The City At Its Limits

Download or read book The City at Its Limits written by Daniella Gandolfo and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1996, against the backdrop of Alberto Fujimori’s increasingly corrupt national politics, an older woman in Lima, Peru—part of a group of women street sweepers protesting the privatization of the city’s cleaning services—stripped to the waist in full view of the crowd that surrounded her. Lima had just launched a campaign to revitalize its historic districts, and this shockingly transgressive act was just one of a series of events that challenged the norms of order, cleanliness, and beauty that the renewal effort promoted. The City at Its Limits employs a novel and fluid interweaving of essays and field diary entries as Daniella Gandolfo analyzes the ramifications of this act within the city’s conflicted history and across its class divisions. She builds on the work of Georges Bataille to explore the relation between taboo and transgression, while Peruvian novelist and anthropologist José María Arguedas’s writings inspire her to reflect on her return to her native city in movingly intimate detail. With its multiple perspectives—personal, sociological, historical, and theoretical—The City at Its Limits is a pioneering work on the cutting edge of ethnography.

Download or read book City Limits written by Paul E. Peterson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This award-winning book “skillfully blends economic and political analysis” to assess the challenges of urban governments (Emmett H. Buell, Jr., American Political Science Review). Winner of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the best book published in the United States on government, politics, or international affairs Many simply presume that a city’s politics are like a nation’s politics, just on a smaller scale. But the nature of the city is different in many respects—it can’t issue currency, or choose who crosses its borders, make war or make peace. Because of these and other limits, one must view cities in their larger socioeconomic and political contexts. Its place in the nation fundamentally affects the policies a city makes. Rather than focusing exclusively on power structures or competition among diverse groups or urban elites, this book assesses the strengths and shortcomings of how we have previously thought about city politics—and shines new light on how agendas are set, decisions are made, resources are allocated, and power is exercised within cities, as they exist within a federal framework. “Professor Peterson's analysis is imaginatively conceived and skillfully carried through. [City Limits] will lastingly alter our understanding of urban affairs in America.”—from the citation by the selection committee for the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award

Download or read book The Limits of the City written by Murray Bookchin and published by Montréal : Black Rose Books. This book was released on 1986 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Making the Unequal Metropolis written by Ansley T. Erickson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-04 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: List of Oral History and Interview Participants -- Notes -- Index

Download or read book City Limits written by Terry Teachout and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2002-09-02 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wall Street Journal drama critic and Missouri native remembers growing up in small-town America, paying tribute to the memories he developed and people he met while revealing the reasons he finally left for New York City. In this collection of anecdotes and memories, Terry Teachout sings of the pride of regional America. City Limits is the story of Teachout’s as he grew up in small town of Silkeston, Missouri, filled with countless adventures and embarrassments. Beginning with his life as a young boy and progressing to eventual his decision to leave the only place he knew for New York City, Teachout gives readers a glance into the mind of small-town boy that grew into a big-city man.

Download or read book L.A. City Limits written by Josh Sides and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-01-27 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1964 an Urban League survey ranked Los Angeles as the most desirable city for African Americans to live in. In 1965 the city burst into flames during one of the worst race riots in the nation's history. How the city came to such a pass—embodying both the best and worst of what urban America offered black migrants from the South—is the story told for the first time in this history of modern black Los Angeles. A clear-eyed and compelling look at black struggles for equality in L.A.'s neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces from the Great Depression to our day, L.A. City Limits critically refocuses the ongoing debate about the origins of America's racial and urban crisis. Challenging previous analysts' near-exclusive focus on northern "rust-belt" cities devastated by de-industrialization, Josh Sides asserts that the cities to which black southerners migrated profoundly affected how they fared. He shows how L.A.'s diverse racial composition, dispersive geography, and dynamic postwar economy often created opportunities—and limits—quite different from those encountered by blacks in the urban North.

Download or read book The Smart Enough City written by Ben Green and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why technology is not an end in itself, and how cities can be “smart enough,” using technology to promote democracy and equity. Smart cities, where technology is used to solve every problem, are hailed as futuristic urban utopias. We are promised that apps, algorithms, and artificial intelligence will relieve congestion, restore democracy, prevent crime, and improve public services. In The Smart Enough City, Ben Green warns against seeing the city only through the lens of technology; taking an exclusively technical view of urban life will lead to cities that appear smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequality. He proposes instead that cities strive to be “smart enough”: to embrace technology as a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other forms of social change—but not to value technology as an end in itself. In a technology-centric smart city, self-driving cars have the run of downtown and force out pedestrians, civic engagement is limited to requesting services through an app, police use algorithms to justify and perpetuate racist practices, and governments and private companies surveil public space to control behavior. Green describes smart city efforts gone wrong but also smart enough alternatives, attainable with the help of technology but not reducible to technology: a livable city, a democratic city, a just city, a responsible city, and an innovative city. By recognizing the complexity of urban life rather than merely seeing the city as something to optimize, these Smart Enough Cities successfully incorporate technology into a holistic vision of justice and equity.