Best of
Cities

2010

Cities for People


Jan Gehl - 2010
    In this revolutionary book, Gehl presents his latest work creating (or recreating) cityscapes on a human scale. He clearly explains the methods and tools he uses to reconfigure unworkable cityscapes into the landscapes he believes they should be: cities for people.Taking into account changing demographics and changing lifestyles, Gehl explains how to develop cities that are lively, safe, sustainable, and healthy.The book is extensively illustrated with over 700 photos and drawings of examples from Gehl’s work around the globe.

Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas


Rebecca Solnit - 2010
    Aided by artists, writers, cartographers, and twenty-two gorgeous color maps, each of which illuminates the city and its surroundings as experienced by different inhabitants, Solnit takes us on a tour that will forever change the way we think about place. She explores the area thematically—connecting, for example, Eadweard Muybridge’s foundation of motion-picture technology with Alfred Hitchcock’s filming of Vertigo. Across an urban grid of just seven by seven miles, she finds seemingly unlimited landmarks and treasures—butterfly habitats, queer sites, murders, World War II shipyards, blues clubs, Zen Buddhist centers. She roams the political terrain, both progressive and conservative, and details the cultural geographies of the Mission District, the culture wars of the Fillmore, the South of Market world being devoured by redevelopment, and much, much more. Breathtakingly original, this atlas of the imagination invites us to search out the layers of San Francisco that carry meaning for us—or to discover our own infinite city, be it Cleveland, Toulouse, or Shanghai.CONTRIBUTORS:Cartographers: Ben Pease and Shizue SeigelDesigner: Lia TjandraArtists: Sandow Birk, Mona Caron, Jaime Cortez, Hugh D'Andrade, Robert Dawson, Paz de la Calzada, Jim Herrington, Ira Nowinski, Alison Pebworth, Michael Rauner, Gent Sturgeon, Sunaura TaylorWriters and researchers: Summer Brenner, Adriana Camarena, Chris Carlsson, Lisa Conrad, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Paul La Farge, Genine Lentine, Stella Lochman, Aaron Shurin, Heather Smith, Richard WalkerAdditional cartography: Darin Jensen; Robin Grossinger and Ruth Askevold, San Francisco Estuary Institute

Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City


Antero Pietila - 2010
    The Federal Housing Administration continued discriminatory housing policies even into the 1960s, long after civil rights legislation. This all-American tale is told through the prism of Baltimore, from its early suburbanization in the 1880s to the consequences of white flight after World War II, and into the first decade of the twenty-first century. The events are real, and so are the heroes and villains. Mr. Pietila's narrative centers on the human side of residential real estate practices, whose discriminatory tools were the same everywhere: restrictive covenants, redlining, blockbusting, predatory lending.

Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World


Doug Saunders - 2010
    These transitional spaces are where the next great economic and cultural boom will be born, or where the great explosion of violence will occur. The difference depends on our ability to notice.The twenty-first century is going to be remembered for the great, and final, shift of human populations out of rural, agricultural life into cities. The movement engages an unprecedented number of people, perhaps a third of the world's population, and will affect almost everyone in tangible ways. The last human movement of this size and scope, and the changes it will bring to family life, from large agrarian families to small urban ones, will put an end to the major theme of human history: continuous population growth.Arrival City offers a detailed tour of the key places of the "final migration" and explores the possibilities and pitfalls inherent in the developing new world order. From villages in China, India, Bangladesh and Poland to the international cities of the world, Doug Saunders portrays a diverse group of people as they struggle to make the transition, and in telling the story of their journeys — and the history of their often multi-generational families enmeshed in the struggle of transition — gives an often surprising sense of what factors aid in the creation of a stable, productive community.

Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean


Philip Mansel - 2010
    It describes three former centers of great wealth, pleasure, and freedom—Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut—cities of the Levant region along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. In these key ports at the crossroads of East and West, against all expectations, cosmopolitanism and nationalism flourished simultaneously. People freely switched identities and languages, released from the prisons of religion and nationality. Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived and worshipped as neighbors.Distinguished historian Philip Mansel is the first to recount the colorful, contradictory histories of Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut in the modern age. He begins in the early days of the French alliance with the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century and continues through the cities' mid-twentieth-century fates: Smyrna burned; Alexandria Egyptianized; Beirut lacerated by civil war.Mansel looks back to discern what these remarkable Levantine cities were like, how they differed from other cities, why they shone forth as cultural beacons. He also embarks on a quest: to discover whether, as often claimed, these cities were truly cosmopolitan, possessing the elixir of coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews for which the world yearns. Or, below the glittering surface, were they volcanoes waiting to erupt, as the catastrophes of the twentieth century suggest? In the pages of the past, Mansel finds important messages for the fractured world of today.

Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco


Teresa Gowan - 2010
    Within a few years, however, what had been perceived as a national crisis came to be seen as a nuisance, with early sympathies for the plight of the homeless giving way to compassion fatigue and then condemnation. Debates around the problem of homelessness—often set in terms of sin, sickness, and the failure of the social system—have come to profoundly shape how homeless people survive and make sense of their plights. In Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders, Teresa Gowan vividly depicts the lives of homeless men in San Francisco and analyzes the influence of the homelessness industry on the streets, in the shelters, and on public policy. Gowan shows some of the diverse ways that men on the street in San Francisco struggle for survival, autonomy, and self-respect. Living for weeks at a time among homeless men—working side-by-side with them as they collected cans, bottles, and scrap metal; helping them set up camp; watching and listening as they panhandled and hawked newspapers; and accompanying them into soup kitchens, jails, welfare offices, and shelters—Gowan immersed herself in their routines, their personal stories, and their perspectives on life on the streets. She observes a wide range of survival techniques, from the illicit to the industrious, from drug dealing to dumpster diving. She also discovered that prevailing discussions about homelessness and its causes—homelessness as pathology, homelessness as moral failure, and homelessness as systemic failure—powerfully affect how homeless people see themselves and their ability to change their situation. Drawing on five years of fieldwork, this powerful ethnography of men living on the streets of the most liberal city in America, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders, makes clear that the way we talk about issues of extreme poverty has real consequences for how we address this problem—and for the homeless themselves.

London's Hidden Walks Volume 1


Stephen Millar - 2010
    This book is packed with interesting details about London's history, offering both personal tales of those that wandered the same streets in former years and a more general social and economic history of the different areas covered. Following any of the 13 walks will allow London visitors to walk in the footsteps of authors and statesmen, murderers and revolutionaries. Detailed maps illustrate the route and locations of buildings and points of interest.

Los Angeles in Maps


Glen Creason - 2010
    Los Angeles inhabits a place of the mind as much as it does a physical geographic space. A land of palm trees and movie stars, sunshine and glamour, the city exists in the imagination as a paradise; of course, the reality is much bigger than this. Through seventy reproductions of seminal and historic documents, Los Angeles in Maps presents the evolution of this almost mythical place. Maps featured include historic Spanish explorers’ charts from as early as 1791, as well as more recent topographic surveys, tourist guides, real estate maps, bird’s-eye views, and more. Like the course of the Los Angeles River, the book winds through essential terrain: the discovery of oil, the rise of Hollywood, the streetcar system, Los Angeles Harbor, earthquakes, sprawl, and splendor.

City Across Time


Peter Kent - 2010
    The lively, warm and friendly illustrations are packed with absorbing and eye-opening details, and clearly show how new buildings are constructed on the rubble of the old. Eagle-eyed readers will have hours of fun spotting the descendants of one particular family though the centuries, and seeing how once-grand building become buried and how some structures remain through the centuries. Brand-new artworks and spreads reveal the prehistoric origins of the settlement, its 21st-century development and even give a glimpse into the far future, when ice sheets threaten to overwhelm the city

Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History Of Punk In Toronto And Beyond 1977-1981


Liz Worth - 2010
    This is a limited edition book of 500 copies. It is the ONLY book on the 1977 Toronto punk scene; an indispensable reference work. There is a wealth of previously unpublished photographs (The Dead Boys, The Ramones, The Nerves, in addition to The Viletones, Poles, Diodes, Dishes, Teenage Head, etc). The book offers an extensive history of The Diodes, Teenage Head, Forgotten Rebels, The Viletones, and also Simply Saucer in addition to B-Girls (Bomp Records), The Ugly, The Curse, etc. It includes the clubs, the drug use, murder, sex and all the related highlights. The book was written by music journalist and author Liz Worth (Exclaim), edited by pop musicologist Gary Pig Gold, and designed by Ralph Alfonso. Maximum Rock'n'Roll magazine has already run interviews with the 3 main bands (Viletones, Teenage Head, The Diodes).

Subversia


Duke Haney - 2010
    Haney shares a series of personal essays on his life, struggles, and artistic evolution; from punk-rock malcontent in 1980s New York, to B-movie actor in the films of Roger Corman; to screenwriter on Friday the 13th Part VII; to expatriated American writer in Serbia; to author of the celebrated underground novel Banned for Life. Consisting of material originally published by the popular online literary magazine The Nervous Breakdown, Subversia is written with the bracing candor and lyrical beauty that have earned Haney a well-deserved cult following worldwide. "Subversia is an excellent collection of autobiographical short pieces, original and often raw...Haney is what you could call an authentically authentic voice—he comes out of the mold of beat-punk Kerouac worship, which has inspired enough writing and music making that it should be considered genre, and judged by its own standards...but, if such a genre exists, then Haney rises above it easily. He is a near-master of the final sentence, the one that pulls it all together and adds a dimension to the whole piece..." - L.A. Observed"...a fast ride on the wild side...Subversia is an accounting of real life in perfect focus..." - The New York Journal of Books"Frequently heartfelt and personal, Haney interweaves tiny details with weighty subjects deftly, through articles smartly ordered for just the right balance of thematic lilt and interest-holding lurch...[he] writes in a way that is infectious and gimmick-free...his enthusiasm for people, creativity and the whole world, is bottomless...[Subversia is] a joyful read on depressing subjects, and the consistency and precision of the writing makes it work." - PANK Magazine"...whether he’s fantasizing about killing his talkative girlfriend (and then sharing that thought with her) or taking a shower for his camp counselor’s private Kodak moment—no matter how ugly, Haney just puts it out there without care or thought to judgment." - BookFetish "Drug abuse, wild punk rock concerts, a short-lived James Dean icon phase, a car accident that nearly killed him, all of the shitty side jobs he worked and screenplays he wrote to keep a dollar in his pocket... it's all in here...Subversia reads like a conversation between two very close friends." - The Next Best Book Blog "...a series of vivid episodes—formative and destructive, hilarious and heartbreaking—that illuminate the mind of an intense soul whose charisma is outshined only by his unrelenting honesty." - Richard Cox, author of Rift and The God Particle"D.R. Haney may very well be the illegitimate love child of Henry Rollins and David Sedaris." - Jeff Martin, author of My Dog Ate My Nobel Prize and editor of The Customer Is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles"Haney's blend of intoxicating content, sharply selected language, and unexpected humor is better than all the heroin in Serbia." - Lenore Zion, author of My Dead Pets Are Interesting"Haney is absolutely compelling. You'll want to read his pieces over and over, and each time you'll marvel at how he took you someplace utterly different than the time before." - Robin Antalek, author of The Summer We Fell Apart"It is a tribute to Haney's immense charisma, brutal honesty, and charming prose that in spite of everything he confesses, one can't help but fall hopelessly in love with him." - Jessica Anya Blau, author of The Summer of Naked Swim Parties and Drinking Closer to Home "The man writes a book. It is a great book of fiction. How will I ever top this? he says. He walks around, and sits and thinks. Then he writes a great book of essays." - Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day

Monday Hearts for Madalene


Page Hodel - 2010
    It happened to San Francisco artist Page Hodel when she found the love of her life, Madalene Rodriguez. She expressed her devotion in an unusual way: Early every Monday morning, Page would create a heart for Madalene and leave it for her to discover somewhere near her front door. Tragically, Madalene died of ovarian cancer less than a year after she and Page met. But Page's love goes on, beautifully symbolized in the hearts she continues to create from a plenitude of objects. Here are photographs of one hundred of Page's hearts for Madalene, fashioned from a magical, surprising diversity of materials: acorns and asparagus; berries, buttons, and bungee cord; cardboard, clothespins, corks, and candy corn. True love embraces the world, and Page's art is testimony to its enduring faith.

Zinester's Guide to NYC: The Last Wholly Analog Guide to NYC


Ayun Halliday - 2010
    Whether you're looking for scam-able coffee or a place to grab a Japanese breakfast, art supplies, volunteer opportunities, or a 4-story Korean bathhouse, the ZG2NYC has it all. Anecdotal and opinionated, the ZG2NYC has listings from over twenty New York-based zine publishers, toiling under the benevolent umbrella of Ayun Halliday (Chief Primatologist of The East Village Inky zine, author of No Touch Monkey!) “The best way to experience the city is to really participate in it," Halliday says. "Why watch the parade when you can march in it? People should know that they can guest bartend, play bike polo in Sara Roosevelt Park, create a public park in a parking space on National Park(ing) Day, and submit the 5-minute movies they shoot on the boardwalk to next year's Coney Island Film Festival.” Like our Portland guide, the pocket-size NYC book is divided into illustrated, user friendly sections (Bars! Pizza! Historic buildings! Veggie options! Open mics! Craft supplies! The keys to low-budget NYC romance!) that give up the goods for first-timers and native New Yorkers alike.

Egon Schiele: Landscapes


Rudolph Leopold - 2010
    Best known for his depictions of the human form, Schiele was also interested in portraying the beauty and structure of the world he inhabited. In fact, Schiele's paintings of the countryside and his native Vienna comprise a large portion of his body of work. Nearly one hundred of the artist's landscapes are exquisitely reproduced in this handsome book and presented alongside photographs of the scenes he depicted, taken from the vantage point of the original works. This volume proves that Schiele s mastery extends beyond his radical renditions of the human figure and reveals themes that appear throughout his work. Schiele's landscapes represent an important facet of his career and are a valuable contribution to the school of European nature painting.

Street Value: Shopping, Planning, and Politics on Fulton Street


Rosten Woo - 2010
    A colossus of commerce, itwelcomes over one hundred thousand shoppers daily and ranks among the most profitable commercial real estate in the entire country, and is also home to some of the city's most recognized institutions, including cheesecake mecca Junior's, that have been immortalized in song, film, and culture. Despite its historic link to Brooklyn's past and its financial success as a shopping district, Fulton Street is rarely celebrated in New York. The street's hand-painted signs, customized jewelry, rare sneakers, mega-church, and vendors offer a special sampling of noncorporate commerce, but many consider its sensorial and physical density a sign of blight. Misunderstandings about race, class, and profitability have led Fulton Street to be characterized as run-down, dangerous, or underutilized, and as a result it has been subject to nearly continuous renovation. Recently rezoned and becoming increasingly attractive to national chain stores, Fulton Street is once again poised for big changes. Street Value is a challenge to creatively rethink the planning and urban design of Fulton Street and other urban shopping districts. Street Value explores the mall's historical and contemporary conditions through original essays, oral histories, new and archival photographs, historic documents, and interviews with key planners, developers, city officials, historians, and activists from the 1960s to the present. Street Value probes the ideology of redevelopment and demonstrates how commercial, governmental, and activist forces have coalesced to produce one of Brooklyn's most legendary public spaces.

Housing Policy in the United States


Alex F. Schwartz - 2010
    The text covers the impact of the crisis in depth, including policy changes put in place and proposed by the Obama administration. This new edition also includes the latest data on housing trends and program budgets, and an expanded discussion of homelessnessof homelessness.

The Language of Towns & Cities: A Visual Dictionary


Dhiru A. ThadaniDouglas Farr - 2010
    The Language of Towns & Cities is a landmark publication that clarifies the language by which we talk about urban planning and design. Everyday words such as "avenue," "boulevard," "park," and "district," as well as less commonly used words and terms such as "sustainability," "carbon-neutral," or "Bilbao Effect" are used with a great variety of meanings, causing confusion among citizens, city officials, and other decision-makers when trying to design viable neighborhoods, towns, and cities. This magnificent volume is the fruit of more than a decade of research and writing in an effort to ameliorate this situation. Abundantly illustrated with over 2,500 photographs, drawings, and charts, The Language of Towns & Cities is both a richly detailed glossary of more than seven hundred words and terms commonly used in architecture and urban planning, and a compendium of great visual interest. From "A" and "B" streets to Zero Lot and Zeitgeist, the book is at once comprehensive and accessible. An essential work for architects, urban planners, students of design, and all those interested in the future of towns and cities, this is destined to become a classic in its field.

Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto


Shawn Micallef - 2010
    His psychogeographic reportages, some of which have been featured in EYE WEEKLY and Spacing magazine, situate Toronto's buildings and streets in living, breathing detail, and tell us about the people who use them; the ways, intended or otherwise, that they are being used; and how they are evolving.Stroll celebrates Toronto's details – some subtle, others grand – at the speed of walking and, in so doing, helps us to better get to know its many neighbourhoods, taking us from well-known spots like the CN Tower and Pearson Airport to the overlooked corners of Scarborough and all the way to the end of the Leslie Street Spit in Lake Ontario.Stroll features thirty-two walks, a flâneur manifesto, a foreword by architecture critic John Bentley Mays, dozens of hand-drawn maps by Marlena Zuber and a full-colour fold-out orientation map of Toronto.

The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City


Katherine Wentworth Rinne - 2010
    Supported by the author’s extensive topographical research, this book presents a unified vision of the city that links improvements to public and private water systems with political, religious, and social change. Between 1560 and 1630, in a spectacular burst of urban renewal, Rome’s religious and civil authorities sponsored the construction of aqueducts, private and public fountains for drinking, washing, and industry, and the magnificent ceremonial fountains that are Rome’s glory. Tying together the technological, sociopolitical, and artistic questions that faced the designers during an age of turmoil in which the Catholic Church found its authority threatened and the infrastructure of the city was in a state of decay, Rinne shows how these public works projects transformed Rome in a successful marriage of innovative engineering and strategic urban planning.

Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities


Peter Harnik - 2010
    The U.S. Conference of Mayors recently cited meeting the growing demand for parks and open space as one of the biggest challenges for urban leaders today. It is now widely agreed that the U.S. needs an ambitious and creative plan to increase urban parklands. Urban Green explores new and innovative ways for “built out” cities to add much-needed parks. Peter Harnik first explores the question of why urban parkland is needed and then looks at ways to determine how much is possible and where park investment should go. When presenting the ideas and examples for parkland, he also recommends political practices that help create parks. The book offers many practical solutions, from reusing the land under defunct factories to sharing schoolyards, from building trails on abandoned tracks to planting community gardens, from decking parks over highways to allowing more activities in cemeteries, from eliminating parking lots to uncovering buried streams, and more. No strategy alone is perfect, and each has its own set of realities. But collectively they suggest a path toward making modern cities more beautiful, more sociable, more fun, more ecologically sound, and more successful.

Modern Ruins: Portraits of Place in the Mid-Atlantic Region


Shaun O'Boyle - 2010
    This collection of photographs features some of his best work. The book is divided into four sections, each representing a type of site now abandoned--prisons and mental health institutions, steel production facilities, coal mining and processing facilities, and a weapons arsenal. These photographs are hauntingly beautiful; they are also historically and culturally instructive.Modern Ruins begins with an introduction by architectural essayist Geoff Manaugh, who offers insight into why people are so drawn to ruins and what they might mean to us in a larger psychological sense. Brief essays by noted historians Curt Miner, Kenneth Warren, Kenneth Wolensky, and Thomas Lewis offer social and historical contexts for the sites documented in the book. These sites include Eastern State Penitentiary, Bethlehem Steel, and Bannerman's Island Arsenal, among others. The book concludes with an interview with the photographer that touches on his fascination with ruins and explores some of his procedures for documenting them. Modern Ruins is a compelling collection of stunning and melancholy photographs, one that helps us hear these abandoned places speak.

Love Jaipur, Rajasthan


Fiona Caulfield - 2010
    The passionately curated guide is designed for the discerning luxury vagabond who wants authenticity in style. The 168-page book, comprises eight sections including an overview of the city with 'must knows and must dos and presents the best places to eat, drink, shop, be pampered, get fit and explore. It also includes mini destination guides to Jodhpur, Agra, Udaipur and Jaisalmer. Unlike mass tourist books, using this guide is like being chaperoned by a good friend. The entries are 'love stories' sourced from in-the-know locals including chefs, artists, designers, architects, ambassadors, foreign correspondents and taxi drivers. Love Jaipur, Rajasthan, celebrates Indian luxury and pays homage to India s rich craft legacy being itself completely handmade in India. Love Jaipur, Rajasthan is printed on paper that is handmade in Jaipur and handcrafted with care by local fashion designers and crafts people. The hand-loom khadi covers were developed in partnership Sonam Dubal of Sanskar. The khadi and silk book bags are by Sonali Sattar of Hidden Harmony.

Brasilia - Chandigarh Living with Modernity


Iwan Baan - 2010
    At the same time, the sectoral city of Chandigarh was rising according to plans by Le Corbusier. The "test tube city" arose as an export of modernity from a Western planning euphoria that displayed utopian traits. In both cities, foreign architecture entered into a harmonious relationship with indigenous culture, forming new and independent identities.This publication addresses the question of how modernism has been appropriated in both cities, and how the people who live in them deal with it. Commonalities and differences are identified and images of everyday urban life showcased. On the initiative of the publisher, the young photographer Iwan Baan has taken stock of contemporary life in both cities. With commentary in the form of essays by Cees Nooteboom on the photographs and by Martino Stierli on the architectural and planning history.

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility


Zack Furness - 2010
    population uses bicycles for transportation—and barely half as many people bike to work. In his original and exciting book, One Less Car, Zack Furness examines what it means historically, culturally, socioeconomically, and politically to be a bicycle transportation advocate/activist.Presenting an underground subculture of bike enthusiasts who aggressively resist car culture, Furness maps out the cultural trajectories between mobility, technology, urban space and everyday life. He connects bicycling to radical politics, public demonstrations, alternative media production (e.g., ‘zines), as well as to the development of community programs throughout the world.One Less Car also positions the bicycle as an object with which to analyze and critique some of the dominant cultural and political formations in the U.S.—and even breaks down barriers of race, class and gender privilege that are interconnected to mobility. For Furness, bicycling can be a form of liberation and a way to support social and environmental justice. So, he asks, Why aren't more Americans adopting bikes for their transportation needs?

Urban Foraging


David Craft - 2010
    It includes recipes and anecdotes - historical and personal - and special sections on herbal teas, edible garden weeds, mushrooms and more.

Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities: Design Strategies for the Post Carbon World


Patrick M. Condon - 2010
    and Canada. With admirable clarity, Patrick Condon responds to these questions. He addresses transportation, housing equity, job distribution, economic development, and ecological systems issues and synthesizes his knowledge and research into a simple-to-understand set of urban design recommendations.No other book so clearly connects the form of our cities to their ecological, economic, and social consequences. No other book takes on this breadth of complex and contentious issues and distills them down to such convincing and practical solutions.

The Gentrification Reader


Loretta Lees - 2010
    This Reader brings together the classic writings and contemporary literature that has helped to define the field, changed the direction of how it is studied and illustrated the points of conflict and consensus that are distinctive of gentrification research. Covering everything from the theories of gentrification through to analysis of state-led policies and community resistance to those polices, this is an unparalleled collection of influential writings on a contentious contemporary issue. With insightful commentary from the editors, who are themselves internationally renowned experts in the field, this is essential reading for students of urban planning, geography, urban studies, sociology and housing studies.

Milwaukee's Early Architecture


Megan E. Daniels - 2010
    Following the Civil War, Milwaukee's growth at the onset of the Industrial Era afforded the city a fanciful array of Victorian streetscapes. The 1890s followed with an era of ethnic architecture in which bold interpretations of German Renaissance Revival and Baroque designs paid homage to Milwaukee's overwhelming German population. At the turn of the century, Milwaukee's proximity to Chicago influenced the streetscape with classicized civic structures and skyscrapers designed by Chicago architects. World War I and the ensuing anti-German sentiment, as well as Prohibition, inevitably had adverse effects on "Brew City." By the 1920s, Milwaukee's architecture had assimilated to the national aesthetic, suburban development was on the rise, and architectural growth would soon be stunted by the Great Depression.

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain


Owen Hatherley - 2010
    Darkly humorous architectural guide to the decrepit new Britain that neoliberalism built.

The Sublime


Simon Morley - 2010
    This anthology examines how contemporary artists and theorists explore ideas of the sublime, in relation to the unpresentable, transcendence, terror, nature, technology, the uncanny, and altered states. Providing a philosophical and cultural context for discourse around the sublime in recent art, the book surveys the diverse and sometimes conflicting interpretations of the term as it has evolved from the writings of Longinus, Burke, and Kant to present-day writers and artists. The sublime underlies the nobility of Classicism, the awe of Romantic nature, and the terror of the Gothic. In the last half-century, the sublime has haunted postwar abstraction, returned from the repression of theoretical formalism, and has become a key term in critical discussions of human otherness and posthuman realms of nature and technology.Artists surveyed include Marina Abramovic[, Joseph Beuys, Tacita Dean, Walter De Maria, A K Dolven, Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Gursky, Jitka Hanzlov�, Gary Hill, Susan Hiller, Shirazeh Houshiary, Anish Kapoor, Mike Kelley, Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein, Richard Long, Barnett Newman, Tony Oursler, Cornelia Parker, Gerhard Richter, Doris Salcedo, Lorna Simpson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Fred Tomaselli, James Turrell, Luc Tuymans, Bill Viola, Zhang HuanWriters include Marco Belpoliti, John Berger, Paul Crowther, Jacques Derrida, Okwui Enwezor, Jean Fisher, Barbara Claire Freeman, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Doreet LeVitte-Harten, Eleanor Hartney, Lynn M. Herbert, Luce Irigaray, Fredric Jameson, Lee Joon, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard, Thomas McEvilley, Vijay Mishra, David Morgan, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranci�re, Gene Ray, Robert Rosenblum, Philip Shaw, Paul Virilio, Marina Warner, Thomas Weiskel, Slavoj Zizek

Paris, 1200


John W. Baldwin - 2010
    The great cathedral of Notre Dame was halfway through its construction and walls were being built to enclose the new, larger limits of the city. Pope Innocent III ordered all French churches closed to punish King Philip Augustus for his remarriage; the king himself negotiated an unprecedented truce with the English; and the students of Paris threatened a general strike, punctuated with incidents of violence, to protest infringements of their rights.John W. Baldwin brilliantly resurrects this key moment in Parisian history using documents only from 1190 to 1210—a narrow focus made possible by the availability of collections of the Capetian monarchy and the medieval scholastic thinkers. This unique approach results in a vivid snapshot of the city at the turn of the thirteenth century.Paris, 1200 introduces the reader to the city itself and its inhabitants. Three "faces" exemplify these inhabitants: that of the celebrated scholar Pierre the Chanter, of King Philip Augustus, and of the more deeply hidden visages of women. The book examines the city's primary institutions: the royal government, the Church, and its celebrated schools that evolved into the university at Paris. Finally, it offers an account of the delights and pleasures, as well as the fears and sorrows, of Parisian life in this period.

Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination


Amira Mittermaier - 2010
    Amira Mittermaier guides the reader through landscapes of the imagination that feature Muslim dream interpreters who draw on Freud, reformists who dismiss all forms of divination as superstition, a Sufi devotional group that keeps a diary of dreams related to its shaykh, and ordinary believers who speak of moving encounters with the Prophet Muhammad. In close dialogue with her Egyptian interlocutors, Islamic textual traditions, and Western theorists, Mittermaier teases out the dream’s ethical, political, and religious implications. Her book is a provocative examination of how present-day Muslims encounter and engage the Divine that offers a different perspective on the Islamic Revival. Dreams That Matter opens up new spaces for an anthropology of the imagination, inviting us to rethink both the imagined and the real.

Cincinnati's Incomplete Subway: The Complete History


Jacob R. Mecklenborg - 2010
    Mecklenborg reveals a fresh, thought-provoking, full examination of the Cincinnati subway's demise and what its future might hold.What of those ghostly catacombs that lie dormant below city streets? Those subway tunnels, never finished, never filled with the screeches of trains and the busy commotion of commuters. Just there. Dead. You've heard of the subway's demise. The tunnels were too narrow. The city was too broke. A grand miscalculation. Well, most of what you've heard is, sorry to say, untrue. The popular story of the subway's demise is myth-laden and as incomplete as the original plan. The full story, long buried in mounds of public records dispersed in libraries, is now exposed.

Frommer's New York City 2011


Brian Silverman - 2010
    Hundreds of color photos Free pocket map inside,plus easy-to-read maps throughout Exact prices, directions, opening hours,and other practical information Candid reviews of hotels and restaurants,plus sights, shopping, and nightlife Itineraries, walking tours, and trip-planning ideas Insider tips from local expert authors

American Society: How It Really Works


Erik Olin Wright - 2010
    Wright and Rogers ask readers to evaluate to what degree contemporary American society realizes these values and suggest how Americans might solve some of the social problems that confront America today.

Moving to Opportunity: The Story of an American Experiment to Fight Ghetto Poverty


Xavier de Souza Briggs - 2010
    Launched in 1994, the MTO program took a largely untested approach: helping families move from high-poverty, inner-city public housing to low-poverty neighborhoods, some in the suburbs. The book's innovative methodology emphasizes the voices and choices of the program's participants but also rigorously analyzes the changing structures of regional opportunity and constraint that shaped the fortunes of those who signed up. It shines a light on the hopes, surprises, achievements, and limitations of a major social experiment. As the authors make clear, for all its ambition, MTO is a uniquely American experiment, and this book brings home its powerful lessons for policymakers and advocates, scholars, students, journalists, and all who share a deep concern for opportunity and inequality in our country.

The Old Shanghai A–Z


Paul French - 2010
    A definitive index to the street names of Shanghai, some of which have disappeared or been removed, allows historians, researchers, tourists and the just plain curious to navigate the city in its pre-1949 incarnation, through the former International Settlement, French Concession, and External Roads Area with a detailed map and alphabetical entry for every road. The book is lavishly illustrated with old advertising, images and postcards of the streets and businesses, the bars and nightclubs, the people and characters of old Shanghai bringing alive the city in its previous heyday as the Pearl of the Orient. The Old Shanghai A-Z should become the standard reference work as well as being an easy-to-use guide for researchers and visitors looking to recapture the glamour and uniqueness of old Shanghai.

New York City Skyscrapers


Richard Panchyk - 2010
    This book traces the history of New York's tallest structures from the late 19th century, when church spires ruled the skyline, through the 20th century, when a succession of amazing buildings soared to new heights. From the Flatiron and Woolworth Buildings to the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, the skyscrapers of New York have long captured the imagination of people around the world.

Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989: The Emergence of the World's Greatest City


Edward G. Seidensticker - 2010
    This is particularly ironic in a city whose neighborhoods today hold few distinctive features and whose gentle topography has been all but obscured by batteries of building. But it was not always so, and what better way is there of writing Tokyo's history than by reflecting this shifting geography as neighborhoods prospered and declined while others, more aspirational, climbed up the socio–spacial ladder? This is precisely what Edward Seidensticker does in the pages of these books, brought together here together for the first time under one cover with numerous illustrations and an insert of beautifully colored Japanese woodblock prints of Tokyo from the era. Tokyo: From Edo to Showa tells the story and history of Tokyo's transformation from the Shogun's capital in an isolated Japan to one of the most renowned modern cities in the world. With the same scholarship and style that won him admiration as one of the premier translators of Japanese literature, Seidensticker offers the reader his own brilliant picture of a whole society suddenly emerging into the modern world. By turns elegiac and funny, reflective and crisp, Tokyo: From Edo to Showa is an important cultural history of Asia's greatest city.

America's Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York


Sam Roberts - 2010
    Lindsay (1921-2000) captured the New York mayoralty in 1965 by promising to rid the city of apathy and corruption and make New York governable again. Over the next eight years, Lindsay presided over a city at the vortex of the civil rights, antiwar, women's, and gay rights movements, a turbulent global economy, demographic upheaval defined by an influx of blacks and Puerto Ricans and an exodus of whites, and volatile local labor politics further fractured by race. He would revolutionize urban planning, hoping to make New York not just inhabitable but enjoyable--a celebration of itself-and he would attempt to overhaul the government's services and priorities.Some reforms succeeded. Others failed. While few have evaluated Lindsay's controversial legacy with the benefit of hindsight and within the context of national cultural upheaval, this book does just that. Edited by The New York Times urban affairs correspondent Sam Roberts and published in collaboration with the Museum of the City of New York, America's Mayor is lavishly illustrated and features original essays by Hilary Ballon, Joshua Freeman, Jeff Greenfield, Pete Hamill, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Kenneth T. Jackson, John Mollenkopf, Charles Morris, Nicholas Pileggi, Richard Reeves, James Sanders, and Steven Weisman. Key contemporaries such as Jimmy Breslin, Mario Cuomo, and Juan Gonzalez offer personal reminiscences enhanced by compelling documents and articles.With his undeniable charisma and bold support for cities and urban living, Lindsay galvanized the attention of a nation at a time of looming crisis. This collection vividly reexamines the truth behind Lindsay's reputation as a failed dreamer and the forces that transformed him into America's mayor.

Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History, 1859-1914


Natan M. Meir - 2010
    Kiev, Jewish Metropolis limns the history of Kiev Jewry from the official readmission of Jews to the city in 1859 to the outbreak of World War I. It explores the Jewish community's politics, its leadership struggles, socioeconomic and demographic shifts, religious and cultural sensibilities, and relations with the city's Christian population. Drawing on archival documents, the local press, memoirs, and belles lettres, Natan M. Meir shows Kiev's Jews at work, at leisure, in the synagogue, and engaged in the activities of myriad Jewish organizations and philanthropies.

The American Department Store Transformed, 1920-1960


Richard W. Longstreth - 2010
    This masterful and innovative history of a celebrated building type focuses on many of the nation’s greatest retail companies—Marshall Fields, Lord and Taylor, Gimbel’s, Wanamaker’s, and Bullock’s, among others—and the role they played in defining America’s cities.Author Richard Longstreth traces the development and evolution of department stores from local, urban institutions to suburban entities in the nation’s sixty largest cities, showing how the stores underwent changes to adapt to dramatic economic and urban developments, including the decentralization from metropolitan areas, increased popularity of the automobile, and challenges from retail competitors on a national level. Extensively illustrated, this fascinating book offers a fundamental understanding of the transformation of Main Streets nationwide.

Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture


Thomas Heise - 2010
    Surveying the 1890s to the 1990s, Thomas Heise chronicles how and why marginalized populations immigrant Americans in the Lower East Side, gays and lesbians in Greenwich Village and downtown Los Angeles, the black underclass in Harlem and Chicago, and the new urban poor dispersed across American cities have been selectively targeted as "urban underworlds" and their neighborhoods characterized as miasmas of disease and moral ruin.The quarantining of minority cultures helped to promote white, middle-class privilege. Following a diverse array of literary figures who differ with the assessment of the underworld as the space of the monstrous Other, Heise contends that it is a place where besieged and neglected communities are actively trying to take possession of their own neighborhoods.

The Man Who Saved New York: Hugh Carey and the Great Fiscal Crisis of 1975


Seymour P. Lachman - 2010
    Carey, with emphasis on his leadership during the fiscal crisis of 1975. In this dramatic and colorful account, Seymour P. Lachman and Robert Polner examine Carey s youth, military service, and public career against the backdrop of a changing, challenged, and recession-battered city, state, and nation.It was principally Carey s leadership, Lachman and Polner argue, that helped rescue the city and state from the brink of financial and civic catastrophe. While TV comedians mocked and tabloids shrieked about the Big Apple s rising muggings, its deteriorating public services, and the threats and walkouts by embattled police, firefighters, and teachers, all amid a brutal recession, Carey and his team managed to hold on and ultimately prevailed, narrowly preventing a huge disruption to the state, national, and global economy. At one point the city came within hours of having to declare itself incapable of paying its debts and obligations, but in the end, its drastic cash crunch was eased, stability and consensus prevailed, and America s largest city stayed out of bankruptcy court. The center held.Based on extensive interviews with Carey and his family, as well as numerous friends, observers, and former advisors, including Steven Berger, David Burke, John Dyson, Peter Goldmark, Judah Gribetz, Richard Ravitch, and Felix Rohatyn, The Man Who Saved New York places Carey and his achievements in the eye of the financial maelstrom that attended his arrival in Albany. While others were willing to see the city slide into default, Carey grew to become a bulwark against that distinct possibility, determined to prevent insolvency because it would not only affect the state as a whole but would have reverberations both nationally and internationally.In recounting the 1975 rescue of New York City as well as the aftershocks that nearly sank the state government, Lachman and Polner illuminate the often-volatile interplay among elite New York bankers, hard-nosed municipal union leaders, the press, and powerful conservatives and liberals from City Hall to the Albany statehouse to the White House. Although often underappreciated by the public, it was Carey s force of will, wit, intellect, judgment, and experience that allowed the state to survive this unparalleled ordeal and ultimately to emerge on a stronger footing. Furthermore, Lachman and Polner suggest, Carey s accomplishment is worth recalling as a prime example of how governments local, state, and federal can work to avoid the renewed threat of bankruptcy that now confronts many overstretched states and localities.

Urban Foraging for Edible Wild Plants


Nova Patch - 2010
    From fruits like mulberries and elderberries, greens including nettles and spicy mustards, root vegetables like burdock and jerusalem artichoke, nuts such as hickory and black walnut, to a variety of teas including pineapple weed and various mints. Explore what to eat, where to find it, and how to prepare it, with recipes and a focus on urban environments.

Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940-1959


Lisa Hostetler - 2010
    World War II and its aftermath ushered in a new era of artistic expression. Abstract Expressionism, film noir, Beat poetry, and the New Journalism are often considered responses to war's shocking realities. Creative photographers responded to the same situation with images that broke the rules of conventional photographic technique. Street Seen, a companion volume to an exhibition, highlights six photographers who were prominent during and immediately following the war. Lisette Model s unflinching look at the urban environment; Louis Faurer s portraits of eccentrics in Times Square; Ted Croner s haunting night images; Saul Leiter s evocative glimpses of daily life; William Klein s graphic, confrontational style; and Robert Frank s documentation of American ideals gone awry these and other beautifully reproduced photographs communicate the emotional resonance of everyday life in postwar America. An essay by Lisa Hostetler explores the aesthetic revolution that took place after the war and reveals the principles of spontaneity and subjective interpretation that guided these photographers as they sought to make sense of new realities. A timeline, brief biographies, and bibliography are also included in this valuable compilation of the mid-century s most influential photography.