Urban Sociology

Empire of Sin re-creates the remarkable story of New Orleans' 30-years war against itself, pitting the city's elite "better half" against its powerful and long-entrenched underworld of vice, perversity, and crime. This early-20th-century battle centers on one man: Tom Anderson, the undisputed czar of the city's Storyville vice district, who fights desperately to keep his empire intact as it faces onslaughts from all sides.

An unflinching look at the aspiring city-builders of our smart, mobile, connected future. We live in a world defined by urbanization and digital ubiquity, where mobile broadband connections outnumber fixed ones, machines dominate a new "internet of things," and more people live in cities than in the countryside.

Last Subway is the fascinating and dramatic story behind New York City's struggle to build a new subway line under Second Avenue and improve transit services all across the city. With his extraordinary access to powerful players and internal documents, Philip Mark Plotch reveals why the city's subway system, once the best in the world, is now too often unreliable, overcrowded, and uncomfortable. Last Subway offers valuable lessons in how governments can overcome political gridlock and enormous obstacles to build grand projects.

American cities are distinct from almost all others in the degree to which freeways and freeway travel dominate urban landscapes. In The Drive for Dollars, Brian D. Taylor, Eric A. Morris, and Jeffrey R. Brown tell the largely misunderstood story of how freeways became the centerpiece of US urban transportation systems, and the crucial, though usually overlooked, role of fiscal politics in bringing freeways about.

Once America's "arsenal of democracy," Detroit is now the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of America's racial and economic inequalities, Thomas Sugrue asks why Detroit and other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures of the 1960s.

After his wife’s death, retired cop Walter "Pops" Washington has made a home for his ex-felon son in his sprawling, rent-controlled, Riverside Drive apartment. Will a long-simmering feud with the NYPD cause him to lose his home and the family he’s built there?

Segregation by Design draws on more than 100 years of quantitative and qualitative data from thousands of American cities to explore how local governments generate race and class segregation. Starting in the early 20th century, cities have used their power of land use control to determine the location and availability of housing, amenities (such as parks), and negative land uses (such as garbage dumps). The result has been segregation - first within cities and more recently between them.

This new South End Press edition makes available the full text of this out-of-print classic - along with a new foreword by Manning Marable, interviews with participants in DRUM, and reflections on political developments over the past three decades by Georgakas and Surkin.

Join best-selling science writer James Trefil on a fascinating field trip into the modern city that will open your eyes to the hidden wonders of the man-made world around you. Trefil reveals some surprising truths about the forces that shape our world, as well as some unusual possibilities for the cities of tomorrow.

In the United States today, one in every 31 adults is under some form of penal control, including one in 11 African American men. How did the "land of the free" become the home of the world's largest prison system? Challenging the belief that America's prison problem originated with the Reagan administration's War on Drugs, Elizabeth Hinton traces the rise of mass incarceration to an ironic source: the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society at the height of the civil rights era.

Tras décadas de expansión descontrolada, más personas que nunca están volviendo a la ciudad. La vida urbana densa se ha prescrito como la panacea para la crisis medioambiental y de recursos de nuestro tiempo. ¿Pero es mejor o peor para nuestra felicidad? ¿Son el metro, las aceras y las torres de apartamentos una mejora respecto a la dependencia del coche en los suburbios?

Housing dominates headlines, yet few truly understand how affordable housing works—or why it’s failing. Bittersweet Lane is the first book to demystify America’s housing crisis from both a professional and deeply personal perspective. Spanning from Ireland to America, from the Bittersweet Lane Apartments to M.I.T., Bittersweet Lane also carries the stories and deep scars of intergenerational poverty while offering a bold vision for change.

Бандитский Петербург — это самая полная криминальная история Северной столицы с момента ее основания до настоящего времени. "...в каком-то смысле книга Бандитский Петербург для меня — это бесконечная литературно-исследовательская каторга, отбывая которую с каждым годом все труднее находить в себе силы продолжать работу... И все-таки, как мне кажется, тема "Бандитского Петербурга", будучи сейчас не столь "спекулятивно-актуальной", как это было в девяностые годы прошлого столетия, по-прежнему остается интересной... Истории многих героев не завершены, а значит — не дорассказаны. Так что книга все еще не закончена". Андрей Константинов.

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.

With a new afterword covering the two decades since its first publication, two of Washington, D.C.'s most respected journalists expose one of America's most tragic ironies: How the nation's capital, often a gleaming symbol of peace and hope, is the setting for vicious contradictions and devastating conflicts over race, class, and power. Jaffe and Sherwood have chillingly chronicled the descent of the District of Columbia.

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.

Wer wissen möchte, wie wir und vor allem unsere Kinder bald schon leben, welche Technologien sie und die Welt prägen werden, muss durch Shenzhen streifen. Die 12-Millionen-Metropole in Südchina gehört zu den innovativsten Städten der Welt. Eine Megacity, die quasi aus dem Nichts entstand, wo Nachhaltigkeit und moderne Lebensqualität selbstverständlich sind, aber eben auch Gesichtserkennung und der gläserne Mensch. Die Cloud in Shenzhen weiß alles. Die Shenzhener Techies stellen inzwischen das Silicon Valley in den Schatten, ihre Start-ups zählen zu den wertvollsten der Welt.

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.

Once America’s capitalist dream town, Detroit is our country’s greatest urban failure, having fallen the longest and the farthest. But the city’s worst crisis yet (and that’s saying something) has managed to do the unthinkable: turn the end of days into a laboratory for the future. Urban planners, land speculators, neopastoral agriculturalists, and utopian environmentalists―all have been drawn to Detroit’s baroquely decaying frontier. With an eye for both the darkly absurd and the radically new Detroit-area native Mark Binelli has chronicled this convergence.