An unprecedented redistribution of jobs, population, and wealth is under way in America, and it is likely to accelerate in the years to come. America’s new economic map shows growing differences, not just between people but especially between communities. In this important and persuasive book, U.C. Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti provides a fresh perspective on the tectonic shifts that are reshaping America’s labor market—from globalization and income inequality to immigration and technological progress—and how these shifts are affecting our communities. Drawing on a wealth of stimulating new studies, Moretti uncovers what smart policies may be appropriate to address the social challenges that are arising. We’re used to thinking of the United States in dichotomous terms: red versus blue, black versus white, haves versus have-nots. But today there are three Americas. At one extreme are the brain hubs—cities like San Francisco, Boston, Austin, and Durham—with a well-educated labor force and a strong innovation sector. Their workers are among the most productive, creative, and best paid on the planet. At the other extreme are cities once dominated by traditional manufacturing, which are declining rapidly, losing jobs and residents. In the middle are a number of cities that could go either way. For the past thirty years, the three Americas have been growing apart at an accelerating rate. This divergence is one the most important recent developments in the United States and is causing growing geographic disparities is all other aspects of our lives, from health and longevity to family stability and political engagement. But the winners and losers aren’t necessarily who you’d expect. Moretti’s groundbreaking research shows that you don’t have to be a scientist or an engineer to thrive in one of these brain hubs. Among the beneficiaries are the workers who support the "idea-creators"—the carpenters, hair stylists, personal trainers, lawyers, doctors, teachers and the like. In fact, Moretti has shown that for every new innovation job in a city, five additional non-innovation jobs are created, and those workers earn higher salaries than their counterparts in other cities. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. As the global economy shifted from manufacturing to innovation, geography was supposed to matter less. But the pundits were wrong. A new map is being drawn—the inevitable result of deep-seated but rarely discussed economic forces. These trends are reshaping the very fabric of our society. Dealing with this split—supporting growth in the hubs while arresting the decline elsewhere—will be the challenge of the century, and　The New Geography of Jobs　lights the way.

    He identifies a “global style” of architecture—as practiced by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano—analogous to the international style of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies. More than any art, today’s global style conveys both the dreams and delusions of modernity. Foster demonstrates that a study of the “art-architecture complex” provides invaluable insight into broader social and economic trajectories in urgent need of analysis.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    In the winter of 1913, Grand Central Station was officially opened and immediately became one of the most beautiful and recognizable Manhattan landmarks. In this celebration of the one hundred year old terminal, Sam Roberts of The New York Times looks back at Grand Central's conception, amazing history, and the far-reaching cultural effects of the station that continues to amaze tourists and shuttle busy commuters. Along the way, Roberts will explore how the Manhattan transit hub truly foreshadowed the evolution of suburban expansion in the country, and fostered the nation's westward expansion and growth via the railroad. Featuring quirky anecdotes and behind-the-scenes information, this book will allow readers to peek into the secret and unseen areas of Grand Central -- from the tunnels, to the command center, to the hidden passageways. With stories about everything from the famous movies that have used Grand Central as a location to the celestial ceiling in the main lobby (including its stunning mistake) to the homeless denizens who reside in the building's catacombs, this is a fascinating and, exciting look at a true American institution.

    Drawing on his own experiences in Chicago, and on his relationships with other mayors around America, Emanuel provides dozens of examples to show how cities are improving education, infrastructure, job conditions, and environmental policy at a local level.Emanuel argues that cities are the most ancient political institutions, dating back thousands of years and have reemerged as the nation-states of our time. He makes clear how mayors are accountable to their voters to a greater degree than any other elected officials and illuminates how progressives and centrists alike can best accomplish their goals by focusing their energies on local politics. The Nation City maps out a new, energizing, and hopeful way forward.

    Appropriated, chewed up, mulled over, digested, contemplated, and contorted - gathering up along the way fashion, ecology, politics, and art - architectural concepts become veritable things unto themselves in the present tense. As astoundingly diverse as contemporary architecture is, most importantly it is a reflection of what's happening right now all over the world, in people's minds and in the global collective consciousness. The many faces of world architecture today make for a mind-expanding book. Here you'll find the most recent work of over 60 architects and firms, including familiar names such as O. Gehry, Meier, Ando, Foster, and Starck, as well as a host of newcomers sure to be the architecture-celebrities of future generations. Highlights include Jakob & MacFarlane's morphological Restaurant at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Diller & Scofidio's "Blur Building" proposal for the International Expo 2001 in Switzerland (an ovular structure suspended over a lake, encapsulated by a fine mist of water, creating the look of a cloud hovering over the lake), and Herzog & de Meuron's remarkable Tate Modern. Proving that contemporary architecture is not limited to physical building design, New York firm Asymptote's Guggenheim Virtual Museum is also included, a place where visitors can take a cyber-stroll through rooms that are designed to be "compelling spatial environments." Presented alphabetically by architect or firm, Architecture Now! can be used like a reference guide, with extensive photographs and illustrations, biographical and contact information for designers, and a careful selection of today's most influential architects.

    Atlanta has the highest income inequality in the entire country, blighted neighborhoods and hideous highways, suburban sprawl, and racial injustice. While many cities across America suffer similarly, nowhere but Atlanta have they so dangerously collided.The most promising plan for Atlanta's rebirth is the Beltline, a massive ring of defunct railways already being transformed into a series of parks, pathways, and streetcars. Cutting through forty neighborhoods ranging from affluent to impoverished, the Beltline will complete a twenty-two-mile loop encircling downtown: shifting the character of the city toward a more walkable, prosperous, and enlightened future. By embracing its physical limitations, by building infrastructure and public amenities, and by offering citizens a vision to fight for, Atlanta is hoping to redeem its past and save its future. City on the Verge reveals how cities across the country can transform themselves for the better.

    In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today.Newitz travels to all four sites and investigates the cutting-edge research in archaeology, revealing the mix of environmental changes and political turmoil that doomed these ancient settlements. Tracing the early development of urban planning, Newitz also introduces us to the often anonymous workers—slaves, women, immigrants, and manual laborers—who built these cities and created monuments that lasted millennia.Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate.

    In Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, Thomas J. Campanella unearths long-lost threads of the urban past, telling the rich history of the rise, fall, and reinvention of one of the world's most resurgent cities.Spanning centuries and neighborhoods, Brooklyn-born Campanella recounts the creation of places familiar and long forgotten, both built and never realized, bringing to life the individuals whose dreams, visions, rackets, and schemes forged the city we know today. He takes us through Brooklyn's history as homeland of the Leni Lenape and its transformation by Dutch colonists into a dense slaveholding region. We learn about English �migr� Deborah Moody, whose town of Gravesend was the first founded by a woman in America. We see how wanderlusting Yale dropout Frederick Law Olmsted used Prospect Park to anchor an open space system that was to reach back to Manhattan. And we witness Brooklyn's emergence as a playland of racetracks and amusement parks celebrated around the world.Campanella also describes Brooklyn's outsized failures, from Samuel Friede's bid to erect the world's tallest building to the long struggle to make Jamaica Bay the world's largest deepwater seaport, and the star-crossed urban renewal, public housing, and highway projects that battered the borough in the postwar era. Campanella reveals how this immigrant Promised Land drew millions, fell victim to its own social anxieties, and yet proved resilient enough to reawaken as a multicultural powerhouse and global symbol of urban vitality.

    Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation—the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments—that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north.As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post–World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods.The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. “The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book” (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein’s invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.

    His psychogeographic reportages, some of which have been featured in EYE WEEKLY and Spacing magazine, situate Toronto's buildings and streets in living, breathing detail, and tell us about the people who use them; the ways, intended or otherwise, that they are being used; and how they are evolving.Stroll celebrates Toronto's details – some subtle, others grand – at the speed of walking and, in so doing, helps us to better get to know its many neighbourhoods, taking us from well-known spots like the CN Tower and Pearson Airport to the overlooked corners of Scarborough and all the way to the end of the Leslie Street Spit in Lake Ontario.Stroll features thirty-two walks, a flâneur manifesto, a foreword by architecture critic John Bentley Mays, dozens of hand-drawn maps by Marlena Zuber and a full-colour fold-out orientation map of Toronto.

    This history begins in the slum clearances of the late nineteenth century and the aspirations of those who would build anew. John Boughton looks at how and why the state's duty to house its people decently became central to our politics. Traversing the UK, Boughton offers an architectural tour of some of the best and most remarkable of our housing estates, as well as many accounted ordinary; he asks us to understand better their complex story and to rethink our prejudices. His accounts include extraordinary planners and architects who wished to elevate working men and women through design and the politicians, high and low, who shaped their work, the competing ideologies which have promoted state housing and condemned it, the economics which has always constrained our housing ideals, the crisis wrought by Right to Buy, and the evolving controversies around regeneration. He shows how the loss of the dream of good housing for all is a danger for the whole of society - as was seen in the fire in Grenfell Tower.

    

    The countless individuals, both famous and unknown, who shaped Mexico' history come alive . . . they prosper, decline, and rise again before being extinguished by political and social upheavals beyond their control.

    Created in 1811 by a three-man commission featuring headstrong Founding Father Gouverneur Morris, the plan called for a dozen parallel avenues crossing at right angles with many dozens of parallel streets in an unbroken grid. Hills and valleys, streams and ponds, forests and swamps were invisible to the grid; so too were country villages, roads, farms, and estates and generations of property lines. All would disappear as the crosshatch fabric of the grid overspread the island: a heavy greatcoat on the land, the dense undergarment of the future city.No other grid in Western civilization was so large and uniform as the one ordained in 1811. Not without reason. When the grid plan was announced, New York was just under two hundred years old, an overgrown town at the southern tip of Manhattan, a notorious jumble of streets laid at the whim of landowners. To bring order beyond the chaos-and good real estate to market-the street planning commission came up with a monolithic grid for the rest of the island. Mannahatta-the native "island of hills"-became a place of rectangles, in thousands of blocks on the flattened landscape, and many more thousands of right-angled buildings rising in vertical mimicry.The Manhattan grid has been called "a disaster" of urban planning and "the most courageous act of prediction in Western civilization." However one feels about it, the most famous urban design of a living city defines its daily life. This is its story.

    He sets his sights on Detroit, the failed metropolis of abandoned buildings, widespread poverty, and rampant crime. Arriving with no job, no friends, and no money, Philp buys a ramshackle house for five hundred dollars in the east side neighborhood known as Poletown. The roomy Queen Anne he now owns is little more than a clapboard shell on a crumbling brick foundation, missing windows, heat, water, electricity, and a functional roof.A $500 House in Detroit is Philp’s raw and earnest account of rebuilding everything but the frame of his house, nail by nail and room by room. “Philp is a great storyteller…[and his] engrossing” (Booklist) tale is also of a young man finding his footing in the city, the country, and his own generation. We witness his concept of Detroit shift, expand, and evolve as his plan to save the city gives way to a life forged from political meaning, personal connection, and collective purpose. As he assimilates into the community of Detroiters around him, Philp guides readers through the city’s vibrant history and engages in urgent conversations about gentrification, racial tensions, and class warfare.Part social history, part brash generational statement, part comeback story, A $500 House in Detroit “shines [in its depiction of] the ‘radical neighborliness’ of ordinary people in desperate circumstances” (Publishers Weekly). This is an unforgettable, intimate account of the tentative revival of an American city and a glimpse at a new way forward for generations to come.