Magnet for the ambitious, lodestone for talented and oppressed alike, Mecca for businessmen and immigrants, New York City has presided for over 350 years as the critical center of American life. From its origins as a primitive Dutch outpost to the sprawling urban complex it is today, the defining characteristic of New York has been continuous, dramatic, and rapid change. Historian George J. Lankevich's volume concentrates on political and economic affairs, illustrating how New York has always combined principle and pragmatism in its role as pace-setter in business communications, education, urban policy, and cultural life. American Metropolis is loosely divided into three historical epochs, each spanning roughly one of the last three centuries. In its early years, New York was defined by trial and tribulation; wars, fires, rebellions, and revolution were guiding influences on the colonial port. Nineteenth-century New York history was dominated by heroic figures in the form of bosses, reformers, merchant princes and statesmen, by enormous population increases, and by the achievement of commercial, financial, and cultural supremacy. For much of the twentieth century, greater New York, plagued by crime, white flight, fiscal trauma, and decay, embodied the nation's urban crisis. Its current Renaissance stands as fresh testimony to its characteristic vitality and resilience. Emphasizing the cyclical nature of New York's history through tides of crisis and renewal, George J. Lankevich here offers the definitive short history of America's most important and vibrant metropolis. By understanding the history of New York, we obtain a vital sense of what America was, is, and can become.

Repairing the American Metropolis is based on Douglas Kelbaugh’s Common Place: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design, first published in 1997. It is more timely and significant than ever, with new text, charts, and images on architecture, sprawl, and New Urbanism, a movement that he helped pioneer. Theory and policies have been revised, refined, updated, and developed as compelling ways to plan and design the built environment. This is an indispensable book for architects, urban designers and planners, landscape architects, architecture and urban planning students and scholars, government officials, developers, environmentalists, and citizens interested in understanding and shaping the American metropolis.

A lively history of Boston’s emergence as a world-class city—home to the likes of Frederick Douglass and Alexander Graham Bell—by a beloved Bostonian historian “It’s been quite a while since I’ve read anything—fiction or nonfiction—so enthralling.”—Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River and Shutter Island Once upon a time, “Boston Town” was an insulated New England township. But the community was destined for greatness. Between 1850 and 1900, Boston underwent a stunning metamorphosis to emerge as one of the world’s great metropolises—one that achieved national and international prominence in politics, medicine, education, science, social activism, literature, commerce, and transportation. Long before the frustrations of our modern era, in which the notion of accomplishing great things often appears overwhelming or even impossible, Boston distinguished itself in the last half of the nineteenth century by proving it could tackle and overcome the most arduous of challenges and obstacles with repeated—and often resounding—success, becoming a city of vision and daring. In A City So Grand, Stephen Puleo chronicles this remarkable period in Boston’s history, in his trademark page-turning style. Our journey begins with the ferocity of the abolitionist movement of the 1850s and ends with the glorious opening of America’s first subway station, in 1897. In between we witness the thirty-five-year engineering and city-planning feat of the Back Bay project, Boston’s explosion in size through immigration and annexation, the devastating Great Fire of 1872 and subsequent rebuilding of downtown, and Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone utterance in 1876 from his lab at Exeter Place. These lively stories and many more paint an extraordinary portrait of a half century of progress, leadership, and influence that turned a New England town into a world-class city, giving us the Boston we know today.

This volume examines the unprecedented growth of several cities in Latin America from 1830 to 1930, observing how sociopolitical changes and upheavals created the conditions for the birth of the metropolis. In the century between 1830 and 1930, following independence from Spain and Portugal, major cities in Latin America experienced large-scale growth, with the development of a new urban bourgeois elite interested in projects of modernization and rapid industrialization. At the same time, the lower classes were eradicated from old city districts and deported to the outskirts. The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930 surveys this expansion, focusing on six capital cities—Havana, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, and Lima—as it examines sociopolitical histories, town planning, art and architecture, photography, and film in relation to the metropolis. Drawing from the Getty Research Institute’s vast collection of books, prints, and photographs from this period, largely unpublished until now, this volume reveals the cities’ changes through urban panoramas, plans depicting new neighborhoods, and photographs of novel transportation systems, public amenities, civic spaces, and more. It illustrates the transformation of colonial cities into the monumental modern metropolises that, by the end of the 1920s, provided fertile ground for the emergence of today’s Latin American megalopolis.

Returning social justice to the center of urban policy debates

In this compelling narrative of capitalist development and revolutionary response, Jessica M. Kim reexamines the rise of Los Angeles from a small town to a global city against the backdrop of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Gilded Age economics, and American empire. It is a far-reaching transnational history, chronicling how Los Angeles boosters transformed the borderlands through urban and imperial capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century and how the Mexican Revolution redefined those same capitalist networks into the twentieth. Kim draws on archives in the United States and Mexico to argue that financial networks emerging from Los Angeles drove economic transformations in the borderlands, reshaped social relations across wide swaths of territory, and deployed racial hierarchies to advance investment projects across the border. However, the Mexican Revolution, with its implicit critique of imperialism, disrupted the networks of investment and exploitation that had structured the borderlands for sixty years, and reconfigured transnational systems of infrastructure and trade. Kim provides the first history to connect Los Angeles's urban expansionism with more continental and global currents, and what results is a rich account of real and imagined geographies of city, race, and empire.

The Modern American Metropolis: A Documentary Reader introduces the history of American cities and suburbs through a collection of original source materials that historians have long used to make sense of the urban experience. Carefully integrates and juxtaposes the primary sources that are at the heart of the collection Revisits and compares issues and themes over time Reveals how the history of cities and suburbs is not limited to buildings, innovation, and politics, and not confined to municipal boundaries Explores a wide variety of topics, including infrastructure development, electoral politics, consumer culture, battles over rights, environmental change, and the meaning of citizenship

Regarding issues of urban sprawl Visit Sprawl Net, at Rice University. It's under construction, but it should be an interesting resource. Check out the traffic in the land of commuting. And, finally, enjoy Los Angeles: Revisiting the Four Ecologies.

A collection of essays—historical and personal—about the present and future of American cities Edited by Keith Gessen and Stephen Squibb, City by City is a collection of essays—historical, personal, and somewhere in between—about the present and future of American cities. It sweeps from Gold Rush, Alaska, to Miami, Florida, encompassing cities large and small, growing and failing. These essays look closely at the forces—gentrification, underemployment, politics, culture, and crime—that shape urban life. They also tell the stories of citizens whose fortunes have risen or fallen with those of the cities they call home. A cross between Hunter S. Thompson, Studs Terkel, and the Great Depression–era WPA guides to each state in the Union, City by City carries this project of American storytelling up to the days of our own Great Recession.

In a captivating tour of cities famous and forgotten, acclaimed historian Ben Wilson tells the glorious, millennia-spanning story how urban living sparked humankind's greatest innovations. “A towering achievement.... Reading this book is like visiting an exhilarating city for the first time—dazzling.” —The Wall Street Journal During the two hundred millennia of humanity’s existence, nothing has shaped us more profoundly than the city. From their very beginnings, cities created such a flourishing of human endeavor—new professions, new forms of art, worship and trade—that they kick-started civilization. Guiding us through the centuries, Wilson reveals the innovations nurtured by the inimitable energy of human beings together: civics in the agora of Athens, global trade in ninth-century Baghdad, finance in the coffeehouses of London, domestic comforts in the heart of Amsterdam, peacocking in Belle Époque Paris. In the modern age, the skyscrapers of New York City inspired utopian visions of community design, while the trees of twenty-first-century Seattle and Shanghai point to a sustainable future in the age of climate change. Page-turning, irresistible, and rich with engrossing detail, Metropolis is a brilliant demonstration that the story of human civilization is the story of cities.