Untimely Ruins
Untimely Ruins

Author: Nick Yablon

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-06-15

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 0226946657

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American ruins have become increasingly prominent, whether in discussions of “urban blight” and home foreclosures, in commemorations of 9/11, or in postapocalyptic movies. In this highly original book, Nick Yablon argues that the association between American cities and ruins dates back to a much earlier period in the nation’s history. Recovering numerous scenes of urban desolation—from failed banks, abandoned towns, and dilapidated tenements to the crumbling skyscrapers and bridges envisioned in science fiction and cartoons—Untimely Ruins challenges the myth that ruins were absent or insignificant objects in nineteenth-century America. The first book to document an American cult of the ruin, Untimely Ruins traces its deviations as well as derivations from European conventions. Unlike classical and Gothic ruins, which decayed gracefully over centuries and inspired philosophical meditations about the fate of civilizations, America’s ruins were often “untimely,” appearing unpredictably and disappearing before they could accrue an aura of age. As modern ruins of steel and iron, they stimulated critical reflections about contemporary cities, and the unfamiliar kinds of experience they enabled. Unearthing evocative sources everywhere from the archives of amateur photographers to the contents of time-capsules, Untimely Ruins exposes crucial debates about the economic, technological, and cultural transformations known as urban modernity. The result is a fascinating cultural history that uncovers fresh perspectives on the American city.

Segregation
Segregation

Author: Carl H. Nightingale

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-07-11

Total Pages: 539

ISBN-13: 022637971X

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When we think of segregation, what often comes to mind is apartheid South Africa, or the American South in the age of Jim Crow—two societies fundamentally premised on the concept of the separation of the races. But as Carl H. Nightingale shows us in this magisterial history, segregation is everywhere, deforming cities and societies worldwide. Starting with segregation’s ancient roots, and what the archaeological evidence reveals about humanity’s long-standing use of urban divisions to reinforce political and economic inequality, Nightingale then moves to the world of European colonialism. It was there, he shows, segregation based on color—and eventually on race—took hold; the British East India Company, for example, split Calcutta into “White Town” and “Black Town.” As we follow Nightingale’s story around the globe, we see that division replicated from Hong Kong to Nairobi, Baltimore to San Francisco, and more. The turn of the twentieth century saw the most aggressive segregation movements yet, as white communities almost everywhere set to rearranging whole cities along racial lines. Nightingale focuses closely on two striking examples: Johannesburg, with its state-sponsored separation, and Chicago, in which the goal of segregation was advanced by the more subtle methods of real estate markets and housing policy. For the first time ever, the majority of humans live in cities, and nearly all those cities bear the scars of segregation. This unprecedented, ambitious history lays bare our troubled past, and sets us on the path to imagining the better, more equal cities of the future.

Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City
Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City

Author: Betsy Klimasmith

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-01-27

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0192846213

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Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City sheds new light on the literature of the early US by exploring how literature, theatre, architecture, and images worked together to allow readers to imagine themselves as urbanites even before cities developed. In the four decades following the Revolutionary War, the new nation was a loose network of nascent cities connected by print. Before a national culture could develop, local city cultures took shape; literary texts played key roles in helping new Americans become city people. Drawing on extensive archival research, Urban Rehearsals argues that literature, particularly novels and plays, allowed Bostonians to navigate the transition from colonial town to post-revolution city, enabled Philadelphians to grieve their experiences of the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic and rebuild in the epidemic's aftermath, and showed New Yorkers how the domestic practices that reinforced their urbanity could be opened to the broader public. Throughout, attention to underrepresented voices and texts calls attention to the possibilities for women, immigrants, and Black Americans in developing urban spaces, while showing how those possibilities would be foreclosed as the nation developed. Balancing attention to canonical texts of the early Republic, including The Power of Sympathy, Charlotte Temple, and Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, with novels whose depiction of early cities deserves greater attention, such as Ormond, The Boarding-School, Monima, and Kelroy, this volume shows how US cities developed on the pages and stages of the early Republic, building urban imaginations that would construct the nation's early cities.

Arbitrary Lines
Arbitrary Lines

Author: M. Nolan Gray

Publisher: Island Press

Published: 2022-06-21

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1642832545

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It's time for America to move beyond zoning, argues city planner M. Nolan Gray in Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. With lively explanations, Gray shows why zoning abolition is a necessary--if not sufficient--condition for building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. Gray lays the groundwork for this ambitious cause by clearing up common misconceptions about how American cities regulate growth and examining four contemporary critiques of zoning (its role in increasing housing costs, restricting growth in our most productive cities, institutionalizing racial and economic segregation, and mandating sprawl). He sets out some of the efforts currently underway to reform zoning and charts how land-use regulation might work in the post-zoning American city. Arbitrary Lines is an invitation to rethink the rules that will continue to shape American life--where we may live or work, who we may encounter, how we may travel. If the task seems daunting, the good news is that we have nowhere to go but up

Saving America's Cities
Saving America's Cities

Author: Lizabeth Cohen

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2019-10-01

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 0374721602

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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.

The Exposed City
The Exposed City

Author: Nadia Amoroso

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-04-30

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1136997113

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There is a vast amount of information about a city which is invisible to the human eye – crime levels, transportation patterns, cell phone use and air quality to name just a few. If a city was able to be defined by these characteristics, what form would it take? How could it be mapped? Nadia Amoroso tackles these questions by taking statistical urban data and exploring how they could be transformed into innovative new maps. The "unseen" elements of the city are examined in groundbreaking images throughout the book, which are complemented by interviews with Winy Maas and James Corner, comments by Richard Saul Wurman, and sections by the SENSEable City Lab group and Mark Aubin, co-founder of Google Earth.

Smoldering City
Smoldering City

Author: Karen Sawislak

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1995-12-15

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0226735486

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Examines the various debates the city faced after the Chicago fire in dealing with homelessness, the care and feeding of much of the population and the problem of rebuilding amidst political chaos and people working at cross purposes. Explains the events that led up to the Chicago fire: intensely dry conditions, a 20-m.p.h. southwest wind, and an unfortunate spark at 10 o"clock on the night of Oct. 8 all combined to turn Chicago into a "vast ocean of flame". The rift between the immigrant working class and the wealthy 'native-born' Chicagoans made Catherine O'Leary (and her famous cow) a perfect scapegoat for anti-Irish, anti-working class invective. Provides historical maps, plates and engravings, with an epilogue and notes.

Urban Forests
Urban Forests

Author: Jill Jonnes

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2016-09-27

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 1101632135

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“Far-ranging and deeply researched, Urban Forests reveals the beauty and significance of the trees around us.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction “Jonnes extols the many contributions that trees make to city life and celebrates the men and women who stood up for America’s city trees over the past two centuries. . . . An authoritative account.” —Gerard Helferich, The Wall Street Journal “We all know that trees can make streets look prettier. But in her new book Urban Forests, Jill Jonnes explains how they make them safer as well.” —Sara Begley, Time Magazine A celebration of urban trees and the Americans—presidents, plant explorers, visionaries, citizen activists, scientists, nurserymen, and tree nerds—whose arboreal passions have shaped and ornamented the nation’s cities, from Jefferson’s day to the present As nature’s largest and longest-lived creations, trees play an extraordinarily important role in our cities; they are living landmarks that define space, cool the air, soothe our psyches, and connect us to nature and our past. Today, four-fifths of Americans live in or near urban areas, surrounded by millions of trees of hundreds of different species. Despite their ubiquity and familiarity, most of us take trees for granted and know little of their fascinating natural history or remarkable civic virtues. Jill Jonnes’s Urban Forests tells the captivating stories of the founding mothers and fathers of urban forestry, in addition to those arboreal advocates presently using the latest technologies to illuminate the value of trees to public health and to our urban infrastructure. The book examines such questions as the character of American urban forests and the effect that tree-rich landscaping might have on commerce, crime, and human well-being. For amateur botanists, urbanists, environmentalists, and policymakers, Urban Forests will be a revelation of one of the greatest, most productive, and most beautiful of our natural resources.