Title: The activist's handbook: a primer for the 1990s and beyond
Author: Shaw, Randy 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Politics | Sociology | California and the West | Urban  Studies | American Studies | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: The Activist's Handbook is a hard-hitting guide to winning social change in the 1990s. Randy Shaw, attorney and longtime activist for urban issues, shows how positive change can still be accomplished despite an increasingly grim political order, if activists employ the strategies set forth in this desperately needed primer.Inspiring "fear and loathing" in politicians, building diverse coalitions, and harnessing the media, the courts, and the electoral process to one's cause are only some of the key tactics Shaw advocates and explains. Central to all social-change activism, Shaw shows, is being proactive: rather than simply reacting to right-wing proposals, activists must develop an agenda and focus their resources on achieving it. The Activist's Handbook details the impact of specific strategies on campaigns across the country: battles over homelessness, the environment, AIDS policies, neighborhood preservation, and school reform among others. Though activist groups can have widely different aims, similar tactics are shown to produce success.Further, the book offers a sophisticated analysis of the American power structure by someone on the front lines. In showing how people can and must make a difference at both local and national levels, this is an indispensable guide not only for activists, but for everyone interested in the future of progressive politics in America.   [brief]
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Title: America at century's end 
Author: Wolfe, Alan 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: American Studies | Ethnic Studies | Sociology | Urban  Studies | Politics | Postcolonial Studies
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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]
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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]
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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]
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Title: Behind the label: inequality in the Los Angeles apparel industry
Author: Bonacich, Edna
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Sociology | Social Problems | California and the West | Labor Studies | Economics and Business | Urban  Studies | American Studies | Ethnic Studies
Publisher's Description: In a study crucial to our understanding of American social inequality, Edna Bonacich and Richard Appelbaum investigate the return of sweatshops to the apparel industry, especially in Los Angeles. The "new" sweatshops, they say, need to be understood in terms of the decline in the American welfare state and its strong unions and the rise in global and flexible production. Apparel manufacturers now have the incentive to move production to wherever low-wage labor can be found, while maintaining arm's-length contractual relations that protect them from responsibility. The flight of the industry has led to a huge rise in apparel imports to the United States and to a decline in employment. Los Angeles, however, remains a puzzling exception in that its industry employment has continued to grow, to the point where L.A. is the largest center of apparel production in the nation. Not only the availability of low-wage immigrant (often undocumented) workers but also the focus on moderately priced, fashion-sensitive women's wear makes this possible. Behind the Label examines the players in the L.A. apparel industry, including manufacturers, retailers, contractors, and workers, evaluating the maldistribution of wealth and power. The authors explore government and union efforts to eradicate sweatshops while limiting the flight to Mexico and elsewhere, and they conclude with a description of the growing antisweatshop movement. Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction Book of 2000   [brief]
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Title: Beyond the neon lights: everyday Shanghai in the early twentieth century
Author: Lu, Hanchao
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Sociology | China | Asian History | Urban  Studies | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: How did ordinary people live through the extraordinary changes that have swept across modern China? How did peasants transform themselves into urbanites? How did the citizens of Shanghai cope with the epic upheavals - revolution, war, and again revolution - that shook their lives? Even after decades of scholarship devoted to modern Chinese history, our understanding of the daily lives of the common people of China remains sketchy and incomplete. In this carefully researched study, Hanchao Lu weaves rich documentary data with ethnographic surveys and interviews to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life in China's largest and most complex city in the first half of this century.   [brief]
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Title: Buddha is hiding: refugees, citizenship, the new America
Author: Ong, Aihwa
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | American Studies | Asian American Studies | Gender Studies | Urban  Studies | Sociology | Immigration
Publisher's Description: Fleeing the murderous Pol Pot regime, Cambodian refugees arrive in America as at once the victims and the heroes of America's misadventures in Southeast Asia; and their encounters with American citizenship are contradictory as well. Service providers, bureaucrats, and employers exhort them to be self-reliant, individualistic, and free, even as the system and the culture constrain them within terms of ethnicity, race, and class. Buddha Is Hiding tells the story of Cambodian Americans experiencing American citizenship from the bottom-up. Based on extensive fieldwork in Oakland and San Francisco, the study puts a human face on how American institutions - of health, welfare, law, police, church, and industry - affect minority citizens as they negotiate American culture and re-interpret the American dream. In her earlier book, Flexible Citizenship, anthropologist Aihwa Ong wrote of elite Asians shuttling across the Pacific. This parallel study tells the very different story of "the other Asians" whose route takes them from refugee camps to California's inner-city and high-tech enclaves. In Buddha Is Hiding we see these refugees becoming new citizen-subjects through a dual process of being-made and self-making, balancing religious salvation and entrepreneurial values as they endure and undermine, absorb and deflect conflicting lessons about welfare, work, medicine, gender, parenting, and mass culture. Trying to hold on to the values of family and home culture, Cambodian Americans nonetheless often feel that "Buddha is hiding." Tracing the entangled paths of poor and rich Asians in the American nation, Ong raises new questions about the form and meaning of citizenship in an era of globalization.   [brief]
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Title: Busing and backlash: white against white in a California school district Lillian B. Rubin 
Author: Rubin, Lillian B
Published: University of California Press,  1973
Subjects: Sociology | Urban  Studies | American Studies | African American Studies
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Title: Caught in the middle: Korean merchants in America's multiethnic cities
Author: Min, Pyong Gap 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Sociology | Ethnic Studies | Urban  Studies | American Studies | California and the West | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: In this unflinching exploration of one of the most politically charged topics of our time, Pyong Gap Min investigates the racial dynamics that exist between Korean merchants, the African American community, and white society in general. Focusing on hostility toward Korean merchants in New York and Los Angeles, Min explains how the "middleman" economic role Koreans often occupy - between low-income, minority customers on the one hand and large corporate suppliers on the other - leads to conflicts with other groups. Further, Min shows how ethnic conflicts strengthen ties within Korean communities as Koreans organize to protect themselves and their businesses.Min scrutinizes the targeting of Korean businesses during the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the 1990 African American boycotts of Korean stores in Brooklyn. He explores Korean merchants' relationships with each other as well as with Latin American employees, Jewish suppliers and landlords, and government agencies. In each case, his nuanced analysis reveals how Korean communities respond to general scapegoating through collective action, political mobilization, and other strategies.Fluent in Korean, Min draws from previously unutilized sources, including Korean American newspapers and in-depth interviews with immigrants. His findings belie the media's sensationalistic coverage of African American-Korean conflicts. Instead, Caught in the Middle yields a sophisticated and clear-sighted understanding of the lives and challenges of immigrant merchants in America.   [brief]
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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]
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Title: The city as subject: Seki Hajime and the reinvention of modern Osaka
Author: Hanes, Jeffrey E 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | Japan | Asian History | Urban  Studies
Publisher's Description: In exploring the career of Seki Hajime (1873-1935), who served as mayor of Japan's second-largest city, Osaka, Jeffrey E. Hanes traces the roots of social progressivism in prewar Japan. Seki, trained as a political economist in the late 1890s, when Japan was focused single-mindedly on "increasing industrial production," distinguished himself early on as a people-centered, rather than a state-centered, national economist. After three years of advanced study in Europe at the turn of the century, during which he engaged Marxism and later steeped himself in the exciting new field of social economics, Seki was transformed into a progressive. The social reformism of Seki and others had its roots in a transnational fellowship of progressives who shared the belief that civilized nations should be able to forge a middle path between capitalism and socialism. Hanes's sweeping study permits us not only to weave social progressivism into the modern Japanese historical narrative but also to reconceive it as a truly transnational movement whose impact was felt across the Pacific as well as the Atlantic.   [brief]
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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]
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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]
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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]
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Title: Colonial subjects: Puerto Ricans in a global perspective
Author: Grosfoguel, Ramón
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | Latin American History | Postcolonial Studies | Urban  Studies | Immigration | Urban  Studies | Urban  Studies
Publisher's Description: Colonial Subjects is the first book to use a combination of world-system and postcolonial approaches to compare Puerto Rican migration with Caribbean migration to both the United States and Western Europe. Ramón Grosfoguel provides an alternative reading of the world-system approach to Puerto Rico's history, political economy, and urbanization processes. He offers a comprehensive and well-reasoned framework for understanding the position of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, the position of Puerto Ricans in the United States, and the position of colonial migrants compared to noncolonial migrants in the world system.   [brief]
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Title: The consumer revolution in urban China
Author: Davis, Deborah 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Sociology | China | Urban  Studies | Consumerism
Publisher's Description: After decades of egalitarian, restricted consumption, residents of China's cities are surrounded by a level of material comfort and commercial hype unimaginable just ten years ago. In this first in-depth treatment of the consumer revolution in China, fourteen leading scholars of Chinese culture and society explore the interpersonal consequences of rapid commercialization.In the early 1980s, Beijing's communist leadership advocated decollectivization, foreign trade, and private entrepreneurship to jump-start a stagnant economy, while explicitly rejecting any notion that economic reforms would promote political change. However, by the early 1990s the reforms in the marketplace not only produced double-digit growth but also enabled ordinary citizens to nurture dreams and social networks that challenged official discourse and conventions through millions of daily commercial transactions. Using participant observation, contributors to this book describe and analyze a wide range of these changing consumer practices: luxury housing, white wedding gowns, greeting cards, McDonald's, discos, premium cigarettes, bowling, and more.   [brief]
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Title: Crack in America: demon drugs and social justice
Author: Reinarman, Craig
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: American Studies | Sociology | Urban  Studies
Publisher's Description: Crack in America is the definitive book on crack cocaine. In reinterpreting the crack story, it offers new understandings of both drug addiction and drug prohibition. It shows how crack use arose in the face of growing unemployment, poverty, racism, and shrinking social services. It places crack in its historical context - as the latest in a long line of demonized drugs - and it examines the crack scare as a phenomenon in its own right. Most important, it uses crack and the crack scare as windows onto America's larger drug and drug policy problems.Written by a team of veteran drug researchers in medicine, law, and the social sciences, this book provides the most comprehensive, penetrating, and original analysis of the crack problem to date. It reviews the social pharmacology of crack and offers rich ethnographic case studies of crack binging, addiction, and sales. It explores crack's different impacts on whites, blacks, the middle class, and the poor, and explains why crack was always much less of a problem in other countries such as Canada, Australia, and The Netherlands. Crack in America helps readers understand why the United States has the most repressive, expensive, and yet least effective drug policy in the Western world. It discusses the ways politicians and the media generated the crack scare as the centerpiece of the War on Drugs. It catalogues the costs of the War on Drugs for civil liberties, situates crack use and sales in the political economy of the inner cities in the 1980s, and shows how the drug war led to the most massive wave of imprisonment in U.S. history. Finally, it explains why the failures of drug prohibition have led to the emergence of the harm reduction movement and other opposition forces that are changing the face of U.S. drug policy.   [brief]
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Title: Crossing the border: encounters between homeless people and outreach workers
Author: Rowe, Michael 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Sociology | Anthropology | Psychology | American Studies | Urban  Studies | Social Problems | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: The relationship between the homeless and the social service community marks a border where the disenfranchised meet the mainstream of society. Crossing the Border , the first book-length study of outreach work to the mentally ill homeless, uses ethnographic tools to examine encounters at this border. Michael Rowe provides a rich picture not only of a particular group of homeless people, but also of the complicated interactions between the marginalized and those who try to help them. As it examines both the dilemmas and opportunities of outreach work to the mentally ill homeless, this compelling study asks us to consider the broader questions about how we relate to the poor and other marginal persons at the border of society.The author's personal encounters with the homeless as Director of the New Haven ACCESS outreach project, his interviews with fifty homeless persons for this study, and his numerous interviews with outreach staff, provide an invaluable personal perspective. In this study, Rowe draws a collective portrait of the homeless whom he interviewed and observed, discusses the outreach workers in depth, examines transactions from the perspective of each party, and finally, places these encounters within the social and institutional contexts that shape them.Rowe's writing is accessible and punctuated with many vivid anecdotes. As Crossing the Border shows, encounters between the homeless and outreach workers represent a measure of where we will set our social boundaries and what standard of living we will accept for those who live at that boundary.   [brief]
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Title: Cultures in conflict: social movements and the state in Peru
Author: Stokes, Susan Carol
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Latin American Studies | Politics | Sociology | Anthropology | Urban  Studies
Publisher's Description: In this vivid ethnography set in contemporary Peru, Susan Stokes provides a compelling analysis of the making and unmaking of class consciousness among the urban poor. Her research strategy is multifaceted; through interviews, participant observation, and survey research she digs deeply into the popular culture of the social activists and shantytown residents she studies. The result is a penetrating look at how social movements evolve, how poor people construct independent political cultures, and how the ideological domination of oppressed classes can shatter.This work is a new and vital chapter in the growing literature on the formation of social movements. It chronicles the transformation of Peru's poor from a culture of deference and clientelism in the late 1960s to a population mobilized for radical political action today.   [brief]
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