front cover of Denver In Slices
Denver In Slices
A Historical Guide to the City
Louisa Ward Arps
Ohio University Press, 1983

The Old West has been viewed from many perspectives, from the scornful to the uncritically romantic. But seldom has it been treated with the honest nostalgia of the wonderful accounts and pictures gathered in Denver in Slices.

Ohio University Press/Swallow Press is proud to reissue this Western classic, which includes a brief survey of all Denver history, some slices depicting the most fascinating places and characters. The City Ditch, Cherry Creek, River Front Park, the Denver Mint, the Tabors, the Windsor Hotel, the Baron of Montclair, Overland Park, Buffalo Bill, Elitch's Gardens, and Eugene Field—they're all here. Illustrating these stories is an array of nearly one hundred pictures of the people, buildings, and street scenes: a fascinating panorama of the gold rush camp that became the Rocky Mountain metropolis.

With a new foreword by renowned Denver historian Thomas J. Noel, this classic will once again help preserve Denver's lively past.

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Designing the City
A Guide For Advocates And Public Officials
Adele Fleet Bacow
Island Press, 1995

Written in a clear and engaging style, Designing the City is a practical manual for improving the way communities are planned, designed, and built. It presents a wealth of information on design and decision-making, including advice on how citizens and activists can make their voices heard, and numerous examples of effective strategies for working with all parties involved in neighborhood and community development. It highlights proven models and strategies to help communities:

  • establish unique and productive partnerships with public works and transportation departments
  • develop resources through grant programs
  • broaden expertise, perspective, and constituency
  • create new and enduring models for effective action
  • educate participants and consumers of the design and development process
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Digging in the City of Brotherly Love
Stories from Philadelphia Archaeology
Yamin, Rebecca
Temple University Press, 2023
Historic Philadelphia has long yielded archaeological treasures from its past. Excavations required by the National Historic Preservation Act have recovered pottery shards, pots, plates, coins, bones, and other artifacts relating to early life in the city. This updated edition of Digging in the City of Brotherly Love continues to use archaeology to learn about and understand people from the past.

Rebecca Yamin adds three new chapters that showcase several major discoveries from recent finds including unmarked early eighteenth-century burial grounds, one of which associated with the first African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, in the oldest part of the city; a nineteenth-century working-class neighborhood built along the path of what is now Route I-95 and was once home to Native American life; and the remains of two taverns found on the site of the current Museum of the American Revolution.

Yamin describes the research and state-of-the-art techniques used to study these exciting discoveries. In chronicling the value of looking into a city’s past, Digging in the City of Brotherly Love brings to life the people who lived in the early city and the people in the present who study them.
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Digital Futures and the City of Today
New Technologies and Physical Spaces
Edited by Glenda Amayo Caldwell, Carl Smith, and Edward Clift
Intellect Books, 2016
In the contemporary city, the physical infrastructure and sensorial experiences of two millennia are now interwoven within an invisible digital matrix. This matrix alters human perceptions of the city, informs our behavior, and increasingly influences the urban designs we ultimately inhabit. Digital Futures and the City of Today cuts through these issues to analyze the work of architects, designers, media specialists, and a growing number of community activists, laying out a multifaceted view of the complex integrated phenomenon of the contemporary city. Split into three relevant sections, the book interrogates the concept of the “smart” city, examines innovative digital projects from around the world, documents experimental visions for the future, and describes projects that engage local communities in the design process.
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Discourse and Destruction
The City of Philadelphia versus MOVE
Robin Wagner-Pacifici
University of Chicago Press, 1993
In the early 1980s the radical group MOVE settled into a rowhouse in a predominantly African-American neighborhood of west Philadelphia, beginning years of confrontations with neighbors and police over its anti-establishment ways and militant stance against all social and political institutions. On May 13, 1985, following a period of increased MOVE activity and threats by neighbors to take matters into their own hands, the city moved from bureaucratic involvement to violent intervention. Police bullhorned arrest warrants, hosed down the rowhouse, sprayed tear gas through its walls, and dropped explosives from a helicopter. By the end of the day, eleven MOVE members were dead, an entire block of the neighborhood was destroyed, and Mayor Wilson Goode was calling for an investigation.

How did this struggle between the city and MOVE go from memos and meetings to tear gas and bombs? And how does the mandate to defend public order become a destructive force? Sifting through the hearings that followed the deadly encounter, Robin Wagner-Pacifici reconstructs the conflict between MOVE and the city of Philadelphia. Against this richly nuanced account, in which the participants—from the mayor and the police officers to members of MOVE and their neighbors—offer opposing versions of their aims, assumptions, and strategies, Wagner-Pacifici develops a compelling analysis of the relation between definition and action, between language and violence.

Was MOVE simply a radical, black separatist group with an alternative way of life? Or was it a terrorist cult that held a neighborhood and politicians hostage to its offensive language and bizarre behavior? Wagner-Pacifici shows how competing definitions of MOVE led to different strategies for managing the conflict. In light of the shockingly similar, and even more deadly, 1993 Branch Davidian disaster in Waco, Texas, such an analysis becomes imperative. Indeed, for those who hope to understand—and, finally, to forestall—the moment when language and violence are inexorably drawn together, this book demands attention.
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Dubai, the City as Corporation
Ahmed Kanna
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Somewhere in the course of the late twentieth century, Dubai became more than itself. The city was, suddenly, a postmodern urban spectacle rising from the desert—precisely the glittering global consumer utopia imagined by Dubai’s rulers and merchant elite. In Dubai, the City as Corporation, Ahmed Kanna looks behind this seductive vision to reveal the role of cultural and political forces in shaping both the image and the reality of Dubai.

Exposing local struggles over power and meaning in the making and representation of Dubai, Kanna examines the core questions of what gets built and for whom. His work, unique in its view of the interconnectedness of cultural identity, the built environment, and politics, offers an instructive picture of how different factions—from local and non-Arab residents and expatriate South Asians to the cultural and economic elites of the city—have all participated in the creation and marketing of Dubai. The result is an unparalleled account of the ways in which the built environment shapes and is shaped by the experience of globalization and neoliberalism in a diverse, multinational city.
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