and we hope you enjoy what you find!

"Perhaps the most compelling real fact that radicals in our era have not adequately faced is the fact that capitalism today has become a society, not only an economy" Bookchin 1991.

Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) was a pioneer of the ecology movement, and was a significant social theorist on the Left throughout his life. He was an anti-capitalist and an advocate for the decentralization of society along ecological and democratic lines. He called for alternative energies and wrote prophetically about pesticides, cancer and obesity. His writing on anarchism, specially his 1971 book Post-Scarcity Anarchism, lifted and sustained the movement from the 19th century into the 21st century. His life paralleled major American and international events, such as the Great Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War and the counterculture movement. We'll ask how a large part of the 20th century, with all that's come and gone, has helped shape his thoughts a nd theories. In 2006 Bookchin died after a long and active life as a revolutionary, being deeply involved in the labor movement, in the civil rights movement, in urban activism, and in Green politics. In 1974 he co-founded the Institute for Social Ecology. In 1992 the british newspaper The Independent, referred to him as the foremost Green philosopher of the age. It called his 1982 book The Ecology of Freedom one of the classic statements of contemporary anarchism.

His books include Our Synthetic Environment, The Spanish Anarchists, Towards an Ecological Society, The Ecology of Freedom and The Limits of the City.

The director of BOOKCHIN ON BOOKCHIN is Mark Saunders, an award-winning independent film-maker, media activist and writer. His expertise in the field spans over two decades. He is currently running Spectacle Productions, an independent London-based production company which he founded in 1990. Clients include Amnesty International, Channel 4, the Rowntree Foundation, the Howard League for Penal Reform and many others. Previous film credits include: The Truth Lies in Rostock, The Battle of Trafalgar, Exodus from Babylon and Despite the City. His films have been broadcast internationally and exhibited at galleries, including Tate Britain, the National Film Theatre, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Musee des Beaux-Arts, the National Media Museum and the Photographers Gallery.

Selected bibliography[link]

Books[link]

• Our Synthetic Environment (1962)
• Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971 and 2004) ISBN 1-904859-06-2.
• The Limits of the City (1973) ISBN 0-06-091013-5.
• The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years (1977 and 1998) ISBN 1-873176-04-X.
• Toward an Ecological Society (1980) ISBN 0-919618-98-7.
• The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy^{[dead link]} (1982 and 2005) ISBN 1-904859-26-7.
• The Modern Crisis (1986) ISBN 0-86571-083-X.
• The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (1987 and 1992) ISBN 978-0-87156-706-2
• Remaking Society (1990 and 1998) ISBN 0-921689-02-0
• The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism (1990 and 1996) Montreal: Black Rose Books ISBN 978-1-55164-019-8
• To Remember Spain (1994) ISBN 1-873176-87-2
• Re-Enchanting Humanity (1995) ISBN 0-304-32843-X.
• The Third Revolution. Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era (1996–2003) London and New York: Continuum. ISBN 0-304-33594-0. (4 Volumes)
• Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (1997) ISBN 1-873176-83-X.
• The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism (1997, by Janet Biehl) Montreal: Black Rose Books. ISBN 1-55164-100-3.
• Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left. Interviews and Essays, 1993-1998 (1999) Edinburgh and San Francisco: A.K. Press. ISBN 1-873176-35-X.
• Social Ecology and Communalism, with Eirik Eiglad, AK Press, 2007

Articles[link]

• " Beyond Neo-Marxism ". TELOS 36 (Summer 1978). New York: Telos Press

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Biehl, Janet, The Murray Bookchin Reader (Cassell, 1997) ISBN 0-304-33874-5.
• Janet Biehl, "Mumford Gutkind Bookchin: The Emergence of Eco-Decentralism" (New Compass, 2011) ISBN 978-82-93064-10-7
• Marshall, P. (1992), "Murray Bookchin and the Ecology of Freedom", p. 602-622 in, Demanding The Impossible. Fontana Press. ISBN 0-00-686245-4.
• Selva Varengo, La rivoluzione ecologica. Il pensiero libertario di Murray Bookchin (2007) Milano: Zero in condotta. ISBN 978-88-95950-00-6.
• E. Castano, Ecologia e potere. Un saggio su Murray Bookchin, Mimesis, Milano 2011 ISBN 978-88-575-0501-5.
• Damian F. White 'Bookchin - A Critical Appraisal'. Pluto Press (UK/Europe), University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-7453-1965-0 (HBK); 9780745319643 (pbk).
• Andrew Light, ed., Social Ecology after Bookchin (Guilfor, 1998) ISBN 1-57230-379-4.

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Murray Bookchin

• Murray Bookchin Archive at Anarchy Archives
• Libertarian Communist Library Murray Bookchin holdings
• Institute for Social Ecology (ISE)
• Communalism: A Social Ecology Journal
• Left Green Perspectives^{[dead link]} (formerly Green Perspectives) - A Social Ecology Publication
• 'The Prehistory of Post-Scarcity Anarchism: Josef Weber and the Movement for a Democracy of Content (1947–1964)' by Marcel van der Linden, Anarchist Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, (2001).
• "Bookchin's Originality: A Reply to Marcel van der Linden" by Janet Biehl (2008)
• "Bookchin Breaks with Anarchism" by Janet Biehl (2007)
• Murray Bookchin: Requiem for a Pugilist
• Ecology & Ideology (.mp3 file)
• Social Ecology London. English study/action group exploring Bookchin's ideas.
• Democratic Alternative. Scandinavian communalist organization based on Bookchin's ideas. In Svenska, Norsk, Espanol, English.
• My Graphics About Murray Bookchin: blog and archive of comic strip stories about Bookchin's life maintained by Janet Biehl.
• Being a Bookchinite by Chuck Morse. An account of Bookchin as a revolutionist, written by a former student and collaborator.
• The Inclusive Democracy project and Social Ecology by Takis Fotopoulos, "The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy", vol.1, no.3, (May 2005)
• Murray Bookchin Page Daily Bleed's Anarchist Encyclopedia
• Black, Bob. Anarchy After Leftism (C.A.L. Press, 1997). A reply to Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism.
• Bookchin on Bookchin (http://www.indiegogo.com/Bookchin?c=home&a=528160)