The Importance of Being Urban

The Importance of Being Urban PDF Author: David A. Gamson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022663454X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
From the 1890s through World War II, the greatest hopes of American progressive reformers lay not in the government, the markets, or other seats of power but in urban school districts and classrooms. The Importance of Being Urban focuses on four western school systems—in Denver, Oakland, Portland, and Seattle—and their efforts to reconfigure public education in the face of rapid industrialization and the perceived perils [GDA1] of the modern city. In an era of accelerated immigration, shifting economic foundations, and widespread municipal shake-ups, reformers argued that the urban school district could provide the broad blend of social, cultural, and educational services needed to prepare students for twentieth-century life. These school districts were a crucial force not only in orchestrating educational change, but in delivering on the promise of democracy. David A. Gamson’s book provides eye-opening views of the histories of American education, urban politics, and the Progressive Era.

The Importance of Being Urban

The Importance of Being Urban PDF Author: David A. Gamson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022663454X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Get Book

Book Description
From the 1890s through World War II, the greatest hopes of American progressive reformers lay not in the government, the markets, or other seats of power but in urban school districts and classrooms. The Importance of Being Urban focuses on four western school systems—in Denver, Oakland, Portland, and Seattle—and their efforts to reconfigure public education in the face of rapid industrialization and the perceived perils [GDA1] of the modern city. In an era of accelerated immigration, shifting economic foundations, and widespread municipal shake-ups, reformers argued that the urban school district could provide the broad blend of social, cultural, and educational services needed to prepare students for twentieth-century life. These school districts were a crucial force not only in orchestrating educational change, but in delivering on the promise of democracy. David A. Gamson’s book provides eye-opening views of the histories of American education, urban politics, and the Progressive Era.

The Importance of Being Urban

The Importance of Being Urban PDF Author: David A. Gamson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022663468X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
From the 1890s through World War II, the greatest hopes of American progressive reformers lay not in the government, the markets, or other seats of power but in urban school districts and classrooms. The Importance of Being Urban focuses on four western school systems—in Denver, Oakland, Portland, and Seattle—and their efforts to reconfigure public education in the face of rapid industrialization and the perceived perils [GDA1] of the modern city. In an era of accelerated immigration, shifting economic foundations, and widespread municipal shake-ups, reformers argued that the urban school district could provide the broad blend of social, cultural, and educational services needed to prepare students for twentieth-century life. These school districts were a crucial force not only in orchestrating educational change, but in delivering on the promise of democracy. David A. Gamson’s book provides eye-opening views of the histories of American education, urban politics, and the Progressive Era.

Being Urban

Being Urban PDF Author: David A. Karp
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
This third edition of a classic urban sociology text examines critical but often-neglected aspects of urban life from a social-psychological theoretical perspective. Symbolic interaction is among the most central theoretical paradigms in sociology and the theory that most thoroughly attends to how individuals give meaning to their world—in this case, how city dwellers interpret and respond to their daily experiences as urbanites. This thoroughly updated edition of Being Urban: A Sociology of City Life remains true to this particular theoretical angle of vision—the symbolic interactionist approach—focusing on specific topics that are relatively neglected in other urban sociology texts, and that lend themselves to the kind of social-psychological analyses that define the distinctive conceptual core of the authors' efforts. After the first two chapters supply readers with theoretical foundations of urban sociology, the next four chapters describe the various ways that individuals experience and make sense of key aspects of urban life. The final section—also composed of four chapters—addresses strategically chosen urban institutions and related processes of social change. Specific subject areas covered include sports, everyday public life, tolerance for diversity, women in cities, urban politics, and the arts. Readers will learn about how order is maintained in public urban places, understand why cities naturally breed a tolerance for diversity that may not be so easily achieved in less urban settings, and appreciate the delicate political and economic tensions between cities and their surrounding suburbs.

Great American City

Great American City PDF Author: Robert J. Sampson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022683400X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 573

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Book Description
"In his magisterial Great American City, Robert J. Sampson puts social scientific data behind an argument that we all feel and experience everyday: the neighborhood you live in has a big effect on your life and the city you live in. Not only does your neighborhood determine where your nearest hospital is, what kind of schools your children can attend, or how many police officers you might encounter (and how they respond to you), it affects how you feel, how you think about the world and your place in it. Like many sociologists before him, Sampson looks to Chicago to make his insightful interventions, based on extensive data collected across the city's diverse neighborhoods. This edition includes a new afterword by Sampson reflecting on changes in Chicago and the country that have occurred since the book was initially published. He notes the increase in gun violence, both among civilians and police killings of civilians, as well as steady or growing rates of segregation despite an increase in diversity. With these changes have come new research, much of it a continuation or elaboration of the work in Great American City. He updates readers on the status of the research initiative that serves as the basis of Great American City, the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), and summarizes how scholars have taken up his work. Many of these scholars have new tools at their disposal with the rise of big data; Sampson remarks on these changes in the field"--

Cities in the Urban Age

Cities in the Urban Age PDF Author: Robert A. Beauregard
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022653538X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
We live in a self-proclaimed Urban Age, where we celebrate the city as the source of economic prosperity, a nurturer of social and cultural diversity, and a place primed for democracy. We proclaim the city as the fertile ground from which progress will arise. Without cities, we tell ourselves, human civilization would falter and decay. In Cities in the Urban Age, Robert A. Beauregard argues that this line of thinking is not only hyperbolic—it is too celebratory by half. For Beauregard, the city is a cauldron for four haunting contradictions. First, cities are equally defined by both their wealth and their poverty. Second, cities are simultaneously environmentally destructive and yet promise sustainability. Third, cities encourage rule by political machines and oligarchies, even as they are essentially democratic and at least nominally open to all. And fourth, city life promotes tolerance among disparate groups, even as the friction among them often erupts into violence. Beauregard offers no simple solutions or proposed remedies for these contradictions; indeed, he doesn’t necessarily hold that they need to be resolved, since they are generative of city life. Without these four tensions, cities wouldn’t be cities. Rather, Beauregard argues that only by recognizing these ambiguities and contradictions can we even begin to understand our moral obligations, as well as the clearest paths toward equality, justice, and peace in urban settings.

Neoliberal Cities

Neoliberal Cities PDF Author: Andrew J. Diamond
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479828823
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Traces decades of troubled attempts to fund private answers to public urban problems The American city has long been a laboratory for austerity, governmental decentralization, and market-based solutions to urgent public problems such as affordable housing, criminal justice, and education. Through richly told case studies from Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and New York, Neoliberal Cities provides the necessary context to understand the always intensifying racial and economic inequality in and around the city center. In this original collection of essays, urban historians and sociologists trace the role that public policies have played in reshaping cities, with particular attention to labor, the privatization of public services, the collapse of welfare, the rise of gentrification, the expansion of the carceral state, and the politics of community control. In so doing, Neoliberal Cities offers a bottom-up approach to social scientific, theoretical, and historical accounts of urban America, exploring the ways that activists and grassroots organizations, as well as ordinary citizens, came to terms with new market-oriented public policies promoted by multinational corporations, financial institutions, and political parties. Neoliberal Cities offers new scaffolding for urban and metropolitan change, with attention to the interaction between policymaking, city planning, social movements, and the market.

Making Urban Theory

Making Urban Theory PDF Author: Mary Lawhon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000767957
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
This book facilitates more careful engagement with the production, politics and geography of knowledge as scholars create space for the inclusion of southern cities in urban theory. Making Urban Theory addresses debates of the past fifty years regarding whether and why scholars should conceptualize southern cities as different and argues for the continued importance of unlearning existing theory. With examples from the urban question to environmental justice, urban infrastructure to basic income, this volume highlights the limitations of existing explanations as well as how thinking from the south entails more than collecting data in new places. Throughout the book, instances of juxtapositions, unease, unlearning and learning anew emphasize how theory-making from southern cases can open avenues to more creative possibilities. The book pulls theories apart, examining distinct components to better understand the universality and provinciality of empirical phenomena, causality and norms, including questions of what a city is and ought to be. This book delivers a clearer articulation of ongoing debates and future possibilities for southern urban scholarship, and it will thus be relevant for both scholars and students of Urban Studies, Urban Theory, Urban Geography, Research Methods in Geography, Postcolonial/Southern Cities and Global Cities at graduate and post-graduate levels.

Order without Design

Order without Design PDF Author: Alain Bertaud
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262038765
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
An argument that operational urban planning can be improved by the application of the tools of urban economics to the design of regulations and infrastructure. Urban planning is a craft learned through practice. Planners make rapid decisions that have an immediate impact on the ground—the width of streets, the minimum size of land parcels, the heights of buildings. The language they use to describe their objectives is qualitative—“sustainable,” “livable,” “resilient”—often with no link to measurable outcomes. Urban economics, on the other hand, is a quantitative science, based on theories, models, and empirical evidence largely developed in academic settings. In this book, the eminent urban planner Alain Bertaud argues that applying the theories of urban economics to the practice of urban planning would greatly improve both the productivity of cities and the welfare of urban citizens. Bertaud explains that markets provide the indispensable mechanism for cities' development. He cites the experience of cities without markets for land or labor in pre-reform China and Russia; this “urban planners' dream” created inefficiencies and waste. Drawing on five decades of urban planning experience in forty cities around the world, Bertaud links cities' productivity to the size of their labor markets; argues that the design of infrastructure and markets can complement each other; examines the spatial distribution of land prices and densities; stresses the importance of mobility and affordability; and critiques the land use regulations in a number of cities that aim at redesigning existing cities instead of just trying to alleviate clear negative externalities. Bertaud concludes by describing the new role that joint teams of urban planners and economists could play to improve the way cities are managed.

Waterworks for Urban and Rural Districts, Including the Supply for Mansions and Isolated Buildings

Waterworks for Urban and Rural Districts, Including the Supply for Mansions and Isolated Buildings PDF Author: Henry C. Adams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Water-supply
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description


Human Aspects of Urban Form

Human Aspects of Urban Form PDF Author: Amos Rapoport
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 1483182169
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Human Aspects of Urban Form: Towards a Man-Environment Approach to Urban Form and Design discusses the man-environment interaction in urban setting. The book is comprised six chapters that provide a broad conceptual framework using a range of disciplines. The text first tackles urban design as the organization of space, time, meaning, and communication. The second chapter talks about environmental quality, while the third chapter deals with environmental cognition. Next, the book tackles the importance and nature of environmental perception. Chapter 5 discusses the city in terms of social, cultural, and territorial variables. Chapter 6 details the distinction between associational and perceptual worlds. The book will be of great interest to urban planners and government policymakers. Researchers and practitioners of sociological and behavioral science will also benefit from the book.