Social Cities

A connection to nature is vital to our wellbeing. The sound of birds, the smell of tree oils, the effects of natural sunlight. Studies have shown that patients who can observe a natural scene through a hospital window recover faster, and lockdown proved that when most other aspects of life falls away, nature still feels like a necessity, not a luxury. But the majority of the world’s population lives in some form of urban environment, and by 2050, two thirds of humanity – nearly 7 billion people – are expected to live in towns and cities.

Beat Cop to Top Cop: A Tale of Three Cities documents Timoney's rise, from his days as a tough street cop in the South Bronx to his role as police chief of Miami. This fast-moving narrative by the man Esquire Magazine named "America's Top Cop" offers a blueprint for crime prevention through first-person accounts from the street, detailing how big-city chiefs and their teams can tame even the most unruly cities.

Disability critiques of architecture usually emphasize the need for modification and increased access, but The Architecture of Disability calls for a radical reorientation of this perspective by situating experiences of impairment as a new foundation for the built environment. With its provocative proposal for "the construction of disability," this book fundamentally reconsiders how we conceive of and experience disability in our world.

In this classic 1948 memoir, now in its fourth edition, Caroline Pratt recounts, in a wry authorial voice much closer to Will Rogers than John Dewey, how she founded what is now the dynamic City and Country School in New York City; invented the maple "unit blocks” that have become a staple in classrooms and children’s homes around the globe; and came to play an important role in reimagining preschool and primary-school education in ways that resound in the tumultuously creative age before us.

"Rescuing Hope: The Legacy of the Bowery Mission" is a comprehensive and factual account of the Bowery Mission, from its inception to its enduring impact on society today. The book explores the vision of the founder and the challenges faced in establishing the mission. It delves into the early opposition and controversies surrounding the mission's work, as well as its profound impact on the community. Readers will gain insights into the expansion of the mission's services, overcoming obstacles, and reaching out to the homeless population with shelter and food. The book also examines the ...

From Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former head of the Sierra Club Carl Pope comes a manifesto on how the benefits of taking action on climate change are concrete, immediate, and immense. They explore climate change solutions that will make the world healthier and more prosperous, aiming to begin a new type of conversation on the issue that will spur bolder action by cities, businesses, and citizens—and even, someday, by Washington.

Since his creation, Batman has been many things: a two-fisted detective; a planet-hopping gadabout; a campy pop-art sensation; a pointy-eared master spy; and a grim and gritty ninja of the urban night. For more than three-quarters of a century, he has cycled from a figure of darkness to one of lightness and back again; he's a bat-shaped Rorschach inkblot who takes on the various meanings our changing culture projects onto him.

Miami, Florida, is likely to be entirely underwater by the end of this century. Residents are already starting to see the effects of sea level rise today. From sunny day flooding caused by higher tides to a sewer system on the brink of total collapse, the city undeniably lives in a climate changed world. In Disposable City, Miami resident Mario Alejandro Ariza shows us not only what climate change looks like on the ground today, but also what Miami will look like 100 years from now, and how that future has been shaped by the city's racist past and present.

Steffens was the towering figure in journalism of the early 20th century. This is a series of articles he wrote uncovering the graft and corruption at the highest levels of municipal governments across the country: the "Boodlers" stealing money from public piggy banks through a wide variety of schemes and plans made in smoke-filled rooms; trading power for profit; selling rights and property that belonged to the public and putting the money in their own pockets. This is the birth of investigative journalism. It made a difference.

New York City in the Jazz Age was host to a pulsating artistic and social revolution. Uptown, an unprecedented explosion in Black music, literature, dance, and art sparked the Harlem Renaissance. While the history of this African-American awakening has been widely explored, one chapter remains untold: The story of a group of women collectively dubbed “Miss Anne.” Kaplan’s formidable work remaps the landscape of the 1920s, and alters our perception of this historical moment.

San Francisco, 1900. The Gilded Age. A fantastic time to be alive for lots of people...but not 13-year-old Lizzie Kennedy, stuck at Miss Barstow's snobby school for girls. Lizzie's secret passion is science, an unsuitable subject for finishing-school girls. Lizzie lives to go on house calls with her physician father. On those visits to his patients, she discovers a hidden dark side of the city - a side that's full of secrets, rats, and rumors of the plague.

An Other Kingdom takes us out of a culture of addictive consumption into a place where life is ours to create together. This way depends upon a neighborly covenant—an agreement that we together, will better raise our children, be healthy, be connected, be safe, and provide a livelihood. The authors invite you on a journey of departure from our consumer market culture. Discover an alternative set of beliefs that have the capacity to evoke a culture where poverty, violence, and shrinking well-being are not inevitable.

La crisis de vivienda existe y no podemos seguir ignorándola. Nuestras ciudades son cada vez más inhabitables: cada vez más caras, más distantes, más precarizadas y con menos servicios. Miles de personas están preocupadas por su imposibilidad de adquirir unavivienda en propiedad o, incluso, en arrendamiento. Sin embargo, esta problemática sigue siendo percibida como una preocupación individualizada y no como el problema estructural que realmente es.

On a cold March day in 1893, 26-year-old nurse Lillian Wald rushed through the poverty-stricken streets of New York’s Lower East Side to a squalid bedroom where a young mother lay dying -abandoned by her doctor because she could not pay his fee. The misery in the room and the walk to reach it inspired Wald to establish Henry Street Settlement, which would become one of the most influential social welfare organizations in American history.

In this audiobook, a young boy spends an overnight visit with his nana and is frightened to find that the city where she lives is filled with noise and crowds and scary things. But then Nana makes him a special cape to help him be brave, and soon the everyday sights, sounds, and smells of the city are not scary - but wonderful.

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.

The City of the Sun, published in Italian in 1602 as La città del sole, is a philosophical work by the Dominican philosopher Tommaso Campanella. It is an important utopian work, was inspired by Plato's Republic, and describes a theocratic society where goods, women, and children are held in common.

Modello is an inspirational true story from beginning to end of how Dr. Roger Mills and staff accomplished the "miracle" in the Modello and Homestead Gardens Housing Projects, applying the Three Principles/Health Realization approach based on an innovative spiritual psychology. Through extensive interviews with residents as well as Dr. Mills, his staff, and other professionals, a compelling and moving portrait is painted.

In this brilliant, gracefully written, and important new book, former Secretary of the Interior and Governor of Arizona Bruce Babbitt brings fresh thought to questions of how we can build a future we want to live in.

From 1632 until 1854, Japan’s rulers restricted contact with foreign countries, a near isolation that fostered a remarkable and unique culture that endures to this day. In hypnotic prose and sensual detail, Anna Sherman describes searching for the great bells by which the inhabitants of Edo, later called Tokyo, kept the hours in the shoguns’ city.