An investigation of the practice of “commoning” in urban housing and its necessity for challenging economic injustice in our rapidly gentrifying cities
Provoked by mass evictions and the onset of gentrification in the 1970s, tenants in Washington, D.C., began forming cooperative organizations to collectively purchase and manage their apartment buildings. These tenants were creating a commons, taking a resource—housing—that had been used to extract profit from them and reshaping it as a resource that was collectively owned by them.
In Carving Out the Commons, Amanda Huron theorizes the practice of urban “commoning” through a close investigation of the city’s limited-equity housing cooperatives. Drawing on feminist and anticapitalist perspectives, Huron asks whether a commons can work in a city where land and other resources are scarce and how strangers who may not share a past or future come together to create and maintain commonly held spaces in the midst of capitalism. Arguing against the romanticization of the commons, she instead positions the urban commons as a pragmatic practice. Through the practice of commoning, she contends, we can learn to build communities to challenge capitalism’s totalizing claims over life.
Follow along and encounter some of Chicago’s most infamous citizens--the loathed Traction Baron, high-speed “scorchers,” and peddlers of “swill milk.” Learn about the perils of payday, the lunchtime problems of women, the lure of dime museums, and the fatal attraction of Chicago’s “cruelest place.” Against this bleak backdrop emerged the innovators and institutions that made Chicago the vibrant city it is today. The superbly textured narrative is enhanced by eighty-six historic photographs and illustrations.
Through close attention to everyday lives and narratives and with a particular focus on gender, market, and spatial practices, this collection stresses that, in the case of China, rural life and the impact of socialism must be considered in order to fully comprehend the urban. Individual essays note the impact of legal barriers to geographic mobility in China, the proliferation of different urban centers, the different distribution of resources among various regions, and the pervasive appeal of the urban, both in terms of living in cities and in acquiring products and conventions signaling urbanity. Others focus on the direct sales industry, the Chinese rock music market, the discursive production of femininity and motherhood in urban hospitals, and the transformations in access to healthcare.
China Urban will interest anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and those studying urban planning, China, East Asia, and globalization.
Contributors. Tad Ballew, Susan Brownell, Nancy N. Chen, Constance D. Clark, Robert Efird, Suzanne Z. Gottschang, Ellen Hertz, Lisa Hoffman, Sandra Hyde, Lyn Jeffery, Lida Junghans, Louisa Schein, Li Zhang
Contributors. Arjun Appadurai, Etienne Balibar, Thomas Bender, Teresa P. R. Caldeira, Mamadou Diouf, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, James Holston, Marco Jacquemet, Christopher Kamrath, Cristiano Mascaro, Saskia Sassen, Michael Watts, Michel Wieviorka
While the view that only states act as global actors is conventional, significant diplomatic and cross-cultural activity is taking place in cities today. Economic growth and fiscal experiments all occur in urban contexts. Political reforms, social innovation, and protests and revolutions generate in cities. Criminal activities, terrorist actions, counterinsurgency, missile attacks (indeed, atomic bombs), and wars are centered in big cities. They are sources of global pollution as well as of environmental transformations such as urban gardening. Knowledge production, big data collection, and tech innovation all spur from intense interaction in cities. They are the meeting points between different cultures, religions, and identities.
These increasingly international cities develop twinning networks and projects, share information, sign cooperation agreements, contribute to the drafting of national and international policies, provide development aid, promote assistance to refugees, and do territorial marketing through decentralized city-city or district-district cooperation. Cities do what “municipalities” used to do many centuries ago: they cooperate but also enter into intense competitive dynamics. To understand current sociopolitical dynamics on a planetary level, we need to have two mental maps in mind: the state-centered map and the nonstate centered map. We must take into account the existence of a complex diplomatic regime based on different overlapping levels—the urban and the state.
This introductory but innovative textbook on the economics of cities is aimed at students of urban and regional policy as well as of undergraduate economics. It deals with standard topics, including automobiles, mass transit, pollution, housing, and education but it also discusses non-standard topics such as segregation, water supply, sewers, garbage, fire prevention, housing codes, homelessness, crime, illicit drugs, and economic development.
Its methods of analysis are primarily verbal, geometric, and arithmetic. The author achieves coherence by showing how the analysis of various topics reinforces one another. Thus, buses can tell us something about schools and optimal tolls about land prices. Brendan O'Flaherty looks at almost everything through the lens of Pareto optimality and potential Pareto optimality--how policies affect people and their well-being, not abstract entities such as cities or the economy or growth or the environment. Such traditionalism leads to radical questions, however: Should cities have police and fire departments? Should tax preferences for home ownership be repealed? Should public schools charge for their services? O'Flaherty also gives serious consideration to such heterodox policies as pay-at-the-pump auto insurance, curb rights for buses, land taxes, marginal cost water pricing, and sidewalk zoning.
Combining insights from urban studies, cultural geography, and urban sociology with extensive research in South Africa, Murray reflects on the implications of Johannesburg’s dual character as a city of fortified enclaves that proudly displays the ostentatious symbols of global integration and the celebrated “enterprise culture” of neoliberal design, and as the “miasmal city” composed of residual, peripheral, and stigmatized zones characterized by signs of a new kind of marginality. He suggests that the “global cities” paradigm is inadequate to understanding the historical specificity of cities in the Global South, including the colonial mining town turned postcolonial megacity of Johannesburg.
Social scientists have long argued over the links between crime and place. The authors of Communities and Crime provide an intellectual history that traces how varying images of community have evolved over time and influenced criminological thinking and criminal justice policy.
The authors outline the major ideas that have shaped the development of theory, research, and policy in the area of communities and crime. Each chapter examines the problem of the community through a defining critical or theoretical lens: the community as social disorganization; as a system of associations; as a symptom of larger structural forces; as a result of criminal subcultures; as a broken window; as crime opportunity; and as a site of resilience.
Focusing on these changing images of community, the empirical adequacy of these images, and how they have resulted in concrete programs to reduce crime, Communities and Crime theorizes about and reflects upon why some neighborhoods produce so much crime. The result is a tour of the dominant theories of place in social science today.
Crime in the U.S. and the institutions for its control are deeply embedded in and shaped by history. The historical origins have often become invisible, and their recovery difficult, but any understanding of the contemporary situation requires historical context. For over twenty-five years Eric H. Monkkonen has worked on some of the puzzles and problems in recovering the history of crime and police.
Much of his work has appeared in articles, often in specialized journals or not in English, which this book collects for the first time. In addition to Monkkonen’s major published articles, this volume includes several new ones. The topics embrace violence, public disorder, policing, popular culture, and contrasts between the U.S. and Europe. Some articles illuminate special methodological and source issues that challenge historians of criminal justice. As well as dealing with serious crime, this book includes several articles on specifically urban problems and solutions associated with disorder, crime, and poverty.
In contrast to the more technical articles, several chapters, which originally appeared as op-ed pieces, show how historical understanding can help address current policy issues in crime and crime control. All too often, current policy debates occur without proper historical background. As a result, old ideas that have been tried and rejected are re-introduced, or new and sometimes simple ideas are ignored.
Who really benefits from urban revival? Cities, from trendy coastal areas to the nation’s heartland, are seeing levels of growth beyond the wildest visions of only a few decades ago. But vast areas in the same cities house thousands of people living in poverty who see little or no new hope or opportunity. Even as cities revive, they are becoming more unequal and more segregated. What does this mean for these cities—and the people who live in them?
In The Divided City, urban practitioner and scholar Alan Mallach shows us what has happened over the past 15 to 20 years in industrial cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, and Baltimore, as they have undergone unprecedented, unexpected revival. He draws from his decades of experience working in America’s cities, and pulls in insightful research and data, to spotlight these changes while placing them in their larger economic, social, and political context. Mallach explores the pervasive significance of race in American cities and looks closely at the successes and failures of city governments, nonprofit entities, and citizens as they have tried to address the challenges of change.
The Divided City offers strategies to foster greater equality and opportunity. Mallach makes a compelling case that these strategies must be local in addition to being concrete and focusing on people’s needs—education, jobs, housing and quality of life. Change, he argues, will come city by city, not through national plans or utopian schemes.
This is the first book to provide a comprehensive, grounded picture of the transformation of America’s older industrial cities. It is neither a dystopian narrative nor a one-sided "the cities are back" story, but a balanced picture rooted in the nitty-gritty reality of these cities. The Divided City is imperative for anyone who cares about cities and who wants to understand how to make today’s urban revival work for everyone.
Environmental Activism and the Urban Crisis focuses on the wave of environmental activism and grassroots movements that swept through America's older, industrial cities during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Robert Gioielli offers incisive case studies of Baltimore, St. Louis, and Chicago to show how urban activism developed as an impassioned response to a host of racial, social, and political conflicts. As deindustrialization, urban renewal, and suburbanization caused the decline of the urban environment, residents--primarily African Americans and working-class whites--organized to protect their families and communities from health threats and environmental destruction.
Gioielli examines various groups' activism in response to specific environmental problems caused by the urban crisis in each city. In doing so, he forms concrete connections between environmentalism, the African American freedom struggle, and various urban social movements such as highway protests in Baltimore and air pollution activism in Chicago. Eventually, the efforts of these activists paved the way for the emergence of a new movement-environmental justice.
A timely new look at coexisting without assimilating in multicultural cities
If city life is a “being together of strangers,” what forms of being together should we strive for in cities with ethnic and racial diversity? Everyday Equalities seeks evidence of progressive political alternatives to racialized inequality that are emerging from everyday encounters in Los Angeles, Melbourne, Sydney, and Toronto—settler colonial cities that, established through efforts to dispossess and eliminate indigenous societies, have been destinations for waves of immigrants from across the globe ever since.
Everyday Equalities finds such alternatives being developed as people encounter one another in the process of making a home, earning a living, moving around the city, and forming collective actions or communities. Here four leading scholars in critical urban geography come together to deliver a powerful and cohesive message about the meaning of equality in contemporary cities. Drawing on both theoretical reflection and urban ethnographic research, they offer the formulation “being together in difference as equals” as a normative frame to reimagine the meaning and pursuit of equality in today’s urban multicultures.
As the examples in Everyday Equalities indicate, much emotional labor, combined with a willingness to learn from each other, negotiate across differences, and agitate for change goes into constructing environments that foster being together in difference as equals. Importantly, the authors argue, a commitment to equality is not only a hope for a future city but also a way of being together in the present.
Drawing on his nearly fifteen years of work in African cities—as an activist, teacher, development worker, researcher, and advisor to ngos and local governments—Simone provides a series of case studies illuminating the provisional networks through which most of Africa’s urban dwellers procure basic goods and services. He examines informal economies and social networks in Pikine, a large suburb of Dakar, Senegal; in Winterveld, a neighborhood on the edge of Pretoria, South Africa; in Douala, Cameroon; and among Africans seeking work in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He contextualizes these particular cases through an analysis of the broad social, economic, and historical conditions that created present-day urban Africa. For the City Yet to Come is a powerful argument that any serious attempt to reinvent African urban centers must acknowledge the particular history of these cities and incorporate the local knowledge reflected in already existing informal urban economic and social systems.
Every place has its quirky attributes, cultural reputation, and distinctive flair. But when we travel across America, do we also experience distinct gender norms and expectations? In his groundbreaking Gendered Places, William Scarborough examines metropolitan commuting zones to see how each region’s local culture reflects gender roles and gender equity. He uses surveys and social media data to measure multiple dimensions of gender norms, including expectations toward women in leadership, attitudes toward working mothers, as well as the division of household labor.
Gendered Places reveals that different locations, even within the same region of the country, such as Milwaukee and Madison Wisconsin, have distinct gender norms and highly influential cultural environments. Scarboroughshows how these local norms shape the attitudes and behaviors of residents with implications on patterns of inequality such as the gender wage gap. His findings offer valuable insight for community leaders and organizers making efforts to promote equality in their region.
Scarboroughrecognizes local culture as not value-neutral, but highly crucial to the gender structure that perpetuates, or challenges, gender inequality. Gendered Places questions how these gender norms are sustained and their social consequences.
Today, we take for granted the wisdom of renovating old factory buildings into malls or condos, of making once decaying waterfronts into vibrant public spaces, of protecting historic buildings under landmark laws, and of building public housing on a human scale rather than as high-rises. In contemporary cities, it is now common for community groups to plant gardens in empty lots and to buy abandoned apartment buildings from the city for a dollar and fix them up.
But these and other urban planning policies and practices have not always been accepted. Before they became widespread, they were the visionary ideas of the writer and urban commentator Jane Jacobs. Best known in the United States for her path-breaking efforts to preserve the character of Greenwich Village, Jacobs is the author of the classic 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, one of the most influential works ever published in urban studies. The architectural critic Herbert Muschamp wrote in the New York Times that its publication “was one of twentieth-century architecture’s most traumatic events. Its impact is still felt in cities across the land.”
In this analysis of Jane Jacobs’s ideas and work, Alice Sparberg Alexiou tells the remarkable story of a woman who without any formal training in planning became a prominent spokesperson for sensible urban change. Besides writing the seminal book about contemporary cities, Jacobs organized successful community battles in New York against powerful interests. She resisted urban renewal in the West Village in the 1960s, helped defeat the Lower Manhattan Expressway, advocated the pleasures of street life that she called “sidewalk ballet,” and opposed the original Twin Towers plans. She was also active in the anti–Vietnam War movement, which eventually led her to move to Canada. There she continued her grass-roots activism, including helping to prevent the construction of an expressway that would have cut through several neighborhoods in Toronto.
Based on a rich array of interviews and primary source material, this book brings long-overdue attention to Jacobs’s far-reaching influence as an original thinker and effective activist.
The volume’s essays include an investigation of representation and self-stylization in the city, an ethnographic examination of friction zones and practices of social reproduction in inner-city Johannesburg, and a discussion of the economic and literary relationship between Johannesburg and Maputo, Mozambique’s capital. One contributor considers how Johannesburg’s cosmopolitan sociability enabled the anticolonial projects of Mohandas Ghandi and Nelson Mandela. Journalists, artists, architects, writers, and scholars bring contemporary Johannesburg to life in ten short pieces, including reflections on music and megamalls, nightlife, built spaces, and life for foreigners in the city.
Contributors: Arjun Appadurai, Carol A. Breckenridge, Lindsay Bremner, David Bunn, Fred de Vries, Nsizwa Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Stefan Helgesson, Julia Hornberger, Jonathan Hyslop, Grace Khunou, Frédéric Le Marcis, Xavier Livermon, John Matshikiza, Achille Mbembe, Robert Muponde, Sarah Nuttall, Tom Odhiambo, Achal Prabhala, AbdouMaliq Simone
Today’s American cities and suburbs are the sites of “thick injustice”—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.
Identifying these often invisible and intransigent problems, this volume addresses foundational questions about what justice requires in the contemporary metropolis. Essays focus on inequality within and among cities and suburbs; articulate principles for planning, redevelopment, and urban political leadership; and analyze the connection between metropolitan justice and institutional design. In a world that is progressively more urbanized, and yet no clearer on issues of fairness and equality, this book points the way to a metropolis in which social justice figures prominently in any definition of success.
Contributors: Susan S. Fainstein, Harvard U; Richard Thompson Ford, Stanford U; Gerald Frug, Harvard U; Loren King, Wilfrid Laurier U; Margaret Kohn, U of Toronto; Stephen Macedo, Princeton U; Douglas W. Rae, Yale U; Clarence N. Stone, George Washington U; Margaret Weir, U of California, Berkeley; Thad Williamson, U of Richmond.
A visitor to Beijing in 1900, Chinese or foreign, would have been struck by the great number of native-place lodges serving the needs of scholars and officials from the provinces. What were these native-place lodges? How did they develop over time? How did they fit into and shape Beijing's urban ecology? How did they further native-place ties?
In answering these questions, the author considers how native-place ties functioned as channels of communication between China's provinces and the political center; how sojourners to the capital used native-place ties to create solidarity within their communities of fellow provincials and within the class of scholar-officials as a whole; how the state co-opted these ties as a means of maintaining order within the city and controlling the imperial bureaucracy; how native-place ties transformed the urban landscape and social structure of the city; and how these functions were refashioned in the decades of political innovation that closed the Qing period. Native-place lodges are often cited as an example of the particularistic ties that characterized traditional China and worked against the emergence of a modern state based on loyalty to the nation. The author argues that by fostering awareness of membership in an elite group, the native-place lodges generated a sense of belonging to a nation that furthered the reforms undertaken in the early twentieth century.
A collection of previously untranslated writings by Henri Lefebvre on rural sociology, situating his research in relation to wider Marxist work
On the Rural is the first English collection to translate Lefebvre’s crucial but lesser-known writings on rural sociology and political economy, presenting a wide-ranging approach to understanding the historical and rural sociology of precapitalist social forms, their endurance today, and conditions of dispossession and uneven development.
In On the Rural, Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton present Lefebvre’s key works on rural questions, including the first half of his book Du rural à l’urbain and supplementary texts, two of which are largely unknown conference presentations published outside France. On the Rural offers methodological orientations for addressing questions of economy, sociology, and geography by deploying insights from spatial political economy to decipher the rural as a terrain and stake of capitalist transformation. By doing so, it reveals the production of the rural as a key site of capitalist development and as a space of struggle.
This volume delivers a careful translation—supplemented with extensive notes and a substantive introduction—to cement Lefebvre’s central contribution to the political economy of rural sociology and geography.
Bryan Roberts’ study of two poor neighborhoods of Guatemala City is an important contribution to the understanding of the urban social and power organization of underdeveloped countries. It is the first major study of any Central American urban population.
Organizing Strangers gives an account of how poor people cope with an unstable and mobile urban environment, and case material is provided on the emergence of collective action among them. Several themes that are crucial to understanding the significance of urban growth in the underdeveloped world are explored: the impact of city life on rural migrants, the relationship between living in cities and the development of class consciousness, and the changing significance of personal relationships as a means of organizing social and economic life.
Guatemala City’s rapid growth and low level of industrialization created a keen competition for jobs and available living space and inhibited the development of cohesive residential groupings. Thus the poor found themselves living and working with people who were mostly strangers. Trust is difficult to create in such an environment, and the absence of trust affected the capacity of the poor to organize themselves.
While the poor were integrated into city life, the manner of their integration exposed them to greater exploitation than if they were truly socially isolated or marginal. Bryan Roberts analyzes a variety of formally organized voluntary associations involving the poor and concludes that such associations are essentially means by which middle- and upper-status groups seek to negotiate order among the poor.
The problems faced by these poor families are due less to their own incapacities or inactivity than to the effects of economic and political relationships that exploit them locally, nationally, and even internationally. A major conclusion of this study is that the uncertainties in the relationships among poor people and between them and other social groups are the underlying causes of a general political and economic instability.
In big cities, major museums and elite galleries tend to dominate our idea of the art world. But beyond the cultural core ruled by these moneyed institutions and their patrons are vibrant, local communities of artists and art lovers operating beneath the high-culture radar. Producing Local Color is a guided tour of three such alternative worlds that thrive in the Chicago neighborhoods of Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park.
These three neighborhoods are, respectively, historically African American, predominantly Mexican American, and proudly ethnically mixed. Drawing on her ethnographic research in each place, Diane Grams presents and analyzes the different kinds of networks of interest and support that sustain the making of art outside of the limelight. And she introduces us to the various individuals—from cutting-edge artists to collectors to municipal planners—who work together to develop their communities, honor their history, and enrich the experiences of their neighbors through art. Along with its novel insights into these little examined art worlds, Producing Local Color also provides a thought-provoking account of how urban neighborhoods change and grow.
Restructuring the Philadelphia Region offers one of the most comprehensive and careful investigations written to date about metropolitan inequalities in America’s large urban regions. Moving beyond simplistic analyses of cities-versus-suburbs, the authors use a large and unique data set to discover the special patterns of opportunity in greater Philadelphia, a sprawling, complex metropolitan region consisting of more than 350 separate localities. With each community operating its own public services and competing to attract residents and businesses, the places people live offer them dramatically different opportunities.
The book vividly portrays the region’s uneven development—paying particular attention to differences in housing, employment and educational opportunities in different communities—and describes the actors who are working to promote greater regional cooperation. Surprisingly, local government officials are not prominent among those actors. Instead, a rich network of “third-sector” actors, represented by nonprofit organizations, quasi-governmental authorities and voluntary associations, is shaping a new form of regionalism.
Contributors. Peter Benson, Manuela Camus, Avery Dickins de Girón, Edward F. Fischer, Deborah Levenson, Thomas Offit, Kevin Lewis O’Neill, Kedron Thomas, Rodrigo José Véliz
From reviews of the first edition:
"This is perhaps the best theoretically oriented book by a United States urban sociologist since the work of Firey, Hawley, and Sjoberg in the 1940s and 1950s.... Gottdiener is on the cutting edge of urban theoretical work today." —Joe R. Feagin, Contemporary Sociology
Since its first publication in 1985, The Social Production of Urban Space has become a landmark work in urban studies. In this second edition, M. Gottdiener assesses important new theoretical models of urban space—and their shortcomings—including the global perspective, the flexible accumulation school, postmodernism, the new international division of labor, and the "growth machine" perspective.
Going beyond the limitations of these and older theories, Gottdiener proposes a model of urban growth that accounts for the deconcentration away from the central city that began in the United States in the 1920s and continues today. Sociologists, political scientists, economists, geographers, and urban planners will find his interdisciplinary approach to urban science invaluable, as it is currently the most comprehensive treatment of European and American work in these related fields.
The street riots that swept through France in the fall of 2005 focused worldwide attention on the plight of the country’s immigrants and their living conditions in the suburbs many of them call home. These high-density neighborhoods were constructed according to the principles of functionalist urbanism that were ascendant in the 1960s. Then, as now, the disparities between the planners’ utopian visions and the experiences of the inhabitants raised concerns, generating a number of sociological studies of the “new towns.” One of the most sophisticated and significant of these critiques is Jean-François Augoyard’s Step by Step, which was originally published in France in 1979 and famously influenced Michel de Certeau’s analysis of everyday life. Its examination of social life in the rationally planned suburb remains as cogent and timely as ever.
Step by Step is based on in-depth interviews Augoyard conducted with the inhabitants of l’Arlequin, a new town on the outskirts of Grenoble. A resident of l’Arlequin himself, Augoyard sought to understand how his neighbors used its passages, streets, and parks. He begins with a detailed investigation of the inhabitants’ daily walks before going on to consider how the built environment is personalized through place-names and shared memories, the ways in which sensory impressions define the atmosphere of a place and how, through individual and collective imagination, residents transformed l’Arlequin from a concept into a lived space.
In closely scrutinizing everyday life in l’Arlequin, Step by Step draws a fascinating portrait of the richness of social life in the new towns and sheds light on the current living conditions of France’s immigrants.
Jean-François Augoyard is professor of philosophy and musicology and doctor of urban studies at the Center for Research on Sonorous Space and the Urban Environment at the School of Architecture of Grenoble.
David Ames Curtis is a translator, editor, writer, and citizen activist.
Françoise Choay is professor emeritus in the history and theory of architecture at the University of Paris VIII and Cornell University and the author of numerous books and essays.
What has happened to cities after the global economic recession? Sustaining Cities answers this question by explaining how failed governmental policies contributed to urban problems and offering best practices for solving them.
From social scientists and urban planners to architects and literary and film critics, the authors of this unique collection suggest real responses to this crisis. Could the drastic declines in housing markets have been avoided? Yes, if we reframe our housing values. Do you want to attract corporate investment to your town? You might want to think twice about doing so. The extinction of the “Celtic Tiger” may be charted in statistics, but the response in popular Irish mystery novels is much more compelling. China, while not immune to market vicissitudes, still booms, but at a considerable cost to its urban identities.
Whether constructing a sustainable social framework for Mexican mega-cities or a neighborhood in London, these nine essays consider some strikingly similar strategies. And perhaps, as the contributors suggest, it’s time to look beyond the usual boundaries of urban, suburban, and exurban to forge new links among these communities that will benefit all citizens. Accessible to anyone with an interest in how cities cope today, Sustaining Cities presents a cautionary tale with a hopeful ending.
Anthropological perspectives are not often represented in urban studies, even though many anthropologists have been contributing actively to theory and research on urban poverty, racism, globalization, and architecture. The New Urban Anthropology Reader corrects this omission by presenting 12 cross-cultural case studies focusing on the analysis of space and place.
Our traditional image of Chicago—as a gritty metropolis carved into ethnically defined enclaves where the game of machine politics overshadows its ends—is such a powerful shaper of the city’s identity that many of its closest observers fail to notice that a new Chicago has emerged over the past two decades. Larry Bennett here tackles some of our more commonly held ideas about the Windy City—inherited from such icons as Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Daniel Burnham, Robert Park, Sara Paretsky, and Mike Royko—with the goal of better understanding Chicago as it is now: the third city.
Bennett calls contemporary Chicago the third city to distinguish it from its two predecessors: the first city, a sprawling industrial center whose historical arc ran from the Civil War to the Great Depression; and the second city, the Rustbelt exemplar of the period from around 1950 to 1990. The third city features a dramatically revitalized urban core, a shifting population mix that includes new immigrant streams, and a growing number of middle-class professionals working in new economy sectors. It is also a city utterly transformed by the top-to-bottom reconstruction of public housing developments and the ambitious provision of public works like Millennium Park. It is, according to Bennett, a work in progress spearheaded by Richard M. Daley, a self-consciously innovative mayor whose strategy of neighborhood revitalization and urban renewal is a prototype of city governance for the twenty-first century. The Third City ultimately contends that to understand Chicago under Daley’s charge is to understand what metropolitan life across North America may well look like in the coming decades.
For millennia, the city stood out against the landscape, walled and compact. This concept of the city was long accepted as adequate for characterizing the urban experience. However, the nature of the city, both real and imagined, has always been more permeable than this model reveals.
The essays in Urban Imaginaries respond to this condition by focusing on how social and physical space is conceived as both indefinite and singular. They emphasize the ways this space is shared and thus made into urban culture. Urban Imaginaries offers case studies on cities in Brazil, Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, and India, as well as in the United States and France, and in doing so blends social, cultural, and political approaches to better understand the contemporary urban experience.
Contributors: Margaret Cohen, Stanford U; Camilla Fojas, De Paul U; Beatriz Jaguaribe, Federal U of Rio de Janeiro; Anthony D. King, SUNY Binghamton; Mark LeVine, U of California, Irvine; Srirupa Roy, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; Seteney Shami, Social Science Research Council; AbdouMaliq Simone, New School U; Maha Yahya; Deniz Yükseker, Koç U, Istanbul.
Alev Çinar is associate professor of political science and public administration at Bilkent University, Turkey. Thomas Bender is university professor of the humanities and history at New York University.
With his background as a community organizer and as a state legislator representing Chicago’s South Side, Barack Obama became America’s most “urban” president since Teddy Roosevelt. But what has been his record in dealing with the issues most impacting our metropolitan areas today? Looking past the current administration, what are the future prospects of the nation’s cities, and how have they been shaped by our policies in this century? Seeking to answer these questions, the contributors to Urban Policy in the Time of Obama explore a broad range of policy arenas that shape, both directly and indirectly, metropolitan areas and urbanization processes.
This volume reveals the Obama administration’s surprisingly limited impact on cities, through direct policy initiatives such as Strong Cities, Strong Communities, Promise Neighborhoods, and Choice Neighborhood Initiatives. There has been greater impact with broader policies that shape urban life and governance, including immigration reform, education, and health care.
Closing with Cedric Johnson’s afterword illuminating the Black Lives Matter movement and what its broader social context says about city governance in our times, Urban Policy in the Time of Obama finds that most of the dominant policies and policy regimes of recent years have fallen short of easing the ills of America’s cities, and calls for a more equitable and just urban policy regime.
Contributors: Rachel G. Bratt, Tufts University; Christine Thurlow Brenner, University of Massachusetts Boston; Karen Chapple, University of California, Berkeley; James Fraser, Vanderbilt University; Edward G. Goetz, University of Minnesota; Dan Immergluck, Georgia Tech; Amy T. Khare, University of Chicago; Robert W. Lake, Rutgers University; Pauline Lipman, University of Illinois at Chicago; Lorraine C. Minnite, Rutgers University–Camden; Kathe Newman, Rutgers University; Deirdre Oakley, Georgia State; Frances Fox Piven, City University of New York; Hilary Silver, Brown University; Janet Smith, University of Illinois at Chicago; Preston H. Smith II, Mount Holyoke College; Todd Swanstrom, University of Missouri–St. Louis; Nik Theodore, University of Illinois at Chicago; J. Phillip Thompson, MIT.
A unique more-than-capitalist take on urban dynamics
Vigilante action. Renegades. Human intrigue and the future at stake in New York City. In Urbanism without Guarantees, Christian M. Anderson offers a new perspective on urban dynamics and urban structural inequality based on an intimate ethnography of on-the-ground gentrification.
The book is centered on ethnographic work undertaken on a single street in Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen in New York City—once a site of disinvestment, but now rapidly gentrifying. Anderson examines the everyday strategies of residents to preserve the quality of life of their neighborhood and to define and maintain their values of urban living—from picking up litter and reporting minor concerns on the 311 hotline to hiring a private security firm to monitor the local public park. Anderson demonstrates how processes such as investment and gentrification are constructed out of the collective actions of ordinary people, and challenges prevalent understandings of how place-based civic actions connect with dominant forms of political economy and repressive governance in urban space.
Examining how residents are pulled into these systems of gentrification, Anderson proposes new ways to think and act critically and organize for transformation of a place—in actions that local residents can start to do wherever they are.
For many whites, desegregation initially felt like an attack on their community. But how has the process of racial change affected whites’ understanding of community and race? In Vanishing Eden, Michael Maly and Heather Dalmage provide an intriguing analysis of the experiences and memories of whites who lived in Chicago neighborhoods experiencing racial change during the 1950s through the 1980s. They pay particular attention to examining how young people made sense of what was occurring, and how this experience impacted their lives.
Using a blend of urban studies and whiteness studies, the authors examine how racial solidarity and whiteness were created and maintained—often in subtle and unreflective ways. Vanishing Eden also considers how race is central to the ways social institutions such as housing, education, and employment function. Surveying the shifting social, economic, and racial contexts, the authors explore how race and class at local and national levels shaped the organizing strategies of those whites who chose to stay as racial borders began to change.
Walking connects the rhythms of urban life to the configuration of urban spaces. As the contributors and editors show in Walking in Cities, walking also reflects the systematic inequalities that order contemporary urban life. Walking has different meanings because it can be a way of temporarily “taking possession” of urban space, or it can make the relatively powerless more vulnerable to crime. The essays in Walking in Cities explore how walking intersects with sociological dimensions such as gender, race and ethnicity, social class, and power.
Various chapters explorethe flâneuse, or female urban drifter, in Tehran’s shopping malls; Hispanic neighborhoods in New York, San Diego, and El Paso; and the intra-neighborhood and inter-class dynamics of gentrification in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.The essays in Walking in Cities provide important lessons about urban life.
A favorite destination of visitors to the Texas coast, Corpus Christi is a midsize city that manages to be both cosmopolitan and provincial, networked and local. It is an indispensable provider of urban services to South Texas, as well as a port of international significance. Its industries and military bases and, increasingly, its coastal research institutes give it a range of connections throughout North America. Despite these advantages, however, Corpus Christi has never made it into the first rank of Texas cities, and a keen self-consciousness about the city’s subordinate position has driven debates over Corpus’s identity and prospects for decades.
In this masterful urban history—a study that will reshape the way that Texans look at all their cities—Alan Lessoff analyzes Corpus Christi’s place within Texas, the American Southwest, the western Gulf of Mexico, and the U.S.-Mexican borderlands from the city’s founding in 1839 to the present. He portrays Corpus as a place where westward Anglo expansion overwhelmed the Hispanic settlement process from the south, leaving a legacy of conflicting historical narratives that colors the city’s character even now. Lessoff also explores how competing visions of the city’s identity and possibilities have played out in arenas ranging from artwork in public places to schemes to embellish, redevelop, or preserve the downtown waterfront and North Padre Island. With a deep understanding of the geographic, historical, economic, and political factors that have formed the city, Lessoff demonstrates that Corpus Christi exemplifies the tensions between regional and cosmopolitan influences that have shaped cities across the Southwest.
Fernandes portrays everyday life and politics in the shantytowns of Caracas through accounts of community-based radio, barrio assemblies, and popular fiestas, and the many interviews she conducted with activists and government officials. Most of the barrio activists she presents are Chávez supporters. They see the leftist president as someone who understands their precarious lives and has made important changes to the state system to redistribute resources. Yet they must balance receiving state resources, which are necessary to fund their community-based projects, with their desire to retain a sense of agency. Fernandes locates the struggles of the urban poor within Venezuela’s transition from neoliberalism to what she calls “post-neoliberalism.” She contends that in contemporary Venezuela we find a hybrid state; while Chávez is actively challenging neoliberalism, the state remains subject to the constraints and logics of global capital.
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