Download or read book Reclaiming Gotham written by Juan González and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Bill de Blasio’s mayoral victory triggered a seismic shift in the nation’s urban political landscape—and what it portends for our cities in the future In November 2013, a little-known progressive stunned the elite of New York City by capturing the mayoralty by a landslide. Bill de Blasio's promise to end the "Tale of Two Cities" had struck a chord among ordinary residents still struggling to recover from the Great Recession. De Blasio's election heralded the advent of the most progressive New York City government in generations. Not since the legendary Fiorello La Guardia in the 1930s had so many populist candidates captured government office at the same time. Gotham, in other words, had been suddenly reclaimed in the name of its people. How did this happen? De Blasio's victory, journalist legend Juan González argues, was not just a routine change of government but a popular rebellion against corporate-friendly policies that had dominated New York for decades. Reflecting that broader change, liberal Democrats Bill Peduto in Pittsburgh, Betsy Hodges in Minneapolis, and Martin Walsh of Boston also won mayoral elections that same year, as did insurgent Ras Baraka in Newark the following year. This new generation of municipal leaders offers valuable lessons for those seeking grassroots reform.
Download or read book Reclaiming Your Community written by Majora Carter and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2022-02 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Majora Carter shows how brain drain cripples low-status communities and maps out a development strategy focused on talent retention to help them break out of economic stagnation. "My musical, In the Heights, explores issues of community, gentrification, identity and home, and the question: Are happy endings only ones that involve getting out of your neighborhood to achieve your dreams? In her refreshing new book, Majora Carter writes about these issues with great insight and clarity, asking us to re-examine our notions of what community development is and how we invest in the futures of our hometowns. This is an exciting conversation worth joining.” —Lin-Manuel Miranda How can we solve the problem of persistent poverty in low-status communities? Majora Carter argues that these areas need a talent-retention strategy, just like the ones companies have. Retaining homegrown talent is a critical part of creating a strong local economy that can resist gentrification. But too many people born in low-status communities measure their success by how far away from them they can get. Carter, who could have been one of them, returned to the South Bronx and devised a development strategy rooted in the conviction that these communities have the resources within themselves to succeed. She advocates measures such as • Building mixed-income instead of exclusively low-income housing to create a diverse and robust economic ecosystem • Showing homeowners how to maximize the long-term value of their property so they won't succumb to quick-cash offers from speculators • Keeping people and dollars in the community by developing vibrant “third spaces”—restaurants, bookstores, and places like Carter's own Boogie Down Grind Cafe This is a profoundly personal book. Carter writes about her brother's murder, how turning a local dumping ground into an award-winning park opened her eyes to the hidden potential in her community, her struggles as a woman of color confronting the “male and pale” real estate and nonprofit establishments, and much more. It is a powerful rethinking of poverty, economic development, and the meaning of success.
Download or read book Gotham Girl Interrupted written by Alisa Kennedy Jones and published by Charlesbridge Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nora Ephron and Allie Brosh fans take note: Alisa Jones' memoir Gotham Girl Interrupted is a smart stand-up comedy about the power of falling down. "Get to your safe spaces, people. Here comes the shimmer..." From irreverent NYC blogger Alisa Kennedy Jones comes an account of her "misadventures in motherhood, love, and epilepsy" that James Patterson calls "smart, harrowing, heart-warming, and very funny." What do Da Vinci, Agatha Christie, and blogger Alisa Kennedy Jones have in common? If you said "timeless artistic genius", stop sucking up--the answer is ecstatic epilepsy. In this hilarious and moving dispatch from the frontlines of neurodiversity, Jones chronicles life with these terrifying-yet-beautiful grand mal seizures. Characteristic of Jones's condition are attacks which leave her with what Zen Buddhists sometimes refer to as a "beginner's mind": a vast, open expanse of headspace, coupled with a creative euphoria. With bracing candor and humility, Jones describes living with chronic illness, single motherhood, and her day-to-day life as a hapless writer in NYC. Above all, Jones reminds us to fight the battle for becoming who we are supposed to be--no matter how much flopping around on the ground and wetting ourselves we have to do to get there.
Download or read book Disrupt Discredit and Divide written by Mike German and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Impressively researched and eloquently argued, former special agent Mike German’s Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide tells the story of the transformation of the FBI after the 9/11 attacks from a law enforcement agency, made famous by prosecuting organized crime and corruption in business and government, into arguably the most secretive domestic intelligence agency America has ever seen. German shows how FBI leaders exploited the fear of terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11 to shed the legal constraints imposed on them in the 1970s in the wake of Hoover-era civil rights abuses. Empowered by the Patriot Act and new investigative guidelines, the bureau resurrected a discredited theory of terrorist “radicalization” and adopted a “disruption strategy” that targeted Muslims, foreigners, and communities of color, and tarred dissidents inside and outside the bureau as security threats, dividing American communities against one another. By prioritizing its national security missions over its law enforcement mission, the FBI undermined public confidence in justice and the rule of law. Its failure to include racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and xenophobic violence committed by white nationalists within its counterterrorism mandate only increased the perception that the FBI was protecting the powerful at the expense of the powerless. Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide is an engaging and unsettling contemporary history of the FBI and a bold call for reform, told by a longtime counterterrorism undercover agent who has become a widely admired whistleblower and a critic for civil liberties and accountable government.
Download or read book I Thought It Was Just Me but it Isn t written by Brené Brown and published by Avery. This book was released on 2008 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2007 with the title: I thought it was just me: women reclaiming power and courage in a culture of shame.
Download or read book Gotham Unbound written by Ted Steinberg and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2015 PROSE Award for US History A “fascinating, encyclopedic history…of greater New York City through an ecological lens” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)—the sweeping story of one of the most man-made spots on earth. Gotham Unbound recounts the four-century history of how hundreds of square miles of open marshlands became home to six percent of the nation’s population. Ted Steinberg brings a vanished New York back to vivid, rich life. You will see the metropolitan area anew, not just as a dense urban goliath but as an estuary once home to miles of oyster reefs, wolves, whales, and blueberry bogs. That world gave way to an onslaught managed by thousands, from Governor John Montgomerie, who turned water into land, and John Randel, who imposed a grid on Manhattan, to Robert Moses, Charles Urstadt, Donald Trump, and Michael Bloomberg. “Weighty and wonderful…Resting on a sturdy foundation of research and imagination, Steinberg’s volume begins with Henry Hudson’s arrival aboard the Half Moon in 1609 and ends with another transformative event—Hurricane Sandy in 2012” (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland). This book is a powerful account of the relentless development that New Yorkers wrought as they plunged headfirst into the floodplain and transformed untold amounts of salt marsh and shellfish beds into a land jam-packed with people, asphalt, and steel, and the reeds and gulls that thrive among them. With metropolitan areas across the globe on a collision course with rising seas, Gotham Unbound helps explain how one of the most important cities in the world has ended up in such a perilous situation. “Steinberg challenges the conventional arguments that geography is destiny….And he makes the strong case that for all the ecological advantages of urban living, hyperdensity by itself is not necessarily a sound environmental strategy” (The New York Times).
Download or read book Social Reproduction and the City written by Simon Black and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transformation of child care after welfare reform in New York City and the struggle against that transformation is a largely untold story. In the decade following welfare reform, despite increases in child care funding, there was little growth in New York's unionized, center-based child care system and no attempt to make this system more responsive to the needs of working mothers. As the city delivered child care services "on the cheap," relying on non-union home child care providers, welfare rights organizations, community legal clinics, child care advocates, low-income community groups, activist mothers, and labor unions organized to demand fair solutions to the child care crisis that addressed poor single mothers' need for quality, affordable child care as well as child care providers' need for decent work and pay. Social Reproduction and the City tells this story, linking welfare reform to feminist research and activism around the "crisis of care," social reproduction, and the neoliberal city. At a theoretical level, Simon Black's history of this era presents a feminist political economy of the urban welfare regime, applying a social reproduction lens to processes of urban neoliberalization and an urban lens to feminist analyses of welfare state restructuring and resistance. Feminist political economy and feminist welfare state scholarship have not focused on the urban as a scale of analysis, and critical approaches to urban neoliberalism often fail to address questions of social reproduction. To address these unexplored areas, Black unpacks the urban as a contested site of welfare state restructuring and examines the escalating crisis in social reproduction. He lays bare the aftermath of the welfare-to-work agenda of the Giuliani administration in New York City on child care and the resistance to policies that deepened race, class, and gender inequities.
Download or read book Blurring Timescapes Subverting Erasure written by Sarah Surface-Evans and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-08-30 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when we blur time and allow ourselves to haunt or to become haunted by ghosts of the past? Drawing on archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data, Blurring Timescapes, Subverting Erasure demonstrates the value of conceiving of ghosts not just as metaphors, but as mechanisms for making the past more concrete and allowing the negative specters of enduring historical legacies, such as colonialism and capitalism, to be exorcised.
Download or read book New York written by Ric Burns and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 849 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An expanded edition of the only comprehensive illustrated history of New York—with more than 600 ravishing photographs and illustrations—that tells the remarkable 400-year-long story of the city from its beginning in 1624 up to the current moment. The companion volume to the acclaimed PBS series. This landmark book traces the spectacular growth of New York from its initial settlement on the tip of Manhattan through the destruction wrought by the Revolutionary War to its rise as the nation’s premier commercial capital and industrial center and as a magnet for immigrant hopes and dreams in the 19th century to its standing as a beacon of modern culture in the 20th century and as a worldwide symbol of resilience in the 21st century. The story continues here with new chapters delivering a sweeping portrait of New York at the dawn of the 21st century, when it emerged after decades of decline to assert its place at the very center of a new globalized culture. Here is a city challenged—indeed, sometimes shaken to its core—by a series of profound crises: the aftermath of 9/11, the continual struggle with racial injustice, the financial crisis of 2008, the devastation of Superstorm Sandy, the still unfolding cataclysm of the COVID-19 pandemic—whose earliest and deadliest urban epicenter was New York itself. Here too is a lively portrait of the city’s vibrant street life and culture: the birth of hip-hop in the South Bronx, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates in Central Park, the musicals of Broadway, the explosion in location filmmaking in every borough, the pivotal rise of the tech industry, and so much more. The history of this city—especially in the tumultuous and transformative two decades detailed in the new chapters—is an epic story of rebirth and growth, an astonishing transfiguration, still in progress, of the world’s first modern city into a model and prototype for the global city of the future.
Download or read book Capital City written by Samuel Stein and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This superbly succinct and incisive book” on urban planning and real estate argues gentrification isn’t driven by latte-sipping hipsters—but is engineered by the capitalist state (Michael Sorkin, author of All Over the Map) Our cities are changing. Around the world, more and more money is being invested in buildings and land. Real estate is now a $217 trillion dollar industry, worth thirty-six times the value of all the gold ever mined. It forms sixty percent of global assets, and one of the most powerful people in the world—the former president of the United States—made his name as a landlord and developer. Samuel Stein shows that this explosive transformation of urban life and politics has been driven not only by the tastes of wealthy newcomers, but by the state-driven process of urban planning. Planning agencies provide a unique window into the ways the state uses and is used by capital, and the means by which urban renovations are translated into rising real estate values and rising rents. Capital City explains the role of planners in the real estate state, as well as the remarkable power of planning to reclaim urban life.
Download or read book Geography of Time Place Movement and Networks Volume 3 written by Stanley D. Brunn and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Time to Stir written by Paul Cronin and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 711 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For seven days in April 1968, students occupied five buildings on the campus of Columbia University to protest a planned gymnasium in a nearby Harlem park, links between the university and the Vietnam War, and what they saw as the university’s unresponsive attitude toward their concerns. Exhilarating to some and deeply troubling to others, the student protests paralyzed the university, grabbed the world’s attention, and inspired other uprisings. Fifty years after the events, A Time to Stir captures the reflections of those who participated in and witnessed the Columbia rebellion. With more than sixty essays from members of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, the Students’ Afro-American Society, faculty, undergraduates who opposed the protests, “outside agitators,” and members of the New York Police Department, A Time to Stir sheds light on the politics, passions, and ideals of the 1960s. Moving beyond accounts from the student movement’s white leadership, this book presents the perspectives of black students, who were grappling with their uneasy integration into a supposedly liberal campus, as well as the views of women, who began to question their second-class status within the protest movement and society at large. A Time to Stir also speaks to the complicated legacy of the uprising. For many, the events at Columbia inspired a lifelong dedication to social causes, while for others they signaled the beginning of the chaos that would soon engulf the left. Taken together, these reflections present a nuanced and moving portrait that reflects the sense of possibility and excess that characterized the 1960s.
Download or read book Ending Poverty in America written by John Edwards and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of original essays designed to put the issue of poverty back on the political map in the US, offering a plan to eliminate poverty in 30 years. With contributions on job creation, schools, housing, rural and family life, this forward-thinking selection brings together liberals and conservatives to address one of the great moral and societal issues of modern life.
Download or read book Thurman Munson written by Christopher Devine and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-09-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When in 2000 the Baseball Writers Association of America elected the ever-durable Carlton Fisk to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, many fans quietly pointed to the Hall's omission of Fisk' greatest American League contemporary, Thurman Munson. And when in 2001 the writers honored Kirby Puckett, the Twins star forced to retire with glaucoma after a brilliant but brief 12-year career, the same fans began to raise their voices in support of Munson, another short-timer who was once the toast of his team's hometown. In a position that requires the strapping on of hot, awkward equipment and the torturous alternation of standing and squatting, most catchers struggle to maintain electrolytes, let alone a respectable batting average. It is, in fact, a position so demanding, that men deemed good ball-handlers or pitcher confidants might hang on in the big leagues for years despite their drag on a team's offensive production. Munson, like Fisk and National Leaguer Johnny Bench, was a tough-as-nails backstop, a Gold Glove winner, and the unquestioned leader of his team. Like Bench and Fisk, too, though to a lesser degree, Munson had home run power. But the Yankee captain was in, at least one respect, an even rarer breed of catcher--one who manages despite the physical and mental demands of his position to finish each year somewhere near the .300 mark. Munson, who ranked in the top 10 among A.L. hitters five of the nine full seasons he played, was widely considered one of his generation's great clutch hitters. When the star catcher died at age 32, he was still in his prime, and it seems clear to many that on August 2, 1979, misfortune denied Munson his place in Cooperstown. Outlived by his contemporaries, who went on to post more impressive career numbers, and now overshadowed by the accomplishments of catchers from the current batter-biased era, Munson's chances for recognition grow increasingly faint. But for all the praiseworthy things he did on the field in his short career, Thurman Munson accomplished as much in between the innings and games he labored through. And it might be his influence for which he's ultimately remembered. In this work, author Chris Devine pays special attention to Munson as teammate, friend, husband, and father.
Download or read book Growing Gardens Building Power written by Justin Sean Myers and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-14 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the United States marginalized communities are organizing to address social, economic, and environmental inequities through building community food systems rooted in the principles of social justice. But how exactly are communities doing this work, why are residents tackling these issues through food, what are their successes, and what barriers are they encountering? This book dives into the heart of the food justice movement through an exploration of East New York Farms! (ENYF!), one of the oldest food justice organizations in Brooklyn, and one that emerged from a bottom-up asset-oriented development model. It details the food inequities the community faces and what produced them, how and why residents mobilized to turn vacant land into community gardens, and the struggles the organization has encountered as they worked to feed residents through urban farms and farmers markets. This book also discusses how through the politics of food justice, ENYF! has challenged the growth-oriented development politics of City Hall, opposed the neoliberalization of food politics, navigated the funding constraints of philanthropy and the welfare state, and opposed the entrance of a Walmart into their community. Through telling this story, Growing Gardens, Building Power offers insights into how the food justice movement is challenging the major structures and institutions that seek to curtail the transformative power of the food justice movement and its efforts to build a more just and sustainable world.
Download or read book Dwellers in Gotham written by Annan Dale and published by . This book was released on 1899 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Imperial Metropolis written by Jessica M. Kim and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-08-09 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this compelling narrative of capitalist development and revolutionary response, Jessica M. Kim reexamines the rise of Los Angeles from a small town to a global city against the backdrop of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Gilded Age economics, and American empire. It is a far-reaching transnational history, chronicling how Los Angeles boosters transformed the borderlands through urban and imperial capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century and how the Mexican Revolution redefined those same capitalist networks into the twentieth. Kim draws on archives in the United States and Mexico to argue that financial networks emerging from Los Angeles drove economic transformations in the borderlands, reshaped social relations across wide swaths of territory, and deployed racial hierarchies to advance investment projects across the border. However, the Mexican Revolution, with its implicit critique of imperialism, disrupted the networks of investment and exploitation that had structured the borderlands for sixty years, and reconfigured transnational systems of infrastructure and trade. Kim provides the first history to connect Los Angeles's urban expansionism with more continental and global currents, and what results is a rich account of real and imagined geographies of city, race, and empire.
