Remaking New York


Book Description




Remaking New York


Book Description

Inequality increases, instability grows, communities fragment: this is the fate of a city in the wake of globalization--but is globalization really the cause? Proposing a new perspective on politics, globalization, and the city, this provocative book argues that such urban problems result in part from U.S. policies that can be changed. William Sites develops the concept of primitive globalization, identifying a pattern of reactive politics--ad hoc measures to subsidize business, displace the urban poor, and dismantle the welfare state--that uproots social actors (corporations, citizens, urban residents) and facilitates a damaging, short-term-oriented type of international integration. In light of this theory, Sites examines the transformation of New York City since the 1970s, focusing on the logic of political action at national, local, and neighborhood levels. In the process, the story of late twentieth-century New York and its Lower East Side community emerges as something different: not a tale of globalist transformation or of local resurgence but a distinctly American case, one in which urban politics and the state, in their own right, exacerbate inequality and community fragmentation within the city.




Bloomberg's New York


Book Description

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg claims to run the city like a business. In Bloomberg's New York, Julian Brash applies methods from anthropology, geography, and other social science disciplines to examine what that means. He describes the mayor's attitude toward governance as the Bloomberg Way--a philosophy that holds up the mayor as CEO, government as a private corporation, desirable residents and businesses as customers and clients, and the city itself as a product to be branded and marketed as a luxury good. Commonly represented as pragmatic and nonideological, the Bloomberg Way, Brash argues, is in fact an ambitious reformulation of neoliberal governance that advances specific class interests. He considers the implications of this in a blow-by-blow account of the debate over the Hudson Yards plan, which aimed to transform Manhattan's far west side into the city's next great high-end district. Bringing this plan to fruition proved surprisingly difficult as activists and entrenched interests pushed back against the Bloomberg administration, suggesting that despite Bloomberg's success in redrawing the rules of urban governance, older political arrangements--and opportunities for social justice--remain.




Remaking the Human


Book Description

The technological capacity to transform biology - repairing, reshaping and replacing body parts, chemicals and functions – is now part of our lives. Humanity is confronted with a variety of affordable and non-invasive 'enhancement technologies': anti-ageing medicine, aesthetic surgery, cognitive and sexual enhancers, lifestyle drugs, prosthetics and hormone supplements. This collection focuses on why people find these practices so seductive and provides ethnographic insights into people’s motives and aspirations as they embrace or reject enhancement technologies, which are closely entangled with negotiations over gender, class, age, nationality and ethnicity.




Remaking the Frankenstein Myth on Film


Book Description

Focusing on films outside the horror genre, this book offers a unique account of the Frankenstein myth's popularity and endurance. Although the Frankenstein narrative has been a staple in horror films, it has also crossed over into other genres, particularly comedy and science fiction, resulting in such films as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Young Frankenstein, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Bladerunner, and the Alien and Terminator film series. In addition to addressing horror's relationship to comedy and science fiction, the book also explores the versatility and power of the Frankenstein narrative as a contemporary myth through which our deepest attitudes concerning gender (masculine versus feminine), race (Same versus Other), and technology (natural versus artificial) are both revealed and concealed. The book not only examines the films themselves, but also explores early drafts of film scripts, scenes that were cut from the final releases, publicity materials, and reviews, in order to consider more fully how and why the Frankenstein myth continues to resonate in the popular imagination.




Remaking Home Economics


Book Description

An interdisciplinary effort of scholars from history, women's studies, and family and consumer sciences, Remaking Home Economics covers the field's history of opening career opportunities for women and responding to domestic and social issues. Calls to "bring back home economics" miss the point that it never went away, say Sharon Y. Nickols and Gwen Kay--home economics has been remaking itself, in study and practice, for more than a century. These new essays, relevant for a variety of fields--history, women's studies, STEM, and family and consumer sciences itself--take both current and historical perspectives on defining issues including home economics philosophy, social responsibility, and public outreach; food and clothing; gender and race in career settings; and challenges to the field's identity and continuity. Home economics history offers a rich case study for exploring common ground between the broader culture and this highly gendered profession. This volume describes the resourcefulness of past scholars and professionals who negotiated with cultural and institutional constraints to produce their work, as well as the innovations of contemporary practitioners who continue to change the profession, including its name and identity. The widespread urge to reclaim domestic skills, along with a continual need for fresh ways to address obesity, elder abuse, household debt, and other national problems affirms the field's vitality and relevance. This volume will foster dialogue both inside and outside the academy about the changes that have remade (and are remaking) family and consumer sciences.




Power at Ground Zero


Book Description

The destruction of the World Trade Center complex on 9/11 set in motion a chain of events that fundamentally transformed both the United States and the wider world. In Power at Ground Zero, Lynne Sagalyn offers the definitive account of one of the greatest reconstruction projects in modern world history: the rebuilding of lower Manhattan after 9/11.




Revolting New York


Book Description

"For many, the appearance of Occupy Wall Street seemed so sudden and so surprising it seemed to have come out of nowhere. But Occupy Wall Street was in some sense not unusual: it was part and parcel of a long history of riot, revolt, uprising, and sometimes even revolution that has shaped the city and the larger histories and geographies of which it is part. The history of New York is, in significant part, a history of revolt. Many citizens, activists, and scholars know pieces of that history, but nowhere has it been put together in something close to its entirety. The effect is that each revolt or uprising seems almost sui generis, always surprising, disconnected from both its long- and near-term history and social geography. Revolting New York brings together the historical geography of revolt in New York in its fullness, from the earliest uprisings of the Munsee against Dutch occupation of Manhattan to Occupy. All in a style accessible to a broad as well as academic audience The book will show that there is a continuous, if varied and punctuated, history of rebellion in New York that is at least as vital as the more standard histories of formal politics, planning, economic growth and restructuring that largely define our consciousness of New York's evolution and the structuring of life within it" --




Remaking Home


Book Description

Rather than emphasising boundaries and territories by examining the ‘integration’ and ‘acculturation’ of the immigrant or the refugee, this book offers insights into the ideas and practices of individuals settling into new societies and cultures. It analyses their ideas of connecting and belonging; their accounts of the past, the present and the future; the interaction and networks of relations; practical strategies; and the different meanings of ‘home’ and belonging that are constructed in new sociocultural settings. The author uses empirical research to explore the experiences of refugees from the successor states of Yugoslavia, who are struggling to make a home for themselves in Amsterdam and Rome. By explaining how real people navigate through the difficulties of their displacement as well as the numerous scenarios and barriers to their emplacement, the author sheds new light on our understanding of what it is like to be a refugee.




The New Kings of New York


Book Description

There's a story behind every apartment sale, every building development, and each real estatetransaction in New York City. And many of those stories involve the uber-wealthy behaving badly-the blood sport that is New York real estate is defined by billion-dollar feuds. THE NEW KINGSOF NEW YORK: Renegades, Moguls, Gamblers and the Remaking of the World's MostFamous Skyline, by journalist Adam Piore (The Real Deal; April 12, 2022; hardcover $29.95),charts the extraordinary transformation of America's greatest city from a near-bankrupt urbancombat zone into the land of Billionaires' Row and Hudson Yards-a luxury playground for theglobal 1 percent-and provides an inside look at the bombastic developers behind the biggest realestate deals of this century.The first two decades of the twenty-first century were a giddy, hyperbolic era of dizzying highs anddeep, dark lows. The headlines told the story: the largest residential and commercial development inNorth America, the largest condo conversion in the history of the world, the most expensivepenthouse sale in the city, the most lucrative office skyscraper sale in history, the tallest condo everbuilt. Yet 2020 brought in a new era: 95 percent of Manhattan's office space sat empty amid apandemic, retail stores were boarded up, and restaurants went belly-up.THE NEW KINGS OF NEW YORK offers a behind-the-scenes picture of what it's like tooperate at the highest levels of the industry, and how some of the skyline-transforming deals wereaccomplished. And it features the larger-than-life characters behind the deals.Written and published by the team behind The Real Deal, New York's preeminent real estate-focusedpublication, THE NEW KINGS OF NEW YORK is a book about the history of the city, thedawn of New York real estate's second gilded age, the opportunists who sought to exploit it, and theadventures they had along the way. It is a look at where we have come from as we consider where togo next.