Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or worse for our happiness? Are subways, sidewalks and condo towers an improvement on the car-dependence of sprawl?The award-winning journalist Charles Montgomery finds answers to such questions at the intersection between urban design and the emerging science of happiness, during an exhilarating journey through some of the world’s most dynamic cities. He meets the visionary mayor who introduced a “sexy” bus to ease status anxiety in Bogotá; the architect who brought the lessons of medieval Tuscan hill towns to modern-day New York City; the activist who turned Paris’s urban freeways into beaches; and an army of American suburbanites who have hacked the design of their own streets and neighborhoods.Rich with new insights from psychology, neuroscience and Montgomery’s own urban experiments, Happy City reveals how our cities can shape our thoughts as well as our behavior. The message is as surprising as it is hopeful: by retrofitting cities and our own lives for happiness, we can tackle the urgent challenges of our age. The happy city can save the world--and all of us can help build it.

    And he has boiled it down to one key factor: walkability. The very idea of a modern metropolis evokes visions of bustling sidewalks, vital mass transit, and a vibrant, pedestrian-friendly urban core. But in the typical American city, the car is still king, and downtown is a place that's easy to drive to but often not worth arriving at. Making walkability happen is relatively easy and cheap; seeing exactly what needs to be done is the trick. In this essential new book, Speck reveals the invisible workings of the city, how simple decisions have cascading effects, and how we can all make the right choices for our communities. Bursting with sharp observations and real-world examples, giving key insight into what urban planners actually do and how places can and do change, Walkable City lays out a practical, necessary, and eminently achievable vision of how to make our normal American cities great again.

    Season of the Witch is the first book to fully capture the dark magic of San Francisco in this breathtaking period, when the city radically changed itself & then revolutionized the world. The cool gray city of love was the epicenter of the 60s cultural revolution. But by the early 70s, San Francisco’s ecstatic experiment came crashing down from its starry heights. The city was rocked by savage murder sprees, mysterious terror campaigns, political assassinations, street riots & finally a terrifying sexual epidemic. No other city endured so many calamities in such a short time span. Talbot goes deep into the riveting story of his city’s ascent, decline & heroic recovery. He draws intimate portraits of San Francisco’s legendary demons & saviors: Charles Manson, Patty Hearst & the Symbionese Liberation Army, Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Bill Graham, Herb Caen, the Cockettes, Harvey Milk, Jim Jones & the Peoples Temple, Joe Montana & the Super Bowl 49ers. He reveals how the city emerged from the trials of this period with a new brand of “San Francisco values,” including gay marriage, medical marijuana, immigration sanctuary, universal health care, recycling, renewable energy, consumer safety & a living wage mandate. Considered radical when they were first introduced, these ideas have become the bedrock of decent society in many parts of the country & exemplify the ways that the city now inspires a live-and-let-live tolerance, a shared sense of humanity & an openness to change. As a new generation of activists & dreamers seeks its own path to a more enlightened future, Season of the Witch—with its epic tale of the wild & bloody birth of San Francisco values—offers both inspiration & cautionary wisdom.

    Schulman takes us back to her Lower East Side and brings it to life, filling these pages with vivid memories of her avant-garde queer friends and dramatically recreating the early years of the AIDS crisis as experienced by a political insider. Interweaving personal reminiscence with cogent analysis, Schulman details her experience as a witness to the loss of a generation’s imagination and the consequences of that loss.

    High rent is a problem for all of us, extending beyond personal financial strain. High rent drags on our country’s overall rate of economic growth, damages the environment, and promotes long commutes, traffic jams, misery, and smog. Yet instead of a serious focus on the issue, America’s cities feature niche conversations about the availability of “affordable housing” for poor people. Yglesias’s book changes the conversation for the first time, presenting newfound context for the issue and real-time, practical solutions for the problem.

    The century that followed was an era of vigorous expansion and large-scale projects, of rapidly changing culture and commerce, as huge numbers of people arrived in the shining city, drawn by its immense wealth and power and its many diversions. Borrowing a phrase from Daniel Defoe, Jerry White calls London this great and monstrous thing, the grandeur of its new buildings and the glitter of its high life shadowed by poverty and squalor."A Great and Monstrous Thing" offers a street-level view of the city: its public gardens and prisons, its banks and brothels, its workshops and warehouses and its bustling, jostling crowds. White introduces us to shopkeepers and prostitutes, men and women of fashion and genius, street-robbers and thief-takers, as they play out the astonishing drama of life in eighteenth-century London. What emerges is a picture of a society fractured by geography, politics, religion, history and especially by class, for the divide between rich and poor in London was never greater or more destructive in the modern era than in these years.Despite this gulf, Jerry White shows us Londoners going about their business as bankers or beggars, reveling in an enlarging world of public pleasures, indulging in crimes both great and small amidst the tightening sinews of power and regulation, and the hesitant beginnings of London democracy."

    The grid created the physical conditions for business and society to flourish and embodied the drive and discipline for which the city would come to be known. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York celebrating the bicentennial of the Commissioners' 1811 Plan of Manhattan, this volume does more than memorialize such a visionary effort, it serves as an enduring reference full of rare images and information.The Greatest Grid shares the history of the Commissioners' plan, incorporating archival photos and illustrations, primary documents and testimony, and magnificent maps with essential analysis. The text, written by leading historians of New York City, follows the grid's initial design, implementation, and evolution, and then speaks to its enduring influence. A foldout map, accompanied by explanatory notes, reproduces the Commissioners' original plan, and additional maps and prints chart the city's pre-1811 irregular growth patterns and local precedent for the grid's design. Constituting the first sustained examination of this subject, this text describes the social, political, and intellectual figures who were instrumental in remaking early New York, not in the image of old Europe but as a reflection of other American cities and a distinct New World sensibility. The grid reaffirmed old hierarchies while creating new opportunities for power and advancement, giving rise to the multicultural, highly networked landscape New Yorkers thrive in today.

    Setting Dickens against the city that was the backdrop and inspiration for his work, it takes the reader on a memorable and haunting journey, discovering the places and subjects which stimulated his imagination. Here are captivating photographs of famous landmarks such as the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square and Westminster Abbey, alongside coaching inns, the Thames before the Embankment was built, the construction of the Metropolitan Underground Line, the docklands that studded the river and the many villages that make up London today.Authoritatively written and beautifully illustrated, this book will appeal to anyone who loves this beguiling city and wants to explore it as it was in Dickens' day.

    In the early 20th century, families crowded into single rooms, children played on the streets and neighbours' doors were never locked in case you needed an escape route from the police...World War 2 changed everything. During the Blitz, men set off for work never to return and rows of houses were reduced to rubble overnight. Yet the East Enders' ability to keep calm and carry on cemented their reputation for cheerful resilience. They say Hitler killed off the bugs but, along with the slums, the Blitz destroyed a way of life. After the war families were scattered - some to estates on the edge of London, others to isolated high-rise blocks. The old East End communities were gone forever.Told by the residents themselves, The War on Our Doorstep is an eye-opening, moving and laugh-out-loud depiction of the history of London's East End and what it means to be an East Ender.

    Hannah Dobbz makes the necessary addition of resources and needs in a book that is both a brilliant history of squatting in the USA and a template for the next stage of the Occupy movement.--Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums and Buda's WagonHow does "property" fit into designs for an equitable society? Nine-tenths of the Law examines the history of squatting and property struggles in the United States, from colonialism to twentieth century urban squatting and the foreclosure crisis of the late 2000s, and how such resistance movements shape the law. Stories from our most hard-hit American cities show that property is truly in crisis:One in five homes in Buffalo, NY, are abandoned.Our national housing vacancy rate is 14 percent. If we gave a house to every homeless person in the United States two-thirds of that stock would remain empty.In May of 2011, one in every 103 homes in Nevada was in foreclosure.Nine-tenths of the Law expands our understanding of property law and highlights recent tactics like creative squatting ventures and the use of adverse possession to claim title to vacant homes. Hannah Dobbz unveils the tangled relationship Americans have always had in creating and sustaining healthy communities.Hannah Dobbz is a writer, editor, filmmaker, and former squatter. In 2007 she produced a film about squatters in the Bay Area called Shelter. The film has screened widely at universities, bookstores, and community spaces, including the 2009 Three Rivers Film Festival in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

    Completely re-designed with an accessible, four-color layout, this second edition continues to build upon the fast-changing state of the practice at the local level. The designs in this book were developed by cities for cities, since unique urban streets require innovative solutions.To create the Guide, the authors conducted an extensive worldwide literature search from design guidelines and real-life experience. They worked closely with a panel of urban bikeway planning professionals from NACTO member cities and from numerous other cities worldwide, as well as traffic engineers, planners, and academics with deep experience in urban bikeway applications. The Guide offers substantive guidance for cities seeking to improve bicycle transportation in places where competing demands for the use of the right-of-way present unique challenges.First and foremost, the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide, Second Edition will help practitioners make good decisions about urban bikeway design. The treatments outlined in this updated Guide are based on real-life experience in the world's most bicycle friendly cities and have been selected because of their utility in helping cities meet their goals related to bicycle transportation. Praised by Former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood as an “extraordinary piece of work,” the Guide is an indispensable tool every planner must have for their daily transportation design work.

    This is true both physically (built on steep slopes, the city has no ground plane) and culturally (there is no concept of ground). Density obliterates figure-ground in the city, and in turn re-defines public-private spatial relationships. Perception of distance and time is distorted through compact networks of pedestrian infrastructure, public transport and natural topography in the urban landscape.Without a ground, there can be no figure either. In fact, Hong Kong lacks any of the traditional figure-ground relationships that shape urban space: axis, edge, center, even fabric. Cities Without Ground explores this condition by mapping three-dimensional circulation networks that join shopping malls, train stations and public transport interchanges, public parks and private lobbies as a series of spatial models and drawings. These networks, though built piecemeal, owned by different public and private stakeholders, and adjacent to different programs and uses, form a continuous space of variegated environments that serves as a fundamental public resource for the city. The emergence of the shopping malls as spaces of civil society rather than of global capital— as grounds of resistance— comes as a surprise.This continuous network and the microclimates of temperature, humidity, noise and smell which differentiate it constitute an entirely new form of urban spatial hierarchy. The relation between shopping malls and air temperature, for instance, suggests architectural implications in circulation—differentiating spaces where pedestrians eagerly flow or make efforts to avoid, where people stop and linger or where smokers gather. Air particle concentration is both logical and counterintuitive: outdoor air is more polluted, while the air in the higher-end malls is cleaner than air adjacent to lower value retail programs. Train stations, while significantly cooler than bus terminals, have only moderately cleaner air. Boundaries determined by sound or smell (a street of flower vendors or bird keepers, or an artificially perfumed mall) can ultimately provide more substantive spatial boundaries than a ground. While space in the city may be continuous, plumes of temperature differential or air particle intensity demonstrate that environments are far from equal.

    With this book, he has amassed a collection that speaks to the beauty of the urban landscape: sometimes grittily citified, sometimes unexpectedly pastoral, and always bewitching. Cho is a skilled draftsman, and Back Alleys and Urban Landscapes shines with lovingly rendered details, from expletive-filled graffiti splayed across backyard fences to the graceful twists of power lines over a bend in the road.Back Alleys and Urban Landscapes meanders through the city, functioning as a sort of caught-on-paper psychogeographical Jane's Walk. With each season's change, different color schemes become dominant, and a whole range of moods and moments are articulated. Cho lets the reader visit his city as a virtual flaneur, lingering equally over dilapidated sheds and well-groomed gardens in a dazzling tribute to the urban environs.

    "Northern Cyprus," carved out as a separate space and defined as a distinct (de facto) polity since its invasion by Turkey in 1974, is the subject of this ethnography about postwar politics and social relations. Turkish-Cypriots' sociality in a reforged geography, rid of its former Greek-Cypriot inhabitants after the partition of Cyprus, forms the centerpiece of Yael Navaro-Yashin's conceptual exploration of subjectivity in the context of "ruination" and "abjection." The unrecognized state in Northern Cyprus unfolds through the analytical devices that she develops as she explores this polity's administration and raison d'être via affect theory. Challenging the boundaries between competing theoretical orientations, Navaro-Yashin crafts a methodology for the study of subjectivity and affect, and materiality and the phantasmatic, in tandem. In the process, she creates a subtle and nuanced ethnography of life in the long-term aftermath of war.

    Over the past forty years, the Natural Environment has received more attention of the two, but that is beginning to change. With a renewed interest in "place" within various academic disciplines and the practical issues of rising fuel costs and scarcity of land, the Built Environment has emerged as a coherent and engaging subject for academic and popular consideration. While there is a growing body of work on the Built Environment, very little approaches it from a distinctly Christian perspective. This major new work represents a comprehensive and grounded approach. Employing tools from the field of theology and culture, it demonstrates how looking at the Built Environment through a theological lens provides a unique perspective on questions of beauty, justice, and human flourishing.“Jacobsen (Sidewalks in the Kingdom) offers a fascinating and thorough examination of the development and role of spatial relationships within a human-built environment and how it affects the human situation. . . . This is not another tome about ‘going green’ but a serious, meticulous examination of the physical apparatus, animated by human players, that makes cultures thrive, communities effervesce, and people feel as if they belong somewhere. It is a formidable read that demands resolve of the reader. But its worth justifies its heft. It is an excellent choice for the college classroom and students studying the social sciences.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

    But the heated debate at City Hall has obscured a bigger, decade-long narrative of Toronto's ascending as a mature global city. It raises questions: What role does a mayor play in a city's temperament and self-confidence? Can a terrible mayor make a city better by forcing its citizens to engage? What place is there in our new decentralized, global, open-source world for an autocrat?Edward Keenan serves as senior editor and lead columnist at The Grid magazine in Toronto, Ontario. An eight-time finalist at the National Magazine Awards, he has written for and edited at Eye Weekly, Spacing magazine, and The Walrus.

    While it created tremendous growth, opportunity and prosperity for a generation that had just lived through economic depression and war, the way cities and regions were being built ? spread out across the landscape ? would ultimately be extremely expensive to sustain, far greater than the relative wealth the approach would generate. The harsh legacy of this reality is what nearly every U.S city faces today. A new approach to creating and sustaining prosperity is necessary. Charles Marohn is the author of the Strong Towns Blog and founder of the Strong Towns movement. As a civil engineer, land use planner, economic thinker and author, he brings a fresh perspective to the way America's cities have been built and financed. His work has been widely distributed and examined by decision-makers at all levels of society. Thoughts on Building Strong Towns is a collection of Marohn's thought-provoking essays from 2011, reworked and edited with some additional material and notes added by the author. There are 34 essays in all including: The Growth Ponzi Scheme, The Infrastructure Cult, Do we really care about children?, Complete Roads and The Diverging Diamond.

    

    Ambitiously designed community buildings, faceless mass housingdevelopments, and a monumental emptiness are the definingfeatures of Pyongyang - a city of three million inhabitants risingfrom the rubble to which the Korean War reducedit in the 1950s.This architectural guide to the capital of the Democratic People’sRepublic of Korea has two parts comprising a total of 368 pages.While Volume 1 offers a selection of images and informationon nearly one hundred buildings in Pyongyang provided by thePyongyang Foreign Languages Publishing House and presentedhere without further commentary, Volume 2 sets this materialwithin its architectural and historical context.The Guide offers unprecedented insights into the capital of what is probably the most isolated country in the world, ruled in the third generation by a “first family” stubbornly upholding its own brand of stone-age communism.

    It is also home to the oldest and densest urban settlements in the American West. Focusing on human inhabitation of the Bay since Ohlone times, Down by the Bay reveals the ongoing role of nature in shaping that history. From birds to oyster pirates, from gold miners to farmers, from salt ponds to ports, this is the first history of the San Francisco Bay and Delta as both a human and natural landscape. It offers invaluable context for current discussions over the best management and use of the Bay in the face of sea level rise.

    Today, it is everywhere—in our roads, bridges, sidewalks, walls, and architecture. For each person on the planet, nearly three tons of concrete are produced every year. Used almost universally in modern construction, concrete has become a polarizing material that provokes intense loathing in some and fervent passion in others.             Focusing on concrete’s effects on culture rather than its technical properties, Concrete and Culture examines the ways concrete has changed our understanding of nature, of time, and even of material. Adrian Forty concentrates not only on architects’ responses to concrete, but also takes into account the role concrete has played in politics, literature, cinema, labor-relations, and arguments about sustainability. Covering Europe, North and South America, and the Far East, Forty examines the degree that concrete has been responsible for modernist uniformity and the debates engendered by it. The first book to reflect on the global consequences of concrete, Concrete and Culture offers a new way to look at our environment over the past century.

    Covers a wide range of theoretical approaches to the city, from the historical to the cutting edge Emphasizes the important themes of space and place Offers a balanced account of cities and offers extensive coverage including urban inequality, environment and sustainability, and methods for studying the city Takes a global approach, with examples from Berlin and Chicago to Shanghai and Mumbai Includes a range of pedagogical features such as a substantial glossary of key terms, critical thinking questions, suggestions for further reading and a range of innovative textboxes which follow the themes of Exploring Further, Studying the City and Making the City Better Extensively illustrated with maps, charts, tables, and over 80 photographs Accompanied by a comprehensive student companion site featuring a list of relevant journals, a guide to useful web resources, and an annotated documentary film guide, alongside a useful instructor companion site with further examples, case studies, and discussion and essay questions; instructors will find a link to the instructor website on the student website at www.wiley.com/go/cities

    They help us to understand the relationships between people and the environment at all scales, and to consider the active roles individuals, groups, and social structures play in creating the environments in which people live, work, and play. These readings highlight the ways in which space and place are produced through large- and small-scale social, political, and economic practices, and offer new ways to think about how people engage the environment in multiple and diverse ways.Providing an essential resource for students of urban studies, geography, sociology and many other areas, this book brings together important but, till now, widely dispersed writings across many inter-related disciplines. Introductions from the editors precede each section; introducing the texts, demonstrating their significance, and outlining the key issues surrounding the topic. A companion website, PeoplePlaceSpace.org, extends the work even further by providing an on-going series of additional reading lists that cover issues ranging from food security to foreclosure, psychiatric spaces to the environments of predator animals.

    Rozan, "Queens Noir, " edited by Robert Knightly, and "Staten Island Noir, " edited by Patricia Smith.

    This dimensional die-cut book is packed with fun facts about New York's most iconic landmarks, from the Statue of Liberty to Times Square, all on stylishly designed pages. A gatefold map rounds out the package, making this one souvenir you'll want to pick up in a New York minute.

    Summit Table Mountain for panoramic views, take a boat to Robben Island, or shop and sight-see on the V&A Waterfront; all with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of Cape Town & the Garden Route and begin your journey now! Inside Lonely Planet Cape Town & the Garden Route: Full-colour maps and images throughout Highlights and itineraries help you tailor your trip to your personal needs and interests Insider tips to save time and money and get around like a local, avoiding crowds and trouble spots Essential info at your fingertips - hours of operation, phone numbers, websites, transit tips, prices Honest reviews for all budgets - eating, sleeping, sight-seeing, going out, shopping, hidden gems that most guidebooks miss Cultural insights give you a richer, more rewarding travel experience - wildlife, wine, history, arts, architecture Free, convenient pull-out Cape Town map (included in print version), plus over 30 colour maps Covers City Bowl, Foreshore, Bo-Kaap, De Waterkant, Gardens, Green Point, Waterfront, Sea Point, Hourt Bay, Simon's Town, Cape Flat, the Garden Route and more eBook Features: (Best viewed on tablet devices and smartphones) Downloadable PDF and offline maps prevent roaming and data charges Effortlessly navigate and jump between maps and reviews Add notes to personalise your guidebook experience Seamlessly flip between pages Bookmarks and speedy search capabilities get you to key pages in a flash Embedded links to recommendations' websites Zoom-in maps and images Inbuilt dictionary for quick referencing The Perfect Choice: Lonely Planet Cape Town & the Garden Route, our most comprehensive guide to Cape Town, is perfect for both exploring top sights and taking roads less travelled. Looking for more extensive coverage? Check out Lonely Planet South Africa, Lesotho & Swaziland for a comprehensive look at all the region has to offer. Authors: Written and researched by Lonely Planet, Simon Richmond & Lucy Corne. About Lonely Planet: Since 1973, Lonely Planet has become the world's leading travel media company with guidebooks to every destination, an award-winning website, mobile and digital travel products, and a dedicated traveller community. Lonely Planet covers must-see spots but also enables curious travellers to get off beaten paths to understand more of the culture of the places in which they find themselves. Important Notice: The digital edition of this book may not contain all of the images found in the physical edition.

    It began long before the city itself. "The first white man here was a black man," Potowatami natives reportedly said about Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the brown-skinned man recognized as Chicago's first non-Indian settler. It's all here: from the site of DuSable's cabin--now smack-dab in the middle of Chicago's Magnificent Mile--to images of famous and infamous residents like boxers Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali, and Joe Louis. Here are leaders and cultural touchstones like Jesse Binga's bank, Robert S. Abbott's Chicago Defender, legendary filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, Ida B. Wells, the Eighth Regiment, Jesse Jackson, Oprah, and much more . . . including a guy named Obama. Here is the black Chicago family album, of folks who made and never made the headlines, and pictures and stories of kinship and fellowship of African Americans leaving the violent, racist South and "goin' to Chicago" to find their piece of the American Dream. Chicago has been called the "Second City," but black Chicago is second to none.

    Straightforward shots chronicle the same buildings over the years, or travel the length of a block, facade by facade. Other sections collect vintage Coke signs on variety stores or garage graffiti.Full Frontal T.O. features over three hundred gorgeous photos of Toronto's messy urbanism, with accompanying text by master urban explorer Shawn Micallef.Patrick Cummins has photographed Toronto's built environment since 1978 and has worked as an archivist in Toronto since 1986.Shawn Micallef is the author of Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto and a senior editor at Spacing magazine.

    Each entry conjures up forgotten scenes of London life – stage-coaches racing through the Borough; landing a catch at Billingsgate market; the uproar of a hanging outside Newgate Gaol – together with pointers to the most atmospheric, astonishing and esoteric parts of the Victorian metropolis which have survived into the twenty-first century. Step back into the past: savour the opportunity to dine in a nineteenth century chop-house; explore the rookery of Seven Dials; take tea in one of the Inns of Court; visit a Victorian operating theatre – all this and much more. Drawing upon Dickens' life and work, from museums and monuments to hidden alleys, mews and courtyards; from railway stations and riverside taverns to grim slums and gaslight – Dickens' London : A Timetraveller's Guide is an indispensable guide for anyone exploring Victorian London.Dickens' London : A Timetraveller's Guide is written by the acclaimed historical novelist Lee Jackson, whose encyclopaedic website 'The Dictionary of Victorian London' (www.victorianlondon.org) is well-known to all those interested in the history of the capital.

    In sixty years on the job, whether working in business or government, he was the man willing to tackle some of the most complex challenges facing New York. Trained as a lawyer, he worked briefly for the House of Representatives, then began his career in his family’s construction business. He built high-profile projects like the Whitney Museum and Citicorp Center but his primary energy was devoted to building over 40,000 units of affordable housing including the first racially integrated apartment complex in Washington, D.C. He dealt with architects, engineers, lawyers, bureaucrats, politicians, union leaders, construction workers, bankers, and tenants—virtually all of the people who make cities and states work.It was no surprise that those endeavors ultimately led to a life of public service. In 1975, Ravitch was asked by then New York Governor Hugh Carey to arrange a rescue of the New York State Urban Development Corporation, a public entity that had issued bonds to finance over 30,000 affordable housing units but was on the verge of bankruptcy. That same year, Ravitch was at Carey’s side when New York City’s biggest banks said they would no longer underwrite its debt and he became instrumental to averting the city’s bankruptcy.Throughout his career, Ravitch divided his time between public service and private enterprise. He was chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority from 1979 to 1983 and is generally credited with rebuilding the system. He turned around the Bowery Savings Bank, chaired a commission that rewrote the Charter of the City of New York, served on two Presidential Commissions, and became chief labor negotiator for Major League Baseball.Then, in 2008, after Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned in a prostitution scandal and New York State was in a post-financial-crisis meltdown, Spitzer’s successor, David Paterson, appointed Ravitch Lieutenant Governor and asked him to make recommendations regarding the state’s budgeting plan. What Ravitch found was the result of not just the economic downturn but years of fiscal denial. And the closer he looked, the clearer it became that the same thing was happening in most states. Budgetary pressures from Medicaid, pension promises to public employees, and deceptive budgeting and borrowing practices are crippling our states’ ability to do what only they can do—invest in the physical and human infrastructure the country needs to thrive. Making this case is Ravitch’s current public endeavor and it deserves immediate attention from both public officials and private citizens.

    She came from a Creole family that had known privileges before the Civil War, privileges that largely disappeared in the Jim Crow South. She learned photographic techniques while passing for white. She opened her first studio in her home, and later moved her business to New Orleans’s black business district. Fiercely independent, she ignored convention by moving out of her parents’ house before marriage and, later, by divorcing her first husband.Between 1920 and 1949, Collins documented African American life, capturing images of graduations, communions, and recitals, and allowing her subjects to help craft their images. She supported herself and her family throughout the Great Depression and in the process created an enduring pictorial record of her particular time and place. Collins left behind a visual legacy that taps into the social and cultural history of New Orleans and the South.            It is this legacy that Arthé Anthony, Collins’s great-niece, explores in Picturing Black New Orleans. Anthony blends Collins’s story with those of the individuals she photographed, documenting the profound changes in the lives of Louisiana Creoles and African Americans. Balancing art, social theory, and history and drawing from family records, oral histories, and photographs rescued from New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Anthony gives us a rich look at the cultural landscape of New Orleans nearly a century ago.

    The contributions show how architects, planners, and urban designers describe and give shape to the city, while novelists, humanists, and other scholars examine its operations and performances. The essential question is: How does the physical character of an urban environment influence or enable the events that take place within a specific setting? Contributors from a wide range of fields address the role and life of cities as diverse as Baku, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Detroit, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Paris, Quito, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv, Tirana, and Toronto. Portfolios of contemporary photography present the layered realities of urban life today. With contributions by Arjun Appadurai, Eve Blau, Svetlana Boym, Lindsay Bremner, Jana Cephas, Felipe Correa, Rahul Mehrotra, Mohsen Mostafavi, Antoine Picon, Gyan Prakash, Nasser Rabbat, Rafi Segal, Jorge Silvetti, AbdouMaliq Simone, and Charles Waldheim.Mohsen Mostafavi, an architect and educator, is dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design. He is the editor of Ecological Urbanism (with Gareth Doherty).

    'We have,' said one journalist in 1889, 'an accumulation of matter in the wrong place unexampled in the world's history'. Fighting this rising tide of dirt were an army of workers, from crossing-sweepers, chimney-sweeps and dustmen, to those in less well-known occupations, such as dust-yard sifters, sewer flushers and street orderlies. This book examines the work of these hard-pressed men and women, using their experience as a prism through which we can observe the inner workings of the Victorian metropolis. Along the way, we will uncover many mundane but fascinating details of daily life: what Victorian householders threw in the rubbish; the colour and composition of London 'mud'; why 'climbing-boys' went barefoot on the streets; the decidedly unhygienic habits of Soho attic-dwellers; the dangers of dust-yard pigs … and a good deal more besides. In particular, I hope this book will appeal to anyone intrigued by social or family history. For those with ancestors in such trades, it will answer the important, often neglected question 'But what did they actually do?' For those without, it will provide clues to whether your great-great-grandparents had a toilet, or where they put their dustbin – small things, indeed, but rather important.

    From the disappearance of the Beaumont children to the Snowtown killings in the 1990s, it has been home to a long series of brutal and baffling killings and abductions. In The Element of Need, acclaimed author James Bradley uses this long history of violence as the basis of a fascinating exploration not just of his own childhood and adolescence, but of the psychic landscape of this most haunted of cities.

    The genre of artwork that evolved from this debut would become known as Happenings. Author Mildred Glimcher, an art historian, author, and close observer of contemporary art for more than fifty years, provides a vivid and comprehensive look not only at the events, but also at the culture and society that surrounded it. This new volume provides a comprehensive look at this revolutionary art form. Prepared in conjunction with an exhibition at the Pace Gallery in New York, it focuses on the years that saw the movement's birth in New York and Provincetown, Mass., and the artists who made the genre a legend: Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Robert Whitman, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Simone Forti, Carolee Schneemann. Together, they created a new and outrageous art form with an "anything goes" attitude, one whose influence is still felt within the contemporary art world. Glimcher visits the formative years of the movement in great detail, describing each performance piece in words and photographs. The radical nature of the time and the works is evidenced by Red Grooms's The Burning Building, Claes Oldenburg's Ray Gun Spex, Jim Dine's A Shining Bed, and many more. Happenings is heavily illustrated with photographs from the era, many drawn from a previously unpublished cache by Robert McElroy.

    The Defender was a platform and voice for talents such as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and W.E.B. DuBois. What began as a humble weekly grew into the largest and most influential black newspaper in the country, leading an entire race to leave the oppressive South for a better life in the North. Born in 1868 on the heels of the Reconstruction Era, Abbott--the son of former slaves--managed to influence the first two decades of the 20th century and was a major contributor to the prolific movement known as the "Great Northern Migration." Boasting a circulation of over 300,000 nationally, the Defender was secretly delivered by Pullman porters across the United States. By 1920, the paper's tagline read, "The World's Greatest Weekly." The story of the Defender is one of inspiration, struggle, triumph, and irreversible pathways being forged.

    At the same time, Struth's urban landscapes are also a critical depiction of different human habitats. This volume presents a comprehensive survey of Struth's street views from the 1970s to 2010: narrow lanes in Edinburgh, Wuhan, Naples, and Erfurt; satellite towns in Paris, Leverkusen, Chicago, and Pyongyang; thoroughfares in Brussels, Lima, and Los Angeles; grand boulevards in St. Petersburg, New York City, and Beijing. Frequently there is an almost total absence of people in his cityscapes, which provides a feeling of desolation. In contrast, his famous Shibuya Crossing, Tokyo, is bustling with people and billboards.

    They are at once fragile organisms in constant need of care and battlegrounds of conflicting interests. And above all, they're ours. The smart guide to Utopia showcases 111 projects, initiatives and ideas from all over Europe that make our cities better places. Whether it be an underground waste disposal system in Barcelona or a public swimming pool converted into an arts centre in Berlin, a self-sufficient urban garden or a solar-powered pop-up restaurant traveling with the sun, a building printer or a zero-packaging supermarket, this book celebrates the energy and imagination of people who want to make their cities a little more fun, clean, friendly, green and above all, restore a sense of community. Our cities belong to us, and they depend on us. Only we can make them worth living in.

    This book is a history of London during this crucial period of its rise to world-wide prominence, during which it dominated the economic, political, social and cultural life of the British Isles as never before nor since. London: A Social and Cultural History incorporates the best recent work in urban history, accounts by contemporary Londoners and tourists, and fictional works featuring the city in order to to trace London's rise and explore its role as a harbinger of modernity as well as how its citizens coped with those achievements. This book covers the full range of life in London, from the splendid galleries of Whitehall to the damp and sooty alleyways of the East End. Along the way, readers will brave the dangers of plague and fire, witness the spectacles of the Lord Mayor's Pageant and the hangings at Tyburn, and take refreshment in the city's pleasure gardens, coffeehouses, and taverns.

    "L.A. Raw" is an attempt to right that wrong. Bringing together works by 41 artists in a variety of media, it traces a lineage that connects postwar figurative expressionism to the 1960s and 70s investigations of politics, gender and ethnicity in art. The featured artists include John Altoon, Wallace Berman, William Brice, Hans Burckhardt, Chris Burden, Cameron, Judy Chicago, Connor Everts, Llyn Foulkes, Charles Garabedian, David Hammonds, Robert Heinecken, John Paul Jones, Kim Jones, Ed and Nancy Kienholz, Rico Lebrun, Paul McCarthy, Arnold Mesches, Betye Saar, Ben Sakoguchi, Barbara Smith, James Strombotne, Jan Stussy, Edward Teske, Joyce Treiman, Howard Warshaw, June Wayne, Charles White and Jack Zajac.

    With its proliferation of trees, well-kept neighborhoods, and an extensive system of parks and museums, Rockford enjoys the distinction of being one of the most beautiful inland cities in America; it is also one of the states leading industrial cities. In pictorial format, this book presents the story of Rockford, The Forest City. It is a story of progress, creativity, and achievement, which encouraged immigrant entrepreneurs to develop large industries from their innovative ideas. The story of this city needs no embellishment, and it is documented here with the belief that it will lead to a better appreciation of what Rockford is and what Rockford is to be.

    These early settlers provided the foundation for Plainfield's rich heritage, which has evolved into today's diverse blend of residents. In 1832, Levi Jessup and Elias Hadley platted the town of Plainfield with 64 lots straddling the National Road. The record of the first lot sold is dated May 2, 1833--much has happened since that day. Images of America: Plainfield presents a visual journey into Plainfield's past through nostalgic images of early downtown buildings, the Indiana Boys' School, the railroad, schools, churches, and much more.

    But we are still surrounded by flows of paper with enormous consequences. In the planned city of Islamabad, order and disorder are produced through the ceaseless inscription and circulation of millions of paper artifacts among bureaucrats, politicians, property owners, villagers, imams (prayer leaders), businessmen, and builders. What are the implications of such a thorough paper mediation of relationships among people, things, places, and purposes? Government of Paper explores this question in the routine yet unpredictable realm of the Pakistani urban bureaucracy, showing how the material forms of postcolonial bureaucratic documentation produce a distinctive political economy of paper that shapes how the city is constructed, regulated, and inhabited. Files, maps, petitions, and visiting cards constitute the enduring material infrastructure of more ephemeral classifications, laws, and institutional organizations. Matthew S. Hull develops a fresh approach to state governance as a material practice, explaining why writing practices designed during the colonial era to isolate the government from society have become a means of participation in it.

    Published here as a complete set for the first time, Dawoud Bey: Harlem U.S.A. also includes five previously unpublished photographs from the same period. Bey's vintage images are given new context in an essay by emerging African-American writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, who undertook her own fascinating study of Harlem in 2011.Bey, who grew up in Queens with family roots in Harlem, has become one of most widely acclaimed portraitists on the contemporary scene. This handsome book, with faithful duotone reproductions, provides a wonderful opportunity to revisit a classic portfolio of images that still resonates in today's culture.

    Find the best hotels, food, and attractions for every budget.Expert travel writers have fully revised this edition of DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Top 10 Montreal & Quebec City.+ Brand-new itineraries help you plan your trip to these areas of Montreal and Quebec City.+ Maps of walking routes show you the best ways to maximize your time.+ New Top 10 lists feature off-the-beaten-track ideas, along with standbys like the top attractions, shopping, dining options, and more.+ New typography and fresh layout throughout.You'll still find DK's famous full-color photography and museum floor plans, along with just the right amount of coverage of history and culture.The perfect pocket-size travel companion: DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Top 10 Montreal & Quebec City.Recommended: For an in-depth guidebook to Montreal and Quebec, check out DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Canada, which offers a complete overview of these cities and more of Canada; thousands of photographs, illustrations, and maps; and more.

    This brisk, informative overview explains how farming in the city is not only fun, but also important for the planet. There are many ways to farm in the city: a Detroit high school program teaches students to grow food and raise chickens; in Tokyo, a bank vault was converted into an underground greenhouse; in Nairobi, local youth transformed part of a slum into a garden that helps feed their families. Read about modern inventions such as futuristic pod greenhouses, food-producing wall panels, and industrial-sized composters. Short, kid-friendly descriptions and vibrant photos and illustrations keep the pace moving and the tone light. Toronto Public Health and FoodShare, two respected agencies, both have contributed to the book. Potatoes on Rooftops is the perfect book to get you thinking about how you, too, can grow food in the city.

    Not only is there climate change to contend with, but there are millions of people, right now, who do not have safe or adequate housing.In Urgent Architecture Bridgette Meinhold showcases 40 successful emergency and long-term housing projects—from repurposed shipping containers to sandbag homes. She surveys successful structures as well as highlighting promising projects that are still being developed. Every one is quickly deployable, affordable, and sustainable. This book is an essential resource for those who are interested in green building, sustainable design, eco-friendly materials, affordable housing, material reuse, and humanitarian relief.

    By seamlessly integrating information and communication technologies into the provision and management of public services, such cities will enhance opportunity and bolster civic engagement. Smarter cities will bring in new revenue while saving money. They will be more of everything that a twenty-first century urban planner, citizen, and elected official wants: more efficient, more sustainable, and more inclusive. Is this true?In Uneven Innovation, Jennifer Clark considers the potential of these emerging technologies as well as their capacity to exacerbate existing inequalities and even produce new ones. She reframes the smart city concept within the trajectory of uneven development of cities and regions, as well as the long history of technocratic solutions to urban policy challenges. Clark argues that urban change driven by the technology sector is following the patterns that have previously led to imbalanced access, opportunities, and outcomes. The tech sector needs the city, yet it exploits and maintains unequal arrangements, embedding labor flexibility and precarity in the built environment. Technology development, Uneven Innovation contends, is the easy part; understanding the city and its governance, regulation, access, participation, and representation--all of which are complex and highly localized--is the real challenge. Clark's critique leads to policy prescriptions that present a path toward an alternative future in which smart cities result in more equitable communities.