Title: America becomes urban: the development of U.S. cities & towns, 1780-1980 
Author: Monkkonen, Eric H 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: History | United States History | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: America's cities: celebrated by poets, courted by politicians, castigated by social reformers. In their numbers and complexity they challenge comprehension. Why is urban America the way it is? Eric Monkkonen offers a fresh approach to the myths and the history of US urban development, giving us an unexpected and welcome sense of our urban origins. His historically anchored vision of our cities places topics of finance, housing, social mobility, transportation, crime, planning, and growth into a perspective which explains the present in terms of the past and ofers a point from which to plan for the future.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Working-class heroes: protecting home, community, and nation in a Chicago neighborhood
Author: Kefalas, Maria
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Anthropology | Urban Studies | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies | Politics | Social Problems | Urban Studies | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Chicago's Southwest Side is one of the last remaining footholds for the city's white working class, a little-studied and little-understood segment of the American population. This book paints a nuanced and complex portrait of the firefighters, police officers, stay-at-home mothers, and office workers living in the stable working-class community known as Beltway. Building on the classic Chicago School of urban studies and incorporating new perspectives from cultural geography and sociology, Maria Kefalas considers the significance of home, community, and nation for Beltway residents.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Urban revolt: ethnic politics in the nineteenth-century Chicago labor movement 
Author: Hirsch, Eric L 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | United States History | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Urban Revolt is a careful, incisive reexamination of the most highly mobilized urban revolutionary force in American history - the late nineteenth-century Chicago labor movement. By documenting the importance of ethnic origins in accounting for political choice, Eric L. Hirsch completely reconceptualizes the dynamics of urban social movements.Hirsch links the industrialization of Chicago to the development and maintenance of an ethnically segmented labor market. Urbanization, he argues, fostered ethnic enclaves whose inhabitants were channeled into particular kinds of jobs and excluded from others. Hirsch then demonstrates the political implications of emergent ethnic identities and communities.In the late nineteenth century, Chicagoans of German background - denied economic power by Anglo-Americans' control of craft unions and excluded from political influence by Irish-dominated political machines - formulated radical critiques of the status quo and devised innovative political strategies. In contrast, the Irish revolutionary movement in Chicago targeted the oppressive British political system; Irish activists saw no reason to overthrow a Chicago polity that brought them political and economic upward mobility. Urban Revolt gives a new perspective on revolutionary mobilization by de-emphasizing the importance of class consciousness, social disorganization, and bureaucracy. In his original and provocative focus on the importance of ethnicity in accounting for political choice, Hirsch makes a valuable contribution to the study of social movements, race, and working-class politics.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: The Russian city between tradition and modernity, 1850-1900 
Author: Brower, Daniel R
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: The Russian City Between Tradition and Modernity provides a comprehensive history of urban development in European Russia during the last half of the nineteenth century. Using both statistical perspectives on urbanization and cultural representations of the city, Brower constructs a synthetic view of the remaking of urban Russia. He argues that the reformed municipalities succeeded in creating an embryonic civil society among the urban elite but failed to fashion a unified, orderly city. By the end of the century, the cities confronted social disorder of a magnitude that resembled latent civil war.Drawing on a wide range of archival and published sources, including census materials and reports from municipal leaders and tsarist officials, Brower offers a new approach to the social history of Russia. The author emphasizes the impact of the massive influx of migrants on the country's urban centers, whose presence dominated the social landscape of the city. He outlines the array of practices by which the migrant laborers adapted to urban living and stresses the cultural barriers that isolated them from the well-to-do urban population. Brower suggests that future scholarship should pay particular attention to the duality between the sweeping visions of social progress of the elite and the unique practices of the urban workforce. This contradiction, he argues, offers a key explanation for the social instability of imperial Russia in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: American urban architecture: catalysts in the design of cities 
Author: Attoe, Wayne
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Architecture | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Conceiving of urban design in terms of architectural actions and reactions, Attoe and Logan propose a theory of "catalytic architecture" better suited to specifically American circumstances than the largely European models developed in the last thirty years for the remaking of cities.After exploring instances of failed attempts to impose European visions on American cities, the authors examine urban design successes that illustrate the principles and goals of catalytic architecture. With a series of case studies they characterize urban design as a controlled evolution, one that must also be strategic, responding to existing elements and guiding those that follow. The authors argue that the failure of American cities to control and guide the energies released in urban development can be prevented by "design guidance". From their own combined experience as urban architects and scholars, they provide a taxonomy of methods to guide urban design toward higher standards and better results.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Livable cities?: urban struggles for livelihood and sustainability
Author: Evans, Peter B 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: American Studies | Environmental Studies | Social Problems | Public Policy | Political Theory | Pacific Rim Studies | Urban Studies | Latin American Studies | Urban Studies | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: The sprawling cities of the developing world are vibrant hubs of economic growth, but they are also increasingly ecologically unsustainable and, for ordinary citizens, increasingly unlivable. Pollution is rising, affordable housing is decreasing, and green space is shrinking. Since three-quarters of those joining the world's population during the next century will live in Third World cities, making these urban areas more livable is one of the key challenges of the twenty-first century. This book explores the linked issues of livelihood and ecological sustainability in major cities of the developing and transitional world. Livable Cities? identifies important strategies for collective solutions by showing how political alliances among local communities, nongovernmental organizations, and public agencies can help ordinary citizens live better lives.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: The urban wilderness: a history of the American city 
Author: Warner, Sam Bass 1928-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Urban Studies | American Studies | United States History | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: Sam Bass Warner, Jr., examines the historical roots of the major economic and social problems facing the U.S. in the 1990s. He documents the efforts, both failed and successful, to provide for basic human needs in the urban context, especially for decent housing and health care. For this edition, Wa . . . [more]
Similar Items

Title: The city in literature: an intellectual and cultural history
Author: Lehan, Richard Daniel 1930-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Literature | Urban Studies | Intellectual History | Geography
Publisher's Description: This sweeping literary encounter with the Western idea of the city moves from the early novel in England to the apocalyptic cityscapes of Thomas Pynchon. Along the way, Richard Lehan gathers a rich entourage that includes Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, Bram Stoker, Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Raymond Chandler. The European city is read against the decline of feudalism and the rise of empire and totalitarianism; the American city against the phenomenon of the wilderness, the frontier, and the rise of the megalopolis and the decentered, discontinuous city that followed. Throughout this book, Lehan pursues a dialectic of order and disorder, of cities seeking to impose their presence on the surrounding chaos. Rooted in Enlightenment yearnings for reason, his journey goes from east to west, from Europe to America. In the United States, the movement is also westward and terminates in Los Angeles, a kind of land's end of the imagination, in Lehan's words. He charts a narrative continuum full of constructs that "represent" a cycle of hope and despair, of historical optimism and pessimism.Lehan presents sharply etched portrayals of the correlation between rationalism and capitalism; of the rise of the city, the decline of the landed estate, and the formation of the gothic; and of the emergence of the city and the appearance of other genres such as detective narrative and fantasy literature. He also mines disciplines such as urban studies, architecture, economics, and philosophy, uncovering material that makes his study a lively read not only for those interested in literature, but for anyone intrigued by the meanings and mysteries of urban life.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: The city: Los Angeles and urban theory at the end of the twentieth century
Author: Scott, Allen John
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Urban Studies | Geography | Sociology | California and the West | American Studies
Publisher's Description: Los Angeles has grown from a scattered collection of towns and villages to one of the largest megacities in the world. In the process, it has inspired controversy among critics and scholars, as well as among its residents. Seeking original perspectives rather than consensus, the editors of The City have assembled a variety of essays examining the built environment and human dynamics of this extraordinary modern city, emphasizing the dramatic changes that have occurred since 1960. Together the essays - by experts in urban planning, architecture, geography, and sociology - create a new kind of urban analysis, one that is open to diversity but strongly committed to collective theoretical and practical understanding.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Paris as revolution: writing in the nineteenth-century city 
Author: Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Social Theory | European Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | European History | French Studies
Publisher's Description: In nineteenth-century Paris, passionate involvement with revolution turned the city into an engrossing object of cultural speculation. For writers caught between an explosive past and a bewildering future, revolution offered a virtuoso metaphor by which the city could be known and a vital principle through which it could be portrayed.In this engaging book, Priscilla Ferguson locates the originality and modernity of nineteenth-century French literature in the intersection of the city with revolution. A cultural geography, Paris as Revolution "reads" the nineteenth-century city not in literary works alone but across a broad spectrum of urban icons and narratives. Ferguson moves easily between literary and cultural history and between semiotic and sociological analysis to underscore the movement and change that fueled the powerful narratives defining the century, the city, and their literature. In her understanding and reconstruction of the guidebooks of Mercier, Hugo, Vallès, and others, alongside the novels of Flaubert, Hugo, Vallès, and Zola, Ferguson reveals that these works are themselves revolutionary performances, ones that challenged the modernizing city even as they transcribed its emergence.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Apartment stories: city and home in nineteenth-century Paris and London
Author: Marcus, Sharon 1966-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Literature | European History | Urban Studies | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In urban studies, the nineteenth century is the "age of great cities." In feminist studies, it is the era of the separate domestic sphere. But what of the city's homes? In the course of answering this question, Apartment Stories provides a singular and radically new framework for understanding the urban and the domestic. Turning to an element of the cityscape that is thoroughly familiar yet frequently overlooked, Sharon Marcus argues that the apartment house embodied the intersections of city and home, public and private, and masculine and feminine spheres.Moving deftly from novels to architectural treatises, legal debates, and popular urban observation, Marcus compares the representation of the apartment house in Paris and London. Along the way, she excavates the urban ghost tales that encoded Londoners' ambivalence about city dwellings; contends that Haussmannization enclosed Paris in a new regime of privacy; and locates a female counterpart to the flâneur and the omniscient realist narrator - the portière who supervised the apartment building.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Good with their hands: boxers, bluesmen, and other characters from the Rust Belt
Author: Rotella, Carlo 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | American Studies | Sociology | Literature | Labor Studies | Urban Studies | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: This eloquent, streetwise book is a paean to America's Rust Belt and a compelling exploration of four milieus caught up in a great transformation of city life. With loving attention to detail and a fine sense of historical context, Carlo Rotella explores women's boxing in Erie, Pennsylvania; Buddy Guy and the blues scene in Chicago; police work and crime stories in New York City, especially as they converged in the making of the movie The French Connection; and attempts at urban renewal in the classic mill city of Brockton, Massachusetts. Navigating through accrued layers of cultural, economic, and personal history, Rotella shows how stories of city life can be found in a boxing match, a guitar solo, a chase scene in a movie, or a landscape. The stories he tells dramatize the coming of the postindustrial era in places once defined by their factories, a sweeping set of changes that has remade the form and meaning of American urbanism. A native of the Rust Belt whose own life resonates with these stories, Rotella has gone to the home turfs of his characters, hanging out in boxing gyms and blues clubs, riding along with cops and moviemakers, discussing the future of Brockton with a visionary artist and a pitbull-fancying janitor who both plan to save the city's soul. These people make culture with their hands, and hands become an expressive metaphor for Rotella as he traces the links between their individual talents and the urban scenes in which they flourish. His writing elegantly connects what happens on the street to the larger story of urban transformation, especially the shift from a way of life that demanded individuals be "good with their hands" to one that depends on the intellectual and social skills fostered by formal education and service work. Strong feelings emerge in this book about what has been lost and gained in the long, slow aging-out of the industrial city. But Rotella's journey through the streets has its ultimate reward in discovering deep-rooted instances of what he calls "truth and beauty in the Rust Belt."   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Strangers at the gates: new immigrants in urban America
Author: Waldinger, Roger David
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Anthropology | Urban Studies | African American Studies | Asian American Studies | Latino Studies | Labor Studies | Social Problems | Immigration
Publisher's Description: Immigration is remaking the United States. In New York, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, and Chicago, the multiethnic society of tomorrow is already in place. Yet today's urban centers appear unlikely to provide newcomers with the same opportunities their predecessors found at the turn of the last century. Using the latest sources of information, this hard-hitting volume of original essays looks at the nexus between urban realities and immigrant destinies in these American cities. Strangers at the Gates tells the real story of immigrants' prospects for success today and delineates the conditions that will hinder or aid the newest Americans in their quest to get ahead. This book stresses the crucial importance of understanding that immigration today is fundamentally urban and the equally important fact that immigrants are now flocking to places where low-skilled workers--regardless of ethnic background--are in particular trouble. These two themes are at the heart of this book, which also covers a range of provocative topics, often with surprising findings. Among the essayists, Nelson Lim enters the controversy over whether and how immigrants affect the employment prospects for African Americans; Mark Ellis investigates whether low immigrant wages depress other workers' salaries; William A.V. Clark contends that immigrants seem to be experiencing downward mobility; and Min Zhou asserts that trends among second-generation immigrants are decidedly more optimistic. These well-integrated and well-organized essays sit squarely at the intersection of sociology and economics, and along the way they point out both the strengths and the weaknesses of these two disciplines in understanding immigration. Providing a theoretically and empirically comprehensive overview of the economic fate of immigrants in major American cities, this book will make a major contribution to debates over immigration and the American future.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Representation of places: reality and realism in city design
Author: Bosselmann, Peter
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Architecture | Architectural History | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: People live in cities and experience them firsthand, while urban designers explain cities conceptually. In Representation of Places Peter Bosselmann takes on the challenging question of how designers can communicate the changes they envision in order that "the rest of us" adequately understand how those changes will affect our lives. New modes of imaging technology - from two-dimensional maps, charts, and diagrams to computer models - allow professionals to explain their designs more clearly than ever before. Although architects and planners know how to read these representations, few outside the profession can interpret them, let alone understand what it would be like to walk along the streets such representations describe. Yet decisions on what gets built are significantly influenced by these very representations. A portion of Bosselmann's book is based on innovative experiments conducted at the University of California, Berkeley's Visual Simulation Laboratory. In a section titled "The City in the Laboratory," he discusses how visual simulation was applied to projects in New York City, San Francisco, and Toronto. The concerns that Bosselmann addresses have an impact on large segments of society, and lay readers as well as professionals will find much that is useful in his timely, accessibly written book.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Civic wars: democracy and public life in the American city during the nineteenth century
Author: Ryan, Mary P
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | United States History | Urban Studies | Gender Studies | Ethnic Studies
Publisher's Description: Mary P. Ryan traces the fate of public life and the emergence of ethnic, class, and gender conflict in the nineteenth-century city in this ambitious retelling of a key period of American political and social history. Basing her analysis on three quite different cities - New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco - Ryan illustrates how city spaces were used, understood, and fought over by a dazzling variety of social groups and political forces. She finds that the democratic exuberance America enjoyed in the 1820s and 1840s was irrevocably damaged by the Civil War. Civic life rebounded after the War but was, in Ryan's words, "less public, less democratic, and more visibly scarred by racial bigotry."Ryan's analysis is played out on three different levels - the spatial, the ceremonial, and the political. As she follows the decline of informal democracy from the age of Jackson to the heyday of industrial capitalism, she finds the roots of America's resilient democratic culture in the vigorous, often belligerent urban conflicts that found expression in the social movements, riots, celebrations, and other events that punctuated daily life in these urban centers. With its insightful comparisons, meticulous research, and graceful narrative, this study illustrates the ways in which American cities of the nineteenth century were as full of cultural differences and as fractured by social and economic changes as any metropolis today.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: L.A. city limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the present
Author: Sides, Josh 1972-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: History | African American Studies | Urban Studies | Californian and Western History | California and the West
Publisher's Description: In 1964 an Urban League survey ranked Los Angeles as the most desirable city for African Americans to live in. In 1965 the city burst into flames during one of the worst race riots in the nation's history. How the city came to such a pass - embodying both the best and worst of what urban America offered black migrants from the South - is the story told for the first time in this history of modern black Los Angeles. A clear-eyed and compelling look at black struggles for equality in L.A.'s neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces from the Great Depression to our day, L.A. City Limits critically refocuses the ongoing debate about the origins of America's racial and urban crisis. Challenging previous analysts' near-exclusive focus on northern "rust-belt" cities devastated by de-industrialization, Josh Sides asserts that the cities to which black southerners migrated profoundly affected how they fared. He shows how L.A.'s diverse racial composition, dispersive geography, and dynamic postwar economy often created opportunities - and limits - quite different from those encountered by blacks in the urban North.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: The promise of the city: space, identity, and politics in contemporary social thought 
Author: Tajbakhsh, Kian 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Urban Studies | Sociology | Popular Culture | Social Theory | Geography | Politics
Publisher's Description: The Promise of the City proposes a new theoretical framework for the study of cities and urban life. Finding the contemporary urban scene too complex to be captured by radical or conventional approaches, Kian Tajbakhsh offers a threefold, interdisciplinary approach linking agency, space, and structure. First, he says, urban identities cannot be understood through individualistic, communitarian, or class perspectives but rather through the shifting spectrum of cultural, political, and economic influences. Second, the layered, unfinished city spaces we inhabit and within which we create meaning are best represented not by the image of bounded physical spaces but rather by overlapping and shifting boundaries. And third, the macro forces shaping urban society include bureaucratic and governmental interventions not captured by a purely economic paradigm. Tajbakhsh examines these dimensions in the work of three major critical urban theorists of recent decades: Manuel Castells, David Harvey, and Ira Katznelson. He shows why the answers offered by Marxian urban theory to the questions of identity, space, and structure are unsatisfactory and why the perspectives of other intellectual traditions such as poststructuralism, feminism, Habermasian Critical Theory, and pragmatism can help us better understand the challenges facing contemporary cities.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Native place, city, and nation: regional networks and identities in Shanghai, 1853-1937 
Author: Goodman, Bryna 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: This book explores the role of native place associations in the development of modern Chinese urban society and the role of native-place identity in the development of urban nationalism. From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, sojourners from other provinces dominated the population of Shanghai and other expanding commercial Chinese cities. These immigrants formed native place associations beginning in the imperial period and persisting into the mid-twentieth century. Goodman examines the modernization of these associations and argues that under weak urban government, native place sentiment and organization flourished and had a profound effect on city life, social order and urban and national identity.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: City for sale: the transformation of San Francisco
Author: Hartman, Chester W
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Urban Studies | Californian and Western History | Politics | California and the West
Publisher's Description: San Francisco is perhaps the most exhilarating of all American cities--its beauty, cultural and political avant-gardism, and history are legendary, while its idiosyncrasies make front-page news. In this revised edition of his highly regarded study of San Francisco's economic and political development since the mid-1950s, Chester Hartman gives a detailed account of how the city has been transformed by the expansion--outward and upward--of its downtown. His story is fueled by a wide range of players and an astonishing array of events, from police storming the International Hotel to citizens forcing the midair termination of a freeway. Throughout, Hartman raises a troubling question: can San Francisco's unique qualities survive the changes that have altered the city's skyline, neighborhoods, and economy? Hartman was directly involved in many of the events he chronicles and thus had access to sources that might otherwise have been unavailable. A former activist with the National Housing Law Project, San Franciscans for Affordable Housing, and other neighborhood organizations, he explains how corporate San Francisco obtained the necessary cooperation of city and federal governments in undertaking massive redevelopment. He illustrates the rationale that produced BART, a subway system that serves upper-income suburbs but few of the city's poor neighborhoods, and cites the environmental effects of unrestrained highrise development, such as powerful wind tunnels and lack of sunshine. In describing the struggle to keep housing affordable in San Francisco and the seemingly intractable problem of homelessness, Hartman reveals the human face of the city's economic transformation.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Urban design downtown: poetics and politics of form
Author: Loukaitou-Sideris, Anastasia 1958-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Urban Studies | Economics and Business | Social Science | Architecture | Sociology
Publisher's Description: The corporate downtown, with its multitude of social dilemmas and contradictions, is the focus of this well-illustrated volume. How are downtown projects conceived, scripted, produced, packaged, and used, and how has all this changed during the twentieth century? The authors of Urban Design Downtown offer a critical appraisal of the emerging appearance of downtown urban form. They explore both the poetics of design and the politics and economics of development decisions.Following a historical review of the various phases of downtown transformation, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Tridib Banerjee turn to contemporary American downtowns. They examine the phenomenon of public-space privatization, arguing that corporate open spaces are the consumer-oriented result of policies that have promoted downtown renovation and restructuring but at the same time have neglected the cities' existing poverty-stricken cores. The book's case studies of individual West Coast downtown projects capture the essence of late twentieth-century urbanism. This analysis of downtown urban America, which offers extensive insight into the design and development process, will interest architects, city planners, developers, and urban designers everywhere.   [brief]
Similar Items