It covers subjects throughout the five boroughs from prehistory to the present.

    Following in the footsteps of 19th-century urban reformer Jacob Riis, the author, through the power of photography, reveals the destitution and vulgarities of urban decay. Chicago; Newark, New Jersey; New York; Detroit; Los Angeles; and several other cities are the backdrops for his 400 photographs. Vergara focuses on the physical environment, showing the transformation of particular sites over time. His tour of dilapidated neighborhoods and crumbling downtowns is visually startling. Vergara lays bare the direction of a new urbanness that strips the grandeur from its fabric and lays waste to the cityscape, pointing out that while we have wasted cities, many of the ruins are magnificent. An invaluable resource for urban studies and architecture collections.

    A comprehensive handbook to urban ministry introduces and shows how to implement a Christian community development program.

    The essays include personal reflections about growing up in rural Minnesota and opinions about the state of neglected rural towns and people. The author grew up during the 1950s on an 80-acre farm that his family rented in Rosewood Township, Minnesota. His father supplied the tools, the labor, and the seeds and kept two-thirds of the crop. His family lived off of the land--every summer his mother canned vegetables, fruits, jams, sauces, and meats for the winter. The book suggests that the industrialization of farming has marginalized rural culture and led to the impoverishment of rural towns and communities. Bread baking provides an example of how industrialization changed everyday life. When store-bought bread replaced home baking, the family abandoned more than a habit of living--they lost a piece of rural culture that influenced various aspects of their quality of life. Since 1910, industrialization has reduced the farm workforce from about 50 percent of the U.S. population to less than 2 percent and led to the development of a handful of huge, agribusiness corporations that dominate the American agricultural economy. The book suggests that individuals should oppose any economy that sees people as an expendable resource, that does not consider the health of communities, and that defines reductions in human labor as efficient regardless of non-pecuniary consequences. It questions what kind of values rural people are teaching their children when they sell themselves, in the name of economic development, as ideally suited to the least attractive kinds of factory work, or when they allow the rest of society to dump its toxic trash on rural land for the sake of a few jobs. Recommendations are offered for education, agriculture, and economic development that will reinvigorate rural communities and a rural way of life.

    Does anything remain of the old city?The internationally known Japanese architectural historian Jinnai Hidenobu set out on foot to rediscover the city of Tokyo. Armed with old maps, he wandered through back alleys and lanes, trying to experience the city's space as it had been lived by earlier residents. He found that, despite an almost completely new cityscape, present-day inhabitants divide Tokyo's space in much the same way that their ancestors did two hundred years before.Jinnai's holistic perspective is enhanced by his detailing of how natural, topographical features were incorporated into the layout of the city. A variety of visual documents (maps from the Tokugawa and Meiji periods, building floorplans, woodblock prints, photographs) supplement his observations. While an important work for architects and historians, this unusual book will also attract armchair travelers and anyone interested in the symbolic uses of space.(A translation of Tokyo no kûkan jinruigaku.)

    Targeted at architects, students, urban designers and planners, landscape architects, and city and regional officials, The Fractured Metropolis provides a thorough analysis of not only cities but also the entire metropolitan region, considering how both are intrinsically linked and influence one other.

    Paul seems reborn and infused with future dynamism? And what do Milwaukee and the Twin Cities have to tell us about other cities’ prospects, the trials and destinies of industrial Cleveland and post-industrial Austin?Anthony Orum’s new book tells the story of these cities and, at the same time, of all cities. Here the urban past, present, and future are woven into one compelling tale. Orum traces the shift in the sources of urban growth from entrepreneurs to institutions and highlights the emergence of local government as a prominent force—indeed, as an institution—in shaping the trajectory of the urban industrial heartland. This complex trajectory includes all aspects of urban boom and bust: population trends, economic prosperity, politics and culture, as well as hard-to-pin-down qualities like a city’s collective hope and vision.Interspersing social theory, historical ethnography, and comparative analysis to help explain the fates of different cities, Orum lucidly portrays factory openings, labor strikes, elections, evictions, urban blight, white flight, recession, and rejuvenation to show the core histories—and future shape—of cities beyond the particulars presented in these pages. The reader will discover the key people and politics of cities along with the forces that direct them. With a rich variety of sources including newspapers, diaries, census materials, maps, photo essays, and, perhaps most captivating, original oral histories, City-Building in America is ideal for anyone interested in urban transformation and for courses in urban sociology, urban politics, industrial sociology, social change, and social mobility.

    This new collection brings together, for the first time in English, Lefebvre's reflections on the city and urban life written over a span of some twenty years. The selection of writings is contextualized by an introduction - itself a significant contribution to the interpretation of Henri Lefebvre's work - which places the material within the context of Lefebvre's intellectual and political life and times and raises pertinent issues as to their relevance for contemporary debates over such questions as the nature of urban reality, the production of space and modernity. Writings on Cities is of particular relevance to architects, planners, geographers, and those interested in the philosophical and political understanding of contemporary life.

    Organized into six dossiers, each dossier examines a particular facet of France's development.

     It examines residential and non-residential real estate markets--from the perspectives of both macro- and micro-economics--as well as the role of government in real estate markets.

    By 1930 more than two million people lived in such towns, dotted across an industrial frontier which stretched from Lowell, Massachusetts, through Torrance, California to Norris, Tennessee. Margaret Crawford focuses on the transformation of company town construction from the vernacular settlements of the late eighteenth century to the professional designs of architects and planners one hundred and fifty years later. Eschewing a static architectural approach which reads politics, history, and economics through the appearance of buildings, Crawford portrays the successive forms of company towns as the product of a dynamic process, shaped by industrial transformation, class struggle, and reformers’ efforts to control and direct these forces.