Social Cities

Dickson D. Despommier proposes a visionary yet achievable plan for creating a new, self-sustaining urban landscape. He argues that we can find solutions through the concept of biomimicry: emulating successful strategies found in nature. A better city is possible if we heed the lessons that forests and trees teach about how to store carbon, grow food, collect rainwater, and convert sunlight into energy.

Tragedy unfolded on April 19, 1995, when a massive bomb exploded in America's Heartland, killing 168 people, including fifteen children. History says the Oklahoma City bombing was lone wolf terrorism. But haunting fresh evidence points instead to a neo-Nazi plot in which the FBI played a hidden role. The FBI launched the biggest manhunt in its history for two suspected bombers. Yet they never captured the other suspect, known only as John Doe 2, who rode next to McVeigh in the bomb truck. Soon, the FBI canceled the search, saying eyewitnesses who saw John Doe 2 were mistaken.

Sisters Sunday, Bo, Lee, and Lil are four sisters from a patchwork family. Bonded by their love of music, these sisters formed a musical babysitting band business Operation Sisterhood that just planned the best garden wedding party their Harlem community has seen. Imaginative Sunday impulsively announces her next big community project—staging an original musical—everybody’s counting on her, especially her sisters, Bo and the Twins, Lil and Lee. Then, disaster: Sunday has lost her creative mojo just when she most want to impress her new neighbor, TV star Talitha Thomas.

Since cities emerged 10,000 years ago, they have become one of the most impressive artifacts of humanity. But their evolution has been anything but linear - cities have gone through moments of radical change, turning points that redefine their very essence. In this book a renowned architect and urban planner who studies the intersection of cities and technology argues that we are in such a moment. The authors explain some of the forces behind urban change and offer new visions.

At a time when Google Maps can take you on a virtual tour of Yosemite's remotest trails and cell phones double as navigational systems, it's hard to imagine there's any uncharted ground left on the planet. In Unruly Places, Alastair Bonnett goes to some of the most unexpected, offbeat places in the world to reinspire our geographical imagination. Bonnett's remarkable tour includes moving villages, secret cities, no man's lands, and floating islands.

In 2002, the town of Galesburg, a slowly declining Rustbelt city of 33,000 in western Illinois, learned that it would soon lose its largest factory, a Maytag refrigerator plant that had anchored Galesburg's social and economic life for decades. Workers at the plant earned $15.14 an hour, had good insurance, and were assured a solid retirement. In 2004, the plant was relocated to Reynosa, Mexico, where workers sometimes spent 13-hour days assembling refrigerators for $1.10 an hour.

La mascota de Miguel, Coquí, siempre anda con el: mientras saluda a sus vecinos en San Juan, compra quesitos en la panadería y mientras escucha la historia de su abuelo cuando conoció al famoso pelotero Roberto Clemente. Un día Miguel se entera que el y sus padres se mudarán a los Estados Unidos, lo cual significa dejar atrás a sus amados abuelos, su hogar en Puerto Rico y también a Coquí. La vida en la ciudad de Nueva York es abrumadora, con lugares, comidas y personas desconocidas.

Test your knowledge of 197 capital cities around the world. This book will help you improve your knowledge of geography. With audio quizzes, this book challenges you to associate the capital cities with almost 200 countries around the world. It is grouped by continents, so it helps you to identify which continent every country is located in.

There may not be such a thing as a perfect city, but all great cities have moments of perfection - perfect streets or buildings, perfect places to raise a family or to relax with a coffee - and all of them strive for perfection when they undertake grand projects...Joe Berridge, one of the world's leading urban planners, takes us on an insider's tour of the world's largest and most diverse cities, from New York to London, Shanghai to Singapore, Toronto to Sydney, to examine what is working and not working, what is promising and what needs to be fixed in the contemporary megalopolis.

A delicious account of a murder most gallic - think CSI Paris meets Georges Simenon - whose lurid comibation of sex, brutality, forensics, and hypnotism riveted first a nation and then the world. Little Demon in the City of Light is the thrilling - and so wonderfully French - story of a gruesome 1889 murder of a lascivious court official at the hands of a ruthless con man and his pliant mistress and the international manhunt, sensational trial, and an inquiry into the limits of hypnotic power that ensued.

Lisa Belkin penetrates the prejudices, myths, and heated emotions stirred by the most recent trend in public housing as she re-creates a landmark case in riveting detail, showing how a proposal to build scattered-site public housing in middle-class neighborhoods nearly destroyed an entire city and forever changed the lives of many of its citizens.

A group of children go on a field trip for a guided tour of city hall, where they learn about the roles of the city council, the mayor, and other city departments.

In the summer of 2014 the world watched in horror as the black flag of ISIS swept all before it. Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, fell, ISIS proclaimed the caliphate and the horror mounted: from the mass murder, rape and enslavement of the Yazidis to the public beheading of journalists by British jihadis. For Macer Gifford it wasn't enough to ask why more wasn't being done; he knew he had to act.

Who deserves human rights? The answer to this question is the crux of all moral and political action in society, and defines our character as individuals and as nations. Aimee Murphy seeks to answer this vital question in this accessible and succinct handbook on the Consistent Life Ethic, a moral philosophy whose central principle is that each and every human being has inherent dignity from conception to natural death, and therefore deserves to live free from violence.

Uncover a world of confidence and belonging in just a single read—fall in love with "Ausome City," where each child discovers their inner strength, even if they feel different today. Do you often worry about your child struggling to find their place among peers? Does communicating emotions sometimes feel like you're navigating an uncharted sea? And have you tried multiple resources, yet they never seem to resonate deeply with your child? Imagine how wonderful it would be if your child could see themselves as the hero of their own story—a story that embraces their unique perspective and ...

The Agile City engages the fundamental question: what to do about it? Journalist and urban analyst James S. Russell argues that we'll more quickly slow global warming - and blunt its effects - by retrofitting cities, suburbs, and towns. The Agile City shows that change undertaken at the building and community level can reach carbon-reduction goals rapidly. Adapting buildings (39 percent of greenhouse-gas emission) and communities (slashing the 33 percent of transportation related emissions) offers numerous other benefits that tax gimmicks and massive alternative-energy investments can't match.

As human activity and environmental change come to be increasingly recognized as intertwined phenomena on a rapidly urbanizing planet, the field of urban ecology has risen to offer useful ways of thinking about coupled human and natural systems. On the forefront of this discipline is Marina Alberti, whose innovative work offers a conceptual framework for uncovering fundamental laws that govern the complexity and resilience of cities, which she sees as key to understanding and responding to planetary change and the evolution of Earth.

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.

Paved a Way tells the stories of five neighborhoods in Dallas and how they were shaped by racism and economic oppression. The communities of North Dallas, Deep Ellum, Little Mexico, Tenth Street, and Fair Park look nothing like what they did during their prime, and author Collin Yarbrough argues that their respective declines were intentional - that their foundations were chipped away over time.

Chicago: home to urban Indians and immigrants and working folks and the whole gamut of people getting by in a world that doesn't care whether they do so or not. Sacred City is an incomparable follow-up to Van Alst's award-winning debut collection, Sacred Smokes. Our young narrator now heads deeper into the heart of the city and himself, accompanied by ancestors and spirits who help him and the audience see that Chicago was, is, and always will be Indian Country.