Urban City

“The virus exposed how we live and work. It also revealed how we play, and what we lose when we have to stop.” For every kid who makes it to the NBA, thousands more seek out the pleasure and camaraderie of pick-up basketball in their local community centre or neighbourhood park. It’s a story that plays out in sport after sport–team and individual, youth and adult, men's and women's.

Sinclair McKay's portrait of Berlin from 1919 forward explores the city's broad human history, from the end of the Great War to the Blockade, rise of the Wall, and beyond. Sinclair McKay's Berlin begins by taking listeners back to 1919, when the city emerged from the shadows of the Great War to become an extraordinary by-word for modernity—in art, cinema, architecture, industry, science, and politics. He traces the city’s history through the rise of Hitler and the Battle for Berlin, which ended in the final conquest of the city in 1945.

The Moonstomper series is a two-fisted, suited-and-booted tale that leads the listener through Chicago’s dive bars, darkalleys and smokey house-parties to deliver a curb-stomped world filled with Punks, Skins, Goths, Skaters and Metalheads. In Book 4: Moves in Mud City, things are changing; Mike works on his dream car with Sammy, whose ongoing illicit relationship with Tiffany heats up as her plan to take Hollywood’s music scene by storm takes shape. Luna has her first gallery showing and applies for a job with the famous fashion photographer, Amy Delwich.

After serving a 10-year bid in prison, Taye "City" Savage was finally freed. However, once he was released, there was no time to chill and enjoy the riches that his brothers had acquired at his left and right hand at the king’s throne of the Savage empire. No sooner than City was released, complete mayhem ensued. His brother, Shon, and his greed causes the Savage empire to be in debt with the Columbian cartel of over a million dollars.

To bring your dream of being an urban homesteader to reality, you need to start today! The good news is that you can start practicing urban homesteading within the city. Yes, you may not have enough garden space to grow corn and wheat. However, you can still harvest an incredible amount of many crops using a collection of containers and setting them on your yard, balcony, or local community garden.

Warriors Kaleb and Aya will stop at nothing to destroy their competition. But when Kaleb finds his fate entwined with that of Mallory, a seventeen-year-old human girl, he can't seem to separate the vicious Carnival contest he's entered from his sudden devotion to her. He and Aya may be prizefighters from the otherworldly Untamed City, but his strange, obsessive connection makes staying away from the witch-ruled human world, and Mallory, harder every day.

Over the past 10 years, urban planners, technology companies, and governments have promoted smart cities with a somewhat utopian vision of urban life made knowable and manageable through data collection and analysis. Emerging smart cities have become both crucibles and showrooms for the practical application of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and the integration of big data into everyday life. Are smart cities optimized, sustainable, digitally networked solutions to urban problems? Or are they neoliberal, corporate-controlled, undemocratic non-places?

Here is the inspiring story of how Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, alongside a team of researchers, parents, friends, and community leaders, discovered that the children of Flint, Michigan, were being exposed to lead in their tap water - and then battled her own government and a brutal backlash to expose that truth to the world. Paced like a scientific thriller, What the Eyes Don’t See reveals how misguided austerity policies, broken democracy, and callous bureaucratic indifference placed an entire city at risk.

Drew Philp, an idealistic college student from a working-class Michigan family, withdraws from the comforts of life on a university campus in search of a place to live where he can make a difference. He sets his sights on Detroit, the failed metropolis of abandoned buildings, widespread poverty, and rampant crime - a complicated source of national fascination, often stereotyped and little understood. Arriving with no job, no friends, and no money, Philp is naïvely determined to fix the huge, broken city with his own hands and on his own terms.

In Farm the City, Michael Ableman, the “Spartacus of Sustainable Food Activism”, offers a guide to setting up and running a successful urban farm, derived from the success of Sole Food Street Farms, one of the largest urban agriculture enterprises in North America. Sole Food Street Farms spans four acres of land in Vancouver, produces 25 tons of food annually, provides meaningful work for dozens of disadvantaged people, and has improved the surrounding community in countless ways.

The novel is set in Los Angeles and follows a tenacious inner-city teen who is eventually a victim of many of the social evils that plague children in many low-income neighborhoods. In his once-happy family, he experienced love and grief, as well as violence, betrayal, and separation. His father's death, through a series of terrible events, becomes his breaking point, forcing him into homelessness and dangerous street life.

Detroit artist Meagan Kelly has had a strong sixth sense all her life, but that doesn’t mean the gorgeous stranger’s crazy story—that she’s a half-elf, half human heiress—is true. But Meagan can’t deny the evidence of her own eyes—he’s Fae. A tall, blond, handsome, pointy-eared elf—and a man she just can’t get enough of.

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 City.

Less than a year ago, Fianna Meadows was a pampered noble in the Faerie court. Then she was exiled, turned mortal and forced to work for a living—in a werewolf bar in Detroit, no less! Still, Fianna has to admit her new life isn't so bad…particularly when it comes to Greg Novak, the bar's sexy owner.

Award-winning journalist Alexis Madrigal sculpts an intricate tableau of the city of Oakland that is at once a groundbreaking big-idea book, a deeply researched work of social and political history, and an intimate portrait of an essential American city that has been at the crossroads of the defining themes of the twenty-first century. Oakland’s stories encompass everything from Silicon Valley’s prominence and the ramifications of a compulsively digital future to the underestimated costs of technological innovation on local communities.

In the sunny city of Singapore, the government takes care of everything—even the weird stuff. Benjamin Toh is a middle manager in the Department for Engagement of Unusual Stakeholders (DEUS), and his job is straightforward: keep the supernatural inhabitants of Singapore happy and keep them out of sight. That is, don’t bother the good, normal citizens, and certainly don’t bother the bosses. Sure, he's overworked and understaffed, but usually, people (and senior management) don’t see what they don’t want to see.

Abigail, a wealthy homeowner, decides to throw a lavish birthday in a hillside mansion to raise money for the city’s newest affordable housing project—and prove to her family that she’s made something worthwhile of her life. Sunny, a construction worker who sleeps in a van along the bay’s shore, is in the running for an apartment—but only if enough funds are raised at the party.

Part three of Edward Lee’s notorious, internationally published City Infernal Saga is here. Lee dares you to take another tour through the nightmarish City of the Abyss, and to walk with him though a house of horror, a house of graves...a house infernal. A city, built with blood and bones...Three things are about to join a crypt in Hell with a house on Earth...Nuns molested and drained of blood. A virginal student seduced by the perverse and taunted by things worse than ghosts. And six Angels, imprisoned in Hell and made pregnant by God knows what...

Hasidic Williamsburg is famous as one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy communities. Less known is how the community survived in one of New York City's toughest neighborhoods during an era of steep decline, only to later oppose and also participate in the unprecedented gentrification of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper unravel the fascinating history of how a community of determined Holocaust survivors encountered, shaped, and sometimes fiercely resisted the urban processes that transformed their gritty neighborhood.

It’s not every day that a whistleblower shows up and drops a satchel full of damning documents in my lap. Photographs, audits, and reports, all showing willful wrongdoing by a major magical manufacturer; everything a journalist could ever want for a front page story. Then the whistleblower wound up dead, and my easy work week was shattered. Despite official reports, I knew he didn’t die in a workplace safety accident. What was less obvious, at least until I started digging, was how much fallout his death would leave behind.