Urban Sociology

The buildings designed in our lifetimes encapsulate the dreams and aspirations of our culture, while also revealing the sobering realities. Whether modest or monumental, they offer a living history of Britain, symbols of the forces that have shaped our modern landscape and icons in their own right. Iconicon is an enthralling journey around the Britain we have created since 1980: the horrors and delights, the triumphs and failures.

No es el mercado. Es un juego amañado. Vivir en nuestras ciudades es como jugar una partida amañada de Monopoly: unos pocos acumulan propiedades mientras la mayoría lucha por no quedarse fuera. ¿El resultado? Una sociedad cada vez más desigual, donde heredar o no puede definir tu destino. En este ensayo breve, ágil y respaldado por años de investigación, Jaime Palomera desmonta uno a uno los mitos que rodean al mercado de la vivienda.

Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (1842-1921) was a Russian activist, writer, revolutionary, scientist, economist, sociologist, historian, essayist, researcher, political scientist and philosopher who advocated anarcho-communism. Kropotkin was a proponent of a decentralised society based on voluntary associations of self-governing communities and worker-run enterprises.

In recent years the young, educated, and affluent have surged back into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. And yet all is not well, Richard Florida argues in The New Urban Crisis. Florida demonstrates how the same forces that power the growth of the world's superstar cities also generate their vexing challenges: gentrification, unaffordability, segregation, and inequality.

Cities are birthplaces of civilization; centers of culture, trade, and progress; cauldrons of opportunity - and the home of 80 percent of the world's population by 2050. As the 21st century progresses, metropolitan areas will bear the brunt of global megatrends such as climate change, natural resource depletion, population growth, income inequality, mass migrations, and education and health disparities, among many others.

Often overshadowed by San Francisco, its larger and more glamorous twin, Oakland has a fascinating history of its own. From serving as a major transportation hub to forging a dynamic manufacturing sector, by the mid-twentieth century Oakland had become the urban center of the East Bay. Hella Town focuses on how political deals, economic schemes, and technological innovations fueled this emergence but also seeded the city's postwar struggles.

El autor retoma el relato de una vida de desamparo y violencia la noche en que a los dieciséis años, herido de varios balazos, entra a un instituto de menores. Con una prosa madura -cruda y directa-, González nos lleva a un mundo que conoce como pocos. Y como pocos, se aleja de todo cliché. La caída es insoportable. Arden las heridas de bala, desespera la soledad, se subleva la sangre que reclama cocaína, poxirrán y pastillas. ¿Y ahora? Tras las rejas, las voces de otros pibes quieren captarlo para uno de los dos bandos enemigos que manejan el instituto de menores.

City of Hope, City of Rage gives a fascinating account of three turbulent and transformative decades in the history of Miami. Marked by mass immigration, racially motivated uprisings, economic inequity, rising crime, and social change, Miami's history from 1968 to 1994 saw the city evolve rapidly from a predominantly white city and vacation spot into a global, Hispanic-majority metropolis with an international tourist base. And yet Miami remains highly segregated today.

In the late 1960s and 1970s Carlo Rotella grew up in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood—a place of neat bungalow blocks and desolate commercial strips, and sharp, sometimes painful social contrasts. In the decades since, the hollowing out of the middle class has left residents confronting—or avoiding—each other across an expanding gap that makes it ever harder for them to recognize each other as neighbors. Rotella tells the stories that reveal how that happened.

Sembrano ormai lontani i tempi della Cool Britannia, quegli anni "ruggenti" a cavallo tra il XX e il XXI secolo in cui la stella di Londra brillava più che mai, rappresentando nell'immaginario collettivo un faro a cui guardare per capire dove stesse andando il mondo. Dalla musica delle Spice Girls all'arte di Damien Hirst, dal fenomeno David Beckham alla moda di Alexander McQueen e Vivienne Westwood fino al cinema di Danny Boyle, c'è stata un'epoca in cui la Gran Bretagna era il centro nevralgico di tendenze e rivoluzioni, all'avanguardia in tutti i campi.

Conflicts about space and access to resources have shaped queer histories from at least 1965 to the present. As spaces associated with middle-class homosexuality enter mainstream urbanity in the United States, cultural assimilation increasingly erases insurgent aspects of these social movements. This gentrification itself leads to queer displacement.

Рустам Рахматуллин - писатель-эссеист, краевед, многие годы изучающий историю Москвы, - по-новому осмысляет москвоведческие знания. Автор прибегает к неожиданным сопоставлениям и умозаключениям, ведет читателя одновременно по видимой и невидимой столице. Сравнивая ее с Римом, Иерусалимом, Константинополем, а также с Петербургом и другими русскими городами, он видит Москву как чудо проявления Высшего замысла, воплощаемого на протяжении многих веков в событиях истории, в художественных памятниках, в городской топографии, в символическом пространстве городских монастырей и бывших загородных усадеб.

Nation’s Metropolis describes how the national capital region functions as a metropolitan political economy. Its authors distinguish aspects of the Washington region that reflect its characteristics as a national capital from those common to most other metropolitan regions and to other capitals. To do so, they employ an interdisciplinary approach that draws from economics, political science, sociology, geography, and history.

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to How the Other Half Lives and learn about the conditions of abject poverty that the residents of the slums of New York at the end of the 19th century had to endure.

Bari non è una città qualsiasi del Sud. Tra i grandi capoluoghi meridionali, è il solo a non aver mai avuto un univoco centro di potere. È stata spesso divisa da istituzioni e forze sociali difformi e contrastanti: lo Stato e la Chiesa, la Magistratura e la Mafia, i fascisti e i comunisti, i ricchi e i poveri. Una città di antinomie e di opposizioni, che si è costruita grazie all'apporto faticoso di tribù di non baresi, gente proveniente da fuori che l'ha arricchita di fame e di lavoro.

This is the story of New York City, told through the prism of one block, bordered by 23rd Street to the south, 24th Street to the north, Fifth Avenue and Broadway to the east and Sixth Avenue to the west. It’s a story of forest and cement, bird cries and taxi horns, theatres and factories, gambling dens and gourmet foods. It’s also the story of high life and low life, immigrants and tourists, farmers and aristocrats, crooked cops and moral reformers, toy stores and social climbers

From tenements, to alleyways, 20th-century American cities created spaces where pests flourished and people struggled for healthy living conditions. In Pests in the City, Biehler argues that urban ecologies that supported pests were shaped not only by the physical features of cities, but also by social inequalities, housing policies, and ideas about domestic space. This story reveals how pests thrived on lax code enforcement; the marginalization of the poor, immigrants, and people of color; and at the intersection of public health, politics, and environmental justice.

This Must Be the Place introduces and examines music's relationship to cities. Not the influence cities have on music, but the powerful impact music can have on how cities are developed, built, managed, and governed.

Unsettling Choice traces the contestations that surfaced when, in the wake of the 2007-2009 Great Recession, public schools navigated austerity by expanding choice-based programs. Ujju Aggarwal argues that this strategy mobilized mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side, solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private.

В Питер стекались те, у кого с удачей была напряженка. Им казалось, что приехать сюда стоило только ради того, чтобы тебе фартило всю оставшуюся жизнь. Они еще не знали, что совсем скоро Питер проникнет в их дом, в их постель, он будет все время рядом; куда бы они ни уезжали от этого города, он будет сидеть у них под кожей, как у героев этой истории, где отношения на завтрак, обед и ужин не только со вкусом белых ночей, но и с привкусом серых будней.