An erudite and impassioned guide, Montalban finds a controversy in every building, a story in every street, illuminating the city’s rich history and turbulent politics, its art, gastronomy and football. There are many Barcelonas, and Montalban knows them all: the lavish art-nouveau houses in Vallvidrera where he himself lives; the labyrinthine squalor of the Barri Xino, setting for Genet’s Thief’s Journal; the Barri Gotic where the independent Catalan Kingdom between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries created a nationalist consciousness which has endured for half a millennium; the oneiric Parc Guell, designed by the city’s most celebrated architect, Antoni Gaudi.But this definitive survey is one unlikely to be endorsed by the Oficina de Turismo. For Montalban is fiercely critical of the values of the new ‘Olympic’ Barcelona: the misery of the inner-city slums where one person dies every second day from a heroin overdose; the speculation which has compounded overcrowding in a metropolis with the highest population density in Europe; the ravaging of working-class suburbs to make way for an aseptic international centre. Once Europe’s most utopian city, Barcelona, he argues, ‘has become a market, and everything is up for sale’.For visitors, Barcelonas will prove a stimulating, indispensable companion. And for everyone interested in art and architecture, politics and sport, it will provide an enthralling introduction to the great European city.

    During that time, the mob lost its traditional, institutional role as corporate safety valve and social corrective, tolerated by public officials. It became autonomous, a violent menace to individual and public good expressing the discordant urges and fears of a pluralistic society. Indeed, it tested the premises of democratic government.Paul Gilje relates the practices of New York mobs to their American and European roots and uses both historical and anthropological methods to show how those mobs adapted to local conditions. He questions many of the traditional assumptions about the nature of the mob and scrutinizes explanations of its transformation: among them, the loss of a single-interest society, industrialization and changes in the workforce, increased immigration, and the rise of sub-classes in American society. Gilje's findings can be extended to other cities.The lucid narrative incorporates meticulous and exhaustive archival research that unearths hundreds of New York City disturbances -- about the Revolution, bawdy-houses, theaters, dogs and hogs, politics, elections, ethnic conflict, labor actions, religion. Illustrations recreate the turbulent atmosphere of the city; maps, graphs, and tables define the spacial and statistical dimensions of its ferment. The book is a major contribution to our understanding of social change in the early Republic as well as to the history of early New York, urban studies, and rioting.

    The Economics of Zoning Laws is the first book to apply the modern economic theory of property rights to all major aspects of zoning.Zoning laws are neither irrational constrints on otherwise efficient markets nor disinterested attempts to correct market failure. Rather, zoning must be viewed as a collective property right, vested in local governments and administered by politicians who rationally repsond to their constituents and to developers as markets for development rights arise.The Economics of Zoning Laws develops the economic theories of property rights and public choice and applies them to three zoning controversies: the siting of a large industrial plant, the exclusionary zoning of the suburbs, and the constitutional protection of propery owners from excessive regulation. Economic and legal theory, William Fischel contends, suggest that payment of damages under the taking clause of the Constitution may provide the most effective remedy for excessive zoning regulations.

    This book differs from many topical studies of state formation in that unique and particular developments are given as much weight as those factors which are common to all early states. The ancient literary evidence and the relevant historical and anthropological comparisons are extensively drawn on in an attempt to explain the transition to the city-state, a development which was to have decisive effects for the subsequent development of European society.