By comparing the response of five major French provincial municipalities - Lyon, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Toulouse and St. Etienne - to the challenges of urbanization, the study is able to elucidate the extent to which city governments were at the forefront in the modernization of urban France.
Over the next 20 years, most low-income countries will, for the first time, become more urban than rural. Understanding demographic trends in the cities of the developing world is critical to those countries - their societies, economies, and environments. The benefits from urbanization cannot be overlooked, but the speed and sheer scale of this transformation presents many challenges. In this uniquely thorough and authoritative volume, 16 of the world's leading scholars on urban population and development have worked together to produce the most comprehensive and detailed analysis of the changes taking place in cities and their implications and impacts. They focus on population dynamics, social and economic differentiation, fertility and reproductive health, mortality and morbidity, labor force, and urban governance. As many national governments decentralize and devolve their functions, the nature of urban management and governance is undergoing fundamental transformation, with programs in poverty alleviation, health, education, and public services increasingly being deposited in the hands of untested municipal and regional governments. Cities Transformed identifies a new class of policy maker emerging to take up the growing responsibilities. Drawing from a wide variety of data sources, many of them previously inaccessible, this essential text will become the benchmark for all involved in city-level research, policy, planning, and investment decisions. The National Research Council is a private, non-profit institution based in Washington, DC, providing services to the US government, the public, and the scientific and engineering communities. The editors are members of the Council's Panel on Urban Population Dynamics.
The City: A World History tells the story of the rise and development of urban centers from ancient times to the twenty-first century. It begins with the establishment of the first cities in the Near East in the fourth millennium BCE, and goes on to examine urban growth in the Indus River Valley in India, as well as Egypt and areas that bordered the Mediterranean Sea. Athens, Alexandria, and Rome stand out both politically and culturally. With the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, European cities entered into a long period of waning and deterioration. But elsewhere, great cities-among them, Constantinople, Baghdad, Chang'an, and Tenochtitlán-thrived. In the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, urban growth resumed in Europe, giving rise to cities like Florence, Paris, and London. This urban growth also accelerated in parts of the world that came under European control, such as Philadelphia in the nascent United States. As the Industrial Revolution swept through in the nineteenth century, cities grew rapidly. Their expansion resulted in a slew of social problems and political disruptions, but it was accompanied by impressive measures designed to improve urban life. Meanwhile, colonial cities bore the imprint of European imperialism. Finally, the book turns to the years since 1914, guided by a few themes: the impact of war and revolution; urban reconstruction after 1945; migration out of many cities in the United States into growing suburbs; and the explosive growth of "megacities" in the developing world.
Urban power and politics are topics of abiding interest for students of the city. This exciting collection of essays explores how Europe’s cities have been governed across the last 500 years. Taken as a whole, it provides a unique historical overview of urban politics in early modern and modern Europe. At the same time, it guides the reader through the variety of ways in which power and governance are currently understood by historians and new directions in the subject. The essays are wide-ranging, covering Europe from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, Russia to Ireland, between 1500 and the twentieth century. Each chapter employs a specific case-study to illuminate a way of examining how power worked in regard to topics such as women, popular culture or urban elites. A variety of approaches are deployed, including the study of ritual and performance, morality and conduct, governmentality and the state, infrastructure and the individual. Reflecting the state of the art in European urban history, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the study of urban politics and government. It represents a fresh take on a rich subject and will stimulate a new generation of historical studies of power and the city.
In 'European Cities in the Modern Era, 1850/80-1914', Friedrich Lenger offers an account of Europe's major cities in a period crucial for the development of much of their present shape and infrastructure.
Environmental challenges are defining the twenty-first century. To fully understand ongoing debates about our current crises—climate change, loss of biological diversity, pollution, extinction, resource woes—means revisiting their origins, in all their complexity. With this ambitious, highly original contribution to the environmental history of global modernity, Frank Uekötter considers the many ways humans have had an impact on their physical environment throughout history. Ours is not a one-way trajectory to sudden collapse, he argues, but rather death by a thousand cuts. The many paths we’ve forged to arrive in our current predicament, from agriculture to industry to infrastructure, must be considered collectively if we are to stay afloat in what Uekötter describes as a vortex: a powerful metaphor for the flow of history, capturing the momentum and the many crosscurrents that swept people and environments along. His book invites us to look at environmental challenges from multiple perspectives, including all the twists and turns that have helped to create the mess we find ourselves in. Uekötter has written a world history for an age where things are falling apart: where we know what lies ahead and are equipped with the right tools—technological and otherwise—and plenty of experience to deal with environmental challenges, but somehow fail to get our affairs in order.
Nineteenth-century France was a society of apparent paradoxes. It is famous for periodic and bloody revolutionary upheavals, for class conflict and for religious disputes, yet it was marked by relative demographic stability, gradual urbanisation and modest economic change, class conflict and ongoing religious and cultural tensions. Incorporating much recent research, Roger Magraw draws both upon still-valuable insights derived from the 'new social history' of the 1960s and upon more recent approaches suggested by gender history , cultural anthropology and the 'linguistic turn'.
For those who lived in the wake of the French Revolution, its aftermath left a profound wound that no subsequent king, emperor, or president could heal. "Children of the Revolution" follows the ensuing generations who repeatedly tried and failed to come up with a stable regime after the trauma of 1789.