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Publisher Description
Describes consumers' shifting habits of fuel consumption, tracing how use of wood led to burning coal and coal gas, to the arrival, to the arrival of the arc lamp, and then the coming of electricity. Shows that the city government and utility brokers faced two problems: how to generate a cheap supply of electricity, and how to sell electrical energy to people who were already enjoying gas services. The solutions were found by Samuel Insull, president of Commonwealth Edison Company, who put electrical technology on a sound economic footing.
The dry years -- Introduction : cities, sprawl, and climate change -- The triumph of metropolitanism, 1885-1910 -- The defeat of conservationism, 1910-1920 -- The rise and fall of the American dream, 1920-1945 -- The wet years -- The boom of suburban growth, 1945-1965 -- The bust of urban decline, 1965-1985 -- The rebirth of urban nature, 1985-2011 -- Conclusion : cities, adaptation, and prairie wetlands
Annotation Explores the contributions and challenges presented when scientific authority enters the realm of environmental affairs. Practical examples and case studies illustrate that science must be relevant, credible, and democratic.
Building the Urban Environment is a comparative study of the contestation among planners, policymakers, and the grassroots over the production and meaning of urban space. Award-winning historian Harold Platt presents case studies of seven cities, including Rotterdam, Chicago, and Sao Paulo, to show how, over time, urban life created hybrid spaces that transformed people, culture, and their environments. As Platt explains, during the post-1945 race to technological modernization, policymakers gave urban planners of the International Style extraordinary influence to build their utopian vision of a self-sustaining “organic city.” However, in the 1960s, they faced a revolt of the grassroots. Building the Urban Environment traces the rise and fall of the Modernist planners during an era of Cold War, urban crisis, unnatural disasters, and global restructuring in the wake of the oil-energy embargo of the ’70s. Ultimately, Platt provides a way to measure different visions of the postwar city against actual results in terms of the built environment, contrasting how each city created a unique urban space.
Book Review
In the nineteenth century, politicians transformed a disease-infested bog on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan into an intensively managed waterscape supporting the life and economy of Chicago, now America's third-most populous city. In Liquid Capital, Joshua A. T. Salzmann shows how, through a combination of entrepreneurship, civic spirit, and bareknuckle politics, the Chicago waterfront became a hub of economic and cultural activity while also the site of many of the nation's precendent-setting decisions about public land use and environmental protection. Through the political saga of waterfront development, Salzmann illuminates Chicago's seemingly paradoxical position as both a para...
From the Taiping Rebellion to the Chinese Communist movement, no province in China gave rise to as many reformers, military officers, and revolutionaries as did Hunan. Platt offers the first comprehensive study of why this province wielded such disproportionate influence.
A history of the politics of air pollution.