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Urban Lowlands
A History of Neighborhoods, Poverty, and Planning
Steven T. Moga
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Interrogates the connections between a city’s physical landscape and the poverty and social problems that are often concentrated at its literal lowest points.

In Urban Lowlands, Steven T. Moga looks closely at the Harlem Flats in New York City, Black Bottom in Nashville, Swede Hollow in Saint Paul, and the Flats in Los Angeles, to interrogate the connections between a city’s actual landscape and the poverty and social problems that are often concentrated at its literal lowest points. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective on the history of US urban development from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Moga reveals patterns of inequitable land use, economic dispossession, and social discrimination against immigrants and minorities. In attending to the landscapes of neighborhoods typically considered slums, Moga shows how physical and policy-driven containment has shaped the lives of the urban poor, while wealth and access to resources have been historically concentrated in elevated areas—truly “the heights.” Moga’s innovative framework expands our understanding of how planning and economic segregation alike have molded the American city.
 
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Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era
Revitalization Politics in the Postindustrial City
Clarence N. Stone and Robert P. Stoker
University of Chicago Press, 2015
For decades, North American cities racked by deindustrialization and population loss have followed one primary path in their attempts at revitalization: a focus on economic growth in downtown and business areas. Neighborhoods, meanwhile, have often been left severely underserved. There are, however, signs of change. This collection of studies by a distinguished group of political scientists and urban planning scholars offers a rich analysis of the scope, potential, and ramifications of a shift still in progress. Focusing on neighborhoods in six cities—Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Toronto—the authors show how key players, including politicians and philanthropic organizations, are beginning to see economic growth and neighborhood improvement as complementary goals. The heads of universities and hospitals in central locations also find themselves facing newly defined realities, adding to the fluidity of a new political landscape even as structural inequalities exert a continuing influence.

While not denying the hurdles that community revitalization still faces, the contributors ultimately put forth a strong case that a more hospitable local milieu can be created for making neighborhood policy. In examining the course of experiences from an earlier period of redevelopment to the present postindustrial city, this book opens a window on a complex process of political change and possibility for reform.
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Urban Reform and Its Consequences
A Study in Representation
Susan Welch and Timothy Bledsoe
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Throughout this century, reformers have fought to eliminate party control of city politics. As a result, the majority of American cities today elect council members in at-large and nonpartisan elections. This result of the turn-of-the-century Progressive movement, which worked for election rules that eliminated the power of the urban machine and the working class on which it was based, is today still a subject of lively debate. For example, in the mid-1980s, regular Democrats in Chicago sought to institute a nonpartisan mayoral election. Supporters thought that reform would make the electoral process more democratic, while opponents charged that it was meant to dilute the voting powers of blacks. Clearly, the effect of urban reform remains an important issue for scholars and politicians alike.

Susan Welch and Timothy Bledsoe clarify a portion of the debate by investigating how election structures affect candidates and the nature of representation. They examine the different effects of district versus at-large elections and of partisan versus nonpartisan elections. Who gets elected? Are representatives' socioeconomic status and party affiliation related to election form? Are election structures related to how those who are elected approach their jobs? Do they see themselves as representatives concerned with the good of the city as a whole?

Urban Reform and Its Consequences reports an unprecedented wealth of data drawn from a sample of nearly 1,000 council members and communities with populations between 50,000 and 1 million across 42 states. The sample includes communities that use a variety of election procedures. This study is therefore the most comprehensive and accurate to date.

Welch and Bledsoe conclude that nonpartisan and at-large elections do give city councils a more middle- and upper-middle-class character and have changed the way representatives view their jobs. Reform measures have not, however, produced councils that are significantly more conservative or more prone to conflict. Overall, the authors conclude that partisan and district elections are more likely to represent the whole community and to make the council more accountable to the electorate.
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Urban Regimes and Strategies
Building Europe's Central Executive District in Brussels
Alex G. Papadopoulos
University of Chicago Press, 1996
If a city based its planning decisions on the needs of an international bureaucracy rather than on the traditional needs of local residents and businesses, how would that city change? How might it look?

In Brussels, Belgium—since 1957 home to the European Union—such change is taking place. Observing the change, Alexis G. Papadopoulos explores a new geographical concept, the Central Executive District. This urban form is significantly different from the Central Business District, its conventional counterpart. Drawing on game and rational choice theories, spatial analysis, and land economics, the author analyzes how the landscape of the city's center has evolved over the last three decades under the influence of successive coalitions of local and foreign elites. He describes how foreign diplomats, international corporate executives, and real-estate developers cooperate with one another to carry out major urban projects in the face of resistance from local neighborhood groups, conservationists, and political factions.

This study makes a substantial contribution to geography and urban studies both for its implications about the future of world cities like New York, London, and Paris and for its original application of the notion of cooperative regimes.
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Urban Sociology
Edited by Ernest W. Burgess and Donald J. Boque
University of Chicago Press, 1967

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The Urbanization of Opera
Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century
Anselm Gerhard
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Anselm Gerhard explores the origins of grand opéra, arguing that its aesthetic innovations (both musical and theatrical) reflected not bourgeois tastes, but changes in daily life and psychological outlook produced by the rapid urbanization of Paris. These larger urban and social concerns—crucial to our understanding of nineteenth-century opera—are brought to bear in fascinating discussions of eight operas composed by Rossini, Auber, Meyerbeer, Verdi, and Louise Bertin.

"An invaluable look at this fascinating genre."—George W. Loomis, Opera News
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Urbino
The Story of a Renaissance City
June Osborne
University of Chicago Press, 2003
During the Renaissance, the Italian city of Urbino rivaled Florence and Siena as a center of art, culture, and commerce. Chances are you've never heard of it—but you should have. Raphael was born there. Piero della Francesca painted his famous The Flagellation there. And the city's exquisite Ducal Palace, its twin towers piercing the sky, remains a striking monument to grace and power. Yet despite all its past glory and present charm, Urbino is practically unknown to tourists today.

With Urbino: The Story of a Renaissance City, art historian June Osborne brings to life not only the great city and its art but also its turbulent history and the intrigue surrounding its ruling family. First settled by the ancient Umbrians, Urbino reached its zenith during the fifteenth century under the rule of Duke Federico da Montefeltro and his son Guidobaldo. Federico may have been a usurper and a fierce, opportunistic warlord, but his lust for power was more than matched by his passion for great art. Indeed it was under his direct guidance that the magnificent Ducal Palace was built—its perfectly proportioned courtyard a wonder of early Renaissance architecture.

Today the Ducal Palace hosts the National Gallery of the Marches, one of the most important art galleries in Italy, featuring works by no lesser lights than Raphael, Uccello, Piero della Francesca, and Titian. Exploring such sites as the fourteenth-century Oratorio di San Giovanni Battista and the Gothic Church of San Domenico, Osborne captures not only the startling beauty of Urbino and the Apennine foothills but also the tumultuous legacy of Frederico and his son (and their many wives and courtiers).

With over a hundred lavish color photographs, many by renowned landscape photographer Joe Cornish, Urbino is the best—and the only—guide to this gem of the Italian Marches.

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The Uruk World System
The Dynamics of Expansion of Early Mesopotamian Civilization
Guillermo Algaze
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Archaeologists and historians have long been keenly interested in the emergence of early cities and states in the ancient Near East, particularly in the growth of early Sumerian civilization in the lowlands of Mesopotamia during the second half of the fourth millennium B.C. Most scholars have focused on the internal transformations attending this process, such as the development of new forms of spatial organization, socio-political relationships, and economic arrangements.

In The Uruk World System, Guillermo Algaze concentrates instead on the unprecedented and wide-ranging process of external expansion that coincided with the rapid initial crystallization of Mesopotamian civilization. He contends that the rise of early Sumerian polities cannot be understood without also taking into account developments in surrounding peripheral areas.

Algaze reviews an extensive body of archaeological evidence for cross-cultural exchange between the nascent city-states in the Mesopotamian lowlands and communities in immediately surrounding areas. He shows that at their very inception the more highly integrated lowland centers succeeded in establishing a variety of isolated, far-flung outposts in areas at the periphery of the Mesopotamian lowlands. Embedded in an alien hinterland characterized by demonstrably less complex societies, the outposts were commonly established at the apex of preexisting regional settlement hierarchies and invariably at focal nodes astride important trade routes. Algaze argues that these early colonial out-posts served as collection points for coveted peripheral resources acquired in exchange for core manufactures and that they reflect an inherently asymmetrical system of economic hegemony that extended far beyond areas under the direct political control of Sumerian polities in southern Mesopotamia. From this he concludes that economic exploitation of less developed peripheral areas was integral to the earliest development of civilization in the ancient Near East.
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The Uruk World System
The Dynamics of Expansion of Early Mesopotamian Civilization, Second Edition
Guillermo Algaze
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Most archaeologists and historians of the ancient Near East have focused on the internal transformations that led to the emergence of early cities and states. In The Uruk World System, Guillermo Algaze concentrates on the unprecedented and wide-ranging process of external expansion that coincided with the rapid initial crystallization of Mesopotamian civilization. In this extensive study, he contends that the rise of early Sumerian polities cannot be understood without also taking into account the developments in surrounding peripheral areas. This new edition includes a substantial new chapter that explores recent data and interpretations of the expansion of Uruk settlements across Syro-Mesopotamia.
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Us Against Them
Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion
Donald R. Kinder and Cindy D. Kam
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Ethnocentrism—our tendency to partition the human world into in-groups and out-groups—pervades societies around the world. Surprisingly, though, few scholars have explored its role in political life. Donald Kinder and Cindy Kam fill this gap with Us Against Them, their definitive explanation of how ethnocentrism shapes American public opinion.        

Arguing that humans are broadly predisposed to ethnocentrism, Kinder and Kam explore its impact on our attitudes toward an array of issues, including the war on terror, humanitarian assistance, immigration, the sanctity of marriage, and the reform of social programs. The authors ground their study in previous theories from a wide range of disciplines, establishing a new framework for understanding what ethnocentrism is and how it becomes politically consequential. They also marshal a vast trove of survey evidence to identify the conditions under which ethnocentrism shapes public opinion.  While ethnocentrism is widespread in the United States, the authors demonstrate that its political relevance depends on circumstance.  Exploring the implications of these findings for political knowledge, cosmopolitanism, and societies outside the United States, Kinder and Kam add a new dimension to our understanding of how democracy functions.

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Us and Them
The Science of Identity
David Berreby
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Democrat and Republican. Meat Eaters and Vegetarians. Black and White. As human beings we sort ourselves into groups. And once we identify ourselves as a member of a particular group—say, Red Sox fans—we tend to feel more comfortable with others of our own kind, rather than, say, Yankees fans. Yet we all belong to multiple groups at the same time—one might be a woman, a mother, an American, a violinist. How do we decide which identities matter and why they matter so much? And what makes us willing to die for, or to kill for, a religion, a nation, or a race?
            In this award-winning book, David Berreby describes how twenty-first-century science is addressing these age-old questions. Ably linking neuroscience, social psychology, anthropology, and other fields, Us and Them investigates humanity’s “tribal mind” and how this alters our thoughts, affects our health, and is manipulated for good and ill. From the medical effects of stress to the rhetoric of politics, our perceptions of group identity affect every part of our lives. Science, Berreby argues, shows how this part of human nature is both unexpectedly important and surprisingly misunderstood.
            Humans need our tribal sense—it tells us who we are, how we should behave, and links us to others as well as the past and future. Some condemn this instinct, while others celebrate it. Berreby offers in Us and Them a third alternative: how we can accept and understand our inescapable tribal mind.
“[A] brave book. . . . Berreby’s quest is to understand what he sees as a fundamental human urge to classify and identify with ‘human kinds.’”—Henry Gee, Scientific American
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The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual
The United States Army and Marine Corps
University of Chicago Press, 2007
When the U.S. military invaded Iraq, it  lacked a common understanding of the problems inherent in counterinsurgency campaigns. It had neither studied them, nor developed doctrine and tactics to deal with them. It is fair to say that in 2003, most Army officers knew more about the U.S. Civil War than they did about counterinsurgency.

The U.S. Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual was written to fill that void. The result of unprecedented collaboration among top U.S. military experts, scholars, and practitioners in the field, the manual espouses an approach to combat that emphasizes constant adaptation and learning, the importance of decentralized decision-making, the need to understand local politics and customs, and the key role of intelligence in winning the support of the population. The manual also emphasizes the paradoxical and often counterintuitive nature of counterinsurgency operations: sometimes the more you protect your forces, the less secure you are; sometimes the more force you use, the less effective it is; sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction. 

An new introduction by Sarah Sewall, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, places the manual in critical and historical perspective, explaining the significance and potential impact of this revolutionary challenge to conventional U.S. military doctrine.

An attempt by our military to redefine itself in the aftermath of 9/11 and the new world of international terrorism, The U.S. Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual will play a vital role in American military campaigns for years to come.
 
The University of Chicago Press will donate a portion of the proceeds from this book to the Fisher House Foundation, a private-public partnership that supports the families of America’s injured servicemen. To learn more about the Fisher House Foundation, visit www.fisherhouse.org.
 
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U.S. Engineering in a Global Economy
Edited by Richard B. Freeman and Hal Salzman
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Since the late 1950s, the engineering job market in the United States has been fraught with fears of a shortage of engineering skill and talent. U.S. Engineering in a Global Economy brings clarity to issues of supply and demand in this important market. Following a general overview of engineering-labor market trends, the volume examines the educational pathways of undergraduate engineers and their entry into the labor market, the impact of engineers working in firms on productivity and innovation, and different dimensions of the changing engineering labor market, from licensing to changes in demand and guest worker programs.

The volume provides insights on engineering education, practice, and careers that can inform educational institutions, funding agencies, and policy makers about the challenges facing the United States in developing its engineering workforce in the global economy.
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The U.S. National Income and Product Accounts
Selected Topics
Murray F. Foss
University of Chicago Press, 1983
The main topics treated in this conference volume are problems of deflation and quality change, the adequacy of the data used to construct the U.S. national accounts, and the broad theoretical evolution of the U.S. national income and product accounts. As these topics suggest, this volume represents a new stage in the study of national income and product accounts in that emphasis is placed on the information content of the system rather than on the structure of the accounts. This new emphasis is highlighted by the inclusion of a discussion among prominent users of the national accounts—Lawrence Klein, Otto Eckstein, Alan Greenspan, and Arthur Okun—that indicates the difficulties that confront those who utilize this information.
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The Use of Riches
J. I. M. Stewart
University of Chicago Press, 1983
Art is very much part of Rupert Craine's life. He is a banker and country squire, but also a connoisseur and collector of art. His beautiful and wealthy wife, Jill, is the widow of John Arnander, an artist of genius killed in Italy in World War II. The Craines live happily on a comfortable country estate with Jill's twelve- and eleven-year-old sons by Arnander and their own two young children. As Jill remarks, an almost Edwardian order reigns in the household. "Of course," she says, "none of it may last."

That afternoon she has received a cable from an old acquaintance, an Italian marchesa. It seems that Arnander fathered an illegitimate son whom the archesa has been looking after. She can no longer do so and wants Jill to come and arrange the boy's future. The Crains hasten to Italy, Rupert going along to the preliminary interview with the marchesa, as he is suspicous that there may not really be an Arnander child, that this is a ruse to extract money.

The truth revealed to him by the marchesa is shattering, and the quintessentially civilized Craines find themselves plunged into an increasingly bizarre drama.
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Useful Optics
Walter T. Welford
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Students and professionals alike have long felt the need of a modern source of practical advice on the use of optical tools in scientific research. Walter T. Welford's Useful Optics meets this need.

Welford offers a succinct review of principles basic to the construction and use of optics in physics. His lucid explanations and clear illustrations will particularly help those whose interests lie in other areas but who nevertheless must understand enough about optics to create the experimental apparatus necessary to their research. Consistently emphasizing applications and practical points of design, Welford covers a host of topics: mirrors and prisms, optical materials, aberration, the limits of image formation and resolution, illumination for image-forming systems, laser beams, interference and interferometry, detectors and light sources, holography, and more. The final chapter deals with putting together an experimental optics system.

Many areas of the physical sciences and engineering increasingly demand an appreciation of optics. Welford's Useful Optics will prove indispensable to any researcher trying to develop and use effective optical apparatus.

Walter T. Welford (1916-1990) was professor of physics at Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine from 1951 until his death. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Optical Society of America.
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Uselessness
A Novel
Eduardo Lalo
University of Chicago Press, 2017
The streets of Paris at night are pathways coursing with light and shadow, channels along which identity may be formed and lost, where the grand inflow of history, art, language, and thought—and of love—can both inspire and enfeeble. For the narrator of Eduardo Lalo’s Uselessness, it is a world long desired. But as this young aspiring writer discovers upon leaving his home in San Juan to study—to live and be reborn—in the city of his dreams, Paris’s twinned influences can rip you apart.

Lalo’s first novel, Uselessness is something of a bildungsroman of his own student days in Paris. But more than this, it is a literary précis of his oeuvre—of themes that obsess him still. Told in two parts, Uselessness first follows our narrator through his romantic and intellectual awakenings in Paris, where he elevates his adopted home over the moribund one he has left behind. But as he falls in and out of love he comes to realize that as a Puerto Rican, he will always be apart. Ending the greatest romance of his life—that with the city of Paris itself—he returns to San Juan. And in this new era of his life, he is forced to confront choices made, ambitions lost or unmet—to look upon lives not lived.

A tale of the travails of youthful romance and adult acceptance, of foreignness and isolation both at home and abroad, and of the stultifying power of the desire to belong—and to be moved—Uselessness is here rendered into English by the masterful translator Suzanne Jill Levine. For anyone who has been touched by the disquieting passion of Paris, Uselessness is a stirring saga.
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The Utility of Splendor
Ceremony, Social Life, and Architecture at the Court of Bavaria, 1600-1800
Samuel John Klingensmith
University of Chicago Press, 1993
The grand palaces and princely villas of the Bavarian Wittelsbach dynasty—Nymphenburg, Schleissheim, the vast Residenzschloss in Munich, and others—impress visitors with their great halls and intimate cabinets, dramatic stairhalls and seemingly endless rows of sumptuously decorated rooms. But these dazzling residences did not exist solely to delight the eye. In The Utility of Splendor, Samuel John Klingensmith discusses how, over the years, successive rulers reshaped the internal spaces of their residences to reflect changes in the elaborate ceremony that regulated daily life at court.

Drawing on a broad range of sources, including building documents, correspondence, diaries, and court regulations, Klingensmith investigates the intricacies of Bavarian court practice and shows that Versailles was only one among several influences on German palace planning. Klingensmith offers a cogent, detailed understanding of the relations between architectural spaces and the ceremonial, social, and private life that both required and used them. Handsomely illustrated with photographs and plans, The Utility of Splendor will appeal to anyone interested in how life was lived among the nobility during the last centuries of the old regime.

Samuel John Klingensmith (1949-1986) was assistant professor of art history at Tulane University.
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Utopia's Garden
French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution
E. C. Spary
University of Chicago Press, 2000
The royal Parisian botanical garden, the Jardin du Roi, was a jewel in the crown of the French Old Regime, praised by both rulers and scientific practitioners. Yet unlike many such institutions, the Jardin not only survived the French Revolution but by 1800 had become the world's leading public establishment of natural history: the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle.

E. C. Spary traces the scientific, administrative, and political strategies that enabled the foundation of the Muséum, arguing that agriculture and animal breeding rank alongside classification and collections in explaining why natural history was important for French rulers. But the Muséum's success was also a consequence of its employees' Revolutionary rhetoric: by displaying the natural order, they suggested, the institution could assist in fashioning a self-educating, self-policing Republican people. Natural history was presented as an indispensable source of national prosperity and individual virtue.

Spary's fascinating account opens a new chapter in the history of France, science, and the Enlightenment.
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