Best of
Urban-Studies
2008
On the Lower Frequencies
Erick Lyle - 2008
An icon on the 1990s zine scene, Iggy Scam traces not only the evolution of cities, but of his own thinking, from his early focus on more outré forms of resistance through more contemplative times as he becomes preoccupied with the need for a more affirmative vision of the future. In one of the book’s key pieces, Scam celebrates the history and passing of Hunt’s Donuts in San Francisco’s Mission District. On one level an epitaph for a beloved hangout and on another a metaphor for the effects of gentrification, it’s the untold history of an entire neighborhood in a single retail establishment. Whether handing out fake Starbucks coupons or dreaming of a future with more public art and punk holidays, Scam gives the reader inspiration for living defiantly.
Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York
James T. Murray - 2008
But for how long?Are New York City's local merchants a dying breed or an enduring group of diehards hell bent on retaining the traditions of a glorious past? According to Jim and Karla Murray the influx of big box retailers and chain stores pose a serious threat to these humble institutions, and neighborhood modernization and the anonymity it brings are replacing the unique appearance and character of what were once incredibly colorful streets.Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York is a visual guide to New York City's timeworn storefronts, a collection of powerful images that capture the neighborhood spirit, familiarity, comfort and warmth that these shops once embodied.
Arkitekturang Filipino: A History of Architecture and Urbanism in the Philippines
Gerard Lico - 2008
--Dr. Patrick Flores
The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous: Fighting to Save a Way of Life in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina
Ken Wells - 2008
Bernard Parish, Louisiana, make a fateful decision to ride out Hurricane Katrina on their hand-built fishing boats in a sheltered Civil War–era harbor called Violet Canal. But when Violet is overrun by killer surges, the Robins must summon all their courage, seamanship, and cunning to save themselves and the scores of others suddenly cast into their care. In this gripping saga, Louisiana native Ken Wells provides a close-up look at the harrowing experiences in the backwaters of New Orleans during and after Katrina. Focusing on the plight of the intrepid Robin family, whose members trace their local roots to before the American Revolution, Wells recounts the landfall of the storm and the tumultuous seventy-two hours afterward, when the Robins’ beloved bayou country lay catastrophically flooded and all but forgotten by outside authorities as the world focused its attention on New Orleans. Wells follows his characters for more than two years as they strive, amid mind-boggling wreckage and governmental fecklessness, to rebuild their shattered lives. This is a story about the deep longing for home and a proud bayou people’s love of the fertile but imperiled low country that has nourished them.
The Endless City
Ricky Burdett - 2008
It includes a wealth of material that has emerged from a sequence of six conferences held by influential figures in the field of urban development and its related disciplines, and examines the requisite tools for creating a thriving modern city. The book has been edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic in collaboration with one of the most important educational institutions in this field, the London School of Economics, which assures that the information and data provided is reliable, accurate and informed. Taking 6 key cities as its focal point: New York, Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Berlin, The Endless City discusses in depth not only the infrastructure and architectural expansion necessary for continuous urban growth, but also the social and economic factors that are critical to urban development in the 21st century. Clearly organised into separate sections for each city, the book will have a strong visual impact and make detailed scholarly research straightforward and manageable. Images of each city will complement the discussions and enrich the discussion presented in the text.With contributions by experts in urban development, this book will appeal to architects, city planners, economists, students, politicians and anyone with an interest in the future of our cities.
Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North
Thomas J. Sugrue - 2008
Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North
Vintage Alexandria: Photographs of the City, 1860-1960
Michael Haag - 2008
Seen here in the setting of their homes and gardens, and on the city's streets and beaches, the faces of those forgotten Alexandrians come to life: the Greeks, Italians, Jews, and all those others from around the Mediterranean whose energy and expertise helped modernize and develop Egypt, and who planted their family roots in the city. This was the luxuriant and evocative city celebrated by Constantine Cavafy, E.M. Forster, and Lawrence Durrell, and they too are included in these pages along with photographs of scenes and people that were familiar to them. Vintage Alexandria traces the development and growth of the city, follows its story through the dramatic events of two world wars, and above all provides a background to the city's place in twentieth-century cultural history, through the eyes of Alexandria's cosmopolitan citizens themselves. Those citizens and others who passed through the city and appear in these pages included Antony Benaki (the Greek cotton trader whose collection formed the basis of the famous Benaki Museum in Athens), Robert Koch (who isolated the cholera virus and developed a vaccine in an Alexandria laboratory), the Greek children's writer Penelope Delta, Claude Vincendon (the third wife of Lawrence Durrell), King Victor Emanuel III of Italy, Eve Cohen (the second wife of Lawrence Durrell, and the model for "Justine"), Safinaz Zulfikar (later married to King Farouk as Queen Farida), Rudolph Hess (Hitler's deputy, who attended school in Alexandria), Jean de Menasce (the "best translator" of T.S. Eliot), Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron), the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, the Egyptian film director Youssef Chahine, the Egyptian and international film star Omar Sharif, King Hussein of Jordan, Rhona Haszard (the post-impressionist painter), Ahmed Hassanein Pasha (the Egyptian explorer and diplomat), and Noel Coward (the English writer and wit, who sang at the Fleet Club in Alexandria and was mobbed by sailors).
The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles
Kazys Varnelis - 2008
Infrastructure has ceased to support architecture's plans for the city. This provocative collection looks at infrastructure as a way of mapping residents' place in the city, remaining optimistic about the role of architecture to affect change.
Peacemaking Circles & Urban Youth: Bringing Justice Home
Carolyn Boyes-Watson - 2008
Carolyn Boyes-Watson (the director of the Center for Restorative Justice at Suffolk University) explores how the Circle process is being used by a remarkably innovative youth center outside Boston. Nearly twenty years in operation, Roca, Inc., works with immigrant, gang, and street youth. Using Circles extensively not only with youth but also with the families and community as well as throughout the organization is integral to Roca''s effectiveness. "Peacemaking Circles and Urban Youth" tells a compelling and inspiring story for any organization or person who works with young people, particularly troubled youth who desperately need community-based support to change the trajectory of their lives.
New York for Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate
Tom Angotti - 2008
Most of these were developed during fierce struggles against gentrification, displacement, and environmental hazards, and most got little or no support from government. In fact, community-based plans in New York far outnumber the land use plans produced by government agencies. In New York for Sale, Tom Angotti tells some of the stories of community planning in New York City: how activists moved beyond simple protests and began to formulate community plans to protect neighborhoods against urban renewal, real estate mega-projects, gentrification, and environmental hazards. Angotti, both observer of and longtime participant in New York community planning, focuses on the close relationships among community planning, political strategy, and control over land. After describing the political economy of New York City real estate, its close ties to global financial capital, and the roots of community planning in social movements and community organizing, Angotti turns to specifics. He tells of two pioneering plans forged in reaction to urban renewal plans (including the first community plan in the city, the 1961 Cooper Square Alternate Plan -- a response to a Robert Moses urban renewal scheme); struggles for environmental justice, including battles over incinerators, sludge, and garbage; plans officially adopted by the city; and plans dominated by powerful real estate interests. Finally, Angotti proposes strategies for progressive, inclusive community planning not only for New York City but for anywhere that neighborhoods want to protect themselves and their land. New York for Sale teaches the empowering lesson that community plans can challenge market-driven development even in global cities with powerful real estate industries
Take Back the Land: Land, Gentrification & the Umoja Village Shantytown
Max Rameau - 2008
Though the Umoja Village encampment lasted only a few short months, Take Back the Land's actions inspired activists and observers around the country, shifting the conversation, re-politicizing the act of squatting, and helping to catalyze a new movement against the foreclosure crisis that continues to grow stronger as the economy continues to falter. This is the story of the Umoja Village Shantytown, told by its principal architect, the Haitian-born Pan-African theorist, campaign strategist, organizer, and author Max Rameau. Addressing the issues of land, self-determination, and homelessness in the Black community, Rameau explains the birth and development of Umoja Village day by day, and outlines the larger strategy behind Take Back the Land movement.
Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World
Miriam Greenberg - 2008
Greenberg addresses the role of "image" in urban history, showing who produces brands and how, and demonstrates the enormous consequences of branding. She shows that the branding of New York was not simply a marketing tool; rather it was a political strategy meant to legitimatize market-based solutions over social objectives.
Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes
Andrew Blauvelt - 2008
Portrayed alternately as a middle-class domestic utopia and a dystopic world of homogeneity and conformity--with manicured suburban lawns and the inchoate darkness that lurks just beneath the surface--these stereotypes belie a more realistic understanding of contemporary suburbia and its dynamic transformations. Organized by the Walker Art Center in association with the Heinz Architectural Center at Carnegie Museum of Art, Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes is the first major museum exhibition to examine both the art and architecture of the contemporary American suburb. Featuring paintings, photographs, prints, architectural models, sculptures and video from more than 30 artists and architects, including Christopher Ballantyne, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Gregory Crewdson, Estudio Teddy Cruz, Dan Graham and Larry Sultan, Worlds Away demonstrates the catalytic role of the American suburb in the creation of new art and prospective architecture. Conceived as a revisionist and even contrarian take on the conventional wisdom surrounding suburban life, the catalogue features new essays and seminal writings by John Archer, Robert Beuka, Robert Breugmann, David Brooks, Beatriz Colomina, Malcolm Gladwell and others, as well as a lexicon of suburban neologisms.
The City in Southeast Asia: Patterns, Processes and Policy
Peter J. Rimmer - 2008
This title explores ways of moving beyond outmoded paradigms of the Third World City or a Southeast Asian city 'type'.
The American Vitruvius: An Architects' Handbook of Civic Art
Werner Hegemann - 2008
Today, their reference serves as one of the foundation texts for New Urbanism and associated movements. Civic Art presents over 1200 examples of urban planning principles spanning from classic Roman and Greek times through turn of the twentieth century American design. Hegemann and Peets' work provides a highly relevant context through which to evaluate modern city planning.
Rethinking Federal Housing Policy: How to Make Housing Plentiful and Affordable
Edward L. Glaeser - 2008
Particularly along the coasts, housing remains extremely expensive. In Rethinking Federal Housing Policy: How to Make Housing Plentiful and Affordable, Edward L. Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko explain why housing is so expensive in some areas and outline a plan for making it more affordable. Policymakers must recognize that conditions differ across housing markets, so housing policies need to reflect those differences. The poor and the middle class do not struggle with the same affordability issues, so housing policy needs to address each problem differently. The poor cannot afford housing simply because their incomes are low; the solution to that problem is direct income transfers to the poor, rather than interference with the housing market. In contrast, housing is unaffordable for the middle class because of local zoning restrictions on new home construction that limit the supply of suitable housing. The federal government can sensibly address this issue by providing incentives for local governments in these markets to allow more construction. Ironically, current subsidies for construction of low-income housing only tie impoverished Americans to areas where they have limited job prospects. These supply subsidies also crowd out private-sector construction and benefit politically-connected developers. Mortgage interest deductions, which are intended to make housing more affordable for the middle class, simply allow families who can already afford a house to purchase a bigger one. In restricted, affluent markets, these deductions increase the amount families can pay for a house, driving up prices even higher. Glaeser and Gyourko propose a comprehensive overhaul of federal housing policy that takes into account local regulations and economic conditions. Reform of the home mortgage interest deduction would provide incentives to local governments to allow the market to provide more housing, preventing un
Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer
Wendell E. Pritchett - 2008
This volume, the first biography of the first African American to hold a cabinet position in the federal government, rescues from obscurity the story of a man whose legacy continues to impact American race relations and the cities in which they largely play out. Tracing Weaver’s career through the creation, expansion, and contraction of New Deal liberalism, Wendell Pritchett illuminates his instrumental role in the birth of almost every urban initiative of the period, from public housing and urban renewal to affirmative action and rent control. Beyond these policy achievements, Weaver also founded racial liberalism, a new approach to race relations that propelled him through a series of high-level positions in public and private agencies working to promote racial cooperation in American cities. But Pritchett shows that despite Weaver’s efforts to make race irrelevant, white and black Americans continued to call on him to mediate between the races—a position that grew increasingly untenable as Weaver remained caught between the white power structure to which he pledged his allegiance and the African Americans whose lives he devoted his career to improving. A crucial and largely unknown chapter in the history of American liberalism, this long-overdue biography adds a new dimension to our understanding of racial and urban struggles, as well as the complex role of the black elite in modern U.S. history.
Unbuilt Toronto: A History of the City That Might Have Been
Mark Osbaldeston - 2008
Delving into unfulfilled and largely forgotten visions for grand public buildings, landmark skyscrapers, highways, subways, and arts and recreation venues, it outlines such ambitious schemes as St. Alban's Cathedral, the Queen subway line and early city plans that would have resulted in a paris-by-the-Lake. Readers may lament the loss of some projects (such as the Eaton’s College Street tower), be thankful for the disappearance of others (a highway through the Annex) and marvel at the downtown that could have been (with underground roads and walkways in the sky). Featuring 147 photographs and illustrations, many never before published, Unbuilt Toronto casts a different light on a city you thought you knew.
The City In The Islamic World
Salma Khadra Jayyusi - 2008
Unlike many previous volumes dealing with the city in the Islamic world, this one has been specially expanded not only to include snapshots of historical fabric but also to deal with the transformation of this fabric into modern and contemporary urban entities.
The City in the Making
Marcel Hénaff - 2008
An ambitious, interdisciplinary exploration of the emergence of the urban phenomenon and its social, political and cultural dynamic.
Race and Remembrance: A Memoir
Arthur L. Johnson - 2008
Johnson, a Detroit civil rights and community leader, educator, and administrator whose career spans much of the last century. In his own words, Johnson takes readers through the arc of his distinguished career, which includes his work with the Detroit branch of the NAACP, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission, and Wayne State University. A Georgia native, Johnson graduated from Morehouse College and Atlanta University and moved north in 1950 to become executive secretary of the Detroit branch of the NAACP. Under his guidance, the Detroit chapter became one of the most active and vital in the United States. Despite his dedicated work toward political organization, Johnson also maintained a steadfast belief in education and served as the vice president of university relations and professor of educational sociology at Wayne State University for nearly a quarter of a century. In his intimate and engaging style, Johnson gives readers a look into his personal life, including his close relationship with his grandmother, his encounters with Morehouse classmate Martin Luther King, and the loss of his sons. Race and Remembrance offers an insider's view into the social factors affecting the lives of African Americans in the twentieth century, making clear the enormous effort and personal sacrifice required in fighting racial discrimination and poverty in Detroit and beyond. Readers interested in African American social history and political organization will appreciate this unique and revealing volume.
Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination
Rosie Cox - 2008
Yet this very fact means that we seldom stop to question what we mean by dirt. What do our attitudes to dirt and cleanliness tell us about ourselves and the societies we live in? The contributors to this work expose the interests which underlie everyday conceptions of dirt and reveal how our ideas about it are intimately bound up with issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and the body. Exploring a wide variety of settings--domestic, urban and rural--this original work reveals how attitudes to dirt and cleanliness become manifest in surprisingly diverse ways, including the rituals associated with death and burial; interior and architectural design aesthetics; urban infrastructure, regeneration and renewal; film symbolism; and consumer attitudes to food.A rich and challenging work that extends our understanding of the cultural manifestations of dirt and cleanliness.
Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City
Marcus Foth - 2008
This publication exposes research accounts which seek to convey an appreciation for local differences, for the empowerment of people and for the human-centred design of urban technology.
Gangs, Politics and Dignity in Cape Town
Steffen Jensen - 2008
But a few years into the transition, this miracle appeared increasingly threatened by crime and violence. In this compelling ethnography, Steffen Jensen focuses on a single township in Cape Town in order to explore how residents have negotiated the intersecting forces of political change and violent crime. Jensen spent years closely observing the actions of residents both male and female, young and old, as well as gang members, police officers, and local government officials. The poisonous legacy of apartheid also comes under Jensen’s lens, as he examines the lasting effects that an official policy of racist stereotyping has had on the residents’ conceptions of themselves and their neighbors. While Gangs, Politics, and Dignity in Cape Town brims with insights into ongoing debates over policing, gangs, and local politics, Jensen also shows how people in the townships maintain their dignity in the face of hardship and danger.