Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: urban studies

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  Amazing Grace

  The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

  by Jonathan Kozol

  The children in this book defy the stereotypes of urban youth too frequently presented by the media. Tender, generous and often religiously devout, they speak with eloquence and honesty about the poverty and racial isolation that have wounded but not hardened them. The book does not romanticize or soften the effects of violence and sickness. One fourth of the child-bearing women in the neighborhoods where these... (more)
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  The Death and Life of Great American Cities

  by Jane Jacobs

  A classic since its publication in 1961, this book is the defintive statement on American cities: what makes them safe, how they function, and why all too many official attempts at saving them have failed.
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  And the Band Played On

  Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

  by Randy Shilts

  By the time Rock Hudson's death in 1985 alerted all of America to the danger of the AIDS epidemic, the disease had spread across the nation, killing thousands of people and emerging as the greatest health crisis of the 20th century. America faced a troubling question: What happened? How was this epidemic allowed to spread so far before it was taken seriously? In answering these questions, Shilts weaves the... (more)
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  There Are No Children Here

  The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in The Other America

  by Alex Kotlowitz

  There Are No Children Here, the true story of brothers Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers, ages 11 and 9 at the start, brings home the horror of trying to make it in a violence-ridden public housing project. Their family includes a mother, a frequently absent father, an older brother and younger triplets. We witness the horrors of growing up in an ill-maintained housing project tyrannized by drug gangs and where murders... (more)
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  Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (Cultural Studies)

  by Marc Augé

  An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computer and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Auge calls 'non-space' results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Auge uses the concept of 'supermodernity' to describe the logic of these late-capitalist... (more)
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  The City in History

  Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

  by Lewis Mumford

  The city’s development from ancient times to the modern age. Winner of the National Book Award. “One of the major works of scholarship of the twentieth century” (Christian Science Monitor). Index; illustrations.
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  Green Metropolis

  Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability

  by David Owen

  A challenging, controversial and highly readable look at our lives, our world and our future. In this remarkable challenge to conventional thinking about the environment, David Owen argues that the greenest community in the United States is not Portland, Oregon, or Snowmass, Colorado, but New York, New York. Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, as wastelands of concrete and garbage and... (more)
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  A Pattern Language

  Towns, Buildings, Construction

  by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein

  "Brilliant....Here's how to design or redesign any space you're living or working in--from metropolis to room. Consider what you want to happen in the space, and then page through this book. Its radically conservative observations will spark, enhance, organize your best ideas, and a wondrous home, workplace, town will result"--San Francisco Chronicle. A handbook designed for the layman which aims to present a... (more)
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  Crabgrass Frontier

  The Suburbanization of the United States

  by Kenneth T. Jackson

  This first full-scale history of the development of the American suburb examines how "the good life" in America came to be equated with the a home of one's own surrounded by a grassy yard and located far from the urban workplace. Integrating social history with economic and architectural analysis, and taking into account such factors as the availability of cheap land, inexpensive building methods, and rapid... (more)
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  Image of the City

  by Kevin Lynch

  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... (more)
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  Black Feminist Thought

  Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment

  by Patricia Hill Collins

  In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She not only provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde, but she shows the importance of self-defined knowledge for group empowerment. In the tenth... (more)
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  City Life

  by Witold Rybczyński

  Tracing the development of American cities and city life from early colonial settlements to the familiar downtowns of today, a sweeping cultural history reveals how our urban spaces have been shaped by the land and the American lifestyle. Reprint. 25,000 first printing. NYT.
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  The Other Side of the River

  by Alex Kotlowitz

  Alex Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here was more than a bestseller; it was a national event. His beautifully narrated, heartbreaking nonfiction account of two black boys struggling to grow up in a Chicago public housing complex spent eight weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, was a made-for-television movie starring and produced by Oprah Winfrey, won many distinguished awards, and sparked a... (more)
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  City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920

  by Timothy J. Gilfoyle

  Winner of the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians and the New York State Historical Association Manuscript Prize Winner of the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians and the New York State Historical Association Manuscript Prize
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  When Work Disappears

  The World of the New Urban Poor

  by William J. Wilson

  Wilson, one of our foremost authorities on race and poverty, challenges decades of liberal and conservative pieties to look squarely at the devastating effects that joblessness has had on our urban ghettos. Marshaling a vast array of data and the personal stories of hundreds of men and women, Wilson persuasively argues that problems endemic to America's inner cities--from fatherless households to drugs and violent... (more)
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  Twenty Years at Hull-House

  by Jane Addams

  The true story of one of America's greatest philanthropists This is Jane Addams's graphic account of her famed settlement house in Chicago's West Side slums. Covering the years 1889 to 1909, a time when America was fired with fear of subversives and suspicion of foreigners, this book stands as the immortal testament of a woman who lived and worked among the immigrant settlers, the sweatshop toilers, the unwed... (more)
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  Infinite City

  A San Francisco Atlas

  by Rebecca Solnit

  What makes a place? Infinite City , Rebecca Solnit's brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, searches out the answer by examining the many layers of meaning in one place, the San Francisco Bay Area. Aided by artists, writers, cartographers, and twenty-two gorgeous color maps, each of which illuminates the city and its surroundings as experienced by different inhabitants, Solnit takes us on a tour that... (more)
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  Arlington Park

  by Rachel Cusk

  Arlington Park, a modern-day English suburb very much like its American counterparts, is a place devoted to the profitable ordinariness of life. Amidst its leafy avenues and comfortable houses, its residents live out the dubious accomplishments of civilization: material prosperity, personal freedom, and moral indifference. In Arlington Park, men work, women look after children, and people generally do what’s... (more)
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  The Lost Cities of Africa

  by Basil Davidson

  Combining archeological evidence and scholarly research, Davidson traces the exciting development of the rich kingdoms of the lost cities of Africa, fifteen hundred years before European ships first came to African shores.
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  Love for Sale

  Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900-1945

  by Elizabeth Alice Clement

  The intense urbanization and industrialization of America's largest city from the turn of the twentieth century to World War II was accompanied by profound shifts in sexual morality, sexual practices, and gender roles. Comparing prostitution and courtship with a new working-class practice of heterosexual barter called "treating," Elizabeth Clement examines changes in sexual morality and sexual and economic... (more)