The countless individuals, both famous and unknown, who shaped Mexico' history come alive . . . they prosper, decline, and rise again before being extinguished by political and social upheavals beyond their control.

    By the 1920s, Beaux Art and Art Deco palaces offered residents all the luxuries of a first-class hotel: barbershops, ballrooms, rooftop terraces, and indoor pools. Soon other innovations in apartment living—the garden complex, the cooperative, and the mixed-use building—put Washington at the forefront of urban planning. Today the resurgence of the historic heart of the nation's capital has created an apartment boom rivaled only by that of the 1920s.Through residents' personal recollections, original floor plans, and more than 690 photographs, Best Addresses offers an intimate tour behind the facades of 162 remarkable buildings. Some have already been destroyed or disfigured beyond repair, making their preservation here especially valuable, while others continue to set the standard for elegant living in the nation's capital.

    Gary Nash shows how, from colonial times through the Revolution and into the turbulent 1830s, blacks in the City of Brotherly Love struggled to shape a family life, gain occupational competence, organize churches, establish neighborhoods and social networks, advance cultural institutions, educate their children in schools, forge a political consciousness, and train black leaders who would help abolish slavery. These early generations of urban blacks--many of them newly emancipated--constructed a rich and varied community life.Nash's account includes elements of both poignant triumph and profound tragedy. Keeping in focus both the internal life of the black community and race relations in Philadelphia generally, he portrays first the remarkable vibrancy of black institution-building, ordinary life, and relatively amicable race relations, and then rising racial antagonism. The promise of a racially harmonious society that took form in the postrevolutionary era, involving the integration into the white republic of African people brutalized under slavery, was ultimately unfulfilled. Such hopes collapsed amid racial conflict and intensifying racial discrimination by the 1820s. This failure of the great and much-watched "Philadelphia experiment" prefigured the course of race relations in America in our own century, an enduringly tragic part of this country's past.

    A bestseller in its original edition (Lexikos Books) now restored, after more than a decade OP, with a new afterword by the author.

    He defines architecture as a continuing dialogue between generations which creates an environment across time. This definitive survey extends beyond the cities themselves to the American scene as a whole, which has inspired the reasonable balanced, closed and ordered forms, and above all the probity, that he feels typifies American architecture.

    In Planning in the Face of Power, John Forester argues that effective, public-serving planners can overcome the traditional—but paralyzing—dichotomies of being either professional or political, detached and distantly rational or engaged and change-oriented. Because inequalities of power directly structure planning practice, planners who are blind to relations of power will inevitably fail. Forester shows how, in the face of the conflict-ridden demands of practice, planners can think politically and rationally at the same time, avoid common sources of failure, and work to advance both a vision of the broader public good and the interests of the least powerful members of society.This book provides a systematic reformulation of the politics of professional practice in the arena of city planning, public policy making, and public administration and management. It has immediate implications for the study of administration and management and for students of administration and planning in schools of social work, education, and public health. While focusing concretely on problems of planning practice (e.g. planners' sources of influence, their difficulties of listening critically, their understandings of the politics of organizations), Planning in the Face of Power brings to bear a wide range of theoretical insights and so integrates social and political theory with the demands of actual practice. Accordingly, the book will be important to practitioners who seek to understand the pressures they face at work as well as social theorists who wish to integrate theory and practice more powerfully, but will also appeal to the general reader interested in gaining an understanding of the practice of planning in the face of the realities of social equality and power.

    This non-fiction narrative traces the life of Patience Gromes, her family, her neighbours from the War between the States to the War on Poverty. Meet Patience's grandfather who escaped slavery 14 years before the Civil War. Experience the hard years of Reconstruction, the cruelty of De Jure Segregation, the triumph of Civil Rights. Probe the complexities and ironies of neighbourhood life under urban renewal and the War on Poverty.