Urban communities / city life Books
The University of Chicago Press Sexual Politics Sexual Communities
Book SynopsisIncluding documentation of the oppression of homosexuals and biographical sketches of the lesbian and gay heroes who helped the late-20th-century gay culture to emerge, this text aims to provide a definitive analysis of the homophile movement in the USA from 1940 to 1970.
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press Shanghai Nightscapes A Nocturnal Biography of a
Book SynopsisDrawing on over years of fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, the authors spotlight a largely hidden world of nighttime pleasures - the dancing, drinking, and socializing going on in dance clubs and bars that have flourished in Shanghai over the last century.
£76.00
University of Chicago Press Shanghai Nightscapes A Nocturnal Biography of a
Book SynopsisDrawing on over years of fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, the authors spotlight a largely hidden world of nighttime pleasures - the dancing, drinking, and socializing going on in dance clubs and bars that have flourished in Shanghai over the last century.
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press In the Watches of the Night
Book SynopsisOver the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the technologies began to light up streets, sidewalks, buildings, and public spaces. This book depicts the changing experience of the urban night over this period, visiting a host of actors - scavengers, newsboys, and mashers alike - in the nocturnal city.
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press Managing to Make It Urban Families Adolescent
Book SynopsisBased on over 500 interviews/case studies of families in inner-city Philadelphia, this text reveals how parents managed different levels of resources and dangers in low-income neighbourhoods and how this management, rather than community involvement, contributed to the success of their children.
£30.00
The University of Chicago Press Teenage Wasteland Suburbias Dead End Kids
Book SynopsisThis volume provides portraits of rock and roll kids and analyses of their interests in heavy metal music and Satanism. It aims to draw new conclusions and to present solid reasons to admire the resilience of suburbia's dead-end kids.
£23.00
The University of Chicago Press The City at Its Limits
Book SynopsisIn 1996, 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. This title analyzes the ramifications of this act within the city's conflicted history and across its class divisions.Trade Review"This is a brilliant, beautifully and powerfully written book and a much-needed intervention into academic thought about the senses, affect, intensity, place, the city, and politics - I found it entirely convincing." - Kathleen Stewart, University of Texas at Austin"
£27.00
The University of Chicago Press The Urbanization of Opera Music Theater in Paris
Book SynopsisAnselm Gerhard argues in this text that questions such as "why do so many operas end in suicide, murder, and death?" can only be answered by looking at life in the rapidly urbanized mid-19th-century Paris, which introduced new social forces, and also new modes of perception and expectations of art.Table of ContentsPreface to the English-Language Edition Acknowledgments Chronology Introduction Ch. 1: Realities of a Metropolis Ch. 2: Victor-Joseph Etienne de Jouy, a Hermit in the City Ch. 3: Rossini and the Revolution Ch. 4: Eugene Scribe, an Apolitical Man of Letters Ch. 5: Meyerbeer and the Happy Medium Ch. 6: Victor Hugo, the Illustrious Poet as Librettist Ch. 7: Meyerbeer and Reaction Ch. 8: The Composer as Librettist Ch. 9: Verdi and an Institutional Crisis Ch. 10: The International View Ch. 11: Verdi and Interior Space Bibliography Index of Titles of Operas and Plays Index of Names
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press The Urbanization of Opera Music Theater in Paris
Book SynopsisGerhard explores the origins of grand opera, arguing that its aesthetic innovations reflected not bourgeois tastes, but changes in daily life and psychological outlook produced by the rapid urbanization of Paris. The text explores eight operas composed by Verdi and Rossini, for example.
£34.20
The University of Chicago Press Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era
Book SynopsisFor decades, North American cities racked by deindustrialization and population loss have followed one primary path in their attempts at revitalization: a focus on economic growth in downtown and business areas. Neighborhoods, meanwhile, have often been left severely underserved. There are, however, signs of change. This collection of studies by a distinguished group of political scientists and urban planning scholars offers a rich analysis of the scope, potential, and ramifications of a shift still in progress. Focusing on neighborhoods in six cities-Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Toronto-the authors show how key players, including politicians and philanthropic organizations, are beginning to see economic growth and neighborhood improvement as complementary goals. The heads of universities and hospitals in central locations also find themselves facing newly defined realities, adding to the fluidity of a new political landscape even as structural inequalities exe
£26.00
The University of Chicago Press A Nation of Neighborhoods Imagining Cities
Book SynopsisDespite the pundits who have written its epitaph and the latter-day refugees who have fled its confines for the half-acre suburban estate, the city neighborhood has endured as an idea central to American culture. In A Nation of Neighborhoods, Benjamin Looker presents us with the city neighborhood as both an endless problem and a possibility. Looker investigates the cultural, social, and political complexities of the idea of neighborhood in postwar America and how Americans grappled with vast changes in their urban spaces from World War II to the Reagan era. In the face of urban decline, competing visions of the city neighborhood's significance and purpose became proxies for broader debates over the meaning and limits of American democracy. By studying the way these contests unfolded across a startling variety of genres-Broadway shows, radio plays, urban ethnographies, real estate documents, and even children's programming-Looker shows that the neighborhood ideal has functioned as a ce
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press From Boom to Bubble
Book SynopsisDuring the Great Recession, the housing bubble took much of the blame for bringing the American economy to its knees, but commercial real estate also experienced its own boom-and-bust in the same time period. In Chicago, for example, law firms and corporate headquarters abandoned their historic downtown office buildings for the millions of brand-new square feet that were built elsewhere in the central business district. What causes construction booms like this, and why do they so often leave a glut of vacant space and economic distress in their wake? In From Boom to Bubble, Rachel Weber debunks the idea that booms occur only when cities are growing and innovating. Instead, she argues, even in cities experiencing employment and population decline, developers rush to erect new office towers and apartment buildings when they have financial incentives to do so. Focusing on the main causes of overbuilding during the early 2000s, Weber documents the case of Chicago's Millennial Boom, showing that the Loop's expansion was a response to global and local pressures to produce new assets. An influx of cheap cash, made available through the use of complex financial instruments, helped transform what started as a boom grounded in modest occupant demand into a speculative bubble, where pricing and supply had only tenuous connections to the market. Innovative and compelling, From Boom to Bubble is an unprecedented historical, sociological, and geographic look at how property markets change and fail-and how that affects cities.
£37.05
The University of Chicago Press MusicCity American Festivals and Placemaking in
Book SynopsisAustin's famed South by Southwest is far more than a festival celebrating indie music. It's also a big networking party that sparks the imagination of hip, creative types and galvanizes countless pilgrimages to the city. Festivals like SXSW are a lot of fun, but for city halls, media corporations, cultural institutions, and community groups, they're also a vital part of a complex growth strategy. In Music/City, Jonathan R. Wynn immerses us in the world of festivals, giving readers a unique perspective on contemporary urban and cultural life. Wynn tracks the history of festivals in Newport, Nashville, and Austin, taking readers on-site to consider different festival agendas and styles of organization. It's all here: from the musician looking to build her career to the mayor who wants to exploit a local cultural scene, from a resident's frustration over corporate branding of his city to the music executive hoping to sell records. Music/City offers a sharp perspective on cities and cultu
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press MusicCity American Festivals and Placemaking in
Book SynopsisAustin's famed South by Southwest is far more than a festival celebrating indie music. It's also a big networking party that sparks the imagination of hip, creative types and galvanizes countless pilgrimages to the city. Festivals like SXSW are a lot of fun, but for city halls, media corporations, cultural institutions, and community groups, they're also a vital part of a complex growth strategy. In Music/City, Jonathan R. Wynn immerses us in the world of festivals, giving readers a unique perspective on contemporary urban and cultural life. Wynn tracks the history of festivals in Newport, Nashville, and Austin, taking readers on-site to consider different festival agendas and styles of organization. It's all here: from the musician looking to build her career to the mayor who wants to exploit a local cultural scene, from a resident's frustration over corporate branding of his city to the music executive hoping to sell records. Music/City offers a sharp perspective on cities and cultural institutions in action and analyzes how governments mobilize massive organizational resources to become promotional machines. Wynn's analysis culminates with an impassioned argument for temporary events, claiming that when done right, temporary occasions like festivals can serve as responsive, flexible, and adaptable products attuned to local places and communities.
£26.00
The University of Chicago Press Living the Drama Community Conflict and Culture
Book SynopsisLooks at three neighborhoods in Boston to analyze the many complex ways that the context of community shapes the daily lives and long-term prospects of inner-city boys. Offering a glimpse into the world of urban adolescent boys, this title paints an insightful portrait of life in the inner city.Trade Review"Living the Drama tackles a substantive topic, engages in key theoretical debates, employs a distinctive comparative approach, gives ample voice to its subjects, and enriches our knowledge of poor youth." - Claude S. Fischer, University of California, Berkeley"
£27.00
The University of Chicago Press The Third City
Book Synopsis
£17.00
The University of Chicago Press Practicing Utopia
Book SynopsisThe typical town springs up around a natural resourcea river, an ocean, an exceptionally deep harboror in proximity to a larger, already thriving town. Not so with new towns, which are created by decree rather than out of necessity and are often intended to break from the tendencies of past development. New towns aren't a new thingancient Phoenicians named their colonies Qart Hadasht, or New Citybut these utopian developments saw a resurgence in the twentieth century. In Practicing Utopia, Rosemary Wakeman gives us a sweeping view of the new town movement as a global phenomenon. From Tapiola in Finland to Islamabad in Pakistan, Cergy-Pontoise in France to Irvine in California, Wakeman unspools a masterly account of the golden age of new towns, exploring their utopian qualities and investigating what these towns can tell us about contemporary modernization and urban planning. She presents the new town movement as something truly global, defying a Cold War East-West dichotomy or the north-south polarization of rich and poor countries. Wherever these new towns were located, whatever their size, whether famous or forgotten, they shared a utopian lineage and conception that, in each case, reveals how residents and planners imagined their ideal urban future.
£37.05
The University of Chicago Press The Modernist City An Anthropological Critique of
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£40.85
The University of Chicago Press How Places Make Us Novel LBQ Identities in Four
Book SynopsisWe like to think of ourselves as possessing an essential self, a core identity that is who we really are, regardless of where we live, work, or play. But places actually make us much more than we might think, argues Japonica Brown-Saracino in this novel ethnographic study of lesbian, bisexual, and queer individuals in four small cities across the United States. Taking us into communities in Ithaca, New York; San Luis Obispo, California; Greenfield, Massachusetts; and Portland, Maine; Brown-Saracino shows how LBQ migrants craft a unique sense of self that corresponds to their new homes. How Places Make Us demonstrates that sexual identities are responsive to city ecology. Despite the fact that the LBQ residents share many demographic and cultural traits, their approaches to sexual identity politics and to ties with other LBQ individuals and heterosexual residents vary markedly by where they live. Subtly distinct local ecologies shape what it feels like to be a sexual minority, including
£31.00
The University of Chicago Press A World More Concrete
Book SynopsisMany people characterize urban renewal projects and the power of eminent domain as two of the most widely despised and often racist tools for reshaping American cities in the postwar period. InA World More Concrete, N. D. B. Connolly uses the history of South Florida to unearth an older and far more complex story. Connolly captures nearly eighty years of political and land transactions to reveal how real estate and redevelopment created and preserved metropolitan growth and racial peace under white supremacy. Using a materialist approach, he offers a long view of capitalism and the color line, following much of the money that made land taking and Jim Crow segregation profitable and preferred approaches to governing cities throughout the twentieth century. A World More Concreteargues that black and white landlords, entrepreneurs, and even liberal community leaders used tenements and repeated land dispossession to take advantage of the poor and generate remarkable wealth. Through a pol
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press Chicagos Block Clubs How Neighbors Shape the City
Book SynopsisWhat do you do if your alley is strewn with garbage after the sanitation truck comes through? Or if you're tired of the rowdy teenagers next door keeping you up all night? Is there a vacant lot on your block accumulating weeds, needles, and litter? For a century, Chicagoans have joined block clubs to address problems like these that make daily life in the city a nuisance. When neighbors work together in block clubs, playgrounds get built, local crime is monitored, streets are cleaned up, and every summer is marked by the festivities of day-long block parties. In Chicago's Block Clubs, Amanda I. Seligman uncovers the history of the block club in Chicago from its origins in the Urban League in the early 1900s through to the Chicago Police Department's twenty-first-century community policing program. Recognizing that many neighborhood problems are too big for one resident to handle but too small for the city keep up with city residents have for more than a century created clubs to establi
£26.00
The University of Chicago Press Learning from Shenzhen Chinas PostMao Experiment
Book SynopsisThis multidisciplinary volume, the first of its kind, presents an account of China's contemporary transformation via one of its most important yet overlooked cities: Shenzhen, located just north of Hong Kong. In recent decades, Shenzhen has transformed from an experimental site for economic reform into a dominant city at the crossroads of the global economy. The first of China's special economic zones, Shenzhen is today a UNESCO City of Design and the hub of China's emerging technology industries. Bringing China studies into dialogue with urban studies, the contributors explore how the post-Mao Chinese appropriation of capitalist logic led to a dramatic remodeling of the Chinese city and collective life in China today. These essays show how urban villages and informal institutions enabled social transformation through cases of public health, labor, architecture, gender, politics, education, and more. Offering scholars and general readers alike an unprecedented look at one of the world'
£31.00
The University of Chicago Press The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal
Book SynopsisExamines how postwar thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic considered urban landscapes radically changed by the political and physical realities of sprawl, urban decay, and urban renewal. This title traces changing responses to the challenging issues that most affected the lives of the world's cities.
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press Race Class and Politics in the Cappuccino City
Book SynopsisFor long-time residents of Washington, D.C.'s Shaw/U Street, the neighborhood has become almost unrecognizable in recent years. Where the city's most infamous open-air drug market once stood, a farmers' market now sells grass-fed beef and homemade duck egg ravioli. On the corner where AM.PM carryout used to dish out soul food, a new establishment markets its $28 foie gras burger. Shaw is experiencing a dramatic transformation, from ghetto to gilded ghetto, where white newcomers are rehabbing homes, developing dog parks, and paving the way for a third wave coffee shop on nearly every block.Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City is an in-depth ethnography of this gilded ghetto. Derek S. Hyra captures here a quickly gentrifying space in which long-time black residents are joined, and variously displaced, by an influx of young, white, relatively wealthy, and/or gay professionals who, in part as a result of global economic forces and the recent development of central business dist
£26.00
The University of Chicago Press African American Urban History since World War II
Book SynopsisFocuses on black migration and Latino immigration, examining tensions and alliances that emerged between African Americans and other groups. Exploring the challenges of residential segregation and deindustrialization, this book also tackles such topics as the real estate industry's discriminatory practices.Trade Review"Taken together, the essays in this volume are transformative - and excellent across the board. They collectively propel the historiography of the postwar era in profitable directions. They push against the most staid boundaries of urban history, they break out of the black-white binary that ensnares so much of African American history, and they juxtapose different objects of study in a way that establishes this book as a wonderfully realized interdisciplinary examination of the past." - Jonathan Holloway, Yale University"
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press Going All City Struggle and Survival in LAs
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Going All City is an amazing read that is impossible to put down. A cutting-edge geographical exploration of under-examined Los Angeles landscapes, this poignant, insightful book is unique within graffiti scholarship and expansive in our understanding of the city. Depicting the pain of a childhood spent in poverty, the ambiguity of race, and the subjective experience of policing and gangs, this is the remarkable story of just one of thousands of young people who have found power in the clandestine practice of graffiti."--Susan Phillips, author of Wallbangin' Gangs and Graffiti in L.A.
£19.00
The University of Chicago Press How States Shaped Postwar America State
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£29.45
The University of Chicago Press Bargaining for Brooklyn
Book SynopsisWhen middle-class residents fled American cities in the 1960s and '70s, government services and investment capital left too. Countless urban neighborhoods entered phases of precipitous decline, prompting the creation of community-based organizations to bring resources back to the city. This book examines such organizations that drive urban life.Trade Review"This is a valuable work that will influence the way sociologists understand the cycle of development of poor, urban neighborhoods. Nicole Marwell makes a unique contribution with an analytic strategy that emphasizes the important role played by community-based organizations, actors that have been generally ignored in urban sociology." - Mitchell Duneier, author of Sidewalk"
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press Schools Betrayed
Book SynopsisInner-city schools suffered from far fewer problems a century ago, when black children in most northern cities attended school alongside white children. This title tells the story of how and why these schools came to serve black children so poorly. It compares the circumstances of blacks and white immigrants.Trade Review"One of those rare books that will become a standard reference not only for social scientists, historians, and school officials, but for educated lay readers as well.... No previous study has provided a more definitive analysis of why so many black youngsters and their parents have lost faith in the public schools." - William Julius Wilson. "Kathryn Neckerman's analysis provides a welcome antidote to much of the historical literature on American education, which rarely examines actual policy choices.... Segregation did harm blacks, as this fine book shows." - "Journal of American History"
£26.00
The University of Chicago Press The Problem of Jobs Liberalism Race and
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£30.40
The University of Chicago Press The Browning of the New South
Book SynopsisTrade Review"This provocative book upends the conventional wisdom about relationships between Latinos and African-Americans. Jones shows in vivid detail how shared experiences of hostility from the white majority generate new forms of solidarity and organization. The Browning of the New South has important implications for the future of American politics and scholarly understandings of cross-ethnic coalitions."--David FitzGerald "co-author of Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas " "Jones offers a dynamic, complex, compellingly argued account of the remarkably understudied black-Latinx alliances, an account that will surely resonate far beyond Winston-Salem. At this political moment, she shines a bright light on the possibilities for powerful minority coalitions, which can be key for necessary social change. The Browning of the New South is insightful, timely, and inspiring. I cannot recommend it highly enough."--Cecilia Menj var, University of California, Los Angeles
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press Maxwell Street Writing and Thinking Place
Book SynopsisMaxwell Street sheds light on a historic Chicago neighborhood and offers a new model for how to write about place, approaching the study of place as an assemblage of things, meanings, and practices.
£91.00
The University of Chicago Press New York Recentered Building the Metropolis from
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£33.25
The University of Chicago Press Community Health Equity
Book SynopsisTrade Review"In healthcare, we are taught that the right treatment comes from the right diagnosis. Paradoxically our profession almost always gets the diagnosis for health inequity wrong, and mistreats accordingly. Health workers who read this book will interrupt that cycle, recognizing that they cannot continue to support the current social arrangement if we dream of achieving health equity this generation."--Michelle Morse, founding codirector of EqualHealth "Community Health Equity is an exciting and important opportunity to present the whole story of Chicago's long and deeply rooted history of structural inequities. The book exposes a city divided by power and racism, which impacts access to health care, causing gaps in public health outcomes throughout the last hundred years. The editors detail how these inequities are duly caused and reinforced by structural and social determinants of health; they also provide ways to take action to address them. The target audience for Community Health Equity is wide and broad--after all, learning from the past can help shape and influence the future."--Christina R. Welter, University of Illinois at Chicago
£37.05
The University of Chicago Press Mama Might Be Better Off Dead
Book Synopsis
£19.00
The University of Chicago Press The World Is Always Coming to an End Pulling
Book SynopsisBlending journalism, memoir, and archival research, The World Is Always Coming to an End uses the story of one American neighborhood to challenge our assumptions about what neighborhoods are, and to think anew about what they might be if we can bridge gaps and commit anew to the people who share them with us.
£24.00
The University of Chicago Press The Patchwork City
Book Synopsis
£26.00
The University of Chicago Press Black on the Block
Book SynopsisUses the historic rise, alarming fall, and equally dramatic renewal of Chicago's North Kenwood - Oakland neighborhood to explore the politics of race and class in contemporary urban America. This title explores the battles between haves and have-nots, home owners and apartment dwellers, and newcomers and old-timers.Trade Review"A century from now, when today's sociologists and journalists are dust and their books are too, those who want to understand what the hell happened to Chicago will be finding the answer in this one." - Chicago Reader "To see how diversity creates strange and sometimes awkward bedfellows... turn to Mary Pattillo's Black on the Block." - Boston Globe"
£23.00
The University of Chicago Press The Origins of the Dual City Housing Race and
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£91.00
The University of Chicago Press The Origins of the Dual City Housing Race and
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£31.00
The University of Chicago Press Running the Numbers Race Police and the History
Book SynopsisEvery day in the United States, people test their luck in numerous lotteries, from state-run games to massive programs like Powerball and Mega Millions. Yet few are aware that the origins of today's lotteries can be found in an African American gambling economy that flourished in urban communities in the mid-twentieth century. In Running the Numbers, Matthew Vaz reveals how the politics of gambling became enmeshed in disputes over racial justice and police legitimacy. As Vaz highlights, early urban gamblers favored low-stakes games built around combinations of winning numbers. When these games became one of the largest economic engines in nonwhite areas like Harlem and Chicago's south side, police took notice of the illegal businessand took advantage of new opportunities to benefit from graft and other corrupt practices. Eventually, governments found an unusual solution to the problems of illicit gambling and abusive police tactics: coopting the market through legal state-run lotteries, which could offer larger jackpots than any underground game. By tracing this process and the tensions and conflicts that propelled it, Vaz brilliantly calls attention to the fact that, much like education and housing in twentieth-century America, the gambling economy has also been a form of disputed terrain upon which racial power has been expressed, resisted, and reworked.
£29.45
The University of Chicago Press The Problem with Feeding Cities The Social
Book SynopsisFor most people, grocery shopping is a mundane activity. Few stop to think about the massive, global infrastructure that makes it possible to buy Chilean grapes in a Philadelphia supermarket in the middle of winter. Yet every piece of food represents an interlocking system of agriculture, manufacturing, shipping, logistics, retailing, and nonprofits that controls what we eator don't. The Problem with Feeding Cities is a sociological and historical examination of how this remarkable network of abundance and convenience came into being over the last century. It looks at how the US food system transformed from feeding communities to feeding the entire nation, and it reveals how a process that was once about fulfilling basic needs became focused on satisfying profit margins. It is also a story of how this system fails to feed people, especially in the creation of food deserts. Andrew Deener shows that problems with food access are the result of infrastructural failings stemming from how Trade Review"...a major addition to the literature on food infrastructure history and analysis." * Civil Engineering Magazine *"We take food for granted—that it will always be on the shelf, mostly affordable, and safe to eat. Andrew Deener no longer takes the food supply for granted and in this book, using the City of Philadelphia as a case study, examines the high-volume, high-variety food system on which the U.S. relies." * CHoW Line *"The Problem with Feeding Cities is a tour de force in its examination of the logistical and supply chain effects on our food system...[It] is a valuable book for those interested in food insecurity and organizational sociology." * Sociological Forum *"Deener urges us to think of food as similar to other goods, [such as] electricity [and] housing that changed dramatically in the twentieth century. He does an excellent job taking the reader on the trip--by boat, by railroad, long haulers, and cars--to see how food gets from point A to point B (with a lot of other points in-between)...Changes in food distribution in the twentieth century led to much of the infrastructural decay we see in US cities in the 21st century and exacerbated food inequalities that we still see today." * Urbanities: The Journal of Urban Ethnography *"Andrew Deener’s fascinating book represents an important contribution to the sparsely populated field of social studies of food infrastructure. . . . The Problem with Feeding Cities represents an ambitious attempt to unpack the black box of fresh food provisioning in the United States and theorize the role of food infrastructure in shaping the contemporary city. . . .[It] reveals the importance of understanding what stands between the proverbial farm and table in terms of crafting policies and theories that can adequately confront the 'problem with feeding cities.'" * Gastronomica *“Most of us give little thought to the question of how our food gets to the grocery store, or of how and why this matters. But Deener has spent years investigating the hidden infrastructure that shapes what we grow, what we eat, what we spend, and, most surprisingly, how we’ve built cities, suburbs, and transit networks around the world. The Problem with Feeding Cities is a revelatory study, loaded with ideas about how to create healthier, more sustainable systems for our changing world.” -- Eric Klinenberg, author of Palaces for the People and Heat Wave“This is the food chain fully traced and newly understood. We learn how grocery companies, road builders, and bar codes have shaped cities and fields—and what goes in our mouths. Deener combines politics, technology, and taste for lessons in urban history, consumption, and the wiles and woes of business. He brings the concept of infrastructure to explanatory life.” -- Harvey Molotch, author of Where Stuff Comes From“The Problem with Feeding Cities is a masterpiece of sociological imagination, making the familiar grocery store aisle into a strange concoction of methyl bromide and Universal Product Codes. Deener narrates the ‘social life of infrastructure’ over a century of history and with a remarkable variety of foodstuff examples. This book is a model of urban, economic, organizational, and environmental sociology.” -- Mary Pattillo, author of Black on the Block"What is singularly insightful about this volume is that it disaggregates the food system, showing how supplying cities with grains or meats, about which much has been written...is quite different from feeding cities fresh fruits and vegetables...[Deener] underlines the epistemic consequences of separating rural sociology from urban sociology and a sociology of production from a sociology of consumption, with the ties between the two falling out of analytical view. That sets his task for the rest of the book, which includes exemplary chapters on technologies and techniques of classifying uneven organic material." * City & Community *"Sociologists with interests in food, urban studies, and politics will find The Problem with Feeding Cities to be a helpful resource for many years to come. Any evolution of our food distribution system that expands beyond today’s supermarket model (e.g., home delivery) will require new infrastructure to succeed. Deener’s framing of the problem of getting food to people will help us keep track of the ways industry and government mutually adapt to stock the household pantries of the future." * American Journal of Sociology *Table of ContentsPreface One / The Transformation of the Food System Two / The Rise and Fall of the Urban Middlemen Three / Infrastructural Exclusion Four / The Bar Code: A Micro-technical Force of Change Five / Defeating Seasons: Reassembling the Produce Aisle Six / Cracks in the System Seven / Food Distribution as Unfinished Infrastructure Eight / The Problem with Feeding Cities Acknowledgments Methods Appendix: Strategic Variation and Historical Excavation Notes References Index
£87.40
The University of Chicago Press Street Therapists Race Affect and Neoliberal
Book SynopsisDrawing from almost a decade of ethnographic research in largely Brazilian and Puerto Rican neighborhoods in Newark, New Jersey, the author examines how affect, emotion, and sentiment serve as waypoints for the navigation of interracial relationships among US-born Latinos, Latin American migrants, blacks, and white ethnics.Trade Review"There are many books that try to look at affect/emotion and contemporary urban life, or at the logic of neoliberalism, or even at the many complex links between race/ethnicity/multiculturalism and gender/sexuality, but I can't think of one that takes them all on - and so compellingly. Indeed, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas does a masterful job of emphasizing emotion/affect as significant to the social science of diverse urban communities while putting all of these other themes in conversation with that central concern. It is a tremendously smart, useful, and ambitious piece of urban ethnography." (John L. Jackson Jr., University of Pennsylvania)"
£30.40
The University of Chicago Press Upsold Real Estate Agents Prices and
Book SynopsisWhat do you want for yourself in the next five, ten years? Do your plans involve marriage, kids, a new job? These are the questions a real estate agent might ask in an attempt to unearth information they can employ to complete a sale, which as Upsold shows, often results in upselling. In this book, sociologist Max Besbris shows how agents successfully upsell, inducing buyers to spend more than their initially stated price ceilings. His research reveals how face-to-face interactions influence buyers' ideas about which neighborhoods are desirable and which are less-worthy investments and how these preferences ultimately contribute to neighborhood inequality. ? Stratification defines cities in the contemporary United States. In an era marked by increasing income segregation, one of the main sources of this inequality is housing prices. A crucial part of wealth inequality, housing prices are also directly linked to the uneven distribution of resources across neighborhoods and to racial Trade Review"Real estate agents, it turns out, do more than show off properties, interpret price points, and sing the praises of trendy design features like open-plan kitchens and soaking tubs. Their role, as sociologist Max Besbris reveals in Upsold: Real Estate Agents, Prices, and Neighborhood Inequality, is instead to work a kind of sorcery on buyers—and, by extension, on entire neighborhoods—through a complex matrix of business and interpersonal tactics. . . . Upsold is an intricate, well-researched, and well-written book that provides new insights into real estate, spatial inequalities, and the real estate profession. It is a must-read for scholars interested in markets, decision-making, and residential inequalities." * Public Books *Upsold offers a putative critique of the formal modeling of markets by focusing on the central role of real estate agents, as a distinct occupational community, in structuring the New York real estate market. Besbris uses the sociology of work as a chisel with which to carve a complex and sensitive depiction of real estate agents, their formal and informal training, and their occupational socialization... Besbris's writing is clear, engaging and intellectually mature, which coupled with a clear structure makes Upsold enjoyable and illuminating reading. * British Journal of Sociology *"Max Besbris’s excellent Upsold describes this work of real estate agents in New York City and their interactions with prospective buyers in rich and fascinating detail. Bridging the gap between network and cultural explanations of economic decision-making, he demonstrates how social interactions serve to construct buyers’ preferences. He details how real estate agents push buyers toward sales above their stated price caps—transactions in which agents have a clear vested interest. Importantly, Besbris links these interpersonal interactions and valuations to broader trends, arguing that they contribute to the production and perpetuation of segregation among neighborhoods." * American Journal of Sociology *"In recent years, urban sociologists have paid increasing attention to how people make decisions—about housing, schools, job finding, and more. Besbris makes a powerful contribution to this work by examining how people decide what to buy, why they often end up paying more than they expected, and how realtors play a bigger role in the process than realized. Upsold is based on a remarkable amount of data, including interviewers with buyers, realtors, and others, and quantitative analyses of the spatial patterns of realtor concentration. But perhaps its most intriguing sources of data are its direct, tag-along observations of the interaction between buyer and realtor as they make their round, an interaction where, as the author argues, the price and purchase decisions are actually produced. The book reveals the fascinating ways these costly decisions end up being not only less rational but also less individual, more emotional, and far more interpersonally determined than many have supposed. A contribution to the sociological study of economic decisions, of taste, of neighborhoods, of network brokerage, and of housing, Upsold is wonderfully wide-ranging in its implications." -- Mario Lois Small, Harvard University"Bravo Max Besbris, for deciphering the complex and deeply emotional process of buying a home. Drawing from engrossing interviews with New York sales agents and wealthy buyers, Upsold demonstrates the crucial role of intermediaries in shaping real estate markets. How much we are willing to pay for a home, how satisfied we are with our purchase, and even where we choose to live are contingent on interactions with real estate agents. A pathbreaking contribution to relational economic sociology, the book is a must-read for anyone interested in learning how markets really work." -- Viviana A. Zelizer is Lloyd Cotsen, ’50 Professor of Sociology, Princeton University“In this illuminative ethnography, Besbris roots the macro-dynamics of real estate prices and neighborhood gentrification in the micro-sociological work done by agents driving up buyers’ expectations and affordability thresholds. An entertaining read, it will cause more than one homeowner to look back on their own process and the subtle interactions by which they, too, were once ‘upsold.’” -- Marion Fourcade, University of California, Berkeley"Casting real estate agents as 'market intermediaries' who occupy similar interactional spaces as others who help to define and influence “consumer” preferences and choices (e.g., sommeliers, travel agents, career counselors), we gain a sense oft he transcontextual relevance of Besbris’ engaging work. . . . This is a volume rich in detail and marked by methodological sophistication that deserves a readership far beyond the confines of its substantive area of interest." * Symbolic Interaction *"Max Besbris deserves a lot of credit for the amount of work that he put into the book—observing buyers and agents at open house sessions, conducting interviews with buyers and agents, attending real estate schools, and doing regression analyses. His hard work has paid off. Upsold is a highly readable book that I recommend to scholars, practitioners (including real estate professionals and planners), and the general public." * Journal of Urban Affairs *"Provides insights into how home buyers come to pay the prices they do and the role of market intermediaries in shaping taste preferences in unequal ways, focusing on how real estate agents guide buyers through the process of searching for a home." * Journal of Economic Literature *"[Upsold] shows how, in a variety of ways, real estate agents reinforce and per- petuate inequalities that frame the context in which agents and buyers interact." * American Sociological Association *
£87.40
The University of Chicago Press The City Creative The Rise of Urban Placemaking
Book SynopsisTrade Review"An unprecedented and refreshing history of creative placemaking, from the postwar era to the recent aftermath of the Great Recession. Carriere and Schalliol carefully examine the concept of sociability through the evolution of placemaking, describing how the latter expressed and negotiated tensions between individual identity and communal belonging. With compelling photography and hundreds of examples, the authors skillfully unravel a double narrative that characterizes placemaking and urban planning in contemporary American cities. . . . The City Creative is an exciting invitation to look past outdated practices of trickle-down urban development. The book offers a much needed and long overdue history of placemaking that acknowledges its shortcomings, incorporates more inclusive ideas, and celebrates novel practices. With honesty, rigor, and remarkable visual appeal, Carriere and Schalliol encourage readers to seek more holistic outcomes and benefits that can be distributed equitably. In doing so, they recast placemaking in a broader, more generous light." * Journal of Planning History *"Provocative, although its tone is not strident. Implicit in its narrative, the book raises questions about the very core of city revitalization—the interaction of markets and public policies. . . . Courses in urban planning theory or practice may find this study a useful reference on the power of citizen-initiated action outside of the usual parameters of officialdom to reshape neighborhood environments and reinvigorate activity centers. Its highly readable text and copious images make it accessible to laypersons, as well as practitioners and scholars." * Journal of Urban Affairs *"Carriere and Schalliol consider ideas about revitalizing cities by putting arts at the center of economic development. . . . This is a good reference book for students, urban planners, and community activists. . . . Recommended." * Choice *"This is essential reading for this year of crisis (2020) and beyond: in the midst of a global pandemic, which has decimated urban public life, as diverse Americans reclaim the city’s streets in the name of racial justice, The City Creative illustrates a broader history of creative placemaking in American cities and highlights the diverse and sometimes conflicting efforts to build anew. With an assemblage of rigorous case studies, a commitment to community engagement, and a rich compilation of compelling photographs, Carriere and Schalliol show us how the struggle for more inclusive and more just cities begins at the grassroots." -- Eric Avila, University of California Los Angeles"The City Creative is a profound exploration of how residents working together can turn around the nation’s most struggling cities. It is part scholarly critique of placemaking as an economic and social strategy of urban revitalization, part gorgeous photo essay of urban experimentations, and part powerful argument for making cities productive rather than postindustrial, with remedies homegrown and not top-down. This breathtaking book inspires hope and confidence in what committed members of a community can make possible." -- Lizabeth Cohen, author of Saving America’s Cities“The City Creative is an important book, the first to offer an extensive study of the increasingly ubiquitous practice of creative placemaking. Carriere and Schalliol are the first urbanists offering a persuasive (or any) history of that phenomenon. Drawing upon their rigorous investigation of grassroots local projects, they provide a vital direction for mainstream placemaking to follow.” * Journal of Urban History *
£31.00
The University of Chicago Press Making the Second Ghetto Race and Housing in
Book SynopsisFirst published in 1983 and praised by the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Thomas Sugrue, Arnold R. Hirsch's Making the Second Ghetto is the rare book that has only become more piercingly prescient over the years. Hirsch's classic and groundbreaking work of urban history is a revelatory look at Chicago in the decades after the Great Depression, a period when the city dealt with its rapidly growing Black population not by working to abolish its stark segregation but by expanding and solidifying it. Even as the civil rights movement rose to prominence, Chicago exploited a variety of methods of segregationincluding riots, redevelopment, and a host of new legal frameworksthat provided a national playbook for the emergence of a new kind of entrenched inequality. Hirsch's chronicle of the strategies employed by ethnic, political, and business interests in reaction to the Great Migration of Southern Blacks in the mid-twentieth century makes startingly clear how the violent reactions of an emergent white population found common ground with policy makers to segregate first a city and then the nation. This enlarged edition of Making the Second Ghetto features a visionary afterword by historian N. D. B. Connolly, explaining why Hirsch's book still crackles with blistering relevance for contemporary readers. Trade Review“Arnold Hirsch’s deeply transformational book lays out how a perfect storm of racism, redlining, and public policies formed Chicago and other American cities. If you want to understand what came after the 1960s, you have to understand what came before them. And today we’re still dealing with the same issues Hirsch wrote about. Every sector of the city—its business interests, its government, its people, and sometimes even its churches—have employed particular weaponry to effect a single goal: the subjugation of black people. It hasn’t changed.” * Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of We Were Eight Years In Power and Between the World and Me *Table of ContentsList of tables and maps Foreword Preface 1 The second ghetto and the dynamics of neighborhood change 2 An era of hidden violence 3 Friends, neighbors, and rioters 4 The Loop versus the slums: downtown strikes back 5 A neighborhood on a hill: Hyde Park and the University of Chicago 6 Divided we stand: white unity and the color line at midcentury 7 Making the second ghetto Epilogue: Chicago and the nation Afterword to the 2021 edition Notes Index
£18.05
The University of Chicago Press Block by Block Neighborhoods and Public Policy on
Book SynopsisSeligman's careful and evenhanded account will be essential to understanding that the flight of whites to the suburbs was the eventual result of a series of responses to transformations in Chicago's physical and social landscape, occurring one block at a time.Trade Review"A creative reinterpretation of the postwar urban crisis, Seligman's book challenges the one-dimensional portrait of Chicago's West Side. Her multiplicity of stories and experiences makes this a very rich urban history. Original and useful, Block by Block is an important contribution to postwar urban historiography." - Becky Nicolaides, University of California, San Diego"
£30.40
The University of Chicago Press Believing in South Central
Book SynopsisThe area of Los Angeles known as South Central is often overshadowed by dismal stereotypes, problematic racial stigmas, and its status as the home to some of the city's poorest and most violent neighborhoods. Amid South Central's shifting demographics and its struggles with poverty, sociologist Pamela J. Prickett takes a closer look, focusing on the members of an African American Muslim community and exploring how they help each other combat poverty, job scarcity, violence, and racial injustice. Prickett's engaging ethnography relates how believers in this longstanding religious community see Islam as a way of life, a comprehensive blueprint for individual and collective action, guiding how to interact with others, conduct business, strive for progress, and cultivate faith. Prickett offers deep insights into the day-to-day lived religion of the Muslims who call this community home, showing how the mosque provides a system of social support and how believers deepen their spiritual pracTrade Review"Smart and highly original, Believing in South Central details how a small Muslim community in South Central, Los Angeles, makes meaning of their faith in the midst of a changing racial landscape and a declining community of believers. Prickett brings nuanced analysis, beautiful prose, and seamless narration together in this ethnography that will expand scholars' understanding of how African Americans practice their Islamic faith outside Arab and South Asian Muslim communities."--Ula Y. Taylor, author of The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of IslamTable of ContentsIntroduction: Living a Muslim Way of Life in South Central Chapter One: “Our Test Is Living a Community Life” Chapter Two: “Don’t Move. Improve” Chapter Three: “Money Is Funny” Chapter Four: “Why Not Just Use a Cucumber!” Chapter Five: “That’s What They Think of Us” Conclusion: “Allahu Akbar” Methods Appendix Acknowledgments Notes References Index
£89.02
