Best of
Cities

2000

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream


Andrés Duany - 2000
    This movement stems not only from the realization that sprawl is ecologically and economically unsustainable but also from a growing awareness of sprawl's many victims: children, utterly dependent on parental transportation if they wish to escape the cul-de-sac; the elderly, warehoused in institutions once they lose their driver's licenses; the middle class, stuck in traffic for two or more hours each day.Founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk are at the forefront of this movement, and in Suburban Nation they assess sprawl's costs to society, be they ecological, economic, aesthetic, or social. It is a lively, thorough, critical lament, and an entertaining lesson on the distinctions between postwar suburbia-characterized by housing clusters, strip shopping centers, office parks, and parking lots-and the traditional neighborhoods that were built as a matter of course until mid-century. It is an indictment of the entire development community, including governments, for the fact that America no longer builds towns. Most important, though, it is that rare book that also offers solutions.

American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley - His Battle for Chicago and the Nation


Adam Cohen - 2000
    Daley famously defended his brutal crackdown on protesters at the 1968 Democratic convention. Profoundly divided racially, economically and socially, Chicago was indeed a microcosm of America, and for more than two decades Daley ruled it with an iron fist. The last of the big city bosses, Daley ran an unbeatable political machine that controlled over one million votes. From 1955 until his death in 1976, every decision of any importance -- from distributing patronage jobs to picking Congressional candidates -- went through his office. He was a major player in national politics as well: Kennedy and Johnson owed their presidencies to his control of the Illinois vote, and he made sure they never forgot it. In a city legendary for its corruption and backroom politics, Daley's power was unrivaled. Daley transformed Chicago -- then a dying city -- into a modern metropolis of skyscrapers, freeways and a thriving downtown. But he also made Chicago America's most segregated city. A man of profound prejudices and a deep authoritarian streak , he constructed the nation's largest and worst ghettos, sidestepped national civil rights laws, and successfully thwarted Martin Luther King's campaign to desegregate Northern cities.A quarter-century after his death, Daley's outsize presence continues to influence American urban life, and a reassessment of his career is long overdue. Now, veteran journalists Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor present the definitive biography of Richard J. Daley, drawn from newly uncovered material and dozens of interviews with his contemporaries. In today's era of poll-tested, polished politicians, Daley's rough-and-tumble story is remarkable. From the working-class Irish neighborhood of his childhood, to his steady rise through Chicago's corrupt political hierarchy, to his role as national power broker, American Pharaoh is a riveting account of the life and times of one of the most important figures in twentieth-century domestic politics. In the tradition of Robert Caro's classic The Power Broker, this is a compelling life story of a towering individual whose complex legacy is still with us today.

Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles


Jonathan Gold - 2000
    Counter Intelligence collects over 200 of Gold's best restaurant discoveries--from inexpensive lunch counters you won't find on your own to the perfect undiscovered dish at a beaten-path establishment. He reveals the hidden kitchens where Los Angeles' ethnic communities feed their own, including the best of cuisine from Argentina, Armenia, Brazil, Burma, Canton, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Middle East, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Peru, Thailand, Vietnam and more. Not to mention the perfectly prepared hamburger and Los Angeles' quintessential hot dog.Counter Intelligence is the richest and most complete guide to eating in Los Angeles. The listings include where to find it and how much you'll pay (in many cases, not very much) with appendices that cover food types and feeding by neighborhood.

Berlin


David Clay Large - 2000
    At the same time, Berlin has also been a dynamic center of artistic and intellectual innovation. If Paris was the "Capital of the Nineteenth Century," Berlin was to become the signature city for the next hundred years. Once a symbol of modernity, in the Thirties it became associated with injustice and the abuse of power. After 1945, it became the iconic City of the Cold War. Since the fall of the Wall, Berlin has again come to represent humanity's aspirations for a new beginning, tempered by caution deriving from the traumas of the recent past. David Clay Large's definitive history of Berlin is framed by the two German unifications of 1871 and 1990. Between these two events several themes run like a thread through the city's history: a persistent inferiority complex; a distrust among many ordinary Germans, and the national leadership of the "unloved city's" electric atmosphere, fast tempo, and tradition of unruliness; its status as a magnet for immigrants, artists, intellectuals, and the young; the opening up of social, economic, and ethnic divisions as sharp as the one created by the Wall.

Carfree Cities


J.H. Crawford - 2000
    This book outlines a structure carefully designed to maximize the quality of life for people and communities worldwide. Also available in cloth, 9057270374.

London: The Biography


Peter Ackroyd - 2000
    In this unusual and engaging work, Ackroyd brings the reader through time into the city whose institutions and idiosyncrasies have permeated much of his works of fiction and nonfiction. Peter Ackroyd sees London as a living, breathing organism, with its own laws of growth and change. Reveling in the city’s riches as well as its raucousness, the author traces thematically its growth from the time of the Druids to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Anecdotal, insightful, and wonderfully entertaining, London is animated by Ackroyd’s concern for the close relationship between the present and the past, as well as by what he describes as the peculiar “echoic” quality of London, whereby its texture and history actively affect the lives and personalities of its citizens.London confirms Ackroyd’s status as what one critic has called “our age’s greatest London imagination.”

Jerusalem & the Holy Land (Eyewitness Travel Guide)


Fabrizio Ardito - 2000
    With beautiful commissioned photographs and spectacular 3-D aerial views revealing the charm of each destination, these amazing travel guides show what others only tell.

Spaces of Hope


David Harvey - 2000
    There was nothing new in this. What was new was the virtual absence of any political will to do anything about it. Spaces of Hope takes issue with this.David Harvey brings an exciting perspective to two of the principal themes of contemporary social discourse: globalization and the body. Exploring the uneven geographical development of late-twentieth-century capitalism, and placing the working body in relation to this new geography, he finds in Marx's writings a wealth of relevant analysis and theoretical insight. In order to make much-needed changes, Harvey maintains, we need to become the architects of a different living and working environment and to learn to bridge the micro-scale of the body and the personal and the macro-scale of global political economy.Utopian movements have for centuries tried to construct a just society. Harvey looks at their history to ask why they failed and what the ideas behind them might still have to offer. His devastating description of the existing urban environment (Baltimore is his case study) fuels his argument that we can and must use the force of utopian imagining against all who say "there is no alternative." He outlines a new kind of utopian thought, which he calls dialectical utopianism, and refocuses our attention on possible designs for a more equitable world of work and living with nature. If any political ideology or plan is to work, he argues, it must take account of our human qualities. Finally, Harvey dares to sketch a very personal utopian vision in an appendix, one that leaves no doubt about his own geography of hope.

Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II


Joshua B. Freeman - 2000
    Largely through the efforts of its working class and the dynamic labor movement it built, New York City became the envied model of liberal America and the scourge of conservatives everywhere: cheap and easy-to-use mass transit, work in small businesses and factories that had good wages and benefits, affordable public housing, and healthcare for all.Working-Class New York is an "engrossing" (Dissent) account of the birth of that ideal and the way it came crashing down. In what Publishers Weekly calls "absorbing and beautifully detailed history", historian Joshua Freeman shows how the anticommunist purges of the 1950s decimated the ranks of the labor movement and demoralized its idealists, and how the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s dealt another crushing blow to liberal ideals as the city's wealthy elite made a frenzied grab for power.A grand work of cultural and social history, Working-Class New York is a moving chronicle of a dream that died but may yet rise again.

The Annals of London: A Year-by-Year Record of a Thousand Years of History


John Richardson - 2000
    The victors then created a Roman settlement and established themselves on the river. They developed the city with a southern defense work (Southwark), and the settlement prospered as the preeminent trading base linking Britain to Europe and the Near East. The city's expansion through the invasions of the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings serves as a background for the first of the almanac entries, 1065, which sees the consecration of Edward the Confessor's Abbey at Westminster, shortly before the king's own burial in his new church.The first appearance and gradual evolution of roads, buildings, and landmarks is set in the context of the ebb and flow of history through the capital's streets and rivers: from the local (the 1665 outbreak of plague, where the healthy were incarcerated with the sick to avoid further infection, and the spread of the great fire that decimated much of the city the following year) to the politically significant (the execution of the king in 1649 outside Inigo Jones's banqueting house, whose building in 1619 is also described).The sweep of this book is vast and its detail magnificent. Disasters, innovations, and everyday events relating to politics, society, pageantry, the arts, religion, and industry are revealed to display the wide spectrum of London life. Year by year, from 1065 to the present day, events that have shaped the London we know are brought vividly to life by John Richardson's informative text, which is supported by an extraordinary and eclectic collection of historical illustrations.

Machu Picchu


Elizabeth Mann - 2000
    Without the use of the wheel, they built a vast and sophisticated network of roads. Without an alphabet, they administered a population of ten million people. With the most primitive of tools, they built cities of stone.Machu Picchu is as astonishing as its builders. Set in a remote, inaccessible area of the high Andes, this breathtaking city was never found by the Spanish Conquistadores. It is an untouched example of the genius of the Inkas.Machu Picchu tells the story about the rise of the Inkas and the building of this great city. Award-winning author Elizabeth Mann has become justly famous for engrossing narratives that make distant worlds comprehensible and complex engineering feats accessible. In Machu Picchu, these talents are displayed to their fullest.Amy Crehore's paintings convey a fabulous world that seems at once intensely real and dream-like. Her luminous pallette is an Inka tapestry unfaded by time.Wonders of the World seriesThe winner of numerous awards, this series is renowned for Elizabeth Mann's ability to convey adventure and excitement while revealing technical information in engaging and easily understood language. The illustrations are lavishly realistic and accurate in detail but do not ignore the human element. Outstanding in the genre, these books are sure to bring even the most indifferent young reader into the worlds of history, geography, and architecture."One of the ten best non-fiction series for young readers." - Booklist

The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty First Century


André Sorensen - 2000
    Interestingly, while Japanese governments and planners borrowed carefully from the planning ideas and methods of many other countries, Japanese urban planning, urban governance and cities developed very differently from those of other developed countries. Japan's distinctive patterns of urbanisation are partly a product of the highly developed urban system, urban traditions and material culture of the pre-modern period, which remained influential until well after the Pacific War. A second key influence has been the dominance of central government in urban affairs, and its consistent prioritisation of economic growth over the public welfare or urban quality of life. Andre Sorensen examines Japan's urban trajectory from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, paying particular attention to the weak development of Japanese civil society, local governments, and land development and planning regulations.

Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400-1900


Susan Naquin - 2000
    Using the city's temples as her point of entry, Naquin carefully excavates Peking's varied public arenas, the city's transformation over five centuries, its human engagements, and its rich cultural imprint. This study shows how modern Beijing's glittering image as China's great and ancient capital came into being and reveals the shifting identities of a much more complex past, one whose rich social and cultural history Naquin splendidly evokes. Temples, by providing a place where diverse groups could gather without the imprimatur of family or state, made possible a surprising assortment of community-building and identity-defining activities. By revealing how religious establishments of all kinds were used for fairs, markets, charity, tourism, politics, and leisured sociability, Naquin shows their decisive impact on Peking and, at the same time, illuminates their little-appreciated role in Chinese cities generally. Lacking most of the conventional sources for urban history, she has relied particularly on a trove of commemorative inscriptions that express ideas about the relationship between human beings and gods, about community service and public responsibility, about remembering and being remembered. The result is a book that will be essential reading in the field of Chinese studies for years to come.

When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland


Brian Porter - 2000
    He begins by examining the common assumption that nationalist movements by nature draw lines of inclusion and exclusion around socialgroups, establishing authority and hierarchy among one's own and antagonism towards others. Porter argues instead that the penetration of communal hatred and social discipline into the rhetoric of nationalism must be explained, not merely assumed.Porter focuses on nineteenth-century Poland, tracing the transformation of revolutionary patriotism into a violent anti-Semitic ideology. Instead of deterministically attributing this change to the forces of modernization, Porter demonstrates that the language of hatred and discipline was centralto the way modernity itself was perceived by fin-de-si�cle intellectuals.The book is based on a wide variety of sources, including political speeches and posters, newspaper articles and editorials, underground brochures, published and unpublished memoirs, personal letters, and nineteenth-century books on history, sociology, and politics. It embeds nationalism within amuch broader framework, showing how the concept of the nation played a role in liberal, conservative, socialist, and populist thought.When Nationalism Began to Hate is not only a detailed history of Polish nationalism but also an ambitious study of how the term nation functioned within the political imagination of modernity. It will prove an important text for a wide range of students and researchers of European history andpolitics.

Toronto Street Names: An Illustrated Guide to Their Origins


Leonard Wise - 2000
    Now comes a book for everyone who has walked along or driven by a Toronto street and wondered, "Where do you suppose that name comes from?"Toronto's street names hold the city's past: the trails and portages of the First Nations inhabitants; the arrival of the early explorers; the founding of the town of York at the end of the 18th century; the growth and political turmoil of the 19th century; and the expansion and modernization in the 20th.The street names in Toronto collectively tell the story of a city that is steeped in history and is surprisingly rich in colorful characters. Chicora Avenue recalls a steamship that sailed the Great Lakes for 60 years. Harrison Road was named after William Harrison, a Reformer who died from wounds inflicted in the Rebellion of 1837. Viscount Julian Byng, who led Canadian troops to victory at Vimy in the First World War and served as Governor General in the 1920s, left his name on Byng Avenue. The Ojibway word for little hill, 'espadinong, ' became Spadina (Avenue and Road). Edith Boulton, the beloved wife of piano magnate Samuel Nordheimer, was her husband's inspiration for naming their beautiful house and estate Glen Edyth, now recalled in Glen Edyth Drive. The eloquent Thomas D'Arcy Magee, a Father of Confederaton who was assassinated in a Fenian plot, is honored by D'Arcy Magee Crescent.In all, the stories behind the naming of 350 streets - familiar, and not so familiar - are presented here. The lives of brewers, politicians, architects, royalty, explorers and farmers can be traced in the city's street names. So can the villages and homes that immigrants left behind in Great Britain, and the grand estates of Toronto's early upper class.Reading this charming book is like taking a trip through time, along the way meeting many of the people who shaped the city. The mini-stories open little windows on the past, presenting fascinating glimpses into not only where people lived, but how. Easy to read and yet intriguing enough to send you off to the library to find out even more, this book is illustrated with period photographs and is fully indexed and cross-referenced.

Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895-1937


Kristin Stapleton - 2000
    This work examines the history of urban planning and administration during modern China's first age of city-centred politics, focusing on the new policies of the late Qing and the city administration movement of the 1930s.

Maritime Chicago


Theodore J. Karamanski - 2000
    Early Native American settlers discovered Chicago's rich resources, French missionaries and trappers found the Chicago River an excellent portage to the Des Plaines, Illinois, and Mississippi Rivers, and merchants used it to ship lumber and grain to the rest of the world. Maritime Chicago tells the story of this city situated on a great "inland sea." From the thrill of two lakefront World's Fairs, to the unbelievable sorrow of the Eastland, which went down just a few feet from the banks of the Chicago River, taking with it 800 souls, Chicago's maritime past bears witness to much triumph and tragedy, victory and defeat. Today, the 29 miles of lakefront, and the revived riverfront are vital parts of the economy and recreation of Chicago.

The Essential William H. Whyte


William H. Whyte - 2000
    Whyte offers the core writings of a great observer of the postwar American scene. Included are selections from The Organization Man, Securing Space for Urban America: Conservation Easements, The Last Landscape, The Social Life of Urban Spaces, and City: Rediscovering the Center, as well as many of Whyte's articles from Fortune Magazine.

The Time Out Book Of London Short Stories


Nicholas RoyleSteven Grant - 2000
    This second edition is packed with literary stars and exciting new voices, including Maureen Freely, lain Sinclair, Kim Newman, Michael Moorcock, Esther Freud, Michele Roberts and Geoff Nicholson.

Manhattan Block by Block: A Street Atlas


John Tauranac - 2000
    The first-ever pocket atlas covering all the key features of Manhattan, the"Millennium Capital of the World." A convenient, easy-to-use, richlydetailed and incredibly complete pocket atlas that is sure to be a populargift item as well as a "must-have" reference tool for anyone who needs toget around the city.Includes house numbers for every street, traffic direction, touristattractions, playgrounds, hotels, theaters, major named office and apartmentbuildings, health facilities, police stations, post offices, schools,libraries, parks, playgrounds, and more -- even the location and name ofevery public statue and monument.A special 26-page "rider-friendly" public transportation section will alloweven a first-time visitor to Manhattan get around town efficiently andconfidently, with 12 separate maps and a four-page subway station index.All subway stops and their cross-streets are noted clearly; the differentroutes, lines, and directions are color-coded for easy reference; andseparate maps are provided with information on weekday, evening/weekend, andlate-night bus and subway service.

Safety in Numbers


Nick Waplington - 2000
    Comprising a series of one-on-one portraits juxtaposed with city landscapes, the subterranean world of drugs, music and conter-culture comes alive.

Here Comes the Sun: Architecture and Public Space in Twentieth-Century European Culture


Ken Worpole - 2000
    While much has been written about architectural modernism, Worpole concentrates less on buildings and more on the planning of the spaces in-between – the parks, public squares, open-air museums, promenades, public pools and other public leisure facilities. Life in the open was of particular concern to early urban planners and reformers, with their dreams of release from the confines of overcrowded, unsanitary slums. Picturing youthful working-class bodies made healthy by exercise and tanned by the sun, they imagined an escape route from cities. Worpole demonstrates how open-air public spaces became sought-after commissions for many early modernist architects in the early 1900s, resulting in the transformation of the European cityscape."...a fascinating account of the political idealism that informed urban planning for the first two-thirds of the twentieth-century...full of insights into how public space influences a sense of belonging and ownership."—The Guardian"This is one of those books you stroke lovingly. Open it, and there is page after page of beautiful photographs...this book combines history, society, politics, environment and place in a well-written and emotive text. The strength of the book is the way it crosses these traditional boundaries and disciplines."—Town and Country Planning"Drawing on architectural theories, philosophy, literature and even film-making, Worpole's book is wide-ranging and erudite and should be of interest to the layperson as well as to the urban planner. It is also elegantly written and complemented by a mixture of black and white and colour photographs to provide a visual emphasis to the points he raises."—N16 Magazine

Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City


Claire Jean Kim - 2000
    This work investigates the most prolonged period of such conflict - the Flatbush Boycott of 1990, when Black nationalist and Haitian activists led a boycott and picketing campaign against two Korean-owned produce stores.

Pompeii: Life in a Roman Town


Annamaria Ciarallo - 2000
    The volume includes objects, paintings and diagrams depicting every aspect of existence.