Urban Sociology

Told with equal parts raw honesty and unbridled compassion, All Day recounts a year in Liza Jessie Peterson's classroom at Island Academy, the high school for inmates detained at New York City's Rikers Island. A poet and an actress who had done occasional workshops at the correctional facility, Peterson was ill prepared for a full-time stint teaching in the GED program for the incarcerated youths.

On a 90-degree day in Los Angeles, bus riders across the city line up behind the shadows cast by street signs and telephone poles, looking for a little relief from the sun’s glaring heat. Every summer such scenes play out in cities across the United States, and as Sam Bloch argues, we ignore the benefits of shade at our own peril. Heatwaves are now the country’s deadliest natural disasters with victims concentrated in poorer, less shady areas. Public health, mental health, and crime statistics are worse in neighborhoods without it. For some, finding shade is a matter of life and death.

Education, employment, and home ownership have long been considered stepping stones to the middle class. But in Abandoned Families, social policy expert Kristin Seefeldt shows how many working families have access only to a separate but unequal set of poor-quality jobs, low-performing schools, and declining housing markets, which offer few chances for upward mobility. Through in-depth interviews over a six-year period with women in Detroit, Seefeldt charts the increasing social isolation of many low-income workers.

In American Indians and the American Dream, Kasey R. Keeler examines the long history of urbanization and suburbanization of Indian communities in Minnesota.

The crisscrossing stories of Mark, a white devout Christian who sells his suburban home to move to Baltimore’s inner city, and Nicole, a Black mother determined to leave West Baltimore for the suburbs, chronicle how the region became so deeply segregated and why these fault lines persist today.

For fifty years “Detroit” has been shorthand for all that's wrong with urban America: crime, corruption, decay, racial tension, struggling businesses, failing schools, a declining tax base, and more. Since 1950 Detroit has lost two-thirds of its population, falling from fifth place in the U.S. (just behind Los Angeles) to twenty-fourth (just behind Nashville). Between 2000 and 2017 alone, its population fell 28%, a steeper drop than any other major American city.

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.

Cities and the Creative Class gathers in one place for the first time the research leading up to Richard Florida's theory on how the growth of the creative economy shapes the development of cities and regions. In a new introduction, Florida updates this theory and responds to the critics of his 2002 best seller, The Rise of the Creative Class.

In Moving Up, Moving Out, Will Cooley discusses the damage racism and discrimination have exacted on black Chicagoans in the 20th century, while accentuating the resilience of upwardly mobile African Americans. Cooley examines how class differences created fissures in the black community and produced quandaries for black Chicagoans interested in racial welfare. While black Chicagoans engaged in collective struggles, they also used individualistic means to secure the American Dream.

We have released the genie from the bottle: climate change is coming, and there's no stopping it. The question, according to Matthew Kahn, is not how were going to avoid a hotter future but how were going to adapt to it. In Climatopolis, Kahn, one of the worlds foremost experts on the economics of the environment, argues that cities and regions will adapt to rising temperatures over time, slowly transforming our everyday lives.

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.

This is the story of how a crude French settlement along the Detroit River in 1701 became the birthplace of the automotive industry in 1900.

His name was Antonio, but they would call him Nem. From the infamous favela of Rocinha in Rio, he was a hardworking young father forced to make a decision that would turn his world upside down. Nemesis is the story of an ordinary man who became the king of the largest slum in Rio, the head of a drug cartel and perhaps Brazil’s most wanted criminal. A man who tried to bring welfare and justice to a playground of gang culture and destitution while everyone around him drew guns and partied.

The promise of the so-called smart city has been at the forefront of urban planning and development since the early 2010s, and the tech industry that supplies smart city software and hardware is now worth hundreds of billions a year. But the ideas and approaches underpinning smart city tech raise tough and important questions about the future of urban communities, surveillance, automation, and public participation. The smart city era, moreover, belongs firmly in a longer historical narrative about cities.

"La idea de salir a recorrer -y a contar- las grandes ciudades sudacas se me ocurrió cuando pensé que quería tratar de entender qué es hoy América Latina. Hace mucho que no lo intentamos y, en general, solemos conservar esa imagen rural, ecololó de una región que es, ahora mismo, la más urbana del mundo. Cuatro de cada cinco latinoamericanos viven en ciudades, pero no son ciudades como las que uno imagina cuando piensa en Barcelona o en París. Para saber cómo son -cómo es Latinoamérica- decidí volver a hacer eso que siempre me ha gustado hacer: ir, mirar, escuchar, pensar, contarlo."— Martín Caparrós

Burned-out after years of doing development work around the world, William Powers spent a season in a 12-foot-by-12-foot cabin off the grid in North Carolina, as recounted in his award-winning memoir Twelve by Twelve. Could he live a similarly minimalist life in the heart of New York City? To find out, Powers and his wife jettisoned 80 percent of their stuff, left their 2,000-square-foot Queens townhouse, and moved into a 350-square-foot "micro-apartment" in Greenwich Village.

Exploring the power of naming to shape experience and our sense of place, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro traces the ways in which native Lenape, Dutch settlers, British invaders, and successive waves of immigrants have left their marks on New York City’s map. He excavates the roots of many names, from Brooklyn to Harlem, that have gained iconic meaning worldwide. He interviews the last living speakers of Lenape, visits the harbor’s forgotten islands, lingers on street corners named for ballplayers and saints, and meets linguists who study the estimated 800 languages now spoken in New York.

In The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn, Stuart M. Blumin and Glenn C. Altschuler tell the story of 19th-century Brooklyn's domination by upper- and middle-class Protestants with roots in Puritan New England. This lively history describes the unraveling of the control they wielded as more ethnically diverse groups moved into the "City of Churches" during the 20th century.

Chicago: Metropolis of the Mid-Continent provides a comprehensive portrayal of the growth and development of Chicago from the mudhole of the prairie to today's world-class city. This completely revised fourth edition skillfully weaves together the geography, history, economy, and culture of the city and its suburbs with a special emphasis on the role of the many ethnic and racial groups that comprise the "real Chicago" of its neighborhoods.

In The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down, Howard Mansfield returns with thoughtful linked narratives examining a crucial and overlooked element of American identity: property.