- American Project
- High-rise public housing developments were signature features of the post-World War II city. A hopeful experiment in providing temporary, inexpensive housing for all Americans, the "projects" soon became synonymous with the black urban poor, with isolation and overcrowding, with drugs, gang violence, and neglect. As the wrecking ball brings down some of these concrete monoliths, Sudhir Venkatesh seeks to reexamine public housing from the inside out, and to salvage its troubled legacy.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002
- Aramis, or the Love of Technology
- The story of the birth and death of Aramis--the guided-transportation system intended for Paris--is told in this thought-provoking and fictional account by several different parties: an engineer and his professor; company executives and elected officials; a sociologist; and finally Aramis itself, who delivers a passionate plea on behalf of technological innovations that risk being abandoned by their makers.
- Paperback 1996 / Hardcover 1996
- The Art of Urbanism
- This volume explores how the royal courts of powerful Mesoamerican centers represented their kingdoms in architectural, iconographic, and cosmological terms. Scholars from archaeology, anthropology, art history, and religious studies contribute new perspectives to the understanding of ancient Mesoamericans’ view of their spectacular urban and ritual centers.
- Hardcover 2009
- The Atlantic City Gamble
- Paperback
- The Boston Rehabilitation Program
- Hardcover 1968
- Civility in the City
- Hollywood and the news media have repeatedly depicted the inner-city retail store as a scene of racial conflict and acrimony. Civility in the City uncovers a quite different story. Jennifer Lee examines the relationships between African American, Jewish, and Korean merchants and their black customers in New York and Philadelphia, and shows that, in fact, social order, routine, and civility are the norm.
- Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2006
- Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity
- Exploring classic examples of film noir such as The Asphalt Jungle, Double Indemnity, and The Naked City alongside many lesser-known works, Dimendberg confirms that noir is not simply a reflection of modernity but a virtual continuation of the spaces of the metropolis. He convincingly shows that Hollywood's dark thrillers of the postwar decades were determined by the same forces that shaped the city itself.
- Paperback 2004 / Hardcover 2004
- First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt
- Between 1875 and 1920, Chicago's homicide rate more than quadrupled. Based on an analysis of nearly six thousand homicide cases, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt examines the ways in which industrialization, immigration, poverty, ethnic and racial conflict, and powerful cultural forces reshaped Chicago city life and generated soaring levels of lethal violence. From rage killers to the "Baby Bandit Quartet," Jeffrey Adler offers a dramatic portrait of Chicago during a period in which the characteristic elements of modern homicide in America emerged.
- Hardcover 2006
- From the Puritans to the Projects
- From the almshouses of seventeenth-century Puritans to the massive housing projects of the mid-twentieth century, the struggle over housing assistance in the United States has exposed a deep-seated ambivalence about the place of the urban poor. Lawrence J. Vale's groundbreaking book is both a comprehensive institutional history of public housing in Boston and a broader examination of the nature and extent of public obligation to house socially and economically marginal Americans during the past 350 years.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2007
- Governing the Metropolis
- This book explores key metropolitan management issues, presents practical principles of good governance as they apply to the metropolis, and unfolds cases of institutional and programmatic arrangements to tackle such issues.
- Paperback 2008
- The Government of Victorian London, 1855-1889
- Of all the major cities of Britain, London, the world metropolis, was the last to acquire a modern municipal government.Owen tells in absorbing detail the story of the operations of the Metropolitan Board of Works, its political and other problems, and its limited but significant accomplishments.
- Hardcover 1982
- Hope and Despair in the American City
In Hope and Despair, Gerald Grant compares two cities—his hometown of Syracuse, New York, and Raleigh, North Carolina—in order to examine the consequences of the nation’s ongoing educational inequities. The result is an ambitious portrait—sometimes disturbing, often inspiring—of two cities that exemplify our nation’s greatest educational challenges, as well as a passionate exploration of the potential for school reform that exists for our urban schools today.
- Hardcover 2009
- Inheriting the City
- Behind the contentious politics of immigration lies the question of how well new immigrants are becoming part of American society. To address this question, Inheriting the City draws on the results of a ground-breaking study of young adults of immigrant parents in metropolitan New York to provide a comprehensive look at their social, economic, cultural, and political lives.
- Hardcover 2008
- Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880-1939
- How did the vast number of Jewish immigrants from different regions of Eastern Europe form their American ethnic identity? In his answer to this question, Daniel Soyer examines how Jewish immigrant hometown associations (landsmanshaftn) transformed old-world communal ties into vehicles for integration into American society.
- Hardcover 1997
- A Library Classification for City and Regional Planning
- Hardcover 1973
- Looking at Cities
- Allan Jacobs has written a city planning book for everyone with a passion for urban environments. His message--conveyed in word and vivid image--is that the people who make changes in cities base their decisions upon what they see, and that their visions and actions, which affect the lives of millions, have too often been faulty. Jacobs shows us how to read cities by identifying and discussing the many visual clues and their various meanings in different environments.
- Hardcover 1985
- Makina/Medina
Through a series of essays by urban historians, economists, and designers, Makina/Medina examines the potential impact of cultural events on the revitalization of historic cities. The aim of this volume is to explore how the urban design set up for a cultural event could help improve access and legibility in this medieval city and to positively affect its economic and social development. The book also includes a series of hypothetical design projects for the Makina Square by Harvard Graduate School of Design students.
- Paperback 2009
- Making Room
- The first full-scale economic analysis of homelessness, Making Room provides answers quite unlike those offered so far. Focused on six cities in America and Europe, Brendan O'Flaherty discusses the new homelessness as a response to changes in the housing market which is linked to a widening gap in the incomes of the rich and the poor.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1998
- Metropolis 1985
- This is the key volume in the New York Metropolitan Region Study. It is a synthesis and interpretation of the seven specialized books that have already been published and the one that is still awaiting publication. Here, at last, with a depth of perspective made possible by the author's familiarity with the unpublished as well as the published findings of the other participants in the Study, is the whole picture--New York's busy and varied economy as it is now, as it has been, and as it is likely to be twenty-five years from now.
- Hardcover 1960
- The Metropolitan Enigma
- To paraphrase the editor of The Metropolitan Enigma, James Q. Wilson, not everything about cities constitutes a problem and not all problems to be found in cities are distinctively "urban." This book seeks to explore the complexities and clear away the easy generalizations that prevent an understanding of the human problems of an urbanizing nation.
- Hardcover 1968
- Modernizing the Provincial City
- Toulouse is one of the most striking examples of urban modernization both in France and in the rest of Europe. In this book, Rosemary Wakeman examines the postwar transformation of Toulouse and shows how urban landscape and architecture, culture, and economic life were altered by public modernization programs designed to build "the new France."
- Hardcover 1998
- Natives and Newcomers
- This important contribution to the literature on mobility in nineteenth-century America examines with a fine microscope the world of work in Poughkeepsie, New York. The careers of all workers in each occupation--the entire labor force in this city with an 1870 population of 20,000--are traced over three decades. Clyde Griffen and Sally Griffen describe geographic, occupational, and property mobility in a small city with statistical precision, to illuminate the larger social processes which shaped that mobility, and, simultaneously, to vivify the working lives of anonymous American men and women.
- Hardcover 1978
- Neighborhood Politics
- Hardcover 1983
- Off the Books
- In this revelatory book, Sudhir Venkatesh takes us into Maquis Park, a poor black neighborhood on Chicago's Southside, to explore the desperate and remarkable ways in which a community survives. The result is a dramatic narrative of individuals at work, and a rich portrait of a community. But while excavating the efforts of men and women to generate a basic livelihood for themselves and their families, Off the Books offers a devastating critique of the entrenched poverty that we so often ignore in America, and reveals how the underground economy is an inevitable response to the ghetto's appalling isolation from the rest of the country.
- Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2009
- Province of Reason
- This book is about some of the largest events of the twentieth century, but it sees those sweeping changes through the eyes of fourteen particular Bostonians, in an ambitious attempt to understand the disorienting experiences of recent history. These lives span the years from 1850 to 1980, a time when Boston, like all American cities, was being rebuilt according to the continually changing specifications of science, engineering, mass wealth, and big corporations.
- Hardcover 1984 / Paperback
- Reclaiming Public Housing
- In Reclaiming Public Housing, Lawrence Vale explores the rise, fall, and redevelopment of three public housing projects in Boston. Vale looks at these projects from the perspectives of their low-income residents and assesses the contributions of the design professionals who helped to transform these once devastated places during the 1980s and 1990s.
- Hardcover 2002
- Red-Hot and Righteous
- In this study of American religion, urban life, and commercial culture, Diane Winston shows how a (self-styled "red-hot") militant Protestant mission established a beachhead in the modern city. When The Salvation Army, a British evangelical movement, landed in New York in 1880, local citizens called its eye-catching advertisements "vulgar" and dubbed its brass bands, female preachers, and overheated services "sensationalist." Yet a little more than a century later, this ragtag missionary movement had evolved into the nation's largest charitable fund-raiser. Winston illustrates how the Army borrowed the forms and idioms of popular entertainments, commercial emporiums, and master marketers to deliver its message.
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2000
- Scarcity by Design
- Hardcover
- Still the Promised City?
- Still the Promised City? addresses the question of why African-Americans have fared so poorly in securing unskilled jobs in the postwar era and why new immigrants have done so well. This insightful book uses New York as a prism to examine the changing relationships among race, immigration, and social mobility. Roger Waldinger's analysis offers a new understanding of America's most serious social problem and fresh approaches to attacking it.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1999
- Street Stories
- Based on years of fieldwork with the New York City Police Department and the District Attorney of New York, this book examines the moral ambiguities of the detectives' world as they shuttle between the streets and a bureaucratic behemoth. In piecing together street stories to solve intriguing puzzles of agency and motive, detectives crisscross the checkerboard of urban life. This book brims with the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction violence of the underworld and tells about a justice apparatus that splinters knowledge, reduces life-and-death issues to arcane hair-splitting, and makes rationality a bedfellow of absurdity.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2009
- Streetcar Suburbs
- In the last third of the nineteenth century the American city grew from a crowded merchant town, in which neatly everybody walked to work, to the modern divided metropolis. The street railway created this division of the metropolis into an inner city of commerce and slums and an outer city of commuters' suburbs. This book tells who built the new city, and why, and how.
- Hardcover 1962 / Paperback 1978
- Town into City
- Paperback
- Traffic and the Police
- Although laws governing moving-traffic violations are fairly uniform throughout the United States, the effective levels of enforcement of these laws vary dramatically from city to city. Basing this study on statistics from nearly seven hundred police departments, census data, personal interviews, on-the-spot observation, and detailed case studies of four Massachusetts cities Mr. Gardiner identifies and discusses the factors that determine police decisionmaking in relation to traffic violations.
- Hardcover 1969
- A Turkish Triangle
- Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir have been the major poles of growth and development in Turkey since the Republic was formed, although these three cities have followed very different paths. Through a series of three case studies and an introduction by Turkey's most renowned urban historian and theorist, Ilhan Tekeli, the book studies the rise of these three main urban centers in Turkey and their roles in organizing the territory and its future reorganization.
- Paperback
- Two Squares
- Two Squares examines the changing role of public space in the cities of Beirut and Istanbul as they undergo major redevelopment. The study of Beirut looks at the redesign of Martyrs' Square, and in Istanbul, the focus is on Sirkeci Square. This book examines the nature of public space in the 21st-century city, the history and evolution of public life in Beirut and Istanbul, and the possibilities of using these vital transportation nodes as opportunities for new design strategies.
- Paperback 2006
- Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information
- Hardcover 1973
- Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920
- Boyer explores the links between the urban reforms of the Progressive era and the long efforts of prior generations to tame the cities. By the 1890s there had developed two sharply divergent trends in thinking about urban planning and social control: the bleak assessment that led to coercive strategies and the hopeful evaluation that emphasized the importance of environmental betterment as a means of urban moral control.
- Paperback 1992
- Urban Planning and Civic Order in Germany, 1860-1914
- Ladd describes the struggle of prosperous German bourgeois leaders to bring order to their rapidly growing cities during the tumultuous age of industrial expansion in the decades before World War I. He sets the emerging theory and practice of city planning in the context of debates about the nature of the modern city and the possibility of improving society by regulating its physical environment. In so doing, he reveals the extent to which modern city planning is a product of the aspirations, prejudices, and frustrations of the German burghers who created it.
- Hardcover 1990
- The Urban Transportation Problem
- Paperback 1965
- Useless to the State
- Underlying all of Nanjing's 1930s policies was a concern for the capital's image and looks--offensive people were allowed to exist as long as they remained invisible. Zwia Lipkin exposes both the process of social engineering and the ways in which the suppressed reacted to their abuse. This book puts the poor at the center of the picture, defying efforts to make them invisible.
- Hardcover 2006
- Varieties of Police Behavior
- In his new preface to this highly regarded work, James Q. Wilson reviews the ways in which police styles have changed during the past decade, and he explains the reasons for these changes. Varieties of Police Behavor remains unsurpassed in delineating the role of the patrolman and the problems he faces because of constraints imposed by law, politics, public opinion, and the expectations of superiors.
- Hardcover 1968 / Paperback
- Why the Garden Club Couldn't Save Youngstown
- This book compares the recent history of Allentown, Pennsylvania, with that of Youngstown, Ohio. Safford offers a probing historical explanation for the decline, fall, and unlikely rejuvenation of the Rust Belt.
- Hardcover 2009
- Wild Cowboys
- In this bloody urban saga, Robert Jackall tells how New York detectives pieced together a case of drug trafficking, money laundering, and murder, all centered on a vicious gang of Dominican youths known as the Wild Cowboys. Alongside this gripping tale he tells a sobering one--of a society with irreconcilable differences, fraught with self-doubt and moral ambivalence, where the institutional logics of law and bureaucracy often have perverse outcomes.
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 2005