Publisher Description

Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, a clinical psychiatrist, exposes the devastating outcome of decades of urban renewal projects to our nation’s marginalized communities. Examining the traumatic stress of “root shock” in three African American communities and similar widespread damage in other cities, she makes an impassioned and powerful argument against the continued invasive and unjust development practices of displacing poor neighborhoods.

Shock Cities is environmental history of the highest order. This searching work is the first trans-Atlantic study to examine the industrial city in holistic terms, looking at the transformation of its land, water, and air. Harold L. Platt demonstrates how the creation of industrial ecologies spurred the reorganization of urban areas into separate spheres, unhealthy slums in the center and garden estates in the suburbs. By comparing Chicago and Manchester, Platt also shows how the ruling classes managed the political creation of urban space to ensure financial gain—often to the environmental detriment of both regions. Shock Cities also recasts the age of industry within a larger frame of nature. Frightening epidemics and unnatural "natural disasters" forced the city dwellers onto the path of environmental reform. Crusaders for social justice such as Chicago's Jane Addams and Manchester's Charles Rowley led class-bridging campaigns to clean up the slums. Women activists and other "municipal housekeepers" promoted regulations to reduce air pollution. Public health experts directed efforts to improve sanitation. Out of these reform movements, the Progressives formulated new concepts of environmental conservation and regional planning. Comparing the two cities, Platt highlights the ways in which political culture and institutions act to turn social geography into physical shapes on the ground. This focus on the political formation of urban space helps illuminate questions of social and environmental justice. Shock Cities will be of enormous value to students of ecology, technology, urban planning, and public health in the Western world.

A comparative and trans-national study of urban culture in Britain and the United States from the late nineteenth to the twentieth century

What if divided neighborhoods were causing public health problems? What if a new approach to planning and design could tackle both the built environment and collective well-being at the same time? What if cities could help each other? Dr. Mindy Fullilove, the acclaimed author of Root Shock, uses her unique perspective as a public health psychiatrist to explore ways of healing social and spatial fractures simultaneously. Using the work of French urbanist Michel Cantal-Dupart as a guide, Fullilove takes readers on a tour of successful collaborative interventions that repair cities and make communities whole.

In recent years, European societies and territories have witnessed the spatial impacts of a severe financial and socio-economic crisis. This book builds on the current debate concerning how cities and urban regions and their citizens deal with the consequences of the recent financial and socio-economic crisis. Cities in Crisis examines the political and administrative implications of austerity measures applied in southern European cities. These include cuts in local public spending and the processes of privatization of local public assets, as well as issues related to the re-scaling, recentralization or decentralization of competencies. Attention is paid to the rise of new ‘austerity regimes’, the question of their legitimacy and their spatial manifestations, and in particular to the social consequences of austerity. The contributions to this book lay the foundation for recommendations on how to improve and consolidate qualified governance arrangements in order to better address rapid economic and social changes. Such recommendations are applicable to cities and urban regions both within and outside of Europe. It identifies possible approaches, tools and partnerships to tackle the effects of the crisis and to prepare European cities for future challenges.

In a world where forecasting seems futile, where predictions are unreliable, and where even the most absurd scenarios are plausible, many urban planning decisions seem to be governed not by vision - but by fear. Fear of disaster, fear of change, fear of the unknown. Can we learn from 'fear'? Can we even use it as a guide for spatial planning? 'City Shock' explores ten innocent 'what ifs'. What kinds of radical trend breaks can we expect, and with what effects? Guided by fantasy rather than science, this book imagines how each of these scenarios could play out in the Dutch landscape between 2018 and 2047. In a narrative composed of (im)possible headlines, a chain of fictitious newspaper spreads reports these events, exposes their possible causes and depicts their potential consequences for Dutch spatial planning and lifestyle.

In the 20th century, Ahmedabad was India's "shock city." It was the place where many of the nation's most important developments occurred first and with the greatest intensity -- from Gandhi's political and labor organizing, through the growth of textile, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries, to globalization and the sectarian violence that marked the turn of the new century. Events that happened there resonated throughout the country, for better and for worse. Howard Spodek describes the movements that swept the city, telling their story through the careers of the men and women who led them.

The metropolis is a site of endless making and unmaking. From the attempt to imagine a 'city-symphony' to the cinematic tradition that runs from Walter Ruttmann to Terence Davies, Restless Cities traces the idiosyncratic character of the metropolitan city from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first-century megalopolis. With explorations of phenomena including nightwalking, urbicide, property, commuting and recycling, this wide-ranging new book identifies and traces the patterns that have defined everyday life in the modern city and its effect on us as individuals. Bringing together some of the most significant cultural writers of our time, Restless Cities is an illuminating, revelatory journey to the heart of our metropolitan world.

Cities around the world are striving to be 'global'. This book tells the story of one of them, and in so doing raises questions of identity, place and political responsibility that are essential for all cities. World City focuses its account on London, one of the greatest of these global cities. London is a city of delight and of creativity. It also presides over a country increasingly divided between North and South and over a neo-liberal form of globalisation - the deregulation, financialisation and commercialisation of all aspects of life - that is resulting in an evermore unequal world. World City explores how we can understand this complex narrative and asks a question that should be asked of any city: what does this place stand for? Following the implosion within the financial sector, such issues are even more vital. In a new Preface, Doreen Massey addresses these changed times. She argues that, whatever happens, the evidence of this book is that we must not go back to 'business as usual', and she asks whether the financial crisis might open up a space for a deeper rethinking of both our economy and our society.