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129 books match the query 'City and town life' and 4 start with b

cover of Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America's Postindustrial Frontier

Beautiful Wasteland

The Rise of Detroit as America's Postindustrial Frontier

Rebecca J. Kinney

University of Minnesota Press, 2016

According to popular media and scholarship, Detroit, the once-vibrant city that crumbled with the departure of the auto industry, is where dreams can be reborn. It is a place that, like America itself, is gritty and determined. It has faced the worst kind of adversity, and supposedly now it’s back. But what does this narrative of “new Detroit” leave out? Beautiful Wasteland reveals that the contemporary story of Detroit’s rebirth is an upcycled version of the American Dream, which has long imagined access to work, home, and upward mobility as race-neutral projects. They’re not. As Rebecca J. Kinney shows, the narratives of Detroit’s rise, decline, and potential to rise again are deeply steeped in material and ideological investments in whiteness. 

By remapping the narratives of contemporary Detroit through an extension of America’s frontier mythology, Kinney analyzes a cross-section of twentieth and twenty-first century cultural locations—an Internet forum, ruin photography, advertising, documentary film, and print and online media. She illuminates how the stories we tell about Detroit as a frontier of possibility enable the erasure of white privilege and systemic racism. By situating Detroit as a “beautiful wasteland,” both desirable and distressed, this shows how the narrative of ruin and possibility form a mutually constituted relationship: the city is possible precisely because of its perceived ruin.

Beautiful Wasteland tackles the key questions about the future of postindustrial America. As cities around the country reckon with their own postindustrial landscapes, Rebecca Kinney cautions that development that elides considerations of race and class will only continue to replicate uneven access to the city for the poor, working class, and people of color. 

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cover of Berlin Sports: Spectacle, Recreation, and Media in Germany’s Metropolis

Berlin Sports

Spectacle, Recreation, and Media in Germany’s Metropolis

Heather L. Dichter

University of Arkansas Press, 2024

In many American cities, individual athletes, professional teams, and university sports are integral to the cities’ sporting identities. Berlin, in contrast, features no single hallmark sport, team, or annual event. Five political regimes, wartime destruction, and four decades of division instead fostered ever-changing teams, allegiances, and venues. Yet, the desire to play and watch sport continued unabated across these political watersheds. Berlin Sports: Spectacle, Recreation, and Media in Germany’s Metropolis explores the history of sport in Berlin from the late nineteenth- to the early twenty-first centuries against the backdrop of the city’s sharp political shifts, diverse populations, and status as a major metropolis with both regional and global resonance.
 
This book begins with a long-distance equestrian race in the 1890s and continues with the role of media in spectacle, celebrity, urban life, and gender from the 1890s to the 1920s.It then turns to grassroots sport participation and spectatorship as well as sport diplomacy at the elite international level during the postwar period and the years of German division. Next, it explores recreational sport associations within the context of immigration and youth counterculture. It concludes with the 2015 European Maccabi Games, an international Jewish sports festival through which Berlin sought to grapple with the infamous 1936 Olympics and showcase Berlin as a cosmopolitan and multicultural city. Taken together, the book’s scholarly essays on all of these sporting endeavors reveal the rich and varied sporting culture in Berlin and yield fresh insights into spectacle, recreation, and media in the city.
 
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cover of Beyond the Bauhaus: Cultural Modernity in Breslau, 1918-33

Beyond the Bauhaus

Cultural Modernity in Breslau, 1918-33

Deborah Ascher Barnstone

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Although the Breslau arts scene was one of the most vibrant in all of Weimar-era Germany, it has largely disappeared from memory. Studies of the influence of Weimar culture on modernism have focused almost exclusively on Berlin and the Dessau Bauhaus, yet the advances that occurred in Breslau affected nearly every intellectual field, forming the basis for aesthetic modernism internationally and having an enduring impact on visual art and architecture. Breslau boasted a thriving modern arts scene and one of the premier German arts academies of the day until the Nazis began their assault on so-called degenerate art. This book charts the cultural production of Breslau-based artists, architects, art collectors, urban designers, and arts educators who operated in the margins of Weimar-era cultural debates. Rather than accepting the radical position of the German avant-garde or the reactionary position of German conservatives, many Breslauers sought a middle ground.

This richly illustrated volume is the first book in English to address this history, constituting an invaluable addition to the literature on the Weimar period. Its readership includes scholars of German history, art, architecture, urban design, planning, collecting, and exhibition history; of the avant-garde, and of the development of arts academies and arts pedagogy.

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cover of Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago's West Side

Block by Block

Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago's West Side

Amanda I. Seligman

University of Chicago Press, 2005

In the decades following World War II, cities across the United States saw an influx of African American families into otherwise homogeneously white areas. This racial transformation of urban neighborhoods led many whites to migrate to the suburbs, producing the phenomenon commonly known as white flight. In Block by Block, Amanda I. Seligman draws on the surprisingly understudied West Side communities of Chicago to shed new light on this story of postwar urban America.

Seligman's study reveals that the responses of white West Siders to racial changes occurring in their neighborhoods were both multifaceted and extensive. She shows that, despite rehabilitation efforts, deterioration in these areas began long before the color of their inhabitants changed from white to black. And ultimately, the riots that erupted on Chicago's West Side and across the country in the mid-1960s stemmed not only from the tribulations specific to blacks in urban centers but also from the legacy of accumulated neglect after decades of white occupancy. Seligman's careful and evenhanded account will be essential to understanding that the "flight" of whites to the suburbs was the eventual result of a series of responses to transformations in Chicago's physical and social landscape, occurring one block at a time.
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