Racial strife, increased social and economic discrimination, amplified political friction, and growing uncertainty around the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change have laid bare many inequalities within the city of Boston. How will these disruptions and inequities influence the city’s future, especially as Boston celebrates its quadricentennial in 2030?
This collection of original essays addresses the many challenges Boston contends with in the twenty-first century and considers ways to improve the city for everyone. Presenting a range of perspectives written by area experts—academics, reflective practitioners, and policymakers—these essays tackle issues of resiliency, mobility, affordable housing, health outcomes, social equity, economic equality, zoning, regionalism, and more. Reflecting the diversity of the city and the challenges and opportunities Boston currently faces, Idea City will help readers think differently about their own areas of expertise and draw conclusions from urban regeneration work in other fields.
Imagining Global Amsterdambrings together new essays on the image of Amsterdam as articulated in film, literature, art, and urban discourse, considered within the context of globalization and its impact on urban culture. Subjects include: Amsterdam’s place in global cultural memory; expressions of global consciousness in Amsterdam in the ‘Golden Age’; articulations of Amsterdam as a tolerant, multicultural, and permissive ‘global village’; and globalization’s impact ‘on the ground’ through city branding, the cultural heritage industry, and cultural production in the city.
Written by an interdisciplinary team of scholars, and united by a broad humanities approach, this collection forms a multifaceted inquiry into the dynamic relationship between Amsterdam, globalization, and the urban imaginary.
Nearly half the 2.3 million residents of Queens, New York are foreign-born. Immigrants in Queens hail from more than 120 countries and speak more than 135 languages. As an epicenter of immigrant diversity, Queens is an urban gateway that exemplifies opportunities and challenges in shaping a multi-racial democracy.
The editors and contributors to Immigrant Crossroads examine the social, spatial, economic, and political dynamics that stem from this fast-growing urbanization. The interdisciplinary chapters examine residential patterns and neighborhood identities, immigrant incorporation and mobilizations, and community building and activism.
Essays combine qualitative and quantitative research methods to address globalization and the unprecedented racial and ethnic diversity as a result of international migration. Chapters on incorporation focus on immigrant participation and representation in electoral politics, and advocacy for immigrant inclusion in urban governance and service provision. A section of Immigrant Crossroads concerns placemaking, focusing on the production of neighborhood spaces and identities as well as immigrant activism and community development and control.
Based on engaged and robust analysis, Immigrant Crossroads highlights the dynamics of this urban gateway.
Winner of the Gustavus Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in the United States!
Winner of the Illinois State Historical Society Superior Achievement Award!
This detailed case study of the 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois, which began only a few blocks from Abraham Lincoln’s family home, explores the social origins of rioting by whites against the city’s African American community after a white woman alleged that a black man had raped her. Over two days rioters wrecked black-owned businesses, burned neighborhoods to the ground, killed two black men, and injured many others.
Author Roberta Senechal de la Roche draws from a wide range of sources to describe the riot, identify the rioters and their victims, and challenge previous interpretations that attribute rioting to interracial competition for jobs, housing, or political influence. Written in a direct and clear style, In Lincoln’s Shadow documents a violent explosion of racial hatred that shocked the nation and reveals the complexity of white racial attitudes in the early twentieth century.
Winner of the Grawemeyer Award
“In their brave search for depth in American high schools, scholars Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine suffered many disappointments…Undeterred, they spent 750 hours observing classes, interviewed more than 300 people, and produced the best book on high school dynamics I have ever read.”
—Jay Mathews, Washington Post
“A hopeful, easy-to-read narrative on what the best teachers do and what deep, engaging learning looks like for students. Grab this text if you’re looking for a celebration of what’s possible in American schools.”
—Edutopia
“This is the first and only book to depict not just the constraints on good teaching, but also how good teachers transcend them. A superb book in every way: timely, lively, and entertaining.”
—Jonathan Zimmerman, University of Pennsylvania
What would it take to transform our high schools into places capable of supporting deep learning for students across a wide range of aptitudes and interests? To find out, Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine spent hundreds of hours observing and talking to teachers and students in and out of the classroom at thirty of the country’s most innovative schools. To their dismay, they discovered that deeper learning is more often the exception than the rule. And yet they found pockets of powerful learning at almost every school, often in extracurriculars but also in a few mold-breaking academic courses. So what must schools do to achieve the integrations that support deep learning: rigor with joy, precision with play, mastery with identity and creativity?
In Search of Deeper Learning takes a deep dive into the state of our schools and lays out an inspiring new vision for American education.
Las Vegas, says William Fox, is a pay-as-you-play paradise that succeeds in satisfying our fantasies of wealth and the excesses of pleasure and consumption that go with it. In this context, Fox examines how Las Vegas’s culture of spectacle has obscured the boundaries between high art and entertainment extravaganza, nature and fantasy, for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. His purview ranges from casino art galleries—including Steve Wynn’s private collection and a branch of the famed Guggenheim Museum—to the underfunded Las Vegas Art Museum; from spectacular casino animal collections like those of magicians Siegfried and Roy and Mandalay Bay’s Shark Reef exhibit to the city’s lack of support for a viable public zoo; from the environmental and psychological impact of lavish water displays in the arid desert to the artistic ambiguities intrinsic to Las Vegas’s floating world of showgirls, lapdancers, and ballet divas. That Las Vegas represents one of the world’s most opulent displays of private material wealth in all its forms, while providing miserly funding for local public amenities like museums and zoos, is no accident, Fox maintains. Nor is it unintentional that the city’s most important collections of art and exotic fauna are presented in the context of casino entertainment, part of the feast of sensation and excitement that seduces millions of visitors each year. Instead, this phenomenon shows how our insatiable modern appetite for extravagance and spectacle has diminished the power of unembellished nature and the arts to teach and inspire us, and demonstrates the way our society privileges private benefit over public good. Given that Las Vegas has been a harbinger of national cultural trends, Fox’s commentary offers prescient insight into the increasing commercialization of nature and culture across America.
Behind the contentious politics of immigration lies the question of how well new immigrants are becoming part of American society. To address this question, Inheriting the City draws on the results of a ground-breaking study of young adults of immigrant parents in metropolitan New York to provide a comprehensive look at their social, economic, cultural, and political lives.
Inheriting the City examines five immigrant groups to disentangle the complicated question of how they are faring relative to native-born groups, and how achievement differs between and within these groups. While some experts worry that these young adults would not do as well as previous waves of immigrants due to lack of high-paying manufacturing jobs, poor public schools, and an entrenched racial divide, Inheriting the City finds that the second generation is rapidly moving into the mainstream—speaking English, working in jobs that resemble those held by native New Yorkers their age, and creatively combining their ethnic cultures and norms with American ones. Far from descending into an urban underclass, the children of immigrants are using immigrant advantages to avoid some of the obstacles that native minority groups cannot.
Inside Tenement Time is the first comprehensive treatment of literary and cultural texts on surveillance in the Caribbean. Covering the long historical arc of the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, Inside Tenement Time uses Jamaica as a case study to examine moments of crisis and particular spaces, especially urban yard enclaves and their environs, in the Caribbean encounter with surveillance. Making the argument that the Caribbean situation reveals flexible hegemonies rather than provinces of exclusive control, the book demonstrates the countervailing force of sussveillance and spiritveillance, Afro-Indigenous variations on surveillance. Sussveillance and spiritveillance are exemplars of vernacular arts and sciences that operate at and within the frangible borders of state power, exposing the unique dynamics of surveillance in the region and marshalling the acts of imagination with which it contends. For example, the Smile Jamaica concert of 1976, headlined by reggae Superstar Bob Marley, and the reputedly US government-backed 2010 Tivoli Gardens incursion in West Kingston, both moments that have dramatic, even mythic residue in Caribbean and global memory, are among the real-life events brought into conversation with literary representations of this history.
As the glittering skyline in Shanghai seemingly attests, China has quickly transformed itself from a place of stark poverty into a modern, urban, technologically savvy economic powerhouse. But as Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell show in Invisible China, the truth is much more complicated and might be a serious cause for concern.
China’s growth has relied heavily on unskilled labor. Most of the workers who have fueled the country’s rise come from rural villages and have never been to high school. While this national growth strategy has been effective for three decades, the unskilled wage rate is finally rising, inducing companies inside China to automate at an unprecedented rate and triggering an exodus of companies seeking cheaper labor in other countries. Ten years ago, almost every product for sale in an American Walmart was made in China. Today, that is no longer the case. With the changing demand for labor, China seems to have no good back-up plan. For all of its investment in physical infrastructure, for decades China failed to invest enough in its people. Recent progress may come too late. Drawing on extensive surveys on the ground in China, Rozelle and Hell reveal that while China may be the second-largest economy in the world, its labor force has one of the lowest levels of education of any comparable country. Over half of China’s population—as well as a vast majority of its children—are from rural areas. Their low levels of basic education may leave many unable to find work in the formal workplace as China’s economy changes and manufacturing jobs move elsewhere.
In Invisible China, Rozelle and Hell speak not only to an urgent humanitarian concern but also a potential economic crisis that could upend economies and foreign relations around the globe. If too many are left structurally unemployable, the implications both inside and outside of China could be serious. Understanding the situation in China today is essential if we are to avoid a potential crisis of international proportions. This book is an urgent and timely call to action that should be read by economists, policymakers, the business community, and general readers alike.
Austin, Texas, is renowned as a high-tech, fast-growing city for the young and creative, a cool place to live, and the scene of internationally famous events such as SXSW and Formula 1. But as in many American cities, poverty and penury are booming along with wealth and material abundance in contemporary Austin. Rich and poor residents lead increasingly separate lives as growing socioeconomic inequality underscores residential, class, racial, and ethnic segregation.
In Invisible in Austin, the award-winning sociologist Javier Auyero and a team of graduate students explore the lives of those working at the bottom of the social order: house cleaners, office-machine repairers, cab drivers, restaurant cooks and dishwashers, exotic dancers, musicians, and roofers, among others. Recounting their subjects’ life stories with empathy and sociological insight, the authors show us how these lives are driven by a complex mix of individual and social forces. These poignant stories compel us to see how poor people who provide indispensable services for all city residents struggle daily with substandard housing, inadequate public services and schools, and environmental risks. Timely and essential reading, Invisible in Austin makes visible the growing gap between rich and poor that is reconfiguring the cityscape of one of America’s most dynamic places, as low-wage workers are forced to the social and symbolic margins.
For many years, the interrelated histories of prostitution and cities have perked the ears of urban scholars, but until now the history of urban sex work has dealt only in passing with questions of race. In I’ve Got to Make My Livin’, Cynthia Blair explores African American women’s sex work in Chicago during the decades of some of the city’s most explosive growth, expanding not just our view of prostitution, but also of black women’s labor, the Great Migration, black and white reform movements, and the emergence of modern sexuality.
Focusing on the notorious sex districts of the city’s south side, Blair paints a complex portrait of black prostitutes as conscious actors and historical agents; prostitution, she argues here, was both an arena of exploitation and abuse, as well as a means of resisting middle-class sexual and economic norms. Blair ultimately illustrates just how powerful these norms were, offering stories about the struggles that emerged among black and white urbanites in response to black women’s increasing visibility in the city’s sex economy. Through these powerful narratives, I’ve Got to Make My Livin’ reveals the intersecting racial struggles and sexual anxieties that underpinned the celebration of Chicago as the quintessentially modern twentieth-century city.
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