Search results

The Routledge Companion to Smart Cities explores the question of what it means for a city to be ‘smart’, raises some of the tensions emerging in smart city developments and considers the implications for future ways of inhabiting and understanding the urban condition. The volume draws together a critical and cross-disciplinary overview of the emerging topic of smart cities and explores it from a range of theoretical and empirical viewpoints. This timely book brings together key thinkers and pro...

The term "community organizer" was deployed repeatedly against Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign as a way to paint him as an inexperienced politician unfit for the presidency. The implication was that the job of a community organizer wasn't a serious one, and that it certainly wasn't on the list of credentials needed for a presidential resume. In reality, community organizers have played key roles in the political lives of American cities for decades, perhaps never more so than...

Focusing on the social dissatisfaction with the modern American suburb, Langdon interviewed designers, developers, planners and residents across the USA to see how suburbs are being built. It examines how the typical suburban design of the past 50 years has exacerbated the stress of daily life.

Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary. Nowadays, the majority of people live in cities, and these cities constitute the heart of the global political economy. In a time of planetary urbanization, this contemporary and visionary book provides a critical assessment of the key areas of urban scholar...

The inspirational true story of one plucky young teacher, whose passion for her students transformed their lives-some for only seven days, others for a lifetime. Johanna Grussner arrived in New York City starry-eyed. She was a young Finnish jazz singer looking for the big time. But it was hard to find steady gigs. Propelled by pluck, determination, and a smidgen of desperation, she obtained a job teaching music at P.S. 86, a public school in the Bronx. At first, it was just to pay the bills. But...

In this book, a diverse group of scholars explore key themes in Milwaukee's history from settlement to the present. Contributors discuss the importance of socialism and labor in local politics; Milwaukee's ethnic diversity, including its unusually large and significant German American population; the function and origins of the city's residential architecture; and the role of religious and ethnic culture in forming the city's identity. Rich in detail, the essays also identify critical areas and...

The idea that Britain, the US and other western societies are witnessing the rise of an underclass of people at the bottom of the social heap, structurally and culturally distinct from traditional patterns of `decent' working-class life, has become increasingly popular in the 1990s. Anti-work, anti-social, and welfare dependent cultures are said to typify this new `dangerous class' and `dangerous youth' are taken as the prime subjects of underclass theories. Debates about the family and single-p...

The Autonomous Life? is an ethnography of the squatters' movement in Amsterdam written by an anthropologist who lived and worked in a squatters' community for 3.5 years. She resided as a squatter in 4 different houses, worked on 2 successful anti-gentrification campaigns, was evicted from 2 houses, and was jailed once. With this unique perspective, Kadir focuses on how people in this overtly anarchist movement constantly disavow while silently maintain hierarchy and authority. Specific squatter...

In the postwar years, an eruption of urbanization took place across Japan, from its historical central cities to the outer reaches of the archipelago. During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese literary and visual media took a deep interest in cities and their problems, and what this rapid change meant for the country. In Residual Futures, Franz Prichard offers a pathbreaking analysis of the works wrought from this intensive urbanization, mapping the ways in which Japanese filmmakers, writers, photogr...

Cities, like people, may be best known by the way they party. For nearly a century and a half. San Antonio has partied well. In this look at late-nineteenth-century festivals in San Antonio, Judith Berg Sobre brings an art historian's sensibility to accounts of the pageantry, parades, and festive events that typified a city welcoming settlers into a community that valued their individuality even while it taught them a new identity. Six historic festivals provide windows into the culture of this...

This text is part of the Character Sketches series, a fully illustrated historical guide to literary and artistic groups of the past. The book provides an introduction to London's bohemia in the area termed Fitzrovia.