Download or read book Urban America written by John M. Levy and published by Pearson. This book was released on 2000 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Refreshingly unbiased, this comprehensive, multi-perspective study on urban America provides an historic overview of the field, emphasizes economic, financial, political, and administrative considerations, and explores some of today's most critical urban issues and problems --such as multiculturalism, the controversy over immigration, poverty, crime, and public education. Analyzes the present state of urban housing, urban planning, urban governance, urban economy, and the financing of urban government; provides a history of U.S. immigration and presents divergent views on immigration ranging from essentially open borders to highly restrictionist; covers U.S. poverty since the 1960s, with alternative perspectives on both causes and remedies. Contains a detailed examination of crime and the criminal justice system and outlines changes over the last several decades in both incarceration policy and policing techniques; discusses how public schools are funded, controversies over busing and bilingual education, and the pros of recent proposals such as vouchers and charter schools. For professionals in a variety of fields that have an interest in urban studies.

Download or read book Saving America s Cities written by Lizabeth Cohen and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Bancroft Prize In twenty-first-century America, some cities are flourishing and others are struggling, but they all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. Cities have limited tools to address these problems, and many must rely on the private market to support the public good. It wasn’t always this way. For almost three decades after World War II, even as national policies promoted suburban sprawl, the federal government underwrote renewal efforts for cities that had suffered during the Great Depression and the war and were now bleeding residents into the suburbs. In Saving America’s Cities, the prizewinning historian Lizabeth Cohen follows the career of Edward J. Logue, whose shifting approach to the urban crisis tracked the changing balance between government-funded public programs and private interests that would culminate in the neoliberal rush to privatize efforts to solve entrenched social problems. A Yale-trained lawyer, rival of Robert Moses, and sometime critic of Jane Jacobs, Logue saw renewing cities as an extension of the liberal New Deal. He worked to revive a declining New Haven, became the architect of the “New Boston” of the 1960s, and, later, led New York State’s Urban Development Corporation, which built entire new towns, including Roosevelt Island in New York City. Logue’s era of urban renewal has a complicated legacy: Neighborhoods were demolished and residents dislocated, but there were also genuine successes and progressive goals. Saving America’s Cities is a dramatic story of heartbreak and destruction but also of human idealism and resourcefulness, opening up possibilities for our own time.

Download or read book How the Other Half Lives written by Jacob Riis and published by Applewood Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Urban Problems and Community Development written by Ronald F. Ferguson and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 650 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, concerned governments, businesses, and civic groups have launched ambitious programs of community development designed to halt, and even reverse, decades of urban decline. But while massive amounts of effort and money are being dedicated to improving the inner-cities, two important questions have gone unanswered: Can community development actually help solve long-standing urban problems? And, based on social science analyses, what kinds of initiatives can make a difference? This book surveys what we currently know and what we need to know about community development's past, current, and potential contributions. The authors--economists, sociologists, political scientists, and a historian--define community development broadly to include all capacity building (including social, intellectual, physical, financial, and political assets) aimed at improving the quality of life in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods. The book addresses the history of urban development strategies, the politics of resource allocation, business and workforce development, housing, community development corporations, informal social organizations, schooling, and public security.

Download or read book The Divided City written by Alan Mallach and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Divided City, urban practitioner and scholar Alan Mallach presents a detailed picture of what has happened over the past 15 to 20 years in industrial cities like Pittsburgh and Baltimore, as they have undergone unprecedented, unexpected revival. He spotlights these changes while placing them in their larger economic, social and political context. Most importantly, he explores the pervasive significance of race in American cities, and looks closely at the successes and failures of city governments, nonprofit entities, and citizens as they have tried to address the challenges of change. The Divided City concludes with strategies to foster greater equality and opportunity, firmly grounding them in the cities' economic and political realities.

Download or read book Urban Policy Reconsidered written by Charles C. Euchner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-07-14 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past decade, America has experienced an urban renaissance. Cities as varied as New York, Chicago and Boston are no longer seen as ungovernable and doomed to crime and blight. However, they still face formidable problems. Urban Policy Reconsidered is a comprehensive overview of the issues and problems facing our cities today and cover every important issue in urban affairs. What is poverty? What is economic development? What is education? What is crime? As well as covering all of these fundamental topics in-depth, the author propose a communitarian approach to addressing the many problems of our cities. This book will be the manual for anyone interested in understanding urban policy.

Download or read book Supersizing Urban America written by Chin Jou and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-03-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Supersizing Urban America reveals how the US government has been, and remains, a major contributor to America s obesity epidemic. Government policies, targeted food industry advertising, and other factors helped create and reinforce fast food consumption in America s urban communities. Historian Chin Jou uncovers how predominantly African-American neighborhoods went from having no fast food chains to being deluged. She lays bare the federal policies that helped to subsidize the expansion of the fast food industry in America s cities and explains how fast food companies have deliberately and relentlessly marketed to urban, African-American consumers. These developments are a significant factor in why Americans, especially those in urban, low-income, minority communities, have become disproportionately affected by the obesity epidemic."

Download or read book Barrio America written by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The compelling history of how Latino immigrants revitalized the nation's cities after decades of disinvestment and white flight Thirty years ago, most people were ready to give up on American cities. We are commonly told that it was a "creative class" of young professionals who revived a moribund urban America in the 1990s and 2000s. But this stunning reversal owes much more to another, far less visible group: Latino and Latina newcomers. Award-winning historian A. K. Sandoval-Strausz reveals this history by focusing on two barrios: Chicago's Little Village and Dallas's Oak Cliff. These neighborhoods lost residents and jobs for decades before Latin American immigration turned them around beginning in the 1970s. As Sandoval-Strausz shows, Latinos made cities dynamic, stable, and safe by purchasing homes, opening businesses, and reviving street life. Barrio America uses vivid oral histories and detailed statistics to show how the great Latino migrations transformed America for the better.

Download or read book U S History written by P. Scott Corbett and published by . This book was released on 2024-09-10 with total page 1886 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.

Download or read book The Boy Problem written by Julia Grant and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-03-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical perspective on the factors affecting boys’ relationships with school and the criminal justice system. Outstanding Academic Title, Choice America’s educational system has a problem with boys, and it’s nothing new. The question of what to do with boys—the “boy problem”—has vexed educators and social commentators for more than a century. Contemporary debates about poor academic performance of boys, especially those of color, point to a myriad of reasons: inadequate and punitive schools, broken families, poverty, and cultural conflicts. Julia Grant offers a historical perspective on these debates and reveals that it is a perennial issue in American schooling that says much about gender and education today. Since the birth of compulsory schooling, educators have contended with what exactly to do with boys of immigrant, poor, minority backgrounds. Initially, public schools developed vocational education and organized athletics and technical schools as well as evening and summer continuation schools in response to the concern that the American culture of masculinity devalued academic success in school. Urban educators sought ways to deal with the "bad boys"—almost exclusively poor, immigrant, or migrant—who skipped school, exhibited behavioral problems when they attended, and sometimes landed in special education classes and reformatory institutions. The problems these boys posed led to accommodations in public education and juvenile justice system. This historical study sheds light on contemporary concerns over the academic performance of boys of color who now flounder in school or languish in the juvenile justice system. Grant's cogent analysis will interest education policy-makers and educators, as well as scholars of the history of education, childhood, gender studies, American studies, and urban history.

Download or read book A Country of Cities written by Vishaan Chakrabarti and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Country of Cities, author Vishaan Chakrabarti argues that well-designed cities are the key to solving America's great national challenges: environmental degradation, unsustainable consumption, economic stagnation, rising public health costs and decreased social mobility. If we develop them wisely in the future, our cities can be the force leading us into a new era of progressive and prosperous stewardship of our nation. In compelling chapters, Chakrabarti brings us a wealth of information about cities, suburbs and exurbs, looking at how they developed across the 50 states and their roles in prosperity and globalization, sustainability and resilience, and heath and joy. Counter to what you might think, American cities today are growing faster than their suburban counterparts for the first time since the 1920s. If we can intelligently increase the density of our cities as they grow and build the transit systems, schools, parks and other infrastructure to support them, Chakrabarti shows us how both job opportunities and an improved, sustainable environment are truly within our means. In this call for an urban America, he illustrates his argument with numerous infographics illustrating provocative statistics on issues as disparate as rising childhood obesity rates, ever-lengthening automobile commutes and government subsidies that favor highways over mass transit. The book closes with an eloquent manifesto that rallies us to build "a Country of Cities," to turn a country of highways, houses and hedges into a country of trains, towers and trees. Vishaan Chakrabarti is an architect, scholar and founder of PAU. PAU designs architecture that builds the physical, cultural, and economic networks of cities, with an emphasis on beauty, function and user experience. PAU simultaneously advances strategic urbanism projects in the form of master planning, tactical project advice and advocacy.

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 Neoliberal Cities written by Andrew J. Diamond and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces decades of troubled attempts to fund private answers to public urban problems The American city has long been a laboratory for austerity, governmental decentralization, and market-based solutions to urgent public problems such as affordable housing, criminal justice, and education. Through richly told case studies from Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and New York, Neoliberal Cities provides the necessary context to understand the always intensifying racial and economic inequality in and around the city center. In this original collection of essays, urban historians and sociologists trace the role that public policies have played in reshaping cities, with particular attention to labor, the privatization of public services, the collapse of welfare, the rise of gentrification, the expansion of the carceral state, and the politics of community control. In so doing, Neoliberal Cities offers a bottom-up approach to social scientific, theoretical, and historical accounts of urban America, exploring the ways that activists and grassroots organizations, as well as ordinary citizens, came to terms with new market-oriented public policies promoted by multinational corporations, financial institutions, and political parties. Neoliberal Cities offers new scaffolding for urban and metropolitan change, with attention to the interaction between policymaking, city planning, social movements, and the market.

Download or read book The Rise of Urban America written by Constantine McLaughlin Green and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of cities in the United States from the early seventeenth century to the 1960s is the subject of this sophisticated and witty appraisal by a Pulitzer Prize historian. Constance McLaughlin Green traces the forces - economic, political, social - that led to today's urban civilization, beginning with the growth of colonial seaports and local government, the rise of new cities that competed for wealth and power with the older cities, the spread of industrialization, transportation and communications that made complex city life possible. She discussed the influence of city life on art and architecture, the impact of depression and prosperity upon urban centres, and analyses present-day problems - race-relations, the population explosion, automation, the rise of suburbia, and the development of the 'megapolis' that links city with city in one vast urban interstate region. This book was first published in 1966.

Download or read book Strangers at the Gates written by Roger Waldinger and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-10-10 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays look at U.S. immigration and the nexus between urban realities and immigrant destinies. They argue that immigration today is fundamentaly urban and that immigrants are flocking to places where low-skilled workers are in trouble.

Download or read book Saving Our Cities written by William W. Goldsmith and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Saving Our Cities, William W. Goldsmith shows how cities can be places of opportunity rather than places with problems. With strongly revived cities and suburbs, working as places that serve all their residents, metropolitan areas will thrive, thus making the national economy more productive, the environment better protected, the citizenry better educated, and the society more reflective, sensitive, and humane. Goldsmith argues that America has been in the habit of abusing its cities and their poorest suburbs, which are always the first to be blamed for society's ills and the last to be helped. As federal and state budgets, regulations, and programs line up with the interests of giant corporations and privileged citizens, they impose austerity on cities, shortchange public schools, make it hard to get nutritious food, and inflict the drug war on unlucky neighborhoods.Frustration with inequality is spreading. Parents and teachers call persistently for improvements in public schooling, and education experiments abound. Nutrition indicators have begun to improve, as rising health costs and epidemic obesity have led to widespread attention to food. The futility of the drug war and the high costs of unwarranted, unprecedented prison growth have become clear. Goldsmith documents a positive development: progressive politicians in many cities and some states are proposing far-reaching improvements, supported by advocacy groups that form powerful voting blocs, ensuring that Congress takes notice. When more cities forcefully demand enlightened federal and state action on these four interrelated problems—inequality, schools, food, and the drug war—positive movement will occur in traditional urban planning as well, so as to meet the needs of most residents for improved housing, better transportation, and enhanced public spaces.

Download or read book Central America Urbanization Review written by Augustin Maria and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2017-03-22 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Central America is undergoing an important transition. Urban populations are increasing at accelerated speeds, bringing pressing challenges for development, as well as opportunities to boost sustained, inclusive and resilient growth. Today, 59 percent of the region’s population lives in urban areas, but it is expected that 7 out of 10 people will live in cities within the next generation. At current rates of urbanization, Central America’s urban population will double in size by 2050, welcoming over 25 million new urban dwellers calling for better infrastructure, higher coverage and quality of urban services and greater employment opportunities. With more people concentrated in urban areas, Central American governments at the national and local levels face both opportunities and challenges to ensure the prosperity of their country’s present and future generations. The Central America Urbanization Review: Making Cities Work for Central America provides a better understanding of the trends and implications of urbanization in the six Central American countries -Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama- and the actions that central and local governments can take to reap the intended benefits of this transformation. The report makes recommendations on how urban policies can contribute to addressing the main development challenges the region currently faces such as lack of social inclusion, high vulnerability to natural disasters, and lack of economic opportunities and competitiveness. Specifically, the report focuses on four priority areas for Central American cities: institutions for city management, access to adequate and well-located housing, resilience to natural disasters, and competitiveness through local economic development. This book is written for national and local policymakers, private sector actors, civil society, researchers and development partners in Central America and all around the world interested in learning more about the opportunities that urbanization brings in the 21st century.