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8812 books match the query 'Political Science' and 138 start with u

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Untrodden Ground

How Presidents Interpret the Constitution

Harold H. Bruff

University of Chicago Press, 2015

When Thomas Jefferson struck a deal for the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, he knew he was adding a new national power to those specified in the Constitution, but he also believed his actions were in the nation’s best interest. His successors would follow his example, setting their own constitutional precedents. Tracing the evolution and expansion of the president’s formal power, Untrodden Ground reveals the president to be the nation’s most important law interpreter and examines how our commanders-in-chief have shaped the law through their responses to important issues of their time.

Reviewing the processes taken by all forty-four presidents to form new legal precedents and the constitutional conventions that have developed as a result, Harold H. Bruff shows that the president is both more and less powerful than many suppose. He explores how presidents have been guided by both their predecessors’ and their own interpretations of constitutional text, as well as how they implement policies in ways that statutes do not clearly authorize or forbid. But while executive power has expanded far beyond its original conception, Bruff argues that the modern presidency is appropriately limited by the national political process—their actions are legitimized by the assent of Congress and the American people or rejected through debilitating public outcry, judicial invalidation, reactive legislation, or impeachment. Synthesizing over two hundred years of presidential activity and conflict, this timely book casts new light on executive behavior and the American constitutional system.

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Untying the Knot of War

A Bargaining Theory of International Crises

T. Clifton Morgan

University of Michigan Press, 1994

This book utilizes formal, spatial voting models and game-theoretic techniques to examine why certain international crises erupt into all-out wars while others resolve peacefully through diplomacy. Operating on the premise that a crisis always precedes war, Morgan develops original mathematical frameworks to show how crisis outcomes are fundamentally dictated by the specific characteristics of the bargainers, the multi-dimensional nature of the disputed issues, and the vital interventions of third-party negotiators and agenda setters. By illustrating these formal equations with historical cases, the text moves beyond rigid security-maximization arguments, providing international relations scholars with a robust, predictive framework for conflict resolution and crisis bargaining.

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Unwanted Claims

The Politics of Participation in the U.S. Welfare System

Joe Soss

University of Michigan Press, 2002

Large numbers of Americans claim public resources and participate in direct relationships with government through the diversity of welfare programs found in the United States. Most public debates ignore the political importance of these activities, focusing instead on the economic and moral questions raised by welfare policy. By contrast, Unwanted Claims asks how different types of welfare programs, such as social insurance and public assistance, affect the lives of ordinary citizens. The author investigates why citizens turn to welfare programs, how they view the welfare system, and what they learn from experiences in welfare programs about themselves and government. The analysis shows that the welfare system plays a surprisingly important and sometimes contradictory role in modern political life. Depending on their designs, welfare programs can draw citizens into a more inclusive and vibrant democracy or treat them in ways that reinforce their social and political marginality.
Unwanted Claims is a work of political sociology that provides an illuminating account of political life in the U.S. welfare system that should be of interest to scholars, students, policy practitioners, and the general public. Written in a style that minimizes technical jargon, avoids complex statistical presentations, and makes extensive use of clients' own descriptions of their experiences, beliefs, and actions, it offers an accessible and humanizing portrait of welfare participation that challenges conventional wisdom and raises important questions about poverty, welfare, and democracy in America.
Joe Soss is Assistant Professor of Government, The American University.

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Unwritten Rule

How to Fix the British Constitution

Stephen Green, Thomas Legg, and Martin Donnelly

Haus Publishing, 2021

A consideration of how to repair the British state.

Not since Ireland broke away from the United Kingdom has the British state been so fragile. Northern Ireland now operates under trading rules that are legally separate from the rest of the nation. In Wales, support for independence is running at a historical high, and Scotland is more conscious than ever of its individual identity and has aspirations for a European future. With public trust and confidence in government at record lows, the United Kingdom faces a crisis that can only be repaired by a new constitutional settlement. Unwritten Rule calls for a radical realignment, embracing a federal approach that would accommodate devolution as the best way of bringing about a successful and diverse national life, increasing democratic control over local and national decision-making, and modernizing national political structures.

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Up Against the Archive

Experiments in Writing British Empire History Otherwise

Antoinette Burton, editor

Duke University Press, 2027

In essays covering five centuries of British imperialism and a variety of genres and forms, the contributors to Up Against the Archive make the case for experimental historical writing as a way to work through the gaps and erasures of imperial archives. Drawing on Black feminist theory and Saidiya Hartman’s method to “creatively disorder the institutional fictions and the violent abstractions authorized as fact and truth,” they challenge ways of knowing and telling inherited from British imperialism. Each contribution centers on a distinct archival object or moment in time, exploring ways of understanding historical subjectivity from means and material not included or legible in the traditional archive. In Up Against the Archive, interdisciplinary scholars meet the challenges of our contemporary moment with inventive forms of storytelling that suggest possibilities for doing empire history in an anti-imperial mode.

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Up Against the Wall

Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party

Curtis J. Austin

University of Arkansas Press, 2008

Curtis J. Austin’s Up Against the Wall chronicles how violence brought about the founding of the Black Panther Party in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, dominated its policies, and finally destroyed the party as one member after another—Eldridge Cleaver, Fred Hampton, Alex Rackley—left the party, was killed, or was imprisoned. Austin shows how the party’s early emphasis in the 1960s on self-defense, though sorely needed in black communities at the time, left it open to mischaracterization, infiltration, and devastation by local, state, and federal police forces and government agencies. Austin carefully highlights the internal tension between advocates of a more radical position than the Panthers took, who insisted on military confrontation with the state, and those such as Newton and David Hilliard, who believed in community organizing and alliance building as first priorities. Austin interviewed a number of party members who had heretofore remained silent. With the help of these stories, Austin is able to put the violent history of the party in perspective and show that the “survival” programs, such as the Free Breakfast for Children program and Free Health Clinics, helped the black communities they served to recognize their own bases of power and ability to save themselves.

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Up in the Air?

The Future of Public Service Media in the Western Balkans

Tarik Jusic

Central European University Press, 2021

The agenda for transition after the demise of communism in the Western Balkans made the conversion of state radio and television into public service broadcasters a priority, converting mouthpieces of the regime into public forums in which various interests and standpoints could be shared and deliberated. There is general agreement that this endeavor has not been a success. Formally, the countries adopted the legal and institutional requirements of public service media according to European standards. The ruling political elites, however, retained their control over the public media by various means.

Can this trend be reversed? Instead of being marginalized or totally manipulated, can public service media become vehicles of genuine democratization?

A comparison of public service media in seven countries (Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia) addresses these important questions.

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Upheaval in the Quiet Zone

1199/SEIU and the Politics of Healthcare Unionism

Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg

University of Illinois Press, 2008

This expanded second edition of Upheaval in the Quiet Zone updates the dramatic story of an insurgent labor union that by the end of the 1980s had established itself as a vital force in the modern labor movement. But even bigger changes were on the way. Overcoming internal divisions that originated in its 1930s-inflected and civil rights-era militancy, 1199SEIU adopted a new strategy of labor-management cooperation to emerge as a key player in state and city politics. When SEIU president Andrew Stern laid plans in 2006 for a new national health care workers union that would simultaneously reach out to the unorganized and campaign for universal, national health insurance, he turned to 1199 president Dennis Rivera--and the 1199 political model--to lead the effort. With new material that updates the union's history since the 1990s, this book conveys the promise and problems of movement-building in the twenty-first century health care industry.

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Upon the Altar of Work

Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism

Betsy Wood

University of Illinois Press, 2020

Rooted in the crisis over slavery, disagreements about child labor broke down along sectional lines between the North and South. For decades after emancipation, the child labor issue shaped how Northerners and Southerners defined fundamental concepts of American life such as work, freedom, the market, and the state.

Betsy Wood examines the evolution of ideas about child labor and the on-the-ground politics of the issue against the backdrop of broad developments related to slavery and emancipation, industrial capitalism, moral and social reform, and American politics and religion. Wood explains how the decades-long battle over child labor created enduring political and ideological divisions within capitalist society that divided the gatekeepers of modernity from the cultural warriors who opposed them. Tracing the ideological origins and the politics of the child labor battle over the course of eighty years, this book tells the story of how child labor debates bequeathed an enduring legacy of sectionalist conflict to modern American capitalist society.

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Uprising in East Germany, 1953

The Cold War, the German Question, and the First Major Upheaval behind the Iron Curtain

The National Security Archive Ostermann

Central European University Press, 2001

This volume is the second in the series Cold War Documentary Readers, a project of the US National Security Archive and the Cold War International History Project.

The volume is the first documented account of this early Cold War crisis from both sides of the Iron Curtain. Based on the recent unprecedented access to the once-closed archives of several member states of the Warsaw Pact, this collection of primary-source documents presents one of the most notorious events of post-war European history in a highly readable format.

Previously unreleased Kremlin records, once highly classified American documents, materials from the Soviet Foreign Ministry, and transcripts of internal East German Communist Party Politburo meetings in the days leading to the uprising in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) are among the highlights of this sensational documentary.

In this volume, as in the previous one in the series, each part is preceded by a detailed introductory essay to provide the necessary historical and political context. The individual documents are introduced by short headnotes summarizing the contents and orienting the reader. A chronology, glossary and bibliography offer further background information.

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Uprooting Racism and Racists in the United States

James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs

Disobedience Press, 2027

“Uprooting Racism and Racists in the United States” has become even more timely and instructive today than when James and Grace Lee Boggs first sounded the alarm in 1970. In this essay, the Boggses diagnose the “essential contradiction” of economic overdevelopment and political underdevelopment, tracing its path through key stages: how racism has been interwoven into U.S. economic development; a destructive national drive for economic growth at all costs; and how subsequent generations of Americans prioritize economics over principles—breeding a collective social irresponsibility that leaves us unable to act ethically in the face of pressing social challenges.

Today, the contradiction the Boggses identified has grown more entrenched—and its consequences more destructive. “Uprooting” helps explain why millions voted for Trump in 2024 despite his demonstrated corruption, why society fails to regulate the expansion of AI and data centers, why we are unable to forestall the climate changes that scientists have long warned against, why immigrants face racist vilification, and why the federal government is intent on erasing the centrality of race to the making of the country. Ultimately, “Uprooting” offers a crucial assessment of where this contradiction began, how it shapes the nation, and where we need to go.

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Upsetting Food

Three Eras of Food Protests in the United States

Jeffrey Haydu

Temple University Press, 2021

Battle lines have long been drawn over how food is produced, what food is made available to whom, and how best to protect consumers from risky or unhealthy food. Jeffrey Haydu resurrects the history of food reform and protest in Upsetting Food, showing how activists defined food problems, articulated solutions, and mobilized for change in the United States.

Haydu’s sociological history starts in the 1830s with diet reformer Sylvester Graham, who blamed alcohol and store-bought bread—signs of a commercializing urban society—for poor health and moral decline. His successors at the turn of the twentieth century rallied against impure food and pushed for women to be schooled in scientific food preparation and nutrition. Decades later, in the 1960s and ’70s, a grassroots movement for organic food battled commercial food production in favor of food grown ecologically, by small farmers, and without artificial chemicals.

Each campaign raised doubts about food safety, health, and transparency, reflecting how a capitalist system can undermine trust in food. But Haydu also considers how each movement reflects the politics, inequalities, and gender relations of its time. And he traces how outcomes of each campaign laid the groundwork for the next. The three eras thus come together as parts of a single, recurring food movement.

Upsetting Food offers readers a historical background to better understand contemporary and contentious food politics.

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Upstream

Trust Lands and Power on the Feather River

Beth Rose Middleton Manning

University of Arizona Press, 2018

From Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara lands in South Dakota; to Cherokee lands in Tennessee; to Sin-Aikst, Lakes, and Colville lands in Washington; to Chemehuevi lands in Arizona; to Maidu, Pit River, and Wintu lands in northern California, Native lands and communities have been treated as sacrifice zones for national priorities of irrigation, flood control, and hydroelectric development.

Upstream documents the significance of the Allotment Era to a long and ongoing history of cultural and community disruption. It also details Indigenous resistance to both hydropower and disruptive conservation efforts. With a focus on northeastern California, this book highlights points of intervention to increase justice for Indigenous peoples in contemporary natural resource policy making.

Author Beth Rose Middleton Manning relates the history behind the nation’s largest state-built water and power conveyance system, California’s State Water Project, with a focus on Indigenous resistance and activism. She illustrates how Indigenous history should inform contemporary conservation measures and reveals institutionalized injustices in natural resource planning and the persistent need for advocacy for Indigenous restitution and recognition.

Upstream uses a multidisciplinary and multitemporal approach, weaving together compelling stories with a study of placemaking and land development. It offers a vision of policy reform that will lead to improved Indigenous futures at sites of Indigenous land and water divestiture around the nation.

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Uranium Matters

Central European Uranium in International Politics, 19001960

Rainer Karlsch

Central European University Press, 2008

Examines the impact of the Czechoslovak and East German uranium industries on local politics and on societies, particularly in the decade or so after the end of the Second World War. The Erzgebirge – the Ore Mountains – on the border of Czechoslovakia and East Germany of the time, was the oldest uranium mine in the world, whose important resources were badly needed for Stalin's atomic bomb.

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Urban Childhoods

Growing up in Inequality and Hope

Edited by Claire Cameron

University College London, 2025

A guide to supporting children’s wellbeing in cities, through their own perspectives.

Bringing together insights from critical childhood studies, urban studies, and child public health, Urban Childhoods examines the distinct experiences of children growing up in English cities with an emphasis on centering the voices of children and their families. The volume explores how to prioritize children’s wellbeing in urban planning, focusing primarily on children’s definitions of what they need to thrive: stable relationships, access to engaging activities, and having a voice in decisions that affect their lives. Alongside the more theoretical literature on urban childhood, authors regularly reference strategies from a major prevention program conducted in two English cities between 2019 and 2025.

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Urban Claims and the Right to the City

Grassroots Perspectives from Salvador da Bahia and London

Edited by Julian Walker, Marcos Bau Carvalho, and Ilinca Diaconescu

University College London, 2020

Urban Claims and the Right to the City explores how contested processes of urban development, and the rights of city dwellers, are understood and interpreted from the perspective of women and men working, in different ways, at the grassroots in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, and London, UK. In doing so, it represents the grounded voices of authors whose work and lives mean that they engage, on a daily basis, with issues related to housing and spatial rights, and identity struggles around race, gender, disability, sexuality, citizenship, and class.

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Urban Design Governance

Soft Powers and the European Experience

Matthew Carmona, João Bento, and Tommaso Gabrieli

University College London, 2023

A detailed exploration of the governance of urban design around Europe.

Urban Design Governance takes a deep dive into the governance of urban design around Europe. It examines interventions in the means and processes of designing the built environment as devised by public authorities and other stakeholders across the continent, paying particular attention to the use of soft powers and allied financial mechanisms to influence design quality in the public interest. In doing so, the book traces the scope, use, and effectiveness of the range of informal, non-regulatory urban design governance tools that governments, municipalities, and others have at their disposal.

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Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships

Housing, Memory, and Daily Life in Haiti

Vincent Joos

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships explores the failed international reconstruction of Port-au-Prince after the devastating 2010 earthquake. It describes the failures of international aid in Haiti while it analyzes examples of Haitian-based reconstruction and economic practices. By interrogating the relationship between indigenous uses of the cityscape and the urbanization of the countryside within a framework that centers on the violence of urban planning, the book shows that the forms of economic development promoted by international agencies institutionalize impermanence and instability. Conversely, it shows how everyday Haitians use and transform the city to create spaces of belonging and forms of citizenship anchored in a long history of resistance to extractive economies. Taking readers into the remnants of failed industrial projects in Haitian provinces and into the streets, rubble, and homes of Port-au-Prince, this book reflects on the possibilities and meanings of dwelling in post-disaster urban landscapes.

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Urban Indigeneities

Being Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century

Dana Brablec

University of Arizona Press, 2023

Today a majority of Indigenous peoples live in urban areas: they are builders and cleaners, teachers and lawyers, market women and masons, living in towns and cities surrounded by the people and pollution that characterize life for most individuals in the twenty-first century. Despite this basic fact, the vast majority of studies on Indigenous peoples concentrate solely on rural Indigenous populations.

Aiming to highlight these often-overlooked communities, this is the first book to look at urban Indigenous peoples globally and present the urban Indigenous experience—not as the exception but as the norm. The contributing essays draw on a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, architecture, land economy, and area studies, and are written by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. The analysis looks at Indigenous people across the world and draws on examples not usually considered within the study of indigeneity, such as Fiji, Japan, and Russia.

Indigeneity is often seen as being “authentic” when it is practiced in remote rural areas, but these essays show that a vigorous, vibrant, and meaningful indigeneity can be created in urban spaces too. The book challenges many of the imaginaries and tropes of what constitutes “the Indigenous” and offers perspectives and tools to understand a contemporary Indigenous urban reality. As such, it is a must-read for anyone interested in the real lives of Indigenous people today.

Contributors
Aiko Ikemura Amaral
Chris Andersen
Giuliana Borea
Dana Brablec
Andrew Canessa
Sandra del Valle Casals
Stanislav Saas Ksenofontov
Daniela Peluso
Andrey Petrov
Marya Rozanova-Smith
Kate Stevens
Kanako Uzawa

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Urban Inequality

Evidence From Four Cities

Alice O'Connor

Russell Sage Foundation, 2001

Despite today's booming economy, secure work and upward mobility remain out of reach for many central-city residents. Urban Inequality presents an authoritative new look at the racial and economic divisions that continue to beset our nation's cities. Drawing upon a landmark survey of employers and households in four U.S. metropolises, Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles, the study links both sides of the labor market, inquiring into the job requirements and hiring procedures of employers, as well as the skills, housing situation, and job search strategies of workers. Using this wealth of evidence, the authors discuss the merits of rival explanations of urban inequality. Do racial minorities lack the skills and education demanded by employers in today's global economy? Have the jobs best matched to the skills of inner-city workers moved to outlying suburbs? Or is inequality the result of racial discrimination in hiring, pay, and housing? Each of these explanations may provide part of the story, and the authors shed new light on the links between labor market disadvantage, residential segregation, and exclusionary racial attitudes. In each of the four cities, old industries have declined and new commercial centers have sprung up outside the traditional city limits, while new immigrant groups have entered all levels of the labor market. Despite these transformations, longstanding hostilities and lines of segregation between racial and ethnic communities are still apparent in each city. This book reveals how the disadvantaged position of many minority workers is compounded by racial antipathies and stereotypes that count against them in their search for housing and jobs. Until now, there has been little agreement on the sources of urban disadvantage and no convincing way of adjudicating between rival theories. Urban Inequality aims to advance our understanding of the causes of urban inequality as a first step toward ensuring that the nation's cities can prosper in the future without leaving their minority residents further behind. A Volume in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality

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Urban Latin America

The Political Condition from Above and Below

By Alejandro Portes and John Walton

University of Texas Press, 1976

Much research on the city in developing societies has focused mainly on one of three areas—planning, demography, or economics—and has emphasized either power elites or the masses, but not both. The published literature on Latin America has reflected these interests and has so far failed to provide a comprehensive view of Latin American urbanization. Urban Latin America is an attempt to integrate research on Latin American social organization within a single theoretical framework: development as fundamentally a political problem. Alejandro Portes and John Walton have included material on both elites and marginal populations and on the three major areas of research in order to formulate and address some of the key questions about the structure of urban politics in Latin America.

Following an introduction that delineates the scope of Latin American urban studies, Portes discusses the Latin American city as a creation of European colonialism. He goes on to examine political behavior among the poor, with central reference to system support and countersystem potential. Walton provides material for a comparative study of four cities: Monterrey and Guadalajara in Mexico and Medellín and Cali in Colombia. He also summarizes a large number of urban elite studies and develops a theoretical interpretation of their collective results, based on class structure and vertical integration. Material in each chapter is cross-referenced to other chapters, and the authors have used a common methodological approach in synthesizing and interpreting the research literature. In the final chapter they generalize current findings, elaborating on the interface between elite and mass politics in the urban situation. They make some observations on approaching changes and pinpoint possible research strategies for the future.

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Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era

Revitalization Politics in the Postindustrial City

Clarence N. Stone and Robert P. Stoker

University of Chicago Press, 2015

For decades, North American cities racked by deindustrialization and population loss have followed one primary path in their attempts at revitalization: a focus on economic growth in downtown and business areas. Neighborhoods, meanwhile, have often been left severely underserved. There are, however, signs of change. This collection of studies by a distinguished group of political scientists and urban planning scholars offers a rich analysis of the scope, potential, and ramifications of a shift still in progress. Focusing on neighborhoods in six cities—Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Toronto—the authors show how key players, including politicians and philanthropic organizations, are beginning to see economic growth and neighborhood improvement as complementary goals. The heads of universities and hospitals in central locations also find themselves facing newly defined realities, adding to the fluidity of a new political landscape even as structural inequalities exert a continuing influence.

While not denying the hurdles that community revitalization still faces, the contributors ultimately put forth a strong case that a more hospitable local milieu can be created for making neighborhood policy. In examining the course of experiences from an earlier period of redevelopment to the present postindustrial city, this book opens a window on a complex process of political change and possibility for reform.

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Urban Planning in the Nordic World

Ellen Braae

University of Wisconsin Press, 2022

Urban planning is a keystone in the materialization of the Nordic welfare states. That is not to say that there is one particular city form or planning practice that is synonymous with the emerging welfare city, as welfare per se is far from normative. On the contrary, welfare is a highly ambiguous and contested notion that has changed over the postwar decades, which is also reflected in the development of the welfare city.

However, welfare in urban planning has mainly been associated with ideas of “the good life” and egalitarianism. In a Nordic context, the state has taken the lead in providing the social engineering “hardware” for advancing this universal aim. Social demographic welfare is economically based on full employment, and in this regard housing and caregiving support are key components. Yet education, infrastructure, and leisure facilities are also basic features in the distribution of universal welfare services for citizens’ entire lives. The results, ideally, are green and spacious welfare cities.

This book outlines the origins, development, challenges, and lived realities of the changing welfare city, focusing primarily on Denmark. Strategies have changed over the decades as models of development have shifted and as the needs of society and a warming planet have come into focus. The current welfare city can be described as an urban landscape characterized by, on the one hand, a division of functions and, on the other, mutual competition. The role of the state has been minimized, turning municipalities into the new major agents in attracting taxpayers and providing goods—both by means of urban planning.

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Urban Policy In 20th Century

Hirsch, Arnold

Rutgers University Press, 1992

The recent riots in Los Angeles brought the urban crisis back to the center of public policy debates in Washington, D.C., and in urban areas throughout the United States. The contributors to this volume examine the major policy issues--race, housing, transportation, poverty, the changing environment, the effects of the global economy--confronting contemporary American cities.

Raymond A. Mohl begins with an extended discussion of the origins, evolution, and current state of Federal involvement in urban centers. Michael B. Katz follows with an insightful look at poverty in turn-of-the-century New York and the attempts to ameliorate the desperate plight of the poor during this period of rapid economic growth. Arnold R. Hirsch, Mohl, and David R. Goldfield then pursue different facets of the racial dilemma confronting American cities. Hirsch discusses historical dimensions of residential segregation and public policy, while Mohl uses Overtown, Miami, as a case study of the social impact of the construction of interstate highways in urban communities. David Goldfield explores the political ramifications and incongruities of contemporary urban race relations.

Finally, Carl Abbott and Sam Bass Warner, Jr., examine the impact of global economic developments and the environmental implications of past policy choices. Collectively, the authors show us where we have been, some of the needs that must be addressed, and the urban policy alternatives we face.

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Urban Policy in the Time of Obama

James DeFilippis

University of Minnesota Press, 2016

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.

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Urban Reform and Its Consequences

A Study in Representation

Susan Welch and Timothy Bledsoe

University of Chicago Press, 1988

Throughout this century, reformers have fought to eliminate party control of city politics. As a result, the majority of American cities today elect council members in at-large and nonpartisan elections. This result of the turn-of-the-century Progressive movement, which worked for election rules that eliminated the power of the urban machine and the working class on which it was based, is today still a subject of lively debate. For example, in the mid-1980s, regular Democrats in Chicago sought to institute a nonpartisan mayoral election. Supporters thought that reform would make the electoral process more democratic, while opponents charged that it was meant to dilute the voting powers of blacks. Clearly, the effect of urban reform remains an important issue for scholars and politicians alike.

Susan Welch and Timothy Bledsoe clarify a portion of the debate by investigating how election structures affect candidates and the nature of representation. They examine the different effects of district versus at-large elections and of partisan versus nonpartisan elections. Who gets elected? Are representatives' socioeconomic status and party affiliation related to election form? Are election structures related to how those who are elected approach their jobs? Do they see themselves as representatives concerned with the good of the city as a whole?

Urban Reform and Its Consequences reports an unprecedented wealth of data drawn from a sample of nearly 1,000 council members and communities with populations between 50,000 and 1 million across 42 states. The sample includes communities that use a variety of election procedures. This study is therefore the most comprehensive and accurate to date.

Welch and Bledsoe conclude that nonpartisan and at-large elections do give city councils a more middle- and upper-middle-class character and have changed the way representatives view their jobs. Reform measures have not, however, produced councils that are significantly more conservative or more prone to conflict. Overall, the authors conclude that partisan and district elections are more likely to represent the whole community and to make the council more accountable to the electorate.

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Urban Saniscapes

Slums, Housing and Everyday Sanitation in Accra and Nairobi, 1908–1963

Waseem-Ahmed Bin-Kasim

Michigan State University Press, 2025

In this comparative study, Bin-Kasim examines environmental sanitation in the historical development of Accra and Nairobi, the capitals of the Gold Coast (Ghana) and Kenya. This book traces the approaches to sanitation during colonial rule and urban growth throughout the first half of the twentieth century and beyond. From the consolidation of the colonial regimes to the Great Depression, urbanization waves, and postwar development, sanitation was both a cause and a consequence of the built environment. Bin-Kasim characterizes this complex relationship between sanitation and urban growth over time as the 'saniscape.' The saniscape is the confluence of public health, planning interventions, and various urban constituencies, and includes an array of influences like colonial expertise and African industry, which shaped the two cities regardless of their power dynamics and land tenure. Attention to the saniscape validates how Africans called out colonial discrimination and inefficiencies to intervene and shape cities. This volume highlights the shared histories of Accra and Nairobi and upends conventional narratives that attach too much difference to non-settler and settler colonialism.

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Urban Sustainability

A Global Perspective

Igor Vojnovic

Michigan State University Press, 2012

More than half the world’s population currently lives in urban areas, and virtually all of the world’s population growth over the next three decades is expected to be in cities. What impact will this growth have on the environment? What can we do now to pave the way for resource longevity? Sustainability has received considerable attention in recent years, though conceptions of the term remain vague. Using a wide array of cities around the globe as case studies, this timely book explores the varying nature of global urban-environmental stresses and the complexities involved in defining sustainability policies. Working with six core themes, the editor examines the past, present, and future of urban sustainability within local, national, and global contexts.

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Urbanism without Guarantees

The Everyday Life of a Gentrifying West Side Neighborhood

Christian M. Anderson

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

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.

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Us Against Them

Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion

Donald R. Kinder and Cindy D. Kam

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Ethnocentrism—our tendency to partition the human world into in-groups and out-groups—pervades societies around the world. Surprisingly, though, few scholars have explored its role in political life. Donald Kinder and Cindy Kam fill this gap with Us Against Them, their definitive explanation of how ethnocentrism shapes American public opinion.

Arguing that humans are broadly predisposed to ethnocentrism, Kinder and Kam explore its impact on our attitudes toward an array of issues, including the war on terror, humanitarian assistance, immigration, the sanctity of marriage, and the reform of social programs. The authors ground their study in previous theories from a wide range of disciplines, establishing a new framework for understanding what ethnocentrism is and how it becomes politically consequential. They also marshal a vast trove of survey evidence to identify the conditions under which ethnocentrism shapes public opinion. While ethnocentrism is widespread in the United States, the authors demonstrate that its political relevance depends on circumstance. Exploring the implications of these findings for political knowledge, cosmopolitanism, and societies outside the United States, Kinder and Kam add a new dimension to our understanding of how democracy functions.

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Usage of Idem, Ipse and Words of Related Meaning

Clarence L. Meader

University of Michigan Press, 1910

This book presents a detailed analysis of two Latin pronouns, idem and ipse. Consideration is given to synonymously and etymologically related words in Latin and other Indo-European languages.

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Uses Of The Other

“The East” in European Identity Formation

Iver B. Neumann

University of Minnesota Press, 1998

Examines identity politics in the context of international relations.

The field of international relations has recently witnessed a tremendous growth of interest in the theme of identity and its formation, construction, and deconstruction. In Uses of the Other, Iver B. Neumann demonstrates how thinking about identity in terms of the self and other may prove highly useful in the study of world politics.

Neumann begins by tracing the four different paths along which this thinking has developed during this century-ethnographic, psychological, Continental philosophical, and “Eastern excursion”-and he shows how these blended at the margins of the discipline of international relations at the end of the 1980s. There follow several incisive readings of European identity formations on the all-European, regional, and national levels. The theme that draws these readings together is how “the East” is used as a sign of otherness at all three levels. Whereas previous studies framed this process as part of colonial and postcolonial developments, this book suggests that “Easternness” is also present as a marker in contemporary discourses about Russia, Turkey, Central Europe, and Bashkortostan, among others. Situating his work in contemporary critical debates, Neumann argues that, while the self/other perspective is always of relevance, it is now more in need of being used as a perspective on specific sequences of identity formation than of further embellishment.ISBN: 0-8166-3082-8 Cloth $49.95xxISBN: 0-8166-3083-6 Paper $19.95x248 Pages 5-7/8x9 NovemberBorderlines Series, Volume 9Translation inquiries:

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Using Gramsci

A New Approach

Michele Filippini

Pluto Press, 2016

The notebooks kept by Antonio Gramsci while he was in prison in fascist Italy in the 1920s have been an inspiration to Marxist political thinkers and activists around the world for decades. With Using Gramsci, Michele Filippini teases out a number of previously ignored aspects of Gramsci’s works to create a book that stands apart from previous analyses. While Filippini does examine the aspects of Gramsci’s thought that have long attracted scholars—including his thinking on hegemony, organic intellectuals, and civil society—she foregrounds new concepts, including the individual, crisis, and space and time. The result is a rethinking of Gramsci for our era that offers a number of promising new ways forward.

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Utopia Limited

The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern

Marianne DeKoven

Duke University Press, 2004

Utopia Limited is an original, engaging account of how postmodernism emerged from the political and cultural upheaval of the 1960s. Marianne DeKoven argues that aspects of sixties radical politics and culture simultaneously embodied the full, final flowering of the modern and the beginning of the postmodern. Analyzing classic sixties texts, DeKoven shows where the utopian master narratives underlying the radical and countercultural movements gave way to the “utopia limited” of the postmodern as a range of competing political values and desires came to the fore. She identifies the pivots where the modern was superseded by the nascent postmodern: where modern mass culture was replaced by postmodern popular culture, modern egalitarianism morphed into postmodern populism, and modern individualism fragmented into postmodern politics and cultures of subjectivity.

DeKoven rigorously analyzes a broad array of cultural and political texts important in the sixties—from popular favorites such as William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch to political manifestoes including The Port Huron Statement, the founding document of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). She examines texts that overtly discuss the conflict in Vietnam, Black Power, and second-wave feminism—including Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex; experimental pieces such as The Living Theatre’s Paradise Now; influential philosophical works including Roland Barthes’s Mythologies and Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man; and explorations of Las Vegas, the prime location of postmodernity. Providing extensive annotated bibliographies on both the sixties and postmodernism, Utopia Limited is an invaluable resource for understanding the impact of that tumultuous decade on the present.

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