Common Worlds: Paths Toward Sustainable Urbanism explores expert and lay approaches to sustainable urbanism, focusing on the politics and civic aesthetics of space and place; schooling, project-based learning and their consequences for the life chances of youth; and the prospect of civic engagement. Extended case studies based on participatory action research profile three regions in California, each of which has undergone dramatic demographic and socioeconomic change in the last twenty years and each of which has supported robust sustainability movements. The text opens with a conceptual overview of what constitutes "common worlds" and how communities can reshape their approaches to and frameworks for resolving contemporary urban issues, especially those at the intersection with environmental concerns. Part two delves into the structural transformations of three specific regions, including: rapid population changes and urbanization pressures which affected housing and services; alterations to local ecosystems, affecting plant and animal species and increasing risks of flood and fire, resulting from geographic mobility together with the location of new industries; and changes in the educational arena as schooling regimes adapted to the needs of the new local industries and as venues of informal learning began offering mentoring, apprenticeship, and participation in projects as fledgling artists, engineers, planners, writers, teachers, and scientists. In the socioeconomic sphere, long-held urban institutional arrangements gave way to new configurations of work, family and community life, with increased costs in housing, transportation, fuel, and communication technologies. Maida demonstrates how organized forms of resistance to the consequences of these social, economic and ecological transitions occurred in these regions, ranging from grassroots civic engagement, to ballot measures and land trusts. The result is a deep investigation of transformational change movements in support of aesthetic improvement, including preservation, conservation and restoration efforts on behalf of parkland, open space, agricultural land and marine wetlands in the face of external threats to their sustainability.