Best of
Cities

2005

Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape


Brian Hayes - 2005
    . . . An extraordinary book.”—Anne Eisenberg, Scientific AmericanA companion to the man-made landscape that reveals how our industrial environment can be as dazzling as the natural world. Replete with the author's striking photographs, "Infrastructure" is a unique and spectacular guide, exploring all the major "ecosystems" of our modern industrial world, revealing what the structures are and why they're there, and uncovering beauty in unexpected places--awakening and fulfilling a curiosity you didn't know you had. Covering agriculture, resources, energy, communication, transportation, manufacturing, and waste, this is the "Book of Everything" for the industrial landscape. The objects that fill our everyday environment are streetlights, railroad tracks, antenna towers, highway overpasses, power lines, satellite dishes, and thousands of other manufactured items, many of them so familiar we hardly notice them. Larger and more exotic facilities have transformed vast tracts of the landscape: coal mines, nuclear power plants, grain elevators, oil refineries, and steel mills, to name a few. "Infrastructure" is a compelling and clear guide for those who want to explore and understand this mysterious world we've made for ourselves. 500 color illustrations.ContentsPreface1. Out of the earth2. Waterworks3. Food and farming4. Oil and gas5. Power plants6. The power grid7. Communications8. On the road9. The railroad10. Bridges and tunnels11. Aviation12. Shipping13. Wastes and recyclingAfterword: The postindustrial landscapeA note on the photographsFurther readingIndex

The Works: Anatomy of a City


Kate Ascher - 2005
    When you flick on your light switch the light goes on--how? When you put out your garbage, where does it go? When you flush your toilet, what happens to the waste? How does water get from a reservoir in the mountains to your city faucet? How do flowers get to your corner store from Holland, or bananas get there from Ecuador? Who is operating the traffic lights all over the city? And what in the world is that steam coming out from underneath the potholes on the street? Across the city lies a series of extraordinarily complex and interconnected systems. Often invisible, and wholly taken for granted, these are the systems that make urban life possible. The Works: Anatomy of a City offers a cross section of this hidden infrastructure, using beautiful, innovative graphic images combined with short, clear text explanations to answer all the questions about the way things work in a modern city. It describes the technologies that keep the city functioning, as well as the people who support them-the pilots that bring the ships in over the Narrows sandbar, the sandhogs who are currently digging the third water tunnel under Manhattan, the television engineer who scales the Empire State Building's antenna for routine maintenance, the electrical wizards who maintain the century-old system that delivers power to subways. Did you know that the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is so long, and its towers are so high, that the builders had to take the curvature of the earth's surface into account when designing it? Did you know that the George Washington Bridge takes in approximately $1 million per day in tolls? Did you know that retired subway cars travel by barge to the mid-Atlantic, where they are dumped overboard to form natural reefs for fish? Or that if the telecom cables under New York were strung end to end, they would reach from the earth to the sun? While the book uses New York as its example, it has relevance well beyond that city's boundaries as the systems that make New York a functioning metropolis are similar to those that keep the bright lights burning in big cities everywhere. The Works is for anyone who has ever stopped midcrosswalk, looked at the rapidly moving metropolis around them, and wondered, how does this all work?

Access All Areas: A User's Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration


Ninjalicious - 2005
    Through chapters on topics like sneaking around, equipping and training, readers will learn the basics of the hobby, as well as about the most popular sites for urban exploration, such as abandoned buildings, construction sites, storm drains and utility tunnels. Always an adventurer, Toronto author Ninjalicious began his intensive, thoroughly documented approach to exploration during a lengthy hospital stay, when boredom motivated him to explore the beautiful old building’s every nook and cranny. He began publishing the zine Infiltration in 1996, in conjunction with the website infiltration.org, which, with nearly 2,000 visitors a day, is widely considered to be an authoritative source on the hobby of urban exploration. Ninjalicious completed Access All Areas shortly before his untimely death from cancer in summer 2005. Copies are available for online purchase at www.infilpress.com

The Age Of Sinan: Architectural Culture In The Ottoman Empire


Gülru Necipoğlu - 2005
    His distinctive architectural idiom left its imprint over a vast empire extending from the Danube to the Tigris, and he became the most celebrated of all Ottoman architects.In this lavishly illustrated, major new assessment of Sinan's oeuvre, Gulru Necipoglu challenges standard views of Sinan as a "Turkish Michelangelo" driven solely by an insatiable urge for artistic experimentation. Her innovative analysis shows that Sinan's rich variety of mosque designs sprang from a process of negotiation between the architect and his elite patrons, both men and women. Defined though they were by social and territorial hierarchies and associated notions of identity, memory, and decorum, Sinan's mosques simultaneously shaped these conceptions. "The Age of Sinan" draws on a wealth of primary sources to reveal the chief architect's monuments as bearers of previously unrecognized dimensions of meaning. A sophisticated study of the cultural and social history of Ottoman architecture, interpreting the oeuvre of a seminal figure in the early modern eastern Mediterranean world, it is must reading for scholars and students of art history and other fields with an interest in the Ottoman Empire."

The Destruction of Lower Manhattan


Danny Lyon - 2005
    These buildings were used during the Civil War. The men were all dead, but the buildings were still here, left behind as the city grew around them....The passing of buildings was for me a great event. It didn’t matter so much whether they were of architectural importance. What mattered to me was that they were about to be destroyed. Whole blocks would disappear. An entire neighborhood. Its few last loft occupying tenants were being evicted, and no place like it would ever be built again. The streets involved were among the oldest in New York and when sections of some were closed by the barriers of the demolition men, it meant they would never be opened again.” —Danny Lyon In late 1966, Danny Lyon returned to New York City, having just finished The Bikeriders. He was twenty-five. Living in a loft on the corner of Beekman and William Streets in Downtown Manhattan, Lyon saw that half the buildings on Beekman Street were boarded up, about to be demolished. That year an incredible sixty acres of mostly nineteenth-century buildings were slated for demolition, all below Canal Street. The seven-acre site where the Twin Towers would eventually stand was being cleared, a new ramp added to the Brooklyn Bridge, Pace University expanded, and the Washington Market was being moved to the Bronx. Whole sections of Lower Manhattan were being turned into rubble. Lyon thought of the title The Destruction of Lower Manhattan first, and then made a record of each building before it was demolished. The book was released by Macmillan Publishers in 1969, and remaindered a few years later; the copies sold for one dollar each. It has been a collector’s item ever since. Thirty-eight years after these photographs were made, many of them are the only record that survives of entire blocks that once lined Fulton Street, and West Street along the Hudson. Because of the disaster that would strike the city a generation later, New Yorkers have taken on a renewed and fervent interest in the architecture of their city. This work is a major contribution to that new world. For Lyon, these buildings in their last days standing were the embodiment of a beauty and pathos that people walking by in the street seldom noticed at the time. Those feelings were preserved in the photographs that today survive exactly as the young author intended, as a memory and a record of what was.

The Eastland Disaster


Ted Wachholz - 2005
    This particular Saturday was going to be anything but a routine summer day. Plans had been carefully made for it to be the social and entertainment event of the year, and for some, a lifetime. The fifth annual midsummer excursion and picnic had been organized by the employees of the Western Electric Company's Hawthorne Works. Thousands of carefree merrymakers would enjoy a festive day including a lovely cruise across Lake Michigan to an awaiting parade and day-long picnic. The day would conclude with an evening cruise back to Chicago. For thousands of hard-working immigrant laborers and their families and friends, it was going to be a day to remember. Instead, the day's scheduled event turned into a tragedy unlike any other. The SS Eastland, while still tied to the wharf, rolled into the Chicago River with more than 2,500 passengers on board. Nearly 850 people lost their lives, including 22 entire families. The ensuing struggle for survival, and the resulting death, heroism, cowardice, greed, and scandal gripped the city of Chicago.

The Hashish Man and Other Stories


Lord Dunsany - 2005
    Fanciful tales of strange adventure in imaginary exotic locales and depictions of otherworldly grim creepiness abound.

Berlin Then and Now


Nick Gay - 2005
    Only with the 1989 destruction of the Wall and the subsequent Unification Treaty did Berlin begin to regain its cosmopolitan standing as one of the world’s great cities. Experience the tumultuous events of the city’s modern history through archival and contemporary photography that offers a rare glimpse of Berlin’s fascinating metamorphosis.

San Juan: Memoir of a City


Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá - 2005
    No mere sightseeing tour, this is culture through immersion, a circuit of San Juan's historical and intellectual vistas as well as its architecture.       In the allusive cityscape he recreates, Rodríguez Juliá invokes the ghosts of his childhood, of San Juan's elder literati, and of characters from his own novels. On the most tangible level, the city is a place of cabarets and cockfighting clubs, flâneurs and beach bums, smoke-filled bars and honking automobiles. Poised between a colonial past and a commercial future, the San Juan he portrays feels at times perilously close to the pitfalls of modernization. Tenement houses and fading mansions yield to strip malls and Tastee Freezes; asphalt hems in jacarandas and palm trees. "In Puerto Rico," he muses, "life is not simply cruel, it is also busy erasing our tracks." Through this book—available here in English for the first time—Rodríguez Juliá resists that erasure, thoughtfully etching a palimpsest that preserves images of the city where he grew up and rejoicing in the one where he still lives.     Best Books for Regional General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians and the Public Library Association

Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization was Discovered


Nayanjot Lahiri - 2005
    Within weeks, Marshall´s discovery was recognized as on the same scale as the unearthing of Troy and of Crete. Spanning nearly a century, Finding Forgotten Cities tells the full story of Marshall´s discovery for the first time.The Indus discovery was the work of many individuals: the collector-traveller Charles Masson, who first described Harappa; Alexander Cunningham, the archaeological pioneer and Harappa´s first excavator; Daya Ram Sahni, Rakhaldas Banerji, and Madho Sarup Vats, the discerning diggers who uncovered Harappa and Mohenjodaro; Luigi Pio Tessitori, the Italian linguist-turned-explorer who unearthed Kalibangan but never lived to tell the tale of his exploits; government officials of all kinds who, as self-taught archaeologists, stumbled upon significant clues; and, presiding over the whole process, John Marshall, a Cambridge classicist brought by Lord Curzon to India as Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India, the man who finally pieced into place the tantalising jigsaw of data on the long-forgotten Indus civilization.Based on previously unknown archival materials, Finding Forgotten Cities presents a powerful narrative history of how one of the key sites of ancient civilisation was unexpectedly unearthed.

How the Other Half Worships


Camilo José Vergara - 2005
    It is hard not to be impressed by the standard of living in the nation’s most affluent suburban and urban neighborhoods. Yet, scattered amid stretches that abound in wealth, the country is home to neighborhoods rife with violence, poverty, segregation, and decay. Within these blighted urban landscapes, however, there is at least one notable example of plenty: churches. They do not always appear as traditional houses of worship, but often emerge from the retrofitted shells of former storefronts, garages, factories, warehouses, domestic dwellings, and public institutions. Regardless of the façade, churches populate America’s poorest neighborhoods.Bringing together more than 300 richly textured color photographs and a series of candid interviews with pastors, church officials, and congregation members, this extraordinary book explores the conditions, beliefs, and practices that shape the churches and the lives of the nation’s urban poor. Over a period of thirty years, sociologist and photographer Camilo José Vergara repeatedly visited these places of worship and the eclectic mix of buildings that house them. In twenty-one cities located in ten states across the country, photographic sequences coupled with insightful narrative show how ordinary structures assume, modify, and shed a religious character, how traditional churches—if they fail to adapt to new congregations—are demolished, and how new churches are designed and built from the ground up.Vergara pays special attention to the objects, texts, and imagery that religious leaders make use of to create environments that inspire devotion. Pastors of developing congregations often arrive as crusaders, with missions that cannot be served by traditional religious iconography, and with budgets that force them to use inexpensive materials. In some cases, pastors bring objects of worship from their home towns in places such as Mexico, Puerto Rico, Africa, and the West Indies. Despite the idiosyncratic features and folk decoration that distinguish ghetto churches from one another, however, Vergara shows that, for the most part, they are driven by similar religious agendas. They tend to preach about resilience, avoid involving themselves in national and international events, and consider their truths to be absolute and eternal.A powerful, poignant, and visually arresting portrait, How the Other Half Worships stands as a stark witness to how churches are being rebuilt in the dilapidated streets of America’s cities and how religion is being reinvented by the nation’s poor.

The Promise Of The Metropolis: Bangalore's Twentieth Century


Janaki Nair - 2005
    The book also charts the styles and forms of contemporary urban democracy and the city as the site of a continuous redefinition of Indian citizenship.

Zinester's Guide to Portland: A Low/No Budget Guide to Living In and Visiting Portland, OR


Shawn Granton - 2005
    (lots of etc.). The newly overhauled and illustrated fifth edition gets shoulder-deep into the history and local lore, providing a well-rounded argument as to why (fill in the blank) deserves your time. It also demystifies the TriMet public transportation system, bike events and culture, outdoorsy stuff, the public libraries—basically anything you need to know as the new kid in town. To the wrong eyes the book's title might imply a guide to Portland zine culture, but as editor Shawn Granton says in the introduction, the Zinester's Guide is not just for zinesters, that "It's always been about sharing the interesting and unique things that make Stumptown great, and also helping people get by that aren't swimming in scads of money." For those of us that can't so much as dogpaddle most days, this is "community" at its mightiest.

Memories of a Future Home: Diasporic Citizenship of Chinese in Panama


Lok Siu - 2005
    Memories of a Future Home offers an intimate look at how diasporic Chinese in Panama construct a home and create a sense of belonging as they inhabit the interstices of several cultural-national formations—Panama, their nation of residence; China/Taiwan, their ethnic homeland; and the United States, the colonial force.Juxtaposing the concepts of diaspora and citizenship, this book offers an innovative framework to help us understand how diasporic subjects engage the politics of cultural and political belonging in a transnational context. It does so by examining the interaction between continually shifting geopolitical dynamics, as well as the maneuvers undertaken by diasporic people to negotiate and transform those conditions. In essence, this book explores the contingent citizenship experienced by diasporic Chinese and their efforts to imagine and construct "home" in diaspora.

Space, the City and Social Theory: Social Relations and Urban Forms


Fran Tonkiss - 2005
    Space, the City and Social Theory offers a clear and critical account of key approaches to cities and urban space within social theory and analysis.

City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871-1919


Margaret Garb - 2005
    As the nation moved from an agrarian to an industrialized urban society, the competing visions of capitalists, reformers, and immigrants turned the urban landscape into a testing ground for American values. Neither a natural progression nor an inevitable outcome, the ideal of home ownership emerged from the struggles of industrializing cities. Garb skillfully narrates these struggles, showing how the American infatuation with home ownership left the nation's cities sharply divided along class and racial lines. Based on research of real estate markets, housing and health reform, and ordinary homeowners—African American and white, affluent and working class—City of American Dreams provides a richly detailed picture of life in one of America's great urban centers. Garb shows that the pursuit of a single-family house set on a tidy yard, commonly seen as the very essence of the American dream, resulted from clashes of interests and decades of struggle.

City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America


Laura J. Lawson - 2005
    There have been vacant-lot gardens, school gardens, Depression-era relief gardens, victory gardens, and community gardens—each representing a consistent impulse to return to gardening during times of social and economic change. In this critical history of community gardening in America, the most comprehensive review of the greening of urban communities to date, Laura J. Lawson documents the evolution of urban garden programs in the United States. Her vibrant narrative focuses on the values associated with gardening, the ebb and flow of campaigns during times of social and economic crisis, organizational strategies of these primarily volunteer campaigns, and the sustainability of current programs.

A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York


Tony Michels - 2005
    The movement, founded in the 1880s, was dominated by Russian-speaking intellectuals, including Abraham Cahan, Mikhail Zametkin and Chaim Zhitlovsky. Socialist leaders quickly found Yiddish essential to convey their message to the Jewish immigrant community, and they developed a remarkable public culture through lectures and social events, workers' education societies, Yiddish schools, and a press that found its strongest voice in the mass-circulation newspaper Forverts. Arguing against the view that socialism and Yiddish culture arrived as Old World holdovers, Michels demonstrates that they arose in New York in response to local conditions and thrived not despite Americanisation, but because of it. And the influence of the movement swirled far beyond the Lower East Side, to a trans-national culture in which individuals, ideas, and institutions crossed the Atlantic. New York Jews, in the beginning, exported Yiddish socialism to Russia, not the other way around. States well into the 20th Century and left an important political legacy that extends to the rise of neo-conservatism. A story of hopeful successes and bitter disappointments, A Fire in Their Hearts brings to vivid life this formative period for American Jews and the American left.

It's a Sprawl World After All: The Human Cost of Unplanned Growth -- and Visions of a Better Future


Douglas E. Morris - 2005
    The United States now has the most rapes, assaults, murders, and serial killings per capita, by a wide margin, than any other first-world nation. It’s a Sprawl World After All is the first book to link America’s increase in violence and the corresponding breakdown in society with the post-World War II development of suburban sprawl.Without small towns to bring people together, the unplanned growth of sprawl has left Americans isolated, alienated, and afraid of the strangers that surround them. Suburbia has substituted cars for conversation, malls for main streets, and the artificial community of television for authentic social interaction. This has resulted in dramatically negative impacts on US society, including:• The transformation of America’s community-oriented small-town sensibilities into an isolated society of strangers burdened by isolation, loneliness, and depression • The emergence of a culture of incivility characterized by extreme individualism and a callous disregard for others • Levels of violence so rampant as to be proclaimed “epidemic” by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)Advocating that urgent attention be paid to managing development by emulating the smart growth examples of European cities, the book’s final section offers readers tools to rebuild community in their lives as well as in society at large. It offers practical solutions that can improve everyone’s quality of life.Provocative and thoughtful, It’s a Sprawl World After All also includes a helpful resource listing of organizations committed to making communities more sustainable.Douglas E. Morris is a freelance writer whose 14 years of experience living outside the United States in a number of safe urban areas has given him unique insights into cross-cultural urban comparisons. He has published numerous articles on the topic in the last seven years.

The Cities Book


Holly Alexander - 2005
    More than half the world's population now lives in cities, and for travelers they hold an endless fascination.

City of Cities: The Birth of Modern London


Stephen Inwood - 2005
    Over the next three decades, London began its transformation into a new kind of city—one of unprecedented size, dynamism, and technological advance. This highly evocative account delves into the lives and textures of the booming city, from the glittering new department stores of Oxford Street to the synagogues and sweatshops of the East End, from bohemian bars and gaudy music halls to the well-kept gardens of Edwardian suburbia. It shows how the city, as a result of massive urban migration and construction, took on its shape; and how the advent of novelties such as electricity, the motor car, the telephone, socialism, democracy, and female emancipation transformed the lives of city dwellers. Brought to life is an age when Londoners spoke with excitement of the New Journalism, the New Woman, the New Aristocracy, and the New Liberalism, and when the nation hurled itself into war, realizing the cataclysmic consequences of this rush to modernity.

New Orleans in Photographs


Sharon Keating - 2005
    From historic buildings and architecture, to the natural beauty of the city's parks and waterfront, New Orleans in Photographs captures the spirit of this beloved city. Each photograph highlights a famous sight or location throughout the city, as well as lesser known attractions and hidden gems. Captions offer history, trivia, and interesting anecdotes. Anyone who loves New Orleans, natives and visitors alike, will appreciate this celebration of the city.

Richmond


Susan E. King - 2005
    White and black migrants from older parts of the United States joined emigrants from Ireland and Germany to create a diverse, flourishing, and at times contentious community. Railroads, the Whitewater Canal, and the National Road laid the foundations for economic growth before the Civil War, and Richmond grew steadily in population and prosperity from the Civil War until the late 20th century. Local folklore claims that at one time the city had more millionaires in proportion to population than any other place in the United States. While erecting remarkable homes and buildings, founding enduring institutions like schools, churches, and museums, and supporting at one time as many as six newspapers, Richmond produced memorable and colorful characters who left their mark not just in Richmond and Indiana, but around the United States.

The Senior Cohousing Handbook: A Community Approach to Independent Living


Charles Durrett - 2005
    These seniors are already wanting to ward off the aging process, so they are unlikely to want to live in assisted housing. Senior cohousing revolves around custom-built neighborhoods organized by the seniors themselves in order to fit in with their real needs, wants, and aspirations for health, longevity, and quality of life.Senior Cohousing is a comprehensive guide to joining or creating a cohousing project, written by the US leader in the field. The author deals with all the psychological and logistical aspects of senior cohousing and addresses common concerns, fears, and misunderstandings. He emphasizes the many positive benefits of cohousing, including:Better physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health Friendships and accessible social contact Safety and security Affordability Shared resources Successful aging requires control of one’s life, and today's generation of seniors—the baby boomers—will find that this book holds a compelling vision for their future.Charles Durrett is a principal at McCamant & Durrett in Nevada City, California, a firm that specializes in affordable cohousing. He co-authored the groundbreaking Cohousing with his wife and business partner, Kathryn McCamant.

The Global Cities Reader


Neil Brenner - 2005
    Providing the first comprehensive survey of new interdisciplinary scholarship on globalized urbanization, this important volume contains fifty selections from classic writings by authors such as John Friedmann, Michael Peter Smith, Saskia Sassen, Peter Taylor, Manuel Castells and Anthony King, as well as major contributions by other international scholars of global city formation.Classic and contemporary case studies of globalizing cities serve to illuminate global city theory within Europe, North America and East Asia, whilst contributing authors explore key topics including:the histories and geographies of globalized urbanization the social and economic order of globalizing cities pathways of globalized urbanization in the older industrialized world, the developing world and on the 'margins' of the world economy state restructuring, urban governance and socio-political contestation in globalizing cities culture, identity and representation in globalizing cities emerging issues and debates in contemporary research on globalized urbanization.Containing wide-ranging discussions on major theories, methods, themes and debates, and a combination of theoretical and methodological contributions, comparative analyses and detailed case studies, this key textbook will appeal to a broad interdisciplinary readership at undergraduate and graduate levels in urban, globalization, development, cultural, and environmental studies.

At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850-1930


Elizabeth Klimasmith - 2005
    These multi-unit residences began to define American city landscapes, a shift that had enormous interpersonal and cultural repercussions. These new forms of housing altered the ways in which Americans inhabited and understood urban space. Helping to create among city dwellers a distinctively modern subjectivity were a host of writers (among them, Hawthorne, James, and Nella Larsen) who experimented in prose with the possibilities and dangers of urban space. Reformers, planners, and engineers simultaneously helped to shape urban sensibilities by experimenting with architectural form in the city s physical landscape, often hoping to shape a particular type of citizen with their designs. Imaginatively juxtaposing literary criticism with a history of the built environment, Klimasmith examines urban domestic fiction alongside architectural, sociological, and photographic texts of the period, pairing important American novels with developments in urban domestic architecture. Arguing that nineteenth and early-twentieth-century residential spaces were always more fluid and dynamic than traditional scholarship holds, her study allows us to witness the unfolding of modernity and to view the modernist subject at its very inception."