Download or read book The New Urban Crisis written by Richard Florida and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Florida, one of the world's leading urbanists and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, confronts the dark side of the back-to-the-city movement In recent years, the young, educated, and affluent have surged back into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. and yet all is not well. In The New Urban Crisis, Richard Florida, one of the first scholars to anticipate this back-to-the-city movement, demonstrates how the forces that drive urban growth also generate cities' vexing challenges, such as gentrification, segregation, and inequality. Meanwhile, many more cities still stagnate, and middle-class neighborhoods everywhere are disappearing. We must rebuild cities and suburbs by empowering them to address their challenges. The New Urban Crisis is a bracingly original work of research and analysis that offers a compelling diagnosis of our economic ills and a bold prescription for more inclusive cities capable of ensuring prosperity for all.

Download or read book Mapping Decline written by Colin Gordon and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-09-12 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once a thriving metropolis on the banks of the Mississippi, St. Louis, Missouri, is now a ghostly landscape of vacant houses, boarded-up storefronts, and abandoned factories. The Gateway City is, by any measure, one of the most depopulated, deindustrialized, and deeply segregated examples of American urban decay. "Not a typical city," as one observer noted in the late 1970s, "but, like a Eugene O'Neill play, it shows a general condition in a stark and dramatic form." Mapping Decline examines the causes and consequences of St. Louis's urban crisis. It traces the complicity of private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, and federal housing policies in the "white flight" of people and wealth from the central city. And it traces the inadequacy—and often sheer folly—of a generation of urban renewal, in which even programs and resources aimed at eradicating blight in the city ended up encouraging flight to the suburbs. The urban crisis, as this study of St. Louis makes clear, is not just a consequence of economic and demographic change; it is also the most profound political failure of our recent history. Mapping Decline is the first history of a modern American city to combine extensive local archival research with the latest geographic information system (GIS) digital mapping techniques. More than 75 full-color maps—rendered from census data, archival sources, case law, and local planning and property records—illustrate, in often stark and dramatic ways, the still-unfolding political history of our neglected cities.

Download or read book In Defense of Housing written by Peter Marcuse and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2024-08-27 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In every major city in the world there is a housing crisis. How did this happen and what can we do about it? Everyone needs and deserves housing. But today our homes are being transformed into commodities, making the inequalities of the city ever more acute. Profit has become more important than social need. The poor are forced to pay more for worse housing. Communities are faced with the violence of displacement and gentrification. And the benefits of decent housing are only available for those who can afford it. In Defense of Housing is the definitive statement on this crisis from leading urban planner Peter Marcuse and sociologist David Madden. They look at the causes and consequences of the housing problem and detail the need for progressive alternatives. The housing crisis cannot be solved by minor policy shifts, they argue. Rather, the housing crisis has deep political and economic roots—and therefore requires a radical response.

Download or read book The New Urban Crisis written by Richard Florida and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Never before have our cities been as important as they are now. The drivers of innovation and growth, they are essential to the prosperity of nations. But they are also destructive, plunging us into housing crises and deepening inequality. How can we keep the good and break free of the bad? In this bracingly original work of research and analysis, leading urbanist Richard Florida explores the roots of this new crisis and puts forward a plan to make this the century of the fairer, thriving metropolis.

Download or read book Urban Change and Citizenship in Times of Crisis written by Bryan S. Turner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban Change and Citizenship in Times of Crisis addresses the fact that in the beginning of the twenty-first century the majority of the world’s population is urbanised, a social fact that has turned cities more than ever into focal sites of social change. Multiple economic and political strategies, employed by a variety of individual and collective actors, on a number of scales, constitute cities as contested spaces that hold opportunities as well as restrictions for their inhabitants. While cities and urban spaces have long been of central concern for the social sciences, today, classical sociological questions about the city acquire new meaning: Can cities be spaces of emancipation, or does life in the modern city entail a corrosion of citizenship rights? Is the city the focus of societal transformation processes, or do urban environments lose importance in shaping social reality and economic relationships? Furthermore, new questions urgently need to be asked: What is the impact of different historical phenomena such as neo-liberal restructuring, financial and economic crises, or migration flows, as well as their respective counter-movements, on the structure of contemporary cities and on the citizenship rights of city inhabitants? The three volumes address such crucial questions thereby opening up new spaces of debate on both the city and new developments of urbanism. The contributions to Theories and Concepts offer new theoretical reflections on the city in a philosophical and historical perspective as well as fresh empirical analyses of social life in urban contexts. Chapters not only critically revisit classical and modern philosophical considerations about the nature of cities but no less discuss normative philosophical reflections of urban life and the role of religion in historical processes of the emergence of cities. Composed around the question whether there can be such a thing as a ‘successful city’, this volume addresses issues of urban political subjectivities by considering the city’s role in historical processes of emancipation, the fight for citizenship rights, and today’s challenges and opportunities with regard to promoting social justice, integration, and diversity. Consequentially, theory-driven empirical analyses offer new insight into ways of solving problems in urban contexts and a genuine approach to analyse the Social Quality in cities.

Download or read book Cities in Transition written by Nirmala Rao and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-01-07 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an up-to-date and topical treatment of how six major cities in Europe, North America and Asia are coping with the new demands on urban government. Population expansion, the migration of new peoples and disparities between cities and suburbs are longstanding features of the urban crisis. Today, city governments also face demands for popular participation and better public services while they struggle to position themselves in the new world economy. While each of the cities is located in its unique historical setting, the emphasis of the book is upon the common dilemmas raised by major planning problems and the search for more suitable approaches to governance and citizen involvement. A principal theme is the re-engineering of institutional structures designed to foster local responsiveness and popular participation. The discussion is set in the context of the globalizing forces that have impacted to different degrees, at different times, upon London, Tokyo, Toronto, Berlin, Hyderabad and Atlanta. Cities in Transition is a major and original addition to the comparative literature on urban governance.

Download or read book State of Crisis written by Zygmunt Bauman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today we hear much talk of crisis and comparisons are often made with the Great Depression of the 1930s, but there is a crucial difference that sets our current malaise apart from the 1930s: today we no longer trust in the capacity of the state to resolve the crisis and to chart a new way forward. In our increasingly globalized world, states have been stripped of much of their power to shape the course of events. Many of our problems are globally produced but the volume of power at the disposal of individual nation-states is simply not sufficient to cope with the problems they face. This divorce between power and politics produces a new kind of paralysis. It undermines the political agency that is needed to tackle the crisis and it saps citizens’ belief that governments can deliver on their promises. The impotence of governments goes hand in hand with the growing cynicism and distrust of citizens. Hence the current crisis is at once a crisis of agency, a crisis of representative democracy and a crisis of the sovereignty of the state. In this book the world-renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and fellow traveller Carlo Bordoni explore the social and political dimensions of the current crisis. While this crisis has been greatly exacerbated by the turmoil following the financial crisis of 2007-8, Bauman and Bordoni argue that the crisis facing Western societies is rooted in a much more profound series of transformations that stretch back further in time and are producing long-lasting effects. This highly original analysis of our current predicament by two of the world’s leading social thinkers will be of interest to a wide readership.

Download or read book Apostles of Change written by Felipe Hinojosa and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1960s, the American city found itself in steep decline. An urban crisis fueled by federal policy wreaked destruction and displacement on poor and working-class families. The urban drama included religious institutions, themselves undergoing fundamental change, that debated whether to stay in the city or move to the suburbs. Against the backdrop of the Black and Brown Power movements, which challenged economic inequality and white supremacy, young Latino radicals began occupying churches and disrupting services to compel church communities to join their protests against urban renewal, poverty, police brutality, and racism. Apostles of Change tells the story of these occupations and establishes their context within the urban crisis; relates the tensions they created; and articulates the activists' bold, new vision for the church and the world. Through case studies from Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and Houston, Felipe Hinojosa reveals how Latino freedom movements frequently crossed boundaries between faith and politics and argues that understanding the history of these radical politics is essential to understanding the dynamic changes in Latino religious groups from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

Download or read book Critical Dialogues of Urban Governance Development and Activism written by Susannah Bunce and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical Dialogues of Urban Governance, Development and Activism examines changes in governance, property development, urban politics andcommunity activism, in two key global cities: London and Toronto.

Download or read book City Trenches written by Ira Katznelson and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2013-10-02 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The urban crisis of the 1960s revived a dormant social activism whose protagonists placed their hoped for radical change and political effectiveness in community action. Ironically, the insurgents chose the local community as their terrain for a political battle that in reality involved a few strictly local issues. They failed to achieve their goals, Ira Katznelson argues, not so much because they had chosen their ground badly but because the deep split of the American political landscape into workplace politics and community politics defeats attempts to address grievances or raise demands that break the rules of bread-and-butter unionism on the one hand or of local politics on the other. A fascinating record of the encounter between today’s reformers—the community activists—and the powers they challenge. City Trenches is also a probing analysis of the causes of urban instability. Katznelson anatomizes the unique workings of the American urban system which allow it to contain opposition through “machine” politics and, as a last resort, institutional innovation and co-optation, for example, the authorities’ own version of decentralization used in the 1960s as a counter to a “community control.” Washington Heights–Inwood, a multi-ethnic working-class community in northern Manhattan, provides the setting for an absorbing close-up view of the historical evolution of local politics: the challenge to the system in the 1960s and its reconstitution in the 1970s.

Download or read book The State and the City written by Ted Robert Gurr and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1987-08-27 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of the oldest and largest Western cities today are undergoing massive economic decline. The State and the City deals with a key issue in the political economy of cities—the role of the state. Ted Robert Gurr and Desmond S. King argue that theoreticians from both the left and the right have underestimated the significance of state action for cities. Grounding theory in empirical evidence, they argue that policies of the local and national state have a major impact on urban well-being. Gurr and King's analysis assumes modern states have their own interests, institutional momentum, and the capacity to act with relative autonomy. Their historically based analysis begins with an account of the evolution of the Western state's interest in the viability of cities since the industrial revolution. Their agument extends to the local level, examining the nature of the local state and its autonomy from national political and economic forces. Using cross-national evidence, Gurr and King examine specific problems of urban policy in the United States and Britain. In the United States, for example, they show how the dramatic increases in federal assistance to cities in the 1930s and the 1960s were made in response to urban crises, which simultaneously threatened national interests and offered opportunities for federal expansion of power. As a result, national and local states now play significant material and regulatory roles that can have as much impact on cities as all private economic activities. A comparative analysis of thirteen American cities reflects the range and impact of the state's activities at the urban level. Boston, they argue, has become the archetypical postindustrial public city: half of its population and personal income are directly dependent on government spending. While Gurr and King are careful to delineate the limits to the extent and effectiveness of state intervention, they conclude that these limits are much broader than formerly thought. Ultimately, their evidence suggests that the continued decline of most of the old industrial cities is the result of public decisions to allow their economic fate to be determined in the private sector.

Download or read book Narrating the Global Financial Crisis written by Miriam Meissner and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-05-25 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes how the Global Financial Crisis is portrayed in contemporary popular culture, using examples from film, literature and photography. In particular, the book explores why particular urban spaces, infrastructures and aesthetics – such as skyline shots in the opening credits of financial crisis films – recur in contemporary crisis narratives. Why are cities and finance connected in the cultural imaginary? Which ideologies do urban crisis imaginaries communicate? How do these imaginaries relate to the notion of crisis? To consider these questions, the book reads crisis narratives through the lens of myth. It combines perspectives from cultural, media and communication studies, anthropology, philosophy, geography and political economy to argue that the concept of myth can offer new and nuanced insights into the structure and politics of popular financial crisis imaginaries. In so doing, the book also asks if, how and under what conditions urban crisis imaginaries open up or foreclose systematic and political understandings of the Global Financial Crisis as a symptom of the broader process of financialization.

Download or read book The Crisis of Growth Politics written by Todd Swanstrom and published by . This book was released on 1988-04-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By demonstrating the political role which investment plays in local politics, this book breaks new ground in the study of community power. Until recently, students of community power ignored growth politics because they saw the economic context of cities as nonpolitical. This study examines the effect of mobile investment on political power and public policy in Cleveland, a dying industrial city with an expanding downtown service sector. Swanstrom shows how a combative young mayor named Dennis Kucinich challenged the conservative logic of growth politics but was unable to put forth a positive agenda to address the inequities of urban development. Also, this book demonstrates how Kucinich's brand of politics resulted in paralyzing conflict with the city council and the myriad interest groups of city politics.Growth politics, very simply, is the effort by local governments to attract mobile wealth into their jurisdictions. Under economic pressure, many older cities have succumbed to the conservative logic of growth politics, a form of trickle-down economics. In order to provide the jobs and tax base necessary for a healthy city, the argument goes, local governments must compete with other cities for capital investment by cutting social expenditures for the poor and providing subsidies for mobile corporate investors. In Cleveland, such practices led to a striking contrast between its booming downtown and declining blue-collar neighborhoods, an uneven distribution of the costs and benefits of growth politics. Elected mayor in 1979, Kucinich refused to sell the municipal light plant, even under pressure from area bankers. This resulted in the city's default, thereby killing an ineffective tax abatement program for downtown.Swanstrom, who served in the administrations of both Kucinich and his more conservative successor, offers a careful study of the background, issues, and events of this highly charged episode of confrontation politics. He sets out to dispel the illusion of growth politics, to expose the politics hidden in economic growth issues, and to explore the unintended effects of reform efforts when collective interests rather than individuals benefit from political influence. Here is a study which demonstrates that growth politics and its hidden evils must be reckoned with and reexamined by those in local power. Author note: Todd Swanstrom is Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs at State University of New York, Albany He has been active in city planning both in Cleveland and in Albany.

Download or read book Latino City written by Llana Barber and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-03-08 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Latino City explores the transformation of Lawrence, Massachusetts, into New England's first Latino-majority city. Like many industrial cities, Lawrence entered a downward economic spiral in the decades after World War II due to deindustrialization and suburbanization. The arrival of tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in the late twentieth century brought new life to the struggling city, but settling in Lawrence was fraught with challenges. Facing hostility from their neighbors, exclusion from local governance, inadequate city services, and limited job prospects, Latinos fought and organized for the right to make a home in the city. In this book, Llana Barber interweaves the histories of urban crisis in U.S. cities and imperial migration from Latin America. Pushed to migrate by political and economic circumstances shaped by the long history of U.S. intervention in Latin America, poor and working-class Latinos then had to reckon with the segregation, joblessness, disinvestment, and profound stigma that plagued U.S. cities during the crisis era, particularly in the Rust Belt. For many Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, there was no "American Dream" awaiting them in Lawrence; instead, Latinos struggled to build lives for themselves in the ruins of industrial America.

Download or read book Race for Profit written by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST, 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion. Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers – as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation's first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind. Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.

Download or read book Cities and Crisis written by Kuniko Fujita and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recognizing the deep relations between politics, finance, cities and citizens, this book argues for a rejuvenated account of urban theory. The book emphasises the need to understand the importance of the 2008 global financial crisis and how the crisis affects cities nested in a variety of political economies. Situating urban theory in the current economic climate, it powerfully illuminates the dynamic between history, theory, and practice. Stressing how catastrophic social and economic calamities under the crisis lead to reorganised city structures, city life and city policies and hence new urban experience, it calls for theoretical perspectives that can speak to these challenging changes. This groundbreaking title is a must for anyone interested in urban life and its rapid movements. It will be especially useful for students and researchers in urban sociology, planning, geography, urban and regional development and urban studies

Download or read book When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People written by Dara Z. Strolovitch and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-07-05 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deep and thought-provoking examination of crisis politics and their implications for power and marginalization in the United States. From the climate crisis to the opioid crisis to the Coronavirus crisis, the language of crisis is everywhere around us and ubiquitous in contemporary American politics and policymaking. But for every problem that political actors describe as a crisis, there are myriad other equally serious ones that are not described in this way. Why has the term crisis been associated with some problems but not others? What has crisis come to mean, and what work does it do? In When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People, Dara Z. Strolovitch brings a critical eye to the taken-for-granted political vernacular of crisis. Using systematic analyses to trace the evolution of the use of the term crisis by both political elites and outsiders, Strolovitch unpacks the idea of “crisis” in contemporary politics and demonstrates that crisis is itself an operation of politics. She shows that racial justice activists innovated the language of crisis in an effort to transform racism from something understood as natural and intractable and to cast it instead as a policy problem that could be remedied. Dominant political actors later seized on the language of crisis to compel the use of state power, but often in ways that compounded rather than alleviated inequality and injustice. In this eye-opening and important book, Strolovitch demonstrates that understanding crisis politics is key to understanding the politics of racial, gender, and class inequalities in the early twenty-first century.