Best of
Cities

2006

Moscow, 1937


Karl Schlögel - 2006
    A society utterly wrecked by a hurricane of violence. In this compelling book, the renowned historian Karl Schlogel reconstructs with meticulous care the process through which, month by month, the terrorism of a state-of-emergency regime spiraled into the 'Great Terror' during which 1 1/2 million human beings lost their lives within a single year. He revisits the sites of show trials and executions and, by also consulting numerous sources from the time, he provides a masterful panorama of these key events in Russian history. He shows how, in the shadow of the reign of terror, the regime around Stalin also aimed to construct a new society. Based on countless documents, Schlogel's historical masterpiece vividly presents an age in which the boundaries separating the dream and the terror dissolve, and enables us to experience the fear that was felt by people subjected to totalitarian rule. This rich and absorbing account of the Soviet purges will be essential reading for all students of Russia and for any readers interested in one of the most dramatic and disturbing events of modern history.

Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?


David Rutledge - 2006
    The book winds through the streets of New Orleans toward a deeper understanding of just what this great, wounded city means to the United States. Many of the essays in this collection were composed by writers trying to piece their lives together in the aftermath of the hurricane. Written in places like Baton Rouge, Houston, and Lafayette, these stories create a bridge back to the old New Orleans. And as the battle for this city rages on, this book becomes a razor-sharp weapon in the fight against corporate and governmental attempts to neuter a unique American city. The structure of the book parallels a New Orleans jazz funeral, mournful on the approach and celebratory on the return. Woven throughout the book is a series of interviews with New Orleans residents from all walks of life-jazz pianists, grain traders, tour guides, and others who make up this city. Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? takes intimate looks at old New Orleans staples such as Cajun food and Zydeco music as well as some unexpected views on race, economics and living in exile.Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? is the second book from Chin Music Press. Chin Music released Kuhaku & Other Accounts from Japan in the spring of 2005 and immediately established itself as a publisher focused on meticulous design and collaboration among artists and writers.

Forgotten New York: Views of a Lost Metropolis


Kevin Walsh - 2006
    Forgotten New York covers all five boroughs with easy-to-use maps and suggested routes to hundreds of out-of-the way places, antiquated monuments, streets to nowhere, and buildings from a time lost.Forgotten New York features:Quiet PlacesTruly ForgottenHistory Happened HereWhat Is This Thing?Forgotten PeopleAnd so much more

New York Then and Now (Compact)


Marcia Reiss - 2006
    Today, it is America's densest urban environment and most vital city, boasting one of the most recognizable skylines in the world.• New York Then and Now places today's post 9/11 cityscape within the context of history, reflecting the changing and enduring aspects of life in the Big Apple.• Remarkable past-and-present photographs showcase Manhattan's development and the amazing architecture that defines the city. See side-by-side images of the lavish Waldorf-Astoria, Radio City Music Hall, Union Square, St. Patrick's Cathedral, Penn Station, Empire State Building, and the Chrysler Building.• The Twin Towers, part of the World Trade Center, redefined the Manhattan skyline when they opened in 1976. After the tragedies of 9/11, the skyline is defined as much by their absence.• New York continues to be one of the most popular destinations in the world-everyone who has experienced the energy and magic of the Big Apple will want this compact edition of New York Then and Now. It's the perfect souvenir or gift!

The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro


Zachary M. Schrag - 2006
    And parking? Don't bet on it unless you're in the fast lane of the Capital Beltway during rush hour.Little wonder, then, that so many residents and visitors rely on the Washington Metro, the 106-mile rapid transit system that serves the District of Columbia and its inner suburbs. In the first comprehensive history of the Metro, Zachary M. Schrag tells the story of the Great Society Subway from its earliest rumblings to the present day, from Arlington to College Park, Eisenhower to Marion Barry.Unlike the pre–World War II rail systems of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, the Metro was built at a time when most American families already owned cars, and when most American cities had dedicated themselves to freeways, not subways. Why did the nation's capital take a different path? What were the consequences of that decision?Using extensive archival research as well as oral history, Schrag argues that the Metro can be understood only in the political context from which it was born: the Great Society liberalism of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. The Metro emerged from a period when Americans believed in public investments suited to the grandeur and dignity of the world's richest nation. The Metro was built not merely to move commuters, but in the words of Lyndon Johnson, to create "a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community."Schrag scrutinizes the project from its earliest days, including general planning, routes, station architecture, funding decisions, land-use impacts, and the behavior of Metro riders. The story of the Great Society Subway sheds light on the development of metropolitan Washington, postwar urban policy, and the promises and limits of rail transit in American cities.

Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992


Brandon Stosuy - 2006
    Sometime after Andy Warhol's heyday but before Soho became a tourist trap, a group of poets, punk rockers, guerilla journalists, graffiti artists, writers, and activists transformed lower Manhattan into an artistic scene so diverse it became known simply as "Downtown." Willfully unpolished and subversively intelligent, figures such as Spalding Gray, Kathy Acker, Richard Hell, David Wojnarowicz, Lynne Tillman, Miguel Pi�ero, and Eric Bogosian broke free from mainstream publishing to produce a flood of fiction, poetry, experimental theater, art, and music that breathed the life of the street.The first book to capture the spontaneity of the Downtown literary scene, Up Is Up, But So Is Down collects more than 125 images and over 80 texts that encompass the most vital work produced between 1974 and 1992. Reflecting the unconventional genres that marked this period, the book includes flyers, zines, newsprint weeklies, book covers, and photographs of people and the city, many of them here made available to readers outside the scene for the first time. The book's striking and quirky design--complete with 2-color interior--brings each of these unique documents and images to life.Brandon Stosuy arranges this hugely varied material chronologically to illustrate the dynamic views at play. He takes us from poetry readings in Alphabet City to happenings at Darinka, a Lower East Side apartment and performance space, to the St. Mark's Bookshop, unofficial crossroads of the counterculture, where home-printed copies of the latest zines were sold in Ziploc bags. Often attacking the bourgeois irony epitomized by the New Yorker's short fiction, Downtown writers played ebulliently with form and content, sex and language, producing work that depicted the underbelly of real life.With an afterword by Downtown icons Dennis Cooper and Eileen Myles, Up Is Up, But So Is Down gathers almost twenty years of New York City's smartest and most explosive--as well as hard to find--writing, providing an indispensable archive of one of the most exciting artistic scenes in U.S. history.

London: A Life in Maps


Peter Whitfield - 2006
    From Big Ben to the grimy Victorian streets of Dickens novels on up to the sleek high-rises that dot the skyline of the twenty-first-century metropolis, the urban landscape of London is steeped in history, while forever responsive to the changing dictates of progress, industry, and culture. In London: A Life in Maps, acclaimed historian Peter Whitfield reveals a wealth of surprising truths and forgotten facts hidden in the city’s historic maps.Whitfield examines nearly 200 maps spanning the last 500 years, all of which vividly demonstrate the vast changes wrought on London’s streets, open spaces, and buildings. In a rich array of colorful cartographic illustrations, the maps chronicle London’s tumultuous history, from the devastation of the Great Fire to the indelible marks left by World Wars I and II to the emergence of the West End as a fashion mecca. Whitfield reads historic sketches and detailed plans as biographical keys to this complex, sprawling urban center, and his in-depth examination unearths fascinating insights into the city of black cabs and red double-deckers. With engaging prose and astute analysis he also expertly coaxes out the subtle complexities—of social history, urban planning, and design—within the rich documentation of London’s immense and constantly changing cityscape.London: A Life in Maps lets readers wander through the past and present of London’s celebrated streets—from Abbey Road to Savile Row—and along the way reveals the city’s captivating history, vibrant culture, and potential future.

The Cities Book: A Journey Through the Best Cities in the World


Trent Holden - 2006
    More than half the world's population now lives in cities, and for travelers they hold an endless fascination.Every city has its own personality, in the form of its streets and buildings and in its human architecture. Taking our cue from the buzz on the street, we have captured the flavor of each city through the eyes of the typical citizen: hot conversation topics, urban myths, the best places to eat and rink and to seek out after dark. It's a tempting cocktail for the urban adventurer.

Planning and Urban Design Standards


Emina Sendich - 2006
    Contributions from more than two hundred renowned professionals provide rules of thumb and best practices for mitigating such environmental impacts as noise, traffic, aesthetics, preservation of green space and wildlife, water quality, and more. You get in-depth information on the tools and techniques used to achieve planning and design outcomes, including economic analysis, mapping, visualization, legal foundations, and real estate developments. Thousands of illustrations, examples of custom work by today's leading planners, and insider information make this work the new standard in the field. Order your copy today.

Sarajevo: A Biography


Robert J. Donia - 2006
    Under Tito it was a haven of multiculturalism where Yugoslavs lived and worked together, irrespective of their ethnic or religious affiliations. This title explores the city's history from its founding in the 15th century onwards.

Barrio: Photographs from Chicago's Pilsen and Little Village


Paul D'Amato - 2006
    Intrigued by the barrio and neighboring Little Village, he began to take photographs and would continue to do so off and on for the next fourteen years. D’Amato started with the public life of the neighborhood: women and children in the streets, open fire hydrants, and graffiti. But later—after he got to know the area’s Mexican residents better—he was allowed to take more intimate photos of people at work, families at weddings and parties, and even gang members.Barrio collects ninety of these striking color images along with D’Amato’s fascinating account of his time photographing Mexican Chicago and his acceptance—often grudging, after threatened violence—into the heart of the city’s Mexican community. Some of the photos here are beautifully composed and startling—visual narratives that are surreal and dreamlike, haunting and mythic. Others, like those D’Amato took while shadowing graffiti artists in the subway, are far more immediate and improvisational. With a foreword by author Stuart Dybek that places D’Amato’s work in the context of the Pilsen and Little Village that Dybek has elsewhere captured so memorably, this book offers a penetrating, evocative, and overall streetwise portrait of two iconic and enduring Hispanic neighborhoods.

New York 2000: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Bicentennial and the Millennium


Robert A.M. Stern - 2006
    As the world's financial and cultural capital, New York demands the best in architectural design and balances the constant pressure to build with the need to preserve its historic fabric. Author Robert A. M. Stern and his colleagues trace the rise and fall of the real estate market, the impact of the designation of historic districts and new zoning on development, and the emergence of new commercial and residential centers. The survey is organized geographically, moving north from Lower Manhattan and covering the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island as well. New York 2000 documents milestones in the city's architectural history over the past forty years—the development of Battery Park City, the rebirth of Harlem and Times Square, the creation of the cultural precinct around the new MoMA, and the reclaiming of the waterfront along the East and Hudson Rivers as recreational parkland—and celebrates the achievements of internationally recognized architects such as Sir Norman Foster, Cesar Pelli, Richard Meier, and Renzo Piano.

Design for Ecological Democracy


Randolph T. Hester - 2006
    Showing how to combine the forces of ecological science and participatory democracy to design urban landscapes that enable us to act as communities, this book outlines principles for urban design that allows us to forge connections with our fellow citizens and our natural environment.

Atlas of Lost Cities: Legendary Cities Rediscovered


Brenda Rosen - 2006
    Examining the role of natural and man-made disasters, rulers and their hostile neighbors, and the fate of cities built to celebrate religious beliefs, this fascinating volume features stunning photography of major archaeological sites and recently discovered cities. Detailed reconstructions and maps trace the lost beauty and ancient wisdom embodied in the Borobodur in Java, Aphrodisias in Turkey, and Niya in Central Asia. An illuminating and thought-provoking work that builds on the recent success of numerous bestsellers about how and why ancient civilizations fail, it will prove an invaluable reference.

No-Stop City: Archizoom Associati


Andrea Branzi - 2006
    

The Art of City-Making


Charles Landry - 2006
    The skills required to re-enchant the city are far wider than the conventional ones like architecture, engineering and land-use planning. There is no simplistic, ten-point plan, but strong principles can help send good city-making on its way. The vision for 21st century cities must be to be the most imaginative cities for the world rather than in the world. This one change of word - from 'in' to 'for' - gives city-making an ethical foundation and value base. It helps cities become places of solidarity where the relations between the individual, the group, outsiders to the city and the planet are in better alignment. Following the widespread success of The Creative City, this new book, aided by international case studies, explains how to reassess urban potential so that cities can strengthen their identity and adapt to the changing global terms of trade and mass migration. It explores the deeper fault-lines, paradoxes and strategic dilemmas that make creating the 'good city' so difficult.

A Mis Guide To Anywhere


Stephen Hodge - 2006
    

The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia


Donald Filtzer - 2006
    It examines urban living conditions under the Stalinist regime with a focus on the key issues of sanitation, access to safe water supplies, personal hygiene and anti-epidemic controls, diet and nutrition, and infant mortality. Comparing five key industrial regions, it shows that living conditions still lagged some fifty years behind Western European norms. The book reveals that, despite this, the years preceding Stalin's death saw dramatic improvements in mortality rates thanks to the application of rigorous public health controls and Western medical innovations. While tracing these changes, the book also analyzes the impact that the absence of an adequate urban infrastructure had on people's daily lives and on the relationship between the Stalinist regime and the Russian people, and, finally, how the Soviet experience compared to that of earlier industrializing societies.

The Urban Design Reader


Michael Larice - 2006
    Forty-one generous selections include contributions from Le Corbusier and Jacobs through to Hayden and Gillham.This book provides an essential resource for students and practitioners of urban design, drawing together important but widely dispersed writings. Section and selection introductions are provided to assist students in understanding where readings come from and how they fit into the larger picture of the field of urban design.

Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America


Lisa Gray-Garcia - 2006
    As Dee, a single mother, struggles with the demons of her own childhood of neglect and abuse, Lisa has to quickly assume the role of an adult in an attempt to keep some stability in their lives. “Dee and Tiny” ultimately become underground celebrities in San Francisco, squatting in storefronts and performing the “art of homelessness.” Their story, filled with black humor and incisive analysis, illuminates the roots of poverty, the criminalization of poor families, and their struggle for survival.

The Spectator and the Topographical City


Martin Aurand - 2006
    Martin Aurand explores the conditions present in the natural landscape that led to the creation of architectural forms; man’s response to an unruly terrain of hills, hollows, and rivers. From its origins as a frontier fortification to its heyday of industrial expansion; through eras of City Beautiful planning and urban Renaissance to today’s vision of a green sustainable city; Pittsburgh has offered environmental and architectural experiences unlike any other place.Aurand adopts the viewpoint of the spectator to study three of Pittsburgh’s “terrestrial rooms”: the downtown Golden Triangle; the Turtle Creek Valley with its industrial landscape; and Oakland, the cultural and university district. He examines the development of these areas and their significance to our perceptions of a singular American city, shaped to its topography.

Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City


Sherry Simon - 2006
    She traces an evocative history of literary passages across familiar sites as she follows adventurous cultural translators.

Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred


Philip Bess - 2006
    . . for the sake of the good life.” So wrote Aristotle nearly 2,400 years ago, articulating an idea that prevailed throughout most of Western culture and the world until the environmental consequences of the Industrial Revolution called into question the goodness of traditional urban life. Urban history ever since—from England’s early-nineteenth-century hygiene laws to mid-twentieth-century modernist architecture and planning to today’s New Urbanism—has consisted of efforts to ameliorate the consequences of the industrial city by either embracing or challenging the idealization of nature that has followed it.Architect Philip Bess’s Till We Have Built Jerusalem puts forth fresh arguments for traditional architecture and urbanism, their relationship to human flourishing, and the kind of culture required to create and sustain traditional towns and city neighborhoods. Bess not only dissects the questionable intellectual assumptions of contemporary architecture, he also shows how the individualist ethos of modern societies finds physical expression in contemporary suburban sprawl, making traditional urbanism difficult to sustain. He concludes by considering the role of both the natural law tradition and communal religion in providing intellectual and spiritual depth to contemporary attempts to build new—and revive existing—traditional towns and cities, attempts that, at their best, help fulfill our natural human desires for order, beauty, and community.

The Form Of Cities: Political Economy And Urban Design


Alexander Cuthbert - 2006
     Demonstrates that cities are replete with symbolic values, collective memory, association and conflict. Proposes a new theoretical understanding of urban design, based in political economy. Demonstrates different ways of conceptualising the city, whether through aesthetics or the prism of gender, for example. Written in an engaging and jargon-free style, but retains a sophisticated interpretative edge. Complements Designing Cities by the same author (Blackwell, 2003).

D.F., 52 obras en un acto


Emilio Carballido - 2006
    1925) obtained a Master's degree in literature and dramatic arts at the University of Mexico. He has written or collaborated on more than 50 film scripts. This collection of one-act plays began as an exercise for teaching dramatic arts, until over the years their number reached 52. 'Originally, the collection had two different purposes, ' says Emilio Carballido. 'One more modest aim was; to provide drama students with material for their exams. The other, perhaps more presumptuous, was to compose a dramatic collage, a kaleidoscope of small acts comprising a very personal vision of my Federal District, my Mexico City as it grows and evolves like a living being.'

London's Cemeteries


Darren Beach - 2006
    It gives detailed reviews for each cemetery, including where all the most notable people are buried, from Sid James to Karl Marx. The book also reveals some of the fascinating history surrounding London's cemeteries including the Victorian railway line dedicated to transporting the dead, with first and second class tickets for the deceased.

Renaissance Florence: A Social History


Roger J. Crum - 2006
    Treating the city, its art, and its rituals as lived experiences that extended through space and time, the contributors to this volume consider well-known objects, monuments, sites, and events in the vivifying context of a variety of spaces, which are here understood as a dimension of physical, psychological, religious, and political perceptions for the city of Florence during the Renaissance. The volume provides a multi-dimensional view of Florence as it evolved into an economic powerhouse and dynamic center of artistic achievement, as well as the setting for political and religious struggles. It also demonstrates how permeable boundaries between the disciplines of history and art history have become.

Lucknow: City of Illusion


Rosie Llewellyn-Jones - 2006
    The Northern Indian city of Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, extends along the banks of the River Gomti. Once the center of an elaborate and highly sophisticated culture, and home to a variety of ethnic communities, Lucknow was also the sight of some of the most destructive fighting of the 1857 uprising. Many of its ornate and culturally diverse buildings were subsequently destroyed, and countless roads were rebuilt, effectively demolishing the thriving city that had once existed. This series of lovely 19th-century duotone photographs from the renowned Alkazi Collection follows the life and death of many of the city's most important buildings. Augmented by the work of world-class historians and architects, it reveals the important connections between the two disciplines, as played out in a city that is constantly changing, and forever adding to its rich historic past.

Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry


Vincent Kaufmann - 2006
    In this ambitious and innovative biography, Vincent Kaufmann places Debord's very hostility toward the inquisitive, biographical gaze at the center of an investigation into his subject's diverse output—from his earliest films to his landmark works of social theory and political provocation—and the poetic sensibility that informed both his work and his life.Instead of providing a conventional day-to-day account of Debord's life, Kaufmann deftly locates his subject within the historical and intellectual context of the radical social, political, and artistic movements in which he participated. He traces Debord's development as an intellectual: his involvement with the lettrist movement in the early 1950s, his central role in the Situationist International from 1957 to 1971 and in the events of May 1968, and the productive and frequently misunderstood period between the dissolution of the situationists and his suicide, during which time Debord clarified the rules of his war against inauthenticity.As Kaufmann makes clear, for Debord political thought and action were inseparable from aesthetics and poetic expression. Whether envisioning the recovery of a lost, protocommunist age of authenticity and transparency in The Society of the Spectacle or critically assessing the possibility of revolution against postmodern capitalism two decades later, Debord advocated and practiced an art of defiance, a concurrently martial and melancholic poetics. Avoiding the mythologies about Debord that both admirers and critics have cultivated, Kaufmann provides a groundbreaking and generous assessment of Debord and his uncompromising struggle against a corrupt civilization.Vincent Kaufmann is professor of French language and literature at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.Robert Bononno, a teacher and translator, lives in New York City.

Milwaukee's Bronzeville: 1900-1950


Paul H. Geenen - 2006
    Most settled around a 12-block area along Walnut Street that came to be known as Milwaukee's Bronzeville, a thriving residential, business, and entertainment community. Barbershops, restaurants, drugstores, and funeral homes were started with a little money saved from overtime pay at factory jobs or extra domestic work taken on by the women. Exotic nightclubs, taverns, and restaurants attracted a racially mixed clientele, and daytime social clubs sponsored "matinees" that were dress-up events featuring local bands catering to neighborhood residents. Bronzeville is remembered by African American elders as a good place to grow up--times were hard, but the community was tight.

Chennai, Not Madras: Perspectives on the City


A.R. Venkatachalapathy - 2006
    Writings on the city that are available view it from an elite middle-class perspective, epitomized by the opposition to the renaming of Madras a few years ago. This somewhat provocatively titled book high

Urban Recreation


Peter Barsky - 2006
    Swings made out of city driftwood hang under traffic signs. Akay and Peter breathe life into the city's intervals. Without permission, they reshape the streets to places of enjoyment. Their work raises questions on participation in public space.

Rally 'Round the Flag: Chicago and the Civil War


Theodore J. Karamanski - 2006
    Karamanski examines the people and events that formed this critical period in the city's history. Using diaries, letters, and newspapers that survived the Great Fire of 1871, he shows how Chicagoans' opinions evolved from a romantic and patriotic view of the war to recognition of the conflict's brutality. Located a safe distance behind the battle lines and accessible to the armies via rail and waterways, the city's economy grew feverishly while increasing population strained Chicago's social fabric. From the great Republican convention of 1860 in the "Wigwam," to the dismal life of Confederate prisoners in Camp Douglas on the South Side of Chicago, Rally 'Round the Flag paints a vivid picture of the Midwest city vigorously involved in the national conflict.

London: The Executioner's City


David Brandon - 2006
    London: The Executioner's City reveals the capital as a place where the bodies of criminals defined the boundaries of the city and heads on poles greeted patrons on London Bridge. The ubiquity of crime and punishment was taken for granted by countless generations of the capital's inhabitants, though it seems to have done little to stem the tide of criminality that has always threatened to engulf the city. The book is a powerful evocation of the dark side of London's history, where the great and not so good, the poor and helpless, the cruel and the idealistic crowd together to be punished in public. A king and more than one queen, heretics, archbishops, pirates, poisoners, plotters, murderers, and a cook executed for selling putrid fish met death by hanging, beheading, burning, or boiling in London, and on most occasions the crowd roared its approval.

Columbus: 1910-1970


Richard E. Barrett - 2006
    During the years covered here, the city lost many of its manufacturing enterprises and transformed into a government, education, research, and financial hub. Downtown Columbus was teeming with activity, making transportation to the city center vital. This volume ends as Columbus is in the beginning of a transformation that saw the accelerated development of suburbs and the dissipation of activities to outlying areas. In the vintage photographs in these pages, readers will also see the flood of 1913, which claimed 100 lives and brought about flood prevention measures that forever changed the face of downtown Columbus.