Best of
Urban-Studies

2011

Why Loiter?: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets


Shilpa Phadke - 2011
    And they raise the question: can women’s access to public space be viewed in isolation from that of other marginal groups?Going beyond the problem of the real and implied risks associated with women’s presence in public, they draw from feminist theory to argue that only by celebrating loitering—a radical act for most Indian women—can a truly equal, global city be created.

Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile


Taras Grescoe - 2011
    The perception of public transportation in America is often unflattering—a squalid last resort for those with one too many drunk-driving charges, too poor to afford insurance, or too decrepit to get behind the wheel of a car. Indeed, a century of auto-centric culture and city planning has left most of the country with public transportation that is underfunded, ill maintained, and ill conceived. But as the demand for petroleum is fast outpacing the world's supply, a revolution in transportation is under way. Grescoe explores the ascendance of the straphangers—the growing number of people who rely on public transportation to go about the business of their daily lives. On a journey that takes him around the world—from New York to Moscow, Paris, Copenhagen, Tokyo, Bogotá, Phoenix, Portland, Vancouver, and Philadelphia—Grescoe profiles public transportation here and abroad, highlighting the people and ideas that may help undo the damage that car-centric planning has done to our cities and create convenient, affordable, and sustainable urban transportation—and better city living—for all.

Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City Out of Control


David Sims - 2011
    Using a wealth of recent studies on Greater Cairo and a deep reading of informal urban processes, the city and its recent history are portrayed and mapped: the huge, spontaneous neighborhoods; housing; traffic and transport; city government; and its people and their enterprises. The book argues that understanding a city such as Cairo is not a daunting task as long as pre-conceived notions are discarded and care is taken to apprehend available information and to assess it with a critical eye. In the case of Cairo, this approach leads to a conclusion that the city can be considered a kind of success story, in spite of everything.

Savage Messiah


Laura Oldfield Ford - 2011
    Ford’s prose is scabrous and melancholic, incorporating theoretical shards from Guy Debord and Marc Augé, and mapping the transformations to the capital that the property boom and neoliberalist economics have wrought. Each zine is a drift, a wander through landscape that echoes certain strands of contemporary psychogeography. Ford—or a version of her, at least—is an occasional character, offering up narcotic memories of a forgotten metropolis. The images, hand-drawn, photographed and messily laid out, suggest both outtakes from a Sophie Calle project and the dust jacket of an early 1980s anarcho-punk compilation record: that is, both poetry and protest.”—Sukhdev Sandhu, New Statesman Savage Messiah collects the entire set of Laura Oldfield Ford’s fanzine to date. Part graphic novel, part artwork, the book is both an angry polemic against the marginalization of the city’s working class and an exploration of the cracks that open up in urban space.

Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City


Neil Brenner - 2011
    It has also given new impetus to the struggles of urban social movements emphasizing the injustice, destructiveness and unsustainability of capitalist forms of urbanization. This book contributes analyses intended to be useful for efforts to roll back contemporary profit-based forms of urbanization, and to promote alternative, radically democratic and sustainable forms of urbanism.The contributors provide cutting-edge analyses of contemporary urban restructuring, including the issues of neoliberalization, gentrification, colonization, "creative" cities, architecture and political power, sub-prime mortgage foreclosures and the ongoing struggles of "right to the city" movements. At the same time, the book explores the diverse interpretive frameworks - critical and otherwise - that are currently being used in academic discourse, in political struggles, and in everyday life to decipher contemporary urban transformations and contestations. The slogan, "cities for people, not for profit," sets into stark relief what the contributors view as a central political question involved in efforts, at once theoretical and practical, to address the global urban crises of our time.Drawing upon European and North American scholarship in sociology, politics, geography, urban planning and urban design, the book provides useful insights and perspectives for citizens, activists and intellectuals interested in exploring alternatives to contemporary forms of capitalist urbanization.

Justice in the City: An Argument from the Sources of Rabbinic Judaism


Aryeh Cohen - 2011
    That is, in a community thus conceived, the privilege of citizenship is the assumption of the obligations of the city towards Others who are not always in view-workers, the poor, the homeless. These Others form a constitutive part of the city. The second part of the book is a close analysis of homelessness, labor and restorative justice from within the theory that was developed. This title will be useful for scholars and students in Jewish Studies, especially rabbinic literature and Jewish thought, but also for those interested in contemporary urban issues.

World of Department Stores


Jan Whitaker - 2011
    With photographs and ephemera from all over the world, this lavish book goes beyond in-store extravaganzas to the history of these consumer institutions, the personalities behind them, their vast range of goods, unique architecture, advertising, and associated sociological trends. With perfumed air and chandeliers, department stores have lured millions for over a century with that enticing, dizzying sense that no matter how much you already have, there is always more.Praise for The World of Department Stores:“Since my visits as a child to La Opera Department Store in Santo Domingo, I have believed that the best department stores are merchants not of clothing or shoes or cosmetics but of dreams. Whitaker’s book is a remarkable around-the-world look at these dream factories. It is an invaluable resource to anyone interested in the business of retailing and to shoppers everywhere.”—Oscar de la Renta “The World of Department Stores is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the foundations of the urban experience in the West and the department store as the ultimate expression of the needs of the rising middle class and its tastes.” ­—Leonard Lauder, Chairman Emeritus, The Estée Lauder Companies Inc.   “I have nothing but good memories about the many department stores that played an important part in my business, [and] I warmly welcome the publication of this wonderful and unique book on department stores throughout the world.” —Hubert de Givenchy "The birth of the department store in the late 19th century brought everything glamorous together under one roof—from inviting, intelligent architecture and design to the latest fashions. Jan Whitaker's The World of Department Stores looks back to the biggest and brightest shops— including the belle epoque splendor of Paris's Bon Marché, the block-long, palatial GUM in Moscow; and the always outrageous holiday windows at Barneys New York." –Elle Décor "In photos and art, this visual feast details the extraordinary history of the world's "great retail palaces" from the past century. With authoritative and informative text." -Sacramento Bee "Illustrated with photos of window displays, catalog covers and the Gilded Age architecture of institutions from Philadelphia’s long-gone Wanamaker’s to Paris’s still-strong La Samaritaine, The World of Department Stores makes a worthwhile gift for the history, sociology or shopping buff on your list. " -Washington Post

Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain


Stan Allen - 2011
    New technologies, new design techniques and a demand for enhanced environmental performance have provoked a re-thinking of architecture's traditional relationship to the ground. The book Landform Building sets out to examine the many manifestations of landscape and ecology in contemporary architectural practice: not as a cross-disciplinary phenomenon (architects working in the landscape) but as new design techniques, new formal strategies and technical problems within architecture.

The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper


Kate Ascher - 2011
     The skyscraper is perhaps the most recognizable icon of the modern urban landscape. Providing offices, homes, restaurants, and shopping to thousands of inhabitants, modern skyscrapers function as small cities- with infrastructure not unlike that hidden beneath our streets. Clean water is provided to floors thousands of feet in the sky; elevators move people swiftly and safely throughout the building; and telecom networks allow virtual meetings with people on other continents. How are these services-considered essential, but largely taken for granted- possible in such a complex structure? What does it really take to sustain human life at such enormous heights? Exploring the interconnected systems that make life livable in the sky is the task of Kate Ascher's stunningly illustrated The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper. Ascher examines skyscrapers from around the world to learn how these incredible structures operate. Just how do skyscrapers sway in the wind, and why exactly is that a good idea? How can a modern elevator be as fast as an airplane? Why are skyscrapers in Asia safer than those in the United States? Have new safeguards been designed to protect skyscrapers from terrorism? What happens when the power goes out in a building so tall? Why are all modern skyscrapers seemingly made of glass, and how can that be safe? How do skyscrapers age, and how can they be maintained over decades of habitation? No detail is too small, no difficulty too big to escape Ascher's encyclopedic eye. Along the way, The Heights introduces the reader to every type of person involved in designing, building, and maintaining a skyscraper: the designers who calculate how weight and weather will affect their structures, the workers who dig the foundations and raise the lightning rods, the crews who clean the windows and maintain the air ducts, and the firefighters-whose special equipment allows blazes to be fought at unprecedented heights. More than a technical survey, Ascher's work is a triumphant ode to the most monumental aspect of modern civilization. Saturated with vivid illustrations and unforgettable anecdotes, The Heights is the ultimate guide to the way things work in the skyscraper.

The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America's Eden


Lisa Sun-Hee Park - 2011
    But one town in Colorado, under the guise of environmental protection, passed a resolution limiting immigration, bolstering the privilege of the wealthy and scapegoating Latin American newcomers for the area's current and future ecological problems. This might have escaped attention save for the fact that this wasn't some rinky-dink backwater. It was Aspen, Colorado, playground of the rich and famous and the West's most elite ski town.Tracking the lives of immigrant laborers through several years of exhaustive fieldwork and archival digging, The Slums of Aspen tells a story that brings together some of the most pressing social problems of the day: environmental crises, immigration, and social inequality. Park and Pellow demonstrate how these issues are intertwined in the everyday experiences of people who work and live in this wealthy tourist community.Offering a new understanding of a little known class of the super-elite, of low-wage immigrants (mostly from Latin America) who have become the foundation for service and leisure in this famous resort, and of the recent history of the ski industry, Park and Pellow expose the ways in which Colorado boosters have reshaped the landscape and altered ecosystems in pursuit of profit and pleasure. Of even greater urgency, they frame how environmental degradation and immigration reform have become inextricably linked in many regions of the American West, a dynamic that interferes with the efforts of valorous environmental causes, often turning away from conservation and toward insidious racial privilege.

Lectures on Urban Economics


Jan K. Brueckner - 2011
    To make the book accessible to a broad range of readers, the analysis is diagrammatic rather than mathematical. Although nontechnical, the book relies on rigorous economic reasoning. In contrast to the cursory theoretical development often found in other textbooks, Lectures on Urban Economics offers thorough and exhaustive treatments of models relevant to each topic, with the goal of revealing the logic of economic reasoning while also teaching urban economics.Topics covered include reasons for the existence of cities, urban spatial structure, urban sprawl and land-use controls, freeway congestion, housing demand and tenure choice, housing policies, local public goods and services, pollution, crime, and quality of life. Footnotes throughout the book point to relevant exercises, which appear at the back of the book. These 22 extended exercises (containing 125 individual parts) develop numerical examples based on the models analyzed in the chapters. Lectures on Urban Economics is suitable for undergraduate use, as background reading for graduate students, or as a professional reference for economists and scholars interested in the urban economics perspective.

Vauxhall Gardens: A History


David E. Coke - 2011
    By the 18th century, Vauxhall was crucial to the cultural and fashionable life of the country, patronized by all levels of society, from royal dukes to penurious servants. In the first book on the subject for over fifty years, Alan Borg and David E. Coke reveal the teeming life, the spectacular art and the ever-present music of Vauxhall in fascinating detail. Borg and Coke's historical exposition of the entire history of the gardens makes a major contribution to the study of London entertainments, art, music, sculpture, class and ideology. It reveals how Vauxhall linked high and popular culture in ways that look forward to the manner in which both art and entertainment have evolved in modern times.

Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia


Derek Hall - 2011
    Powers of Exclusion examines the key processes through which shifts in land relations are taking place, notably state land allocation and provision of property rights, the dramatic expansion of areas zoned for conservation, booms in the production of export-oriented crops, the conversion of farmland to post-agrarian uses, "intimate" exclusions involving kin and co-villagers, and mobilizations around land farmed in terms of identity and belonging. In case studies drawn from seven countries, the authors find that four "powers of exclusion" - regulation, market, force and legitimation - have combined to shape land relations in new and often surprising ways.Land debates are often presented as a conflict between market-oriented land use with full private property rights on one side, and equitable access, production for subsistence, and respect for custom on the other. The authors step back from these debates to point out that any productive use of land requires the exclusion of some potential users, and that most projects for transforming land relations are thus accompanied by painful dilemmas. Rather than counterposing "exclusion" to "inclusion", the book argues taht attention must be paid to who is excluded, how, why, and with what consequences.Powers of Exclusion is a path-breaking book that draws on insights from multiple disciplines to map out the new contours of struggles for land in Southeast Asia. The volume provides a framework for analyzing the dilemmas of land relations across the Global South and beyond.

The Alphabet and the Algorithm


Mario Carpo - 2011
    But if the digital has created a "paradigm shift" for architecture, which paradigm is shifting? In The Alphabet and the Algorithm, Mario Carpo points to one key practice of modernity: the making of identical copies. Carpo highlights two examples of identicality crucial to the shaping of architectural modernity: in the fifteenth century, Leon Battista Alberti's invention of architectural design, according to which a building is an identical copy of the architect's design; and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the mass production of identical copies from mechanical master models, matrixes, imprints, or molds. The modern power of the identical, Carpo argues, came to an end with the rise of digital technologies. Everything digital is variable. In architecture, this means the end of notational limitations, of mechanical standardization, and of the Albertian, authorial way of building by design. Charting the rise and fall of the paradigm of identicality, Carpo compares new forms of postindustrial digital craftsmanship to hand-making and the cultures and technologies of variations that existed before the coming of machine-made, identical copies. Carpo reviews the unfolding of digitally based design and construction from the early 1990s to the present, and suggests a new agenda for architecture in an age of variable objects and of generic and participatory authorship.

American Property: A History of How, Why, and What We Own


Stuart Banner - 2011
    But beneath our nation's proprietary longing looms a troublesome question: what does it mean to own something? More simply: what is property?The question is at the heart of many contemporary controversies, including disputes over who owns everything from genetic material to indigenous culture to music and film on the Internet. To decide if and when genes or culture or digits are a kind of property that can be possessed, we must grapple with the nature of property itself. How does it originate? What purposes does it serve? Is it a natural right or one created by law?Accessible and mercifully free of legal jargon, American Property reveals the perpetual challenge of answering these questions, as new forms of property have emerged in response to technological and cultural change, and as ideas about the appropriate scope of government regulation have shifted. This first comprehensive history of property in the United States is a masterly guided tour through a contested human institution that touches all aspects of our lives and desires.Stuart Banner shows that property exists to serve a broad set of purposes, constantly in flux, that render the idea of property itself inconstant. Despite our ideals of ownership, property has always been a means toward other ends. What property signifies and what property is, we come to see, has consistently changed to match the world we want to acquire.

Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution


William Bunge - 2011
    Fitzgerald, at its core, is dedicated to understanding global phenomena through the intensive study of a small, local place.Beginning with an 1816 encounter between the Ojibwa population and the neighborhood’s first surveyor, William Bunge examines the racialized imposition of local landscapes over the course of European American settlement. Historical events are firmly situated in space—a task Bunge accomplishes through liberal use of maps and frequent references to recognizable twentieth-century landmarks.More than a work of historical geography, Fitzgerald is a political intervention. By 1967 the neighborhood was mostly African American; Black Power was ascendant; and Detroit would experience a major riot. Immersed in the daily life of the area, Bunge encouraged residents to tell their stories and to think about local politics in spatial terms. His desire to undertake a different sort of geography led him to create a work that was nothing like a typical work of social science. The jumble of text, maps, and images makes it a particularly urgent book—a major theoretical contribution to urban geography that is also a startling evocation of street-level Detroit during a turbulent era.A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication

Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States


Samantha MacBride - 2011
    The accomplishments of the recycling movement can be seen in municipal practice, a thriving private recycling industry, and widespread public support and participation. In the United States, more people recycle than vote. But, as Samantha MacBride points out in this book, the goals of recycling -- saving the earth (and trees), conserving resources, and greening the economy -- are still far from being realized. The vast majority of solid wastes are still burned or buried. MacBride argues that, since the emergence of the recycling movement in 1970, manufacturers of products that end up in waste have successfully prevented the implementation of more onerous, yet far more effective, forms of sustainable waste policy. Recycling as we know it today generates the illusion of progress while allowing industry to maintain the status quo and place responsibility on consumers and local government.MacBride offers a series of case studies in recycling that pose provocative questions about whether the current ways we deal with waste are really the best ways to bring about real sustainability and environmental justice. She does not aim to debunk or discourage recycling but to help us think beyond recycling as it is today.

Architecture of Oblivion: Ruins and Historical Consciousness in Modern Russia


Andreas Schönle - 2011
    While the Soviet Union was notorious for leveling churches, post-Soviet Russia has only intensified the practice of massive destruction and reconstruction. Architecture of Oblivion examines the role of ruins in the development of Russia’s historical consciousness from the 18th century to the present. Investigating the meaning and functions ruins have acquired in Russian culture, Schönle looks at ideological reasons for the current disregard for the value of ruins and historical buildings, in particular by political authorities, and reveals how ruins have often become a site of resistance to official ideology and an invitation to map out alternative visions of history and of statehood.An interdisciplinary study of Russia’s response to ruins has never been attempted, although the topic of ruins has garnered considerable interest in Western Europe and in the U.S. This original work from a leading authority on the subject will appeal to historians of Russian culture and thought, literature and art scholars, and general readers interested in ruins.

Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention


Zoe Ryan - 2011
    This handsome publication, the first to focus in-depth on the entirety of Goldberg's life and work, traces his development from his early Bauhaus training to his notable architectural achievements. Featuring previously unpublished material, it also includes Goldberg's plans for unrealized projects as well as his collaborations with other prominent modern architects, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Buckminster Fuller. Goldberg's interest in the social dimension of architecture was reflected in many of his cutting-edge designs. In 1959, he conceived the plan for his most iconic structure, the sixty-story Marina City residential towers, in the heart of downtown Chicago. He created a number of hospitals that offered a new paradigm for how patients and staff interacted within the space. Goldberg's progressive designs also extended to schools, prefabricated structures, and furniture.

Living in the Endless City: The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank's Alfred Herrhausen Society


Ricky Burdett - 2011
    This follow-up to Phaidon’s successful The Endless City is a close look at the issues that affect cities, and thus human life across the globe in the twenty-first century. Based on a series of conferences held by the London School of Economics, Living in the Endless City examines Mumbai, Sao Paolo and Istanbul through a series of essays by global scholars and thinkers, photographs illustrating key aspects of life in the three cities, and compellingly presented analytical data.

White Flight/Black Flight: The Dynamics of Racial Change in an American Neighborhood


Rachael A. Woldoff - 2011
    cities. White Flight/Black Flight takes readers inside a neighborhood that has shifted rapidly and dramatically in race composition over the last two decades. The book presents a portrait of the life of a working-class neighborhood in the aftermath of white flight, illustrating cultural clashes that accompany racial change as well as common values that transcend race, from the perspectives of three different groups who are living it: white stayers, black pioneers, and second-wave blacks.Rachael A. Woldoff offers a fresh look at race and neighborhoods by documenting a two-stage process of neighborhood transition and focusing on the perspectives of two understudied groups: newly arriving black residents and whites who have stayed in the neighborhood. Woldoff describes the period of transition when white residents still remain, though in diminishing numbers, and a second, less discussed stage of racial change: black flight. She reveals what happens after white flight is complete: Pioneer blacks flee to other neighborhoods or else adjust to their new segregated residential environment by coping with the loss of relationships with their longer-term white neighbors, signs of community decline, and conflicts with the incoming second wave of black neighbors.Readers will find several surprising and compelling twists to the white flight story related to positive relations between elderly stayers and the striving pioneers, conflict among black residents, and differences in cultural understandings of what constitutes crime and disorder.

Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia


Ronit Ricci - 2011
    As it expanded into these regions, Islam was received by cultures vastly different from those in the Middle East, incorporating them into a diverse global community that stretched from India to the Philippines. In Islam Translated, Ronit Ricci uses the Book of One Thousand Questions—from its Arabic original to its adaptations into the Javanese, Malay, and Tamil languages between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries—as a means to consider connections that linked Muslims across divides of distance and culture. Examining the circulation of this Islamic text and its varied literary forms, Ricci explores how processes of literary translation and religious conversion were historically interconnected forms of globalization, mutually dependent, and creatively reformulated within societies making the transition to Islam.

Facets of Social Geography: International and Indian Perspectives


Ashok K. Dutt - 2011
    It discusses both conceptual and empirical approaches, and traditional and emergent social geography themes including art and culture, urbanism and crime, social institutions of caste, class and religion, gender, disability, activism, feminism, social planning, enterprise zones, social and economic inequities, post-colonialism, post-modernism and development of quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods. India 's social structure based on centuries-old Karma principles and a four-level caste system are dealt with in this book to help unravel the country's social geography. This book is a felicitation volume in honour of Allen G. Noble, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Geography and Planning at the University of Akron, Ohio, USA. A result of the collective effort of 40 leading national and international scholars, it is an excellent addition to the current stock of knowledge and will be of interest to geographers, sociologists, demographers, urban and regional planners and policy-makers.

Worlding Cities


Ananya Roy - 2011
    It includes important contributions from a respected group of scholars across a range of generations, disciplines, and sites of study. Describes the new theoretical framework of 'worlding' Substantially expands and updates the themes of capital and culture Includes a unique collection of authors across generations, disciplines, and sites of study Demonstrates how references to Asian power, success, and hegemony make possible urban development and limit urban politics

My House Our House: Living Far Better for Far Less in a Cooperative Household


Karen M. Bush - 2011
    My House Our House is the story of three trailblazing women who came together to create a 21st century cooperative household. Alternative living arrangements account for a large and growing percentage of American households, and offer practical, economical solutions for people looking to live together for less and still maintain a high quality of life. CNN and CBS Boston report that Boomer couples are divorcing at double the rate of other age groups, and have less attachment to traditional concepts of family. Told with humor, affection and honesty, this book invites the reader to explore the challenges, practicalities and joys of moving from "my house" to "our house."

The Lost Panoramas: When Chicago Changed its River and the Land Beyond


Michael F. Williams - 2011
    Offering the most complete description available of the river reversal, the stories told here provide a better understanding as to how it was done and why it was necessary, as well as how the water from the Chicago River is treated. The photographs were pulled from a glass plate photo collection taken by the Sanitary District of Chicago.

Imagining Zion


S. Ilan Troen - 2011
    This extraordinary activity of planners, architects, social scientists, military personnel, politicians, and settlers is inextricably linked to multiple contexts: Jewish and Zionist history, the Arab/Jewish conflict, and the diffusion of European ideas to non-European worlds.S. Ilan Troen demonstrates how professionals and settlers continually innovated plans for both rural and urban frontiers in response to the competing demands of social and political ideologies and the need to achieve productivity, economic independence, and security in a hostile environment. In the 1930s, security became the primary challenge, shaping and even distorting patterns of growth. Not until the 1993 Oslo Accords, with prospects of compromise and accommodation, did planners again imagine Israel as a normal state, developing like other modern societies. Troen concludes that if Palestinian Arabs become reconciled to a Jewish state, Israel will reassign priority to the social and economic development of the country and region.

Saigon’s Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City


Erik Harms - 2011
    Hóc Môn, a district that lies along a key transport corridor on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, epitomizes one of those places. In Saigon’s Edge, Erik Harms explores life in Hóc Môn, putting forth a revealing perspective on how rapid urbanization impacts the people who live at the intersection of rural and urban worlds.Unlike the idealized Vietnamese model of urban space, Hóc Môn is between worlds, neither outside nor inside but always uncomfortably both. With particular attention to everyday social realities, Harms demonstrates how living on the margin can be both alienating and empowering, as forces that exclude its denizens from power and privilege in the inner city are used to thwart the status quo on the rural edges.More than a local case study of urban change, Harms’s work also opens a window on Vietnam’s larger turn toward market socialism and the celebration of urbanization—transformations instructively linked to trends around the globe.

The Fate of Cities: Urban America and the Federal Government, 1945-2000


Roger Biles - 2011
    By then the investment in urban revitalization begun during the activist 1960s had become a romantic memory. Roger Biles's insightful new book shows why. The first major comprehensive treatment of the subject in thirty-five years, superseding Mark Gelfand's landmark A Nation of Cities, it examines the federal government's relationship with urban America from the Truman through the Clinton administrations.Deftly analyzing the efforts of presidents, legislators, and other policy makers to deal with a range of troubling and persistent urban issues--especially problems related to housing, transportation, and poverty--Biles chronicles the attitudes and policy proposals of each president and his chief appointees. He shows that, although various presidents announced initiatives to benefit cities, only Jimmy Carter actually made a sustained effort to do so, while the Eisenhower administration stepped back from New Deal-Fair Deal engagement in urban affairs and LBJ's Great Society programs succeeded in reviving ailing cities--until money was diverted to the Vietnam war. Biles explains how Ronald Reagan's New Federalism reduced the federal government's presence in urban America with a vengeance and how Bill Clinton's Third Way for America's cities signaled yet another triumph for devolution and decentralization. He also critiques the Department of Housing and Urban Development, citing its ongoing inability to serve as a strong advocate for the cities within the federal government.Well organized, clearly written, and wide-ranging, Biles's impressive treatise provides a telling critique of how in the long run the government turned a blind eye to the fate of the cities. No other work offers such a useful narrative of presidential action or inaction and Washington political maneuvering with regard to urban issues. This comprehensive history will become the standard source for understanding the development and trajectory of federal policy making affecting America's urban centers.

Humanism and the Urban World: Leon Battista Alberti and the Renaissance City


Caspar Pearson - 2011
    Past scholars have generally characterized the Italian Renaissance architect and theorist as an enthusiast of the city who envisioned it as a rational, Renaissance ideal. Pearson argues, however, that Alberti's approach to urbanism was far more complex-that he was even "essentially hostile" to the city at times. Rather than proposing the "ideal" city, Pearson maintains, Alberti presented a variety of possible cities, each one different from another. This book explores the ways in which Alberti sought to remedy urban problems, tracing key themes that manifest in De re aedificatoria. Chapters address Alberti's consideration of the city's possible destruction and the city's capacity to provide order despite its intrinsic instability; his assessment of a variety of political solutions to that instability; his affinity for the countryside and discussions of the virtues of the active versus the contemplative life; and his theories of aesthetics and beauty, in particular the belief that beauty may affect the soul of an enemy and thus preserve buildings from attack.

International Handbook of Globalization and World Cities


Ben Derudder - 2011
    By treating cities at a global scale, it focuses on the 'stretching' of urban functions beyond specific place locations, without losing sight of the multiple divisions in contemporary world cities. The book firmly bases city networks in their historical context, critically discusses contemporary concepts and key empirical measures, and analyzes major issues relating to world city infrastructures, economies, governance and divisions. The variety of urban outcomes in contemporary globalization is explored through detailed case studies.Edited by leading scholars of the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) Research Network and written by over 60 experts in the field, the Handbook is a unique resource for students, researchers and academics in urban and globalization studies as well as for city professionals in planning and policy.Contributors: M. Acuto, A.S. Alderson, H. Ali, D. Bassens, H. Bathelt, J.V. Beaverstock, J. Beckfield, A. Boulton, S.D. Brunn, L.C.S. Budd, T. Bunnell, K. Datta, B. Derudder, A. De Vos, L. Devriendt, E. Engelen, Y. Evans, J. Faulconbridge, R. Grant, T.H. Grubesic, C. Grundy-Warr, S. Hall, C. Hamnett, J. Harrison, J. Herbert, M. Hoyler, P. Hubbard, R. Keil, A.D. King, R. Kloosterman, P. Knox, E. Korcelli-Olejniczak, K.P.Y. Lai, B. Lambregts, R.E. Lang, L. Lees, C. Lizieri, E.J. Malecki, T.C. Matisziw, J. May, C. McIlwaine, D. Murakami Wood, C. Nagel, P. Newman, C. Nicholas, J. Nijman, S. Oosterlynck, K. Pain, C. Parnreiter, A.C. Pratt, J. Rennie Short, J.D. Sidaway, D. Smith, R.G. Smith, M. Sparke, P.J. Taylor, A. Thornley, B. van der Knaap, H. van der Wusten, R. Wall, A. Watson, J. Wills, F. Witlox

The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City


Pauline Lipman - 2011
    Old paradigms are being eclipsed by global forces of privatization and markets and new articulations of race, class, and urban space. These factors and more set the stage for Pauline Lipman's insightful analysis of the relationship between education policy and the neoliberal economic, political, and ideological processes that are reshaping cities in the United States and around the globe.Using Chicago as a case study of the interconnectedness of neoliberal urban policies on housing, economic development, race, and education, Lipman explores larger implications for equity, justice, and the right to the city. She draws on scholarship in critical geography, urban sociology and anthropology, education policy, and critical analyses of race. Her synthesis of these lenses gives added weight to her critical appraisal and hope for the future, offering a significant contribution to current arguments about urban schooling and how we think about relations between neoliberal education reforms and the transformation of cities. By examining the cultural politics of why and how these relationships resonate with people's lived experience, Lipman pushes the analysis one step further toward a new educational and social paradigm rooted in radical political and economic democracy.

Ahmedabad: From Royal city to Megacity


Achyut Yagnik - 2011
    Soon after it was established, the royal city of Ahmedabad became the commercial and cultural capital of Gujarat. When the Mughal Empire annexed Gujarat in 1572, Ahmedabad lost its political pre-eminence, but continued to flourish as a great trading centre connecting the silk route with the spice route. Briefly under the Marathas in the eighteenth century, Ahmedabad experienced a dimming of its fortunes, but with the beginning of British control from the early nineteenth century the city reasserted its mercantile ethos, even as it began questioning age-old social hierarchies. The opening of the first textile mill in 1861 was a turning point and by the end of the century Ahmedabad was known as the Manchester of the East. When Gandhi returned to India from South Africa in 1915, looking for a place where he could establish 'an institution for the whole of India', it was Ahmedabad he chose. With the setting up of his Sabarmati Ashram, the great manufacturing centre also became a centre for new awakening. It became the political hub of India, radiating the message of freedom struggle based on truth and non-violence. After Independence, it emerged as one of the fastest-growing cities of India and in the 1960s Ahmedabadis pioneered institutions of higher education and research in new fields such as space sciences, management, design and architecture. Yet, through the centuries, Ahmedabad's prosperity has been punctuated by natural disasters and social discord, from famines and earthquakes to caste and religious violence. Ahmedabadis have tried to respond to these, trying to meld economic progress with a new culture of social harmony. Coinciding with the 600th anniversary of the founding of Ahmedabad, this broad brush history highlights socio-economic patterns that emphasize Indo-Islamic and Indo-European synthesis and continuity, bringing the focus back to the pluralistic heritage of this medieval city. Evocative profiles of Ahmedabadi merchants, industrialists, poets and saints along with descriptions and illustrations of the city's art and architecture bring alive the city and its citizens.