Our Towns
Our Towns

Author: James Fallows

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2018-05-08

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 1101871857

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "James and Deborah Fallows have always moved to where history is being made.... They have an excellent sense of where world-shaping events are taking place at any moment" —The New York Times • The basis for the HBO documentary streaming on HBO Max For five years, James and Deborah Fallows have travelled across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, the America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems—from economic dislocation to the opioid scourge—but it is also crafting solutions, with a practical-minded determination at dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics. At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallowses describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves. Their view of the country is as complex and contradictory as America itself, but it also reflects the energy, the generosity and compassion, the dreams, and the determination of many who are in the midst of making things better. Our Towns is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself.

The Routledge Handbook of Small Towns
The Routledge Handbook of Small Towns

Author: Jerzy Bański

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-08-16

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 1000421635

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The Routledge Handbook of Small Towns addresses the theoretical, methodical, and practical issues related to the development of small towns and neighbouring countryside. Small towns play a very important role in spatial structure by performing numerous significant developmental functions for rural areas. At the local scale, they act as engines for economic growth of rural regions and as a link in the system of connections between large urban centres and the countryside. The book addresses the role of small towns in the local development of regions in countries with different levels of development and economic systems, including those in Europe, Africa, South America, Asia, and Australia. Chapters address the functional structure of small towns, relations between small towns and rural areas, and the challenges of spatial planning in the context of shaping the development of small towns. Students and scholars of urban planning, urban geography, rural geography, political geography, historical geography, and population geography will learn about the role of small towns in the local development of countries representing different economic systems and developmental conditions.

The Lost Continent
The Lost Continent

Author: Bill Bryson

Publisher: VNR AG

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9780060161583

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"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the movies from his youth were set. Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs, which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Coma, and Doldrum. At best his search led him to Anywhere, USA, a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by obese and slow-witted hicks with a partiality for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost: lost to itself because he found it blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country.

Small Towns and Big Business
Small Towns and Big Business

Author: Stephen Halebsky

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0739122401

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During the 1990s, a new type of controversy began occurring across the United States: controversies over the siting of superstores, also known as big box stores. In these disputes, which often involved Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer, local citizens mounted organized opposition to the proposed siting of a superstores in their town or neighborhood. Opponents criticized Wal-Mart superstores for putting local independent merchants out of business, siphoning money from the local economy, providing substandard jobs, disrupting residential neighborhoods, contributing to the "McDonaldization" of society, inducing sprawl, destroying downtowns and Main Streets, and undermining local uniqueness and small town charm. More generally, these David-and-Goliath controversies represented particularly stark examples of the conflict of interests between local communities and large corporations that have become common in contemporary society. Small Towns and Big Business uses fieldwork and archival sources to comprehensively examine these controversies and the underlying issues. While Wal-Mart is usually able to site its stores at its preferred locations, in some cases local opponents have been able to thwart its plans. Using detailed case studies of anti-superstore controversies in six small cities in five states, Halebsky employs a comparative-historical approach to construct an explanation of how some of these local social movements managed to prevail against Wal-Mart. This explanation is then extended to provide the basis for a model of the general conditions under which local communities may be able to constrain unwanted corporate action. Thus, this is both a study of social movement outcomes and an investigation of community-corporate conflict. Small Towns and Big Business provides insight into the potential of the local state to control large corporations, the inherently problematic nature of corporate retailing, the possibilities for resisting McDonaldization, and the fate of local anti-corporation activism. Book jacket.

John Betjeman
John Betjeman

Author: William S. Peterson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 584

ISBN-13: 9780198184034

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This bibliography describes all John Betjeman's known writings, including his own books, contributions to periodicals and to books by others, lectures, and radio and television programs. Other categories include editorships and interviews, as well as a section devoted to writings about him. Manuscripts and drafts of his works are described in detail.

European Cities and Towns
European Cities and Towns

Author: Peter Clark

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2009-01-30

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 0191547441

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Since the Middle Ages Europe has been one of the most urbanized continents on the planet and Europe's cities have firmly stamped their imprint on the continent's economic, social, political, and cultural life. This study of European cities and towns from the fall of the Roman Empire to the present day looks both at regional trends from across Europe and also at the widely differing fortunes of individual communities on the roller coaster of European urbanization. Taking a wide-angled view of the continent that embraces northern and eastern Europe as well as the city systems of the Mediterranean and western Europe, it addresses important debates ranging from the nature of urban survival in the post-Roman era to the position of the European city in a globalizing world. The book is divided into three parts, dealing with the middle ages, the early modern period, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - with each part containing chapters on urban trends, the urban economy, social developments, cultural life and landscape, and governance. Throughout, the book addresses key questions such as the role of migration, including that of women and ethnic minorities; the functioning of competition and emulation between cities, as well as issues of inter-urban cooperation; the different ways civic leaders have sought to promote urban identity and visibility; the significance of urban autonomy in enabling cities to protect their interests against the state; and not least why European cities and towns over the period have been such pressure cookers for new ideas and creativity, whether economic, political, or cultural.

Small Cities, Big Issues
Small Cities, Big Issues

Author: Christopher Walmsley

Publisher: Athabasca University Press

Published: 2018-07-20

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1771991631

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Small Canadian cities confront serious social issues as a result of the neoliberal economic restructuring practiced by both federal and provincial governments since the 1980s. Drastic spending reductions and ongoing restraint in social assistance, income supports, and the provision of affordable housing, combined with the offloading of social responsibilities onto municipalities, has contributed to the generalization of social issues once chiefly associated with Canada’s largest urban centres. As the investigations in this volume illustrate, while some communities responded to these issues with inclusionary and progressive actions others were more exclusionary and reactive—revealing forms of discrimination, exclusion, and “othering” in the implementation of practices and policies. Importantly, however their investigations reveal a broad range of responses to the social issues they face. No matter the process and results of the proposed solutions, what the contributors uncovered were distinctive attributes of the small city as it struggles to confront increasingly complex social issues. If local governments accept a social agenda as part of its responsibilities, the contributors to Small Cities, Big Issues believe that small cities can succeed in reconceiving community based on the ideals of acceptance, accommodation, and inclusion.

Small Towns in Europe in the 20th and 21st Centuries
Small Towns in Europe in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Author: Luďa Klusáková et al.

Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press

Published: 2017-07-01

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 802463645X

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Largely unknown small towns, always in the shadow of famous cities, are mostly overlooked by historical research. English, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Czech and Russian towns are staged in this volume as examples of a typical European phenomenon. They appear in diverse shapes, influenced by their countries and regions in history. One of possible strategies to overcome difficulties and motivate new development uses cultural heritage as a marketable value. International team of urban historians, sociologists and historians of arts and architects joined at the European Association for Urban History conference in Lisbon in 2014 and decided to present the issue in this volume – composed of five chapters – using a variety of methods and perspectives.

Towns and Buildings
Towns and Buildings

Author: Steen Eiler Rasmussen

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1969

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 9780262680110

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In the present book an effort has been made to bring the reader to look on the city as an entity which expresses certain ideals. The individual monuments, the buildings, thus become part of a whole. The cities are not all treated in the same fashion or according to a particular method. The chapters are as varied as the subjects, for there are no two cities in the world that are identical.