In this reappraisal of America's dilemma of racial and economic inequality, Thomas Sugrue asks why Detroit and other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty.

    The story then moves to Rome in the time of the Emperor Hadrian, exploring Roman beliefs in the geometrical perfection of the body.The second part of the book examines how Christian beliefs about the body related to the Christian city—the Venetian ghetto, cloisters, and markets in Paris. The final part of Flesh and Stone deals with what happened to urban space as modern scientific understanding of the body cut free from pagan and Christian beliefs. Flesh and Stone makes sense of our constantly evolving urban living spaces, helping us to build a common home for the increased diversity of bodies that make up the modern city.

    Here, witness Chicago's growth from a desolate fur-trading post in the 1830s to one of the world's most explosively alive cities by 1900.Donald Miller's powerful narrative embraces it all: Chicago's wild beginnings, its reckless growth, its natural calamities (especially the Great Fire of 1871), its raucous politics, its empire-building businessmen, its world-transforming architecture, its rich mix of cultures, its community of young writers and journalists, and its staggering engineering projects -- which included the reversal of the Chicago River and raising the entire city from prairie mud to save it from devastating cholera epidemics. The saga of Chicago's unresolved struggle between order and freedom, growth and control, capitalism and community, remains instructive for our time, as we seek ways to build and maintain cities that retain their humanity without losing their energy. City of the Century throbs with the pulse of the great city it brilliantly brings to life.

    It reveals gentrification as part of a much larger shift in the political economy and culture of the late twentieth century. Documenting in gritty detail the conflicts that gentrification brings to the new urban 'frontiers', the author explores the interconnections of urban policy, patterns of investment, eviction, and homelessness. The failure of liberal urban policy and the end of the 1980s financial boom have made the end-of-the-century city a darker and more dangerous place. Public policy and the private market are conspiring against minorities, working people, the poor, and the homeless as never before. In the emerging revanchist city, gentrification has become part of this policy of revenge.

    The books' beautiful reproductions and finest quality printing and binding match those of the originals, while their 9-by-12-inch format makes them accessible and affordable. New introductions bring a modern voice to these texts, updating them to become invaluable contemporary resources.

    Ranging from the pinnacles of human achievement in art, technology, and architecture to wars and plagues, we see how these forces have shaped our urban centers. Nineteenth-century London, for example, depicts the Industrial Revolution-age city, while 16th-century Florence is a center of refinement and enlightenment. We are led, ultimately, to the emergence of the modern mega-metropolis, 20th-century New York. Lorenz employs such illustrative techniques as aerial perspectives and cut-away views into buildings in order to capture as many details as possible. Each of the 10 mini-chapters is a visual realm unto itself; a completely illustrated timeline unites them. One of the most memorable illustrations is Lorenz's imagining of the countless artists and craftsmen building the glorious Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The full-color illustrations throughout effectively educate both kids and adults about art, culture, and architecture.

    "Chicago Days" is a collection of 150 essays and 500 dramatic photographs compiled from the voluminous files of the "Chicago Tribune," the Chicago Historical Society, and other important collections.

    The result of more than one hundred interviews, this compelling analysis highlights the importance of local sources of competitive advantage in a volatile world economy.

    The city's largest day-labor market, notorious for its population of casual laborers, drunks, gamblers, and vagrants, has been home for more than half a century to anywhere from five to fifteen thousand men who cluster in the mornings at a crossroads called Namidabashi (Bridge of Tears) in hopes of getting work. The day-labor market, along with gambling and prostitution, is run by Japan's organized crime syndicates, the yakuza. Working as a day laborer himself, Fowler kept a diary of his experiences. He also talked with day laborers and local merchants, union leaders and bureaucrats, gangsters and missionaries. The resulting oral histories, juxtaposed with Fowler's narrative and diary entries, bring to life a community on the margins of contemporary Japan.Located near a former outcaste neighborhood, on what was once a public execution ground, San'ya shows a hidden face of Japan and contradicts the common assumption of economic and social homogeneity. Fowler argues that differences in ethnicity and class, normally suppressed in mainstream Japanese society, are conspicuous in San'ya and similar communities. San'ya's largely middle-aged, male day-laborer population contains many individuals displaced by Japan's economic success, including migrants from village communities, castoffs from restructuring industries, and foreign workers from Korea and China. The neighborhood and its inhabitants serve as an economic buffer zone--they are the last to feel the effects of a boom and the first to feel a recession. They come alive in this book, telling urgent stories that personify such abstractions as the costs of modernization and the meaning of physical labor in postindustrial society.

    This book is a timely and lucid study of Benjamin's lifelong fascination with the city and forms of metropolitan experience.Benjamin's critical and complex account of the modern urban environment is traced through a number of key texts: the pioneering sketches of Naples, Marseilles and Moscow; his childhood reminiscences of Berlin; and his brilliant and unfinished studies of nineteenth-century Paris and the poet Charles Baudelaire.Gilloch emphasizes the importance of these writings for an interpretation of Benjamin's work as a whole, and highlights their relevance for our contemporary understanding of modernity.

    . . Eminently sane and patient . . . Essential reading for Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike."--The Washington PostVenerated for millennia by three faiths, torn by irreconcilable conflict, conquered, rebuilt, and mourned for again and again, Jerusalem is a sacred city whose very sacredness has engendered terrible tragedy. In this fascinating volume, Karen Armstrong, author of the highly praised A History of God, traces the history of how Jews, Christians, and Muslims have all laid claim to Jerusalem as their holy place, and how three radically different concepts of holiness have shaped and scarred the city for thousands of years.Armstrong unfolds a complex story of spiritual upheaval and political transformation--from King David's capital to an administrative outpost of the Roman Empire, from the cosmopolitan city sanctified by Christ to the spiritual center conquered and glorified by Muslims, from the gleaming prize of European Crusaders to the bullet-ridden symbol of the present-day Arab-Israeli conflict. Written with grace and clarity, the product of years of meticulous research, Jerusalem combines the pageant of history with the profundity of searching spiritual analysis. Like Karen Armstrong's A History of God, Jerusalem is a book for the ages."THE BEST SERIOUS, ACCESSIBLE HISTORY OF THE MOST SPIRITUALLY IMPORTANT CITY IN THE WORLD."--The Baltimore Sun"A WORK OF IMPRESSIVE SWEEP AND GRANDEUR."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

    Most urban travel is to widespread suburban locations rather than to the city centre. It is often argued that fast, efficient public transport is impossible in our 'dispersed' cities. In A Very Public Solution, Paul Mees compares Melbourne's public transport system with the highly successful system in Toronto; a 'dispersed' city very like Melbourne with its suburban sprawl, and sheds new light on a century-old debate. This debate is particularly important now, as 'economic rationalists' move to privatise public transport in Australian cities. We can have European-style public transport, Mees argues, if our different forms of public transport stop competing with each other and start competing with the car.A Very Public Solution is the first serious work on public transport planning ever published in Australia. It is essential reading for everyone concerned with urban sustainability and our growing traffic problems.

    The writings included in Theory of the Derive, many published here in English for the first time, are predominantly critical texts, revealing Situationism's aims, focus, breadth of vision, and development. Begun in 1957 by various artists and writers representing avant-garde organizations, the Situationist International was, from its inception, a revolutionary cultural organization. Seeing its project as one of merging art and life in practice, it developed over the next decade, implementing incisive critiques of post-war consumer culture and proposing radical projects of urban utopian design. Against the oppressive, stifling conditions imposed in technocratic city planning, the Situationist International sought to develop new forms of collective action and agitation that would promote free use and transformation of the urban environment. Its tactics, slogans, and visions of an alternative OEnitary urbanism' were especially influential in the events of the May 1968 uprising in France and have since been important influences on radical currents in many countries.

    L.A. Weekly and The Free Press) into a nearly-seamless personal narrative: "a tour through the restless emotional topography of Los Angeles as glimpsed through the scattered fragments of my living memory".This book follows in the footsteps or freeway tracks of such classic Los Angeles portraitists as John Fante, Carey McWilliams, and Nathanael West, not missing the seamy side of town, or its caricature dimensions: "a glitter queen with 5 o'clock shadow whose lovers don't care what sins have been committed... Loving you is an S&M trip. You gave birth to me. And while I love you for that I hate you for the painful afterbirth... Loving your horizons while hating your gutters. Your obscenely glorious fall skies that redden as deeply as any earthbound passion. The sun a big luscious lick. A visual bliss ozoning. Soon to be followed by a moon to swoon for, heavy and broad like the exposed doughy thigh of a tired old Hollywood harlot".Coleman's tough-minded, high-voltage, straight-from-the-hip commentaries can be read as a manual on urban survival, a guide to navigating "the margins defined by poverty and race, presuming no escape". The object lesson in the tale is Coleman's own life -- a tale of grit and determination, of growing up black and poor in South Central L. A. ("I was big and dark and ugly in a world that did not value me") and living to tell about it. From piece to piece we find the author laboring as waitress, bartender, pink collar corporate slave, editorof a sleazy men's magazine, while caught up in militant revolutionary politics, or witnessing the Watts and Rodney King riots. The triumph implicit in the stow is Coleman's escape into her true calling, that of poetry.

    This is all good news for travelers, of course, who benefit from more choice than ever, not only in a vastly improved accommodation sector, but in a revived arts and cultural agenda. The restaurant scene, too, has been given a boost by the city s Year of Gastronomy and thanks to the overwhelming success of Ferran Adri� s restaurant El Bulli. Time Out Barcelona is written exclusively by residents of the city, uniquely placed to keep abreast of these developments and guide visitors towards the best of them. This edition features a new chapter focusing on cultural background and new sidebars, photographs, and introductions, as well as updated listings and maps.

    * One of the leading authorities in postwar urban design * Beautifully illustrated throughout * Only authorized biography of the late Gordon Cullen published with co-operation of his family and friends * Contains many rare and unusual illustrations never published before