Download or read book The Reluctant Metropolis written by William Fulton and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2001-12-04 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Los Angeles Times Bestseller "William Fulton is the Raymond Chandler of Los Angeles real estate."—Kevin Starr, California State Librarian and author of Material Dreams: Los Angeles through the 1920s A Los Angeles Times Bestseller"William Fulton is the Raymond Chandler of Los Angeles real estate."—Kevin Starr, California State Librarian and author of Material Dreams: Los Angeles through the 1920s In twelve engaging essays, William Fulton chronicles the history of urban planning in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, tracing the legacy of short-sighted political and financial gains that has resulted in a vast urban region on the brink of disaster. Looking at such diverse topics as shady real estate speculations, the construction of the Los Angeles subway, the battle over the future of South Central L.A. after the 1992 riots, and the emergence of Las Vegas as "the new Los Angeles," Fulton offers a fresh perspective on the city's epic sprawl. The only way to reverse the historical trends that have made Los Angeles increasingly unliveable, Fulton concludes, is to confront the prevailing "cocoon citizenship," the mind-set that prevents the city's inhabitants and leaders from recognizing Los Angeles's patchwork of communities as a single metropolis.
Download or read book Material Dreams written by Kevin Starr and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1990 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Material Dreams, Starr turns to one of the most vibrant decades in the Golden State's history, the 1920s, when some two million Americans migrated to California, the vast majority settling in or around Los Angeles. Although he treats readers to intriguing side trips to Santa Barbara and Pasadena, Starr focuses here mainly on Los Angeles, revealing how this major city arose almost defiantly on a site lacking many of the advantages required for urban development, creating itself out of sheer will, the Great Gatsby of American cities. He describes how William Ellsworth Smyth, the Peter the Hermit of the Irrigation Crusade, propounded the importance of water in Southern California's future, and how such figures as the self-educated, Irish engineer William Mulholland (who built the main aquaducts to Los Angeles) and George Chaffey (who diverted the Colorado River, transforming desert into the lush Imperial Valley) brought life-supporting water to the arid South. He examines the discovery of oil ("Yes it's oil, oil, oil / that makes LA boil," went the official drinking song of the Uplifters Club), the boosters and land developers, the evangelists (such as Bob Shuler, the Methodist Savanarola of Los Angeles, and Aimee Semple McPherson), and countless other colorful figures of the period. There are also fascinating sections on the city's architecture (such as the remarkably innovative Bradbury Building and its eccentric, neophyte designer, George Wyman), the impact of the automobile on city planning, the great antiquarian book collections, the Hollywood film community, and much more. By the end of the decade, Los Angeles had tripled in population and become the fifth largest city in the nation. In Material Dreams, Kevin Starr captures this explosive growth in a narrative tour de force that combines wide-ranging scholarship with captivating prose.
Download or read book Up Against the Sprawl written by Jennifer R. Wolch and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economists, political scientists, geographers, and urban planners explore how government policy has shaped the development of greater Los Angeles. They challenge the myth of market choice and point to the key roles of government policy, often driven by business priorities. In addition, they show how residents are developing innovative approaches to
Download or read book Latino Metropolis written by Victor M. Valle and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Los Angeles: scratch the surface of the city's image as a rich mosaic of multinational cultures and a grittier truth emerges-its huge, shimmering economy was built on the backs of largely Latino immigrants and still depends on them. This book exposes the underside of the development and restructuring that have turned Los Angeles into a global city, and in doing so it reveals the ways in which ideas about ethnicity-Latino identity itself-are implicated and elaborated in the process."A truly pathbreaking work that puts Latinos where they belong: in the center of debate about the future of the U
Download or read book Reluctant Revolutionaries written by Joseph S. Tiedemann and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of why New Yorkers were such reluctant revolutionaries has long bedeviled historians. In an innovative study of New York City between 1763 and 1776, Joseph S. Tiedemann explains how conscientiously residents labored to build a consensus under difficult circumstances. New Yorkers acted the way they did not because they were mostly loyalist or because a few patrician conservatives were able to stem the tide of revolution but because the population of their city was so heterogeneous that consensus was not easily achieved.Differences within the city's pluralistic population slowed the process of hammering out a course of action acceptable to the large majority. The consensus that finally emerged had to be cautious rather than militant in order to unite as many people as possible behind the revolutionary banner. Ultimately, the time it took was far less significant, Tiedemann notes, than the fact that New York proceeded to declare independence, and went on to become a pivotal state in the new nation. In framing his argument, Tiedemann explains the limitations of interpretations offered by both progressive, New Left, and consensus historians. Citing the work of scholars as diverse as Walter Laqueur, Theda Skocpol, and Louis Kreisberg, Tiedemann pays close attention to the dynamics of British colonial rule and its impact on New York.
Download or read book Place and Prosperity written by William Fulton and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2022-07-21 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Place and Prosperity: How Cities Help Us to Connect and Innovate, urban planning expert William Fulton takes an engaging look at the importance of connecting to place, how cities are engines of prosperity, and how these two ideas - place and prosperity - lie at the heart of what a city is and, by extension, what our society is all about. Fulton has been writing about cities over his forty-year career as a journalist, professor, mayor, planning director, and the director of an urban think tank in one of America's great cities. Place and Prosperity is a curated collection of his writings with new and updated selections and framing material. Fulton shows that at their best, cities not only inspire and uplift us, but they make our daily life more convenient, more fulfilling, and more prosperous.
Download or read book The Regional City written by Peter Calthorpe and published by Shearwater Books. This book was released on 2001 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In The Regional City, two of the most innovative thinkers in the field of urban design and land use planning offer a detailed look at this new metropolitan form: its genesis, physical structure, and policy foundation. Using full-color graphics and in-depth case studies, they provide a thorough examination of the emerging field of regional design, explaining how new forms of smart growth and neighborhood design can help put an end to sprawl, urban disinvestment, and squandered resources." "This book is a must read for environmentalists, planners, architects, landscape architects, local officials, real estate developers, community development advocates, and students in architecture, urban planning, and policy."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Monied Metropolis written by Sven Beckert and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-03-19 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 2001, is a comprehensive history of the most powerful group in the nineteenth-century United States: New York City's economic elite. This small and diverse group of Americans accumulated unprecedented economic, social, and political power, and decisively put their mark on the age. Professor Beckert explores how capital-owning New Yorkers overcame their distinct antebellum identities to forge dense social networks, create powerful social institutions, and articulate an increasingly coherent view of the world and their place within it. Actively engaging in a rapidly changing economic, social, and political environment, these merchants, industrialists, bankers, and professionals metamorphosed into a social class. In the process, these upper-class New Yorkers put their stamp on the major political conflicts of the day - ranging from the Civil War to municipal elections. Employing the methods of social history, The Monied Metropolis explores the big issues of nineteenth-century social change.
Download or read book Creative Common Law Strategies for Protecting the Environment written by Lynn L. Bergeson and published by Environmental Law Institute. This book was released on 2007 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
Download or read book A Better Way to Build written by Michael R. Adamson and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While architects have been the subject of many scholarly studies, we know very little about the companies that built the structures they designed. This book is a study in business history as well as civil engineering and construction management. It details the contributions that Charles J. Pankow, a 1947 graduate of Purdue University, and his firm have made as builders of large, often concrete, commercial structures since the company's foundation in 1963. In particular, it uses selected projects as case studies to analyze and explain how the company innovated at the project level. The company has been recognized as a pioneer in "design-build," a methodology that involves the construction company in the development of structures and substitutes negotiated contracts for the bidding of architects' plans. The Pankow companies also developed automated construction technologies that helped keep projects on time and within budget. The book includes dozens of photographs of buildings under construction from the company's archive and other sources. At the same time, the author analyzes and evaluates the strategic decision making of the firm through 2004, the year in which the founder died. While Charles Pankow figures prominently in the narrative, the book also describes how others within the firm adapted the business so that the company could survive a commercial market that changed significantly as a result of the recession of the 1990s. Extending beyond the scope of most business biographies, this book is a study in industry innovation and the power of corporate culture, as well as the story of one particular company and the individuals who created it.
Download or read book The Urban Mystique written by STEPHENS. JOSH and published by . This book was released on 2020-04-17 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Josh Stephens grew up in Los Angeles knowing that it was a perfectly pleasant place, with enviable weather, an impressive natural environment, and Hollywood glamour. But, still, he wondered whether a great city shouldn't be something ... more. With a title inspired by Betty Friedan's account of life in the suburbs, The Urban Mystique is equal part lamentation and celebration. It collects some of Josh's work from the California Planning & Development Report and elsewhere, covering everything from the minutiae of setbacks, the regional impacts of transit investments, the promise of smart growth and sustainability, the precariousness of urban politics in the 21st century, and the ineffable complexities that make all cities, be they in California or anywhere else, wondrous, maddening, and fascinating.
Download or read book Metropolis written by Ben Wilson and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a captivating tour of cities famous and forgotten, acclaimed historian Ben Wilson tells the glorious, millennia-spanning story how urban living sparked humankind's greatest innovations. “A towering achievement. . . . Reading this book is like visiting an exhilarating city for the first time—dazzling.” —The Wall Street Journal During the two hundred millennia of humanity’s existence, nothing has shaped us more profoundly than the city. From their very beginnings, cities created such a flourishing of human endeavor—new professions, new forms of art, worship and trade—that they kick-started civilization. Guiding us through the centuries, Wilson reveals the innovations nurtured by the inimitable energy of human beings together: civics in the agora of Athens, global trade in ninth-century Baghdad, finance in the coffeehouses of London, domestic comforts in the heart of Amsterdam, peacocking in Belle Époque Paris. In the modern age, the skyscrapers of New York City inspired utopian visions of community design, while the trees of twenty-first-century Seattle and Shanghai point to a sustainable future in the age of climate change. Page-turning, irresistible, and rich with engrossing detail, Metropolis is a brilliant demonstration that the story of human civilization is the story of cities.
Download or read book A Connected Metropolis written by Maxwell Johnson and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2023-07 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Connected Metropolis Maxwell Johnson describes Los Angeles's rise in the early twentieth century as catalyzed by a series of upper-class debates about the city's connections to the outside world. By focusing on specific moments in the city's development when tensions over Los Angeles's connections, or lack thereof, emerged, Johnson ties each movement to two or three contemporary figures who influenced the debates at hand. The elites' previous efforts to secure nationwide and global connections for Los Angeles were wildly successful following World War II. As a result, the city became a landing spot for African American migrants, Cambodian and Laotian refugees, and Mexican and Central American immigrants. Johnson argues that the city's history is more defined by external relationships than previously understood, and those relationships have given the history of the city more continuity than originally recognized. At the turn of the twentieth century, the politics of connection revolved around initiatives to tie Los Angeles to other places both tangibly and metaphorically. Elites built tangible connections to secure, among other things, the water that irrigated the citrus farms of Los Angeles, the capital that propelled its businesses, and the people who migrated from the Midwest to buy its houses. To build metaphorical connections that located the city amid transcontinental and trans-Pacific movements, elites themselves often transcended nearby borders and pursued connections at will. Los Angeles stood as a focal point for elite ambitions, a place with a more ambivalent relationship to external connections. The true story of Los Angeles's rise lies in the spectacular visions and rambunctious activism of a group of elite men dedicated to transforming a remote frontier town into a global metropolis.
Download or read book Romancing the Smokestack written by William Fulton and published by . This book was released on 2010-10 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did Federal Express decide to locate at the Memphis Airport? Why is China also losing manufacturing jobs? Do artists really help turn around a struggling neighborhood? What should you do with a declining auto mall - save it or let it die and start over again? What's better - subsidizing an business or subsidizing the infrastructure such a business requires? These are the kinds of questions that cities and states deal with all the time in their economic development. Bill Fulton's new book, ROMANCING THE SMOKESTACK: HOW CITIES AND STATES PURSUE PROSPERITY, is a collection of economic development columns from GOVERNING magazine that covers deals with these questions - and reveals the good, the bad, and the ugly about how economic development is practiced in the United States. Bill Fulton is a veteran author (GUIDE TO CALIFORNIA PLANNING, THE RELUCTANT METROPOLIS), urban planning and economic development consultant (with the firm Design, Community & Environment), and currently also mayor of Ventura, California, one of the most innovative communities in America. This book discusses economic development efforts that are sometimes shrewd and sometimes stupid - but shows that cities and states are tireless in their efforts to find the next economic engine. You can read an excerpt from the introduction here: https: //www.createspace.com/Preview/1073034
Download or read book Working Stiff written by Tori Carrington and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2010-03-02 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Budding Queens PI Sofie lands her first big criminal case, but is faced with distractions when a body disappears from her Aunt Sotiria's funeral home a week before Halloween.
Download or read book Blue Sky Metropolis written by Peter J. Westwick and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-06-04 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Like citrus, oil, movies, radio, and television, aerospace helped create Southern California and embody its values. Blue Sky Metropolis launches an entirely fresh consideration of an iconic industry that answered the immemorial hunger of the human race for flight and the future."--Kevin Starr, University of Southern California "Blue Sky Metropolis presents an intriguing survey of a unique time in Southern California history, when cheap land and benign weather lured massive aerospace enterprises to the region—eventually serving as home to nearly half of the nation’s defense and space fabricators. Before there was a Silicon Valley, high-tech dreamers were on the loose in the Southland, creating inventions as diverse as the Voyager planetary spacecraft and the Stealth bomber. These highly readable essays help us understand how it happened—how Southern California shaped aerospace, and vice versa."—Charles Elachi, Director, Jet Propulsion Laboratory "Peter Westwick has assembled a rich collection of essays that tell a wonderful story about the importance of the aerospace industry to Southern California and the importance of Southern California to the aerospace industry. There's technology, sociology, economics, geography, anthropology, and much more woven through the chapters. It's an ambitious project, but it succeeds in being interesting, informative, and entertaining."—Michael Rich, President and CEO, The RAND Corporation
Download or read book The City The city in global context written by Michael Pacione and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 856 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
