Winner, Good Brick Award, Preservation Houston, 2020 Just over 180 years ago, the city of Houston was nothing more than an alligator-infested swamp along the Buffalo Bayou that spread onto a flat, endless plain. Today, it is a sprawling, architecturally and culturally diverse metropolis. How did one transform into the other in such a short period? Improbable Metropolis uses the built environment as a guide to explore the remarkable evolution that Houston has undergone from 1836 to the present. Houston’s architecture, an indicator of its culture and prosperity, has been inconsistent, often predictable, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally extraordinary. Industries from cotton, lumber, sugar, and rail and water transportation, to petroleum, healthcare, biomedical research, and aerospace have each in turn brought profit and attention to Houston. Each created an associated building boom, expanding the city’s architectural sophistication, its footprint, and its cultural breadth. Providing a template for architectural investigations of other American cities, Improbable Metropolis is an important addition to the literature on Texas history.

‘Delhi is the twin of pure paradise, a prototype of the heavenly throne on an earthlyscroll’—Amir Khusrau A city of contradictions, where ancient traditions and modern aspirations jostle for space, Delhi has often been compared to a phoenix rising from the ashes. Its three thousand years of eventful history have witnessed the rise and fall of several empires, a process that continues today. City Improbable brings together writings by immigrants, residents, refugees, travellers and invaders who have engaged with India’s capital over different epochs. Babur shares his earliest experience of the city and Amir Khusrau praises the fine lads of Delhi; Ibn Battuta and Niccolao Manucci record the glories and follies of prominent rulers; William Dalrymple and Khushwant Singh provide intriguing accounts of the threshold period that saw the coming of the British and the waning of the Mughals. Poets and storytellers—Meer Taqi Meer, Ghalib, Yashpal, Kamleshwar, Ruskin Bond—narrate their versions of the city. Contemporary Delhi is featured in a variety of vignettes: the bureaucracy, the Emergency, the anti-Sikh violence, lovers and joggers in Lodi Gardens, the city’s Sufi legacy as well as its changing cuisine. Among the new pieces in this expanded edition are Sam Miller’s account of his experiences in the suburb of Noida, Manto’s story about a girl from Delhi leaving the city during Partition, Jarnail Singh’s unflinching recollection of the massacre of Sikhs in 1984, a photo essay on Shahpur Jat by Karoki Lewis, and a composite narrative by the young writers of the Cybermohalla Collective about the making of a resettlement colony.

Atlas of Improbable Places shows the modern world from surprising new vantage points that will inspire urban explorers and armchair travellers alike to consider a new way of understanding the world we live in.

Chronicles the history of the city from its being contended over as swampland through Louisiana's statehood in 1812, discussing its motley identities as a French village, African market town, Spanish fortress, and trade center.

Contributed articles on history and social life of Delhi, India.

Metropolis is a monumental work. On its release in 1925, after sixteen months' filming, it was Germany's most expensive feature film, a canvas for director Fritz Lang's increasingly extravagant ambitions. Lang, inspired by the skyline of New York, created a whole new vision of cities. One of the greatest works of science fiction, the film also tells human stories about love and family. Thomas Elsaesser explores the cultural phenomenon of Metropolis: its different versions (there is no definitive one), its changing meanings, and its role as a database of twentieth-century imagery and ideologies. In his foreword to this special edition, published to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the BFI Film Classics series, Elsaesser discusses the impact of the 27 minutes of 'lost' footage discovered in Buenos Aires in 2008, and incorporated in a restored edition, which premiered in 2010.

Cities are often seen as helpless victims in a global flow of events and many view growing inequality in cities as inevitable. This engaging book rejects this gloomy prognosis and argues that imaginative place-based leadership can enable citizens to shape the urban future in accordance with progressive values – advancing social justice, promoting care for the environment and bolstering community empowerment. This international and comparative book, written by an experienced author, shows how inspirational civic leaders are making a major difference in cities across the world. The analysis provides practical lessons for local leaders and a significant contribution to thinking on public service innovation for anyone who wants to change urban society for the better.

"A beautiful adventuress from the ancient city of New Dalli sets off to reclaim her missing lover. What secrets does she hide beneath her silk skirts? A gay cowboy flees the Great War in search of true love and the elusive undead poet Whit Waltman, but at what cost? A talking statue sends an abused boy spinning through a great metropolis, dodging pirates and search for a home. On these quests, you will meet macho firefighters, tiny fairies, collapsible musicians, lady devils and vengeful sea witches.""--Cover, p. [4].

Dreamers and Schemers chronicles how Los Angeles’s pursuit and staging of the 1932 Olympic Games during the depths of the Great Depression helped fuel the city’s transformation from a seedy frontier village to a world-famous metropolis. Leading that pursuit was the “Prince of Realtors,” William May (Billy) Garland, a prominent figure in early Los Angeles. In important respects, the story of Billy Garland is the story of Los Angeles. After arriving in Southern California in 1890, he and his allies drove much of the city’s historic expansion in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Then, from 1920 to 1932, he directed the city’s bid for the 1932 Olympic Games. Garland’s quest to host the Olympics provides an unusually revealing window onto a particular time, place, and way of life. Reconstructing the narrative from Garland’s visionary notion to its consequential aftermath, Barry Siegel shows how one man’s grit and imagination made California history.

From the Haitian-style “shotgun” houses of the 19th century to the lavish high-rises of the 21st century, a walk through the streets of America’s neighborhoods that reveals the rich history—and future—of urban housing The Philadelphia row house. The New York tenement. The Boston triple-decker. Every American city has its own iconic housing style, structures that have been home to generations of families and are symbols of identity and pride. Max Podemski, an urban planner for the city of Los Angeles and lifelong architecture buff, has spent his career in and around these buildings. Deftly combining his years of experience with extensive research, Podemski walks the reader through the history of our dwelling spaces—and offers a blueprint for how time-tested urban planning models can help us build the homes the United States so desperately needs. In A Paradise of Small Houses, Podemski charts how these dwellings have evolved over the centuries according to the geography, climate, population, and culture of each city. He introduces the reader to styles like Chicago’s prefabricated workers cottages and LA’s car-friendly dingbats, illuminating the human stories behind each city’s iconic housing type. Through it all, Podemski interrogates the American values that have equated home ownership with success and led to the US housing crisis, asking, “How can we look to the past to build the homes, neighborhoods, and cities of the future that our communities deserve?”