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A complete introduction to the history, evolution, and future of the modern city, this book covers a wide range of theory, including the significance of space and place, to provide a balanced account of why cities are an essential part of the global human experience. Covers a wide range of theoretical approaches to the city, from the historical to the cutting edge Emphasizes the important themes of space and place Offers a balanced account of cities and offers extensive coverage including urban inequality, environment and sustainability, and methods for studying the city Takes a global approach, with examples from Berlin and Chicago to Shanghai and Mumbai Includes a range of pedagogical feat...
The revised and updated second edition of Introduction to Cities explores why cities are such a vital part of the human experience and how they shape our everyday lives. Written in engaging and accessible terms, Introduction to Cities examines the study of cities through two central concepts: that cities are places, where people live, form communities, and establish their own identities, and that they are spaces, such as the inner city and the suburb, that offer a way to configure and shape the material world and natural environment. Introduction to Cities covers the theory of cities from an historical perspective right through to the most recent theoretical developments. The authors offer a...
Half a century ago, deindustrialization gutted blue-collar jobs in the American Midwest. But today, these places are not ghost towns. People still call these communities home, even as they struggle with unemployment, poverty, and other social and economic crises. Why do people remain in declining areas through difficult circumstances? What do their choices tell us about rootedness in a time of flux? Through the cases of the former steel manufacturing hub of southeast Chicago and a shuttered mining community in Iron County, Wisconsin, Amanda McMillan Lequieu traces the power and shifting meanings of the notion of home for people who live in troubled places. Building from on-the-ground observa...
From anxieties over work-life balance and entangling technologies, to celebrations of cool jobs and great places to live, quality of life frames the ways we enhance our lives and legitimate social change today. But how does the idea of quality of life envision the greater good, and what gets lost as a result? This book provides the critical framework for understanding the idea’s contexts and tensions that are conspicuously missing in popular discussions, professional activities, and scholarly research on quality of life. With multiple case studies taken across North America and Europe, it provides a sociological perspective on the contradictory ways we talk about and pursue quality of life...
This book presents fourteen contributions by authors examining the importance of dwellings and local communities in people's everyday lives. The volume explores the ways in which home is created both ideally and practically, at levels ranging from individual housing units to neighborhoods and public spaces.
In 1965, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan—then a high-ranking official in the Department of Labor—sparked a firestorm when he released his report “The Negro Family,” which came to be regarded by both supporters and detractors as an indictment of African American culture. Blaming the Poor examines the regrettably durable impact of the Moynihan Report for race relations and social policy in America, challenging the humiliating image the report cast on poor black families and its misleading explanation of the causes of poverty. A leading authority on poverty and racism in the United States, Susan D. Greenbaum dismantles Moynihan’s main thesis—that the so called matriarchal s...
Explores the unconventional ways we communicate what we know about society to others. Becker explores the many ways knowledge about society can be shared and interpreted through different forms of telling—fiction, films, photographs, maps, even mathematical models—many of which remain outside the boundaries of conventional social science. Eight case studies, including the photographs of Walker Evans, the plays of George Bernard Shaw, the novels of Jane Austen and Italo Calvino, and the sociology of Erving Goffman, provide support for Becker’s argument: that every way of telling about society is perfect—for some purpose. The trick is, as Becker notes, to discover what purpose is served by doing it this way rather than that. From publisher description.
Honorable Mention for the 2008 Robert Park Outstanding Book Award given by the ASA’s Community and Urban Sociology Section Mardi Gras, jazz, voodoo, gumbo, Bourbon Street, the French Quarter—all evoke that place that is unlike any other: New Orleans. In Authentic New Orleans, Kevin Fox Gotham explains how New Orleans became a tourist town, a spectacular locale known as much for its excesses as for its quirky Southern charm. Gotham begins in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina amid the whirlwind of speculation about the rebuilding of the city and the dread of outsiders wiping New Orleans clean of the grit that made it great. He continues with the origins of Carnival and the Mardi Gras cele...
Provides comprehensive coverage of major topics in urban and regional studies Under the guidance of Editor-in-Chief Anthony Orum, this definitive reference work covers central and emergent topics in the field, through an examination of urban and regional conditions and variation across the world. It also provides authoritative entries on the main conceptual tools used by anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, and political scientists in the study of cities and regions. Among such concepts are those of place and space; geographical regions; the nature of power and politics in cities; urban culture; and many others. The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies captures t...
Post-9/11 fiction reflects how the September 11, 2001, attacks have influenced our concept of public space, from urban behavior patterns to architecture and urban movement. It also suggests a need for remapping the real and imagined spaces where we live and work. Through close readings of novels from both sides of the Atlantic, this analysis of the literary 21st century metropolis explores the fictional post-9/11 city as a global space not defined or contained by its physical limits.