front cover of Raising Arizona's Dams
Raising Arizona's Dams
Daily Life, Danger, and Discrimination in the Dam Construction Camps of Central Arizona, 1890s-1940s
A. E. Rogge, D. Lorne McWatters, Melissa Keane, and Richard P. Emanuel
University of Arizona Press, 1995
This is the engrossing story of the unsung heroes who did the day-to-day work of building Arizona's dams, focusing on the lives of laborers and their families who created temporary construction communities during the building of seven major dams in central Arizona. The book focuses primarily on the 1903-1911 Roosevelt Dam camps and the 1926-1927 Camp Pleasant at Waddell Dam, although other camps dating from the 1890s through the 1940s are discussed as well. The book is liberally illustrated with historic photographs of the camps and the people who occupied them while building the dams.
[more]

front cover of Recast Your City
Recast Your City
How to Save Your Downtown with Small-Scale Manufacturing
Ilana Preuss
Island Press, 2021
Too many U.S. cities and towns have been focused on a model of economic development that relies on recruiting one big company (such as Amazon), a single industry (usually in technology), or pursuing other narrow or short-term fixes that are inequitable and unsustainable. Some cities and towns were changing, even before the historic retail collapse brought on by COVID-19. They started to shift to a new economic model that works with the community to invest in place in an inclusive and thoughtful way, with short-term wins that build momentum for long-term growth. A secret ingredient to this successful model is small-scale manufacturing.
 
In Recast Your City: How to Save Your Downtown with Small-Scale Manufacturing, community development expert Ilana Preuss explains how local leaders can revitalize their downtowns or neighborhood main streets by bringing in and supporting small-scale manufacturing. Small-scale manufacturing businesses help create thriving places, with local business ownership opportunities and well-paying jobs that other business types can’t fulfill.
 
Preuss draws from her experience working with local governments, large and small and illuminates her recommendations with real-world examples. She details her five-step method for recasting your city using small-scale manufacturing: (1) light the spark (assess what you can build on and establish goals); (2) find and connect (get out of your comfort zone and find connectors outside of your usual circles); (3) interview (talk to people and build trust); (4) analyze (look for patterns and gaps as well as what has not been said); and (5) act (identify short-term actions to help build long-term change). This work is difficult and sometimes uncomfortable, but necessary and critical for success. Preuss supports and inspires change by drawing from her work in cities from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Columbia, Missouri, to Fremont, California.
 
In Recast Your City, Preuss shows how communities across the country can build strong local businesses through small-scale manufacturing, reinvest in their downtowns, and create inclusive economic opportunity. Preuss provides tools that local leaders in government, business, and real estate as well as entrepreneurs and advocates in every community can use.
[more]

front cover of Regional and Metropolitan Growth and Decline in the US
Regional and Metropolitan Growth and Decline in the US
William H. Frey
Russell Sage Foundation, 1988
During the 1970s, several striking population shifts attracted widespread attention and colorful journalistic labels. Urban gentrification, the rural renaissance, the rise of the Sunbelt—these phenomena signaled major reversals in long-term patterns of population distribution. In Regional and Metropolitan Growth and Decline in the United States, authors Frey and Speare place such reversals in context by examining a rich array of census data. This comprehensive study describes new population distribution patterns, explores their consequences, and evaluates competing explanations of current trends. The authors also provide an in-depth look at the changing race, status, and household demographics of the nation's largest cities and discuss the broad societal forces precipitating such changes. Frey and Speare conclude that the 1970s represented a "transition decade" in the history of population distribution and that patterns now emerging do not suggest a return to the past. With impressive scope and detail, this volume offers an unmatched picture of regional growth and decline across the United States. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Census Series.
[more]

front cover of Remaking the Urban Social Contract
Remaking the Urban Social Contract
Health, Energy, and the Environment
Edited by Michael A. Pagano
University of Illinois Press, 2016
This new volume draws from provocative discussions on the urban social contract among policy makers, researchers, public intellectuals, and citizens at the 2015 UIC Urban Forum. Michael A. Pagano presents papers that emphasize political agreements, disagreements, challenges, and controversies on health, energy, and environmental policies. Authors explore the substantive and philosophical changes in the urban social contract and offer proposals for remaking it in the new century. Topics range from big-picture analyses to specifics covering areas like public services, the smart cities movement, and greening strategies.

Contributors: Alba Alexander, Megan Houston, Dennis R. Judd, Cynthia Klein-Banai, William C. Kling, Howard A. Learner, David A. McDonald, David C. Perry, Emily Stiehl, Anthony Townsend, Natalia Villamizar-Duarte, and Moira Zellner.

[more]

front cover of Renewal
Renewal
Liberal Protestants and the American City after World War II
Mark Wild
University of Chicago Press, 2019
In the decades following World War II, a movement of clergy and laity sought to restore liberal Protestantism to the center of American urban life. Chastened by their failure to avert war and the Holocaust, and troubled by missionaries’ complicity with colonial regimes, they redirected their energies back home.

Renewal explores the rise and fall of this movement, which began as an effort to restore the church’s standing but wound up as nothing less than an openhearted crusade to remake our nation’s cities. These campaigns reached beyond church walls to build or lend a hand to scores of organizations fighting for welfare, social justice, and community empowerment among the increasingly nonwhite urban working class. Church leaders extended their efforts far beyond traditional evangelicalism, often dovetailing with many of the contemporaneous social currents coursing through the nation, including black freedom movements and the War on Poverty.

Renewal illuminates the overlooked story of how religious institutions both shaped and were shaped by postwar urban America. 
[more]

front cover of The Return of the Neighborhood as an Urban Strategy
The Return of the Neighborhood as an Urban Strategy
Edited by Michael A. Pagano
University of Illinois Press, 2015
In this new volume, Michael A. Pagano curates essays focusing on the neighborhood's role in urban policy solutions. The papers emerged from dynamic discussions among policy makers, researchers, public intellectuals, and citizens at the 2014 UIC Urban Forum. As the writers show, the greater the city, the more important its neighborhoods and their distinctions.

The topics focus on sustainable capital and societal investments in people and firms at the neighborhood level. Proposed solutions cover a range of possibilities for enhancing the quality of life for individuals, households, and neighborhoods. These include everything from microenterprises to factories; from social spaces for collective and social action to private facilities; from affordable housing and safety to gated communities; and from neighborhood public education to cooperative, charter, and private schools.

Contributors: Andy Clarno, Teresa Córdova, Nilda Flores-González, Pedro A. Noguera, Alice O'Connor, Mary Pattillo, Janet Smith, Nik Theodore, Elizabeth S. Todd-Breland, Stephanie Truchan, and Rachel Weber.

[more]

front cover of Risky Cities
Risky Cities
The Physical and Fiscal Nature of Disaster Capitalism
Albert S. Fu
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Over half the world’s population lives in urban regions, and increasingly disasters are of great concern to city dwellers, policymakers, and builders. However, disaster risk is also of great interest to corporations, financiers, and investors. Risky Cities is a critical examination of global urban development, capitalism, and its relationship with environmental hazards. It is about how cities live and profit from the threat of sinkholes, garbage, and fire. Risky Cities is not simply about post-catastrophe profiteering. This book focuses on the way in which disaster capitalism has figured out ways to commodify environmental bads and manage risks. Notably, capitalist city-building results in the physical transformation of nature. This necessitates risk management strategies –such as insurance, environmental assessments, and technocratic mitigation plans. As such capitalists redistribute risk relying on short-term fixes to disaster risk rather than address long-term vulnerabilities. 
[more]

front cover of Rivers Lost, Rivers Regained
Rivers Lost, Rivers Regained
Rethinking City-River Relations
Martin Knoll
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
Many cities across the globe are rediscovering their rivers. After decades or even centuries of environmental decline and cultural neglect, waterfronts have been vamped up and become focal points of urban life again; hidden and covered streams have been daylighted while restoration projects have returned urban rivers in many places to a supposedly more natural state. This volume traces the complex and winding history of how cities have appropriated, lost, and regained their rivers. But rather than telling a linear story of progress, the chapters of this book highlight the ambivalence of these developments.
            The four sections in Rivers Lost, Rivers Regained discuss how cities have gained control and exerted power over rivers and waterways far upstream and downstream; how rivers and floodplains in cityscapes have been transformed by urbanization and industrialization; how urban rivers have been represented in cultural manifestations, such as novels and songs; and how more recent strategies work to redefine and recreate the place of the river within the urban setting.
            At the nexus between environmental, urban, and water histories, Rivers Lost, Rivers Regained points out how the urban-river relationship can serve as a prime vantage point to analyze fundamental issues of modern environmental attitudes and practices.
[more]

front cover of Roman Cities
Roman Cities
G. Michael Woloch
University of Wisconsin Press, 1984
Roman Cities combines G. Michael Woloch’s translation of Les villes romaines, Pierre Grimal’s noted French work on Roman city planning, archeology, and urban history, with Woloch’s additional notes and descriptions of the cities mentioned by Grimal, as well as other important Roman cities. The book provides a brief history and description of more than a hundred Roman cities, an extensive master bibliography, and a comprehensive glossary. Roman Cities will interest both scholars and students of Roman history and archeology, city planning, urban geography, and the social sciences. The glossary and bibliography make the book of value to specialists pursuing a particular topic and to students, history buffs, and amateur archaeologists seeking to broaden their understanding of the Roman city planning methods that are such an integral part of our modern urban heritage.

Roman Cities provides the first comprehensive study in English of major Roman cities, including an excellent coverage of the Roman legacy which was transmitted to medieval and modern trends in architecture and urban planning..
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Rural Development in China
Prospect and Retrospect
Hsiao-tung Fei
University of Chicago Press, 1989
This collection of essays written from 1947-1986 by Fei Hsiao-tung, China's most distinguished sociologist and anthropologist, presents a rich and representative sampling of the research that has characterized his long career. In 1936, Fei conducted field work in Kaixian'gong, a village in Jiangsu province in east China. This village became the subject of his now classic study Peasant Life in China, in which he argued that, because of China's huge population and the scarcity of cultivable land, household industries such as production of raw silk were vital to the peasants' economic survival. His conclusions, long rejected by China's policymakers, have recently been embraced by the government under the political leadership of Deng Xiaopeng.

Returning to Kaixian'gong in 1957 and again in the 1980s, Fei examined the changes that had occurred since his initial research. Three essays that resulted from these follow-up studies are included in this collection, providing a rare summary and analysis of developments in the village between 1936 and 1986. Also included here are four articles based on Fei's 1983-84 research in other areas of Jiangsu province. His explorations of the contrast between the wealth of southern Jiangsu and the long-standing poverty of the northern half of the province address key issues of public policy in China today. Useful to students of rural sociology as well as of Chinese history, politics, economics, and anthropology, this collection will provide an overview not only of developments in the small towns of China but also of Fei's thought.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter