Oreo


Book Description

A pioneering, dazzling satire about a biracial black girl from Philadelphia searching for her Jewish father in New York City Oreo is raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note that triggers her quest to find him. What ensues is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb. Oreo, our young hero, navigates the labyrinth of sound studios and brothels and subway tunnels in Manhattan, seeking to claim her birthright while unwittingly experiencing and triggering a mythic journey of self-discovery like no other.




The Image of the City


Book Description

The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.




Metropolis 1890-1940


Book Description

An ideal and welcome reference and reader for students of urbanism, Metropolis 1890-1940 examines perceptions of the city during the dramatic urban growth of this period. Metropolis looks at the policies adopted to deal with the new city and at the views of the city expressed in the art, architecture, literature, cinema, music, and ideology of the time. Internationally known experts discuss case studies of London, Paris, Berlin, the Ruhr, New York, Moscow, and Tokyo, and a postscript brings the reader up to date with a survey of postwar urbanism.




New Brooms (Classic Reprint)


Book Description

NEW BROOMS BY ROBERT J. SHORES This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. NEW BROOMS BY ROBERT J. SHORES




Experts and Politicians


Book Description

During the Progressive Era, reform candidates in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago challenged the status quo--with strikingly different results: brief triumph in New York, sustained success in Cleveland, and utter failure in Chicago. Kenneth Finegold seeks to explain this phenomenon by analyzing the support for reform in these cities, especially the role of an emerging class of urban policy professionals in each campaign. His work offers a new way of looking at urban reform opposition to machine politics. Drawing on original research and quantitative analysis of electoral data, Finegold identifies three distinct patterns of support for reform candidates: traditional reformers drew support from native-stock elites; municipal populists found support among stock immigrant groups and segments of the working class; and progressive candidates won the backing of coalitions made up of traditional reform and municipal populist voters. The success of these reform efforts, Finegold shows, depended on the different ways in which experts were incorporated into city politics. This book demonstrates the significance of expertise as a potential source of change in American politics and policy, and of each city's electoral and administrative organizations as mediating institutions within a national system of urban political economies.




The Modern City and Its Problems (Classic Reprint)


Book Description

Excerpt from The Modern City and Its Problems In so far as this volume carries a message it is that the American city lags behind the work it should properly perform. It is negative in its functions, rather than positive in its services. It has been stripped of power and responsibility. It is politically weak and lacks ideals of its possibilities. It has so little concern for its people that they in turn have little concern for it. We have failed to differentiate between those activities which are private and those which are public. We have failed, too, to provide protection to the individual from inequalities of power and position, and have left him a prey to forces as dangerous to his life and comfort as those against which the police are employed to protect. Further than this, we have failed to shift to society the burdens of industry which the coming of the city has created. We have permitted the sacrifice of low wages, irregular employment, and disease to be borne by the individual rather than by the community. Those who suffer from these conditions are in reality a vicarious sacrifice; a sacrifice which society has no right to accept. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.




City


Book Description

How did neighborhood groceries, parish halls, factories, and even saloons contribute more to urban vitality than did the fiscal might of postwar urban renewal? With a novelist’s eye for telling detail, Douglas Rae depicts the features that contributed most to city life in the early “urbanist” decades of the twentieth century. Rae’s subject is New Haven, Connecticut, but the lessons he draws apply to many American cities. City: Urbanism and Its End begins with a richly textured portrait of New Haven in the early twentieth century, a period of centralized manufacturing, civic vitality, and mixed-use neighborhoods. As social and economic conditions changed, the city confronted its end of urbanism first during the Depression, and then very aggressively during the mayoral reign of Richard C. Lee (1954–70), when New Haven led the nation in urban renewal spending. But government spending has repeatedly failed to restore urban vitality. Rae argues that strategies for the urban future should focus on nurturing the unplanned civic engagements that make mixed-use city life so appealing and so civilized. Cities need not reach their old peaks of population, or look like thriving suburbs, to be once again splendid places for human beings to live and work.




Justice and Cities


Book Description

This book explores different theories of justice and explains how these connect to broader geographical questions and inform our understanding of urban problems. Since philosophers like Socrates debated in the ancient agora, cities have prompted arguments about the best ways to live together. Cities have also produced some of the most vexing moral problems, including the critical question of what obligations we have to people we neither know nor affiliate with. The first part of this book outlines the most well-developed answers to these questions: the justice theories of Utilitarianism, Libertarianism, Liberalism, Marxism, Communitarianism, Conservativism, and recent "post" critiques. Within each theory, we find a set of geographical propensities that shape the ways purveyors of the theories see the city and its moral problems. The central thesis of the book is therefore that competing moral theories have distinct geographical concerns and perspectives, and that these propensities often condition how the city and its injustices are understood. The second part of the book features three studies of contemporary urban problems – gentrification, segregation, and (un)affordability – to demonstrate how predominant justice theories generate distinctive moral and geographical interpretations. This book therefore serves as an urbanist’s guide to justice theory, written for undergraduates and postgraduates studying human geography, urban and municipal planning, urban theory and urban politics, sociology, and politics and government.




Guide to Reprints


Book Description




Neighborhood


Book Description

In an effort to make neighborhoods compatible with 21st century ideals, Talen has produced a singular resource for understanding what is meant by neighborhood--a multi-dimensional, comprehensive view of what neighborhoods signify, how they're idealized and measured, and what their historical progression has been.