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Author: David A. Gamson Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022663468X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 341
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.
Author: David A. Gamson Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022663468X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 341
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.
Author: David A. Gamson Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022663454X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 341
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.
Author: David A. Karp Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 458
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.
Author: Timothy Beatley Publisher: Island Press ISBN: 164283047X Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 271
Book Description
How does a bird experience a city? A backyard? A park? As the world has become more urban, noisier from increased traffic, and brighter from streetlights and office buildings, it has also become more dangerous for countless species of birds. Warblers become disoriented by nighttime lights and collide with buildings. Ground-feeding sparrows fall prey to feral cats. Hawks and other birds-of-prey are sickened by rat poison. These name just a few of the myriad hazards. How do our cities need to change in order to reduce the threats, often created unintentionally, that have resulted in nearly three billion birds lost in North America alone since the 1970s? In The Bird-Friendly City, Timothy Beatley, a longtime advocate for intertwining the built and natural environments, takes readers on a global tour of cities that are reinventing the status quo with birds in mind. Efforts span a fascinating breadth of approaches: public education, urban planning and design, habitat restoration, architecture, art, civil disobedience, and more. Beatley shares empowering examples, including: advocates for “catios,” enclosed outdoor spaces that allow cats to enjoy backyards without being able to catch birds; a public relations campaign for vultures; and innovations in building design that balance aesthetics with preventing bird strikes. Through these changes and the others Beatley describes, it is possible to make our urban environments more welcoming to many bird species. Readers will come away motivated to implement and advocate for bird-friendly changes, with inspiring examples to draw from. Whether birds are migrating and need a temporary shelter or are taking up permanent residence in a backyard, when the environment is safer for birds, humans are happier as well.
Author: Robert A. Beauregard Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022653538X Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 230
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.
Author: Robert J. Sampson Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022683400X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 573
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"--
Author: Borut Juvanec Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443892998 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 247
Book Description
How do we value historic urban landscape in order to intervene within it as designers? This is the central question posed in this volume, and is tackled by its 16 essays which investigate different facets of value as bases of building and design practices on a range of spatial scales and brought about by a variety of historical circumstances. While the modernist metanarrative of universalism propagated functionalism and, through it, biological and psychological motives of design activity, contemporary building practices are based on more complex and diverse patterns of values that range from cultural to market-driven. Researched, reconstructed and critically assessed, the different case studies brought together here reveal the many possible shades of the ‘importance of place’ with which architects, urban planners and city officials work today in the Southern European context. Marked in recent decades by social and political transition and economic hardship, the reality of this region’s cities caused repeated revisions of value-systems in all spheres of public life, making it, thus, a particularly intriguing context to observe in these terms. In this sense, these essays will be of interest to university scholars in architecture, art history, urbanism and planning, in addition to practicing designers and public officials who encounter problems of value-definitions in their everyday working tasks related to the shaping and management of contemporary urban space.
Author: Alain Bertaud Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262038765 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 433
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.
Author: Clarence Nathan Stone Publisher: ISBN: Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 324
Book Description
In the past twenty years the study of urban politics has shifted from a predominant concern with political culture and ethos to a preoccupation with political economy, particularly that of urban development. Urban scholars have come to recognize that cities are shaped by forces beyond their boundaries. From that focus have emerged the views that cities are clearly engaged in economic competition; that market processes are shaped by national policy decisions, sometimes intentionally and sometimes inadvertently; and that the costs and benefits of economic growth are unevenly distributed. But what else needs to be said about the policies and politics of urban development? To supplement prevailing theories, The Politics of Urban Development argues that the role of local actors in making development decisions merits closer study. Whatever the structural constraints, politics still matters. Collectively the essays provide ample evidence that local government officials and other community actors do not simply follow the imperatives that derive from the national political economy; they are able to assert a significant degree of influence over the shared destiny of an urban population. The impact of the collection is to heighten awareness of local political practices and of how and why they make a difference.