24-Hour Shopkeepers in New York City -- The Old Cinema Novo -- Rescuing a River -- The Forbidden City -- Cali -- Do Nothing! Urgently -- Around the Clock, or The 24-Hour City -- Urban Kindness -- Musical Acupuncture -- Continuity is Life -- Street Sounds, Colors, and Scents -- Good Recycling -- People in the Streets -- Smart Car, Smart Bus -- Commitment to Solidarity -- Draw Your City -- Instructions for Performing Urban Acupuncture -- Creative Leisure vs. Industrious Mediocrity -- Self-Esteem Is Good Acupuncture -- Light Is Good Acupuncture -- Aqua-puncture -- The Mobility Card -- Eco-clock -- Arborescence -- Produced Memory -- Of Parks, Squares, and Monuments -- The One-Page Guide -- Urban Cholesterol -- Buildings with Dignity -- Acupuncture of Silence -- Ramblas and Galleries -- A Pinprick Doesn't Hurt -- Trompe L' oeil -- A Letter to Fellini -- How to Find Someone in a City -- The Presence of Genius -- Markets and Street Fairs -- The Bar Counter -- Love for the City.

During his three terms as mayor of Curitiba, Brazil in the 1970s and '80s, architect and urbanist Jaime Lerner transformed his city into a global model of the sustainable and livable community. Through his pioneering work, Lerner has learned that changes to a community don't need to be large-scale and expensive to have a transformative impact-in fact, one block, park or a single person can have an outsized effect on life in the surrounding city. In Urban Acupuncture, his first work published in English, Lerner celebrates these "pinpricks" of urbanism-projects, people and initiatives from around the world that ripple through their communities to uplift city life. With meditative and descriptive prose, Lerner brings readers around the world to streets and neighborhoods where urban acupuncture has been practiced best, from the bustling La Boqueria market in Barcelona to the revitalization of the Cheonggyecheon River in Seoul, South Korea. Through this journey, Lerner invites us to re-examine the true building blocks of vibrant communities-the tree-lined avenues, night vendors and songs and traditions that connect us to our cities and to one another.