Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America


Randy Shaw - 2018
    Randy Shaw tells the powerful stories of tenants, politicians, homeowner groups, developers, and activists in over a dozen cities impacted by the national housing crisis. From San Francisco to New York, Seattle to Denver, and Los Angeles to Austin, Generation Priced Out challenges progressive cities to reverse rising economic and racial inequality.Shaw exposes how boomer homeowners restrict millennials' access to housing in big cities, a generational divide that increasingly dominates city politics. Shaw also demonstrates that neighborhood gentrification is not inevitable and presents proven measures for cities to preserve and expand their working- and middle-class populations and achieve more equitable and inclusive outcomes. Generation Priced Out is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of urban America.

The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo


Saskia Sassen - 1991
    What distinguishes Sassen's theoretical framework is the emphasis on the formation of cross-border dynamics through which these cities and the growing number of other global cities begin to form strategic transnational networks. All the core data in this new edition have been updated, while the preface and epilogue discuss the relevant trends in globalization since the book originally came out in 1991.

Bienville's Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans


Richard Campanella - 2008
    "Bienville's Dilemma" presents sixty-eight articles on the historical geography of New Orleans, covering the formation and foundation of the city, its urbanization and population, its "humanization" into a place of distinction, the manipulation of its environment, its devastation by Hurricane Katrina, and its ongoing recovery.

Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America


Beryl Satter - 2009
    In this powerful book, Beryl Satter identifies the true causes of the city's black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods throughout the country: not, as some have argued, black pathology, the culture of poverty, or white flight, but a widespread and institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation. In Satter's riveting account of a city in crisis, unscrupulous lawyers, slumlords, and speculators are pitched against religious reformers, community organizers, and an impassioned attorney who launched a crusade against the profiteers—the author's father, Mark J. Satter. At the heart of the struggle stand the black migrants who, having left the South with its legacy of sharecropping, suddenly find themselves caught in a new kind of debt peonage. Satter shows the interlocking forces at work in their oppression: the discriminatory practices of the banking industry; the federal policies that created the country's shameful "dual housing market"; the economic anxieties that fueled white violence; and the tempting profits to be made by preying on the city's most vulnerable population. A monumental work of history, this tale of racism and real estate, politics and finance, will forever change our understanding of the forces that transformed urban America.

Race & Place: How Urban Geography Shapes the Journey to Reconciliation


David P. Leong - 2017
    We long for diverse, thriving neighborhoods and churches, yet racial injustices persist. Why? Because geographic structures and systems create barriers to reconciliation and prevent the flourishing of our communities. Race and Place reveals the profound ways in which these geographic forces and structures sustain the divisions among us. Urban missiologist David Leong, who resides in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the country, unpacks the systemic challenges that are rarely addressed in the conversation about racial justice. The evening news may deliver story after story that causes us to despair. But Leong envisions a future of belonging and hope in our streets, towns, cities, and churches. A discussion about race needs to go hand in hand with a discussion about place. This book is a welcome addition to a conversation that needs to include both.

Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City


Mary Pattillo - 2007
    But in the late 1980s, activists rose up to tackle the social problems that had plagued the area for decades. Black on the Block tells the remarkable story of how these residents laid the groundwork for a revitalized and self-consciously black neighborhood that continues to flourish today. But theirs is not a tale of easy consensus and political unity, and here Pattillo teases out the divergent class interests that have come to define black communities like North Kenwood–Oakland. She explores the often heated battles between haves and have-nots, home owners and apartment dwellers, and newcomers and old-timers as they clash over the social implications of gentrification. Along the way, Pattillo highlights the conflicted but crucial role that middle-class blacks play in transforming such districts as they negotiate between established centers of white economic and political power and the needs of their less fortunate black neighbors. “A century from now, when today's sociologists and journalists are dust and their books are too, those who want to understand what the hell happened to Chicago will be finding the answer in this one.”—Chicago Reader “To see how diversity creates strange and sometimes awkward bedfellows . . . turn to Mary Pattillo's Black on the Block.”—Boston Globe

The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream


Peter Calthorpe - 1995
    It's under construction, but it should be an interesting resource. Check out the traffic in the land of commuting. And, finally, enjoy Los Angeles: Revisiting the Four Ecologies.

The Grammar of Ornament


Owen Jones - 1856
    First published in 1856, The Grammar of Ornament remains a design classic. Its inspiration came from the pioneering architect and designer Owen Jones. His observations of decorative art on his extensive travels in Europe and the Near East were employed to improve the poor quality of Western design. His goal was to change the Victorian habit of mixing elements from a wide variety of sources and applying this mix indiscriminately to buildings, graphic design, and products. His resulting study is a comprehensive analysis of a remarkable collection of styles of ornamental design -- from Ancient Egypt and Greece to Imperial China and Renaissance Italy. With its sumptuous illustrations, its detailed survey of individual cultures, and its manifesto of "General Principles," it offered guidance to the designers of the future. In this new edition the designs are further illuminated by Iain Zaczek's perceptive commentaries. Hugely influential since its first publication, The Grammar of Ornament inspired great figures such as William Morris and Frank Lloyd Wright. Contemporary designers, entertained by the archaic charm of Jones's descriptions, are struck by the book's enduring relevance and its soundness regarding the essential principles of good design.

Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back


Jane Holtz Kay - 1997
    Jane Holtz Kay provides a history of the rapid spread of the automobile and documents the huge subsidies commanded by the highway lobby, to the detriment of once-efficient forms of mass transportation. Demonstrating that there are economic, political, architectural, and personal solutions to the problem, she shows that radical change is entirely possible. This book is essential reading for everyone interested in the history of our relationship with the car, and in the prospect of returning to a world of human mobility.

Louis Kahn: Essential Texts


Louis I. Kahn - 2003
    Professor Twombly's introduction and headnotes offer incisive commentary on the texts.

Visual Thinking


Rudolf Arnheim - 1969
    In this seminal work, Arnheim, author of The Dynamics of Architectural Form, Film as Art, Toward a Psychology of Art, and Art and Visual Perception, asserts that all thinking (not just thinking related to art) is basically perceptual in nature, and that the ancient dichotomy between seeing and thinking, between perceiving and reasoning, is false and misleading. An indispensable tool for students and for those interested in the arts.

Building Construction Book By Rangwala


Rangwala
    BUILDING CONSTRUCTION BY RANGWALA, 9789385039041

The City: A Global History


Joel Kotkin - 2005
    In this authoritative and engagingly written account, the acclaimed urbanist and bestselling author examines the evolution of urban life over the millennia and, in doing so, attempts to answer the age-old question: What makes a city great?Despite their infinite variety, all cities essentially serve three purposes: spiritual, political, and economic. Kotkin follows the progression of the city from the early religious centers of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China to the imperial centers of the Classical era, through the rise of the Islamic city and the European commercial capitals, ending with today's post-industrial suburban metropolis.Despite widespread optimistic claims that cities are "back in style," Kotkin warns that whatever their form, cities can thrive only if they remain sacred, safe, and busy-and this is true for both the increasingly urbanized developing world and the often self-possessed "global cities" of the West and East Asia.Looking at cities in the twenty-first century, Kotkin discusses the effects of developments such as shifting demographics and emerging technologies. He also considers the effects of terrorism-how the religious and cultural struggles of the present pose the greatest challenge to the urban future.Truly global in scope, The City is a timely narrative that will place Kotkin in the company of Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, and other preeminent urban scholars.

The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths


Rosalind E. Krauss - 1985
    Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.

Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places


Edward W. Soja - 1996
    In what may eventually be seen as one of the most important intellectual and political developments in the late twentieth century, scholars have begun to interpret space and the embracing spatiality of human life with the same critical insight and emphasis that has traditionally been given to time and history on the one hand, and social relations and society on the other. Thirdspace is both an enquiry into the origins and impact of the spatial turn and an attempt to expand the scope and practical relevance of how we think about space and such related concepts as place, location, landscape, architecture, environment, home, city, region, territory, and geography. The book's central argument is that spatial thinking, or what has been called the geographical or spatial imagination, has tended to be bicameral, or confined to two approaches. Spatiality is either seen as concrete material forms to be mapped, analyzed, and explained; or as mental constructs, ideas about and representations of space and its social significance. Edward Soja critically re-evaluates this dualism to create an alternative approach, one that comprehends both the material and mental dimensions of spatiality but also extends beyond them to new and different modes of spatial thinking.Thirdspace is composed as a sequence of intellectual and empirical journeys, beginning with a spatial biography of Henri Lefebvre and his adventurous conceptualization of social space as simultaneously perceived, conceived, and lived. The author draws on Lefebvre to describe a trialectics of spatiality that threads though all subsequent journeys, reappearing in many new forms in bell hooks evocative exploration of the margins as a space of radical openness; in post-modern spatial feminist interpretations of the interplay of race, class, and gender; in the postcolonial critique and the new cultural politics of difference and identity; in Michel Foucault's heterotopologies and trialectics of space, knowledge, and power; and in interpretative tours of the Citadel of downtown Los Angeles, the Exopolis of Orange County, and the Centrum of Amsterdam.