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This interdisciplinary book considers national identity through the lens of urban spaces. By bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, The City as Power provides broad comparative perspectives about the critical importance of urban landscapes as forums for creating, maintaining, and contesting identity and belonging. Rather than serving as passive backdrops, urban spaces and places are active mediums for defining categories of inclusion—and exclusion. With an international scope and ready appeal to visual learners, the book offers a compelling survey of historical and contemporary efforts to enact state ideals, express counter-narratives, and negotiate global trends in cities. The contributors show how successive regimes reshape cityscapes to mirror their respective socio-political agendas, perspectives on history, and assumptions of power. Yet they must do so within the legal, ethnic, religious, social, economic, and cultural geographies inherited from previous regimes. Exploring the rich diversity of urban space, place, and national identity, the book compares core elements of identity projects in a range of political, cultural, and socioeconomic settings. By focusing on the built form and urban settings for social movements, protest, and even organized violence, this timely book demonstrates that cities are not simply lived in but also lived through.
Reigning theories of urban power suggest that in a world dominated by footloose transnational capital, cities have little capacity to effect social change. In City Power, Richard Schragger challenges this conventional wisdom, arguing that cities can and should pursue aims other than making themselves attractive to global capital. Using the municipal living wage movement as an example, Schragger explains why cities are well-positioned to address issues like income equality and how our institutions can be designed to allow them to do so.
Overlooked Cities reflects and impacts the changing landscape of urban studies and geography from the perspective of smaller and more regional cities in the urban South. It critically examines the ways in which cities are uniquely positioned within different urban and knowledge hierarchies. The book unpacks the dynamics of “overlooked-ness” in these cities, identifies emerging trends and processes that characterise such cities and provides alternative sites for comparative urban theory. It is organised into two themes: firstly, politics and power and secondly, production and negotiation of knowledge. The authors share a commitment to challenging the unevenness of urban knowledge production by approaching these cities on their own terms. Only then can we harness the insights emanating from these overlooked cities, and contribute to a deeper and richer understanding of the urban itself. This collection of essays, focusing on 13 cities in nine countries and across three continents (Luzhou, China; Bharatpur, Nepal; Bloemfontein/Mangaung and Pretoria/Tshwane, South Africa; Zarqa, Jordan; Santa Fe, Argentina; Manizales, Colombia; Arequipa and Trujillo, Peru; Dili, Timor-Leste; Bandar Lampung, Semarang and Bontang, Indonesia) makes a timely contribution to urban scholarship. The volume will be of interest to scholars from the disciplines of urban studies, geography, development and anthropology, as well as postgraduate students researching the global South and third year undergraduate students studying cities and urban studies, development and critical thinking.
"Pringle’s fast-paced book is a master class in investigative journalism... when institutions collude to protect one another, reporting may be our last best hope for accountability." —The New York Times For fans of Spotlight and Catch and Kill comes a nonfiction thriller about corruption and betrayal radiating across Los Angeles from one of the region's most powerful institutions, a riveting tale from a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who investigated the shocking events and helped bring justice in the face of formidable odds. On a cool, overcast afternoon in April 2016, a salacious tip arrived at the L.A. Times that reporter Paul Pringle thought should have taken, at most, a few weeks to check out: a drug overdose at a fancy hotel involving one of the University of Southern California’s shiniest stars—Dr. Carmen Puliafito, the head of the prestigious medical school. Pringle, who’d long done battle with USC and its almost impenetrable culture of silence, knew reporting the story wouldn’t be a walk in the park. USC is one of the biggest employers in L.A., and it casts a long shadow. But what he couldn’t have foreseen was that this tip would lead to the unveiling of not one major scandal at USC but two, wrapped in a web of crimes and cover-ups. The rot rooted out by Pringle and his colleagues at The Times would creep closer to home than they could have imagined—spilling into their own newsroom. Packed with details never before disclosed, Pringle goes behind the scenes to reveal how he and his fellow reporters triumphed over the city’s debased institutions, in a narrative that reads like L.A. noir. This is L.A. at its darkest and investigative journalism at its brightest.
Visions of the City is a dramatic history of utopian urbanism in the twentieth century. It explores radical demands for new spaces and ways of living, and considers their effects on planning, architecture and struggles to shape urban landscapes. The author critically examines influential utopian approaches to urbanism in western Europe associated with such figures as Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier, uncovering the political interests, desires and anxieties that lay behind their ideal cities. He also investigates avant-garde perspectives from the time that challenged these conceptions of cities, especially from within surrealism. At the heart of this richly illustrated book is an encounter with the explosive ideas of the situationists. Tracing the subversive practices of this avant-garde group and its associates from their explorations of Paris during the 1950s to their alternative visions based on nomadic life and play, David Pinder convincingly explains the significance of their revolutionary attempts to transform urban spaces and everyday life. He addresses in particular Constant's New Babylon, finding within his proposals a still powerful provocation to imagine cities otherwise. The book not only recovers vital moments from past hopes and dreams of modern urbanism. It also contests current claims about the 'end of utopia', arguing that reconsidering earlier projects can play a critical role in developing utopian perspectives today. Through the study of utopian visions, it aims to rekindle elements of utopianism itself. A superb critical exploration of the underside of utopian thought over the last hundred years and its continuing relevance in the here and now for thinking about possible urban worlds. The treatment of the Situationists and their milieu is a revelation. David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, City University of New York Graduate School
With a new afterword covering the two decades since its first publication, two of Washington, D.C.’s most respected journalists expose one of America’s most tragic ironies: how the nation’s capital, often a gleaming symbol of peace and hope, is the setting for vicious contradictions and devastating conflicts over race, class, and power. Jaffe and Sherwood have chillingly chronicled the descent of the District of Columbia—congressional hearings, gangland murders, the establishment of home rule and the inside story of Marion Barry’s enigmatic dynasty and disgrace. Now their afterword narrates the District’s transformation in the last twenty years. New residents have helped bring developments, restaurants, and businesses to reviving neighborhoods. The authors cover the rise and fall of Mayors Adrian Fenty and Vince Gray, how new corruption charges are taking down politicians and businessmen, and how a fading Barry is still a player. The “city behind the monuments” remains flawed and polarized, but its revival is turning it into a distinct world capital—almost a dream city. Harry Jaffe has been a national editor at The Washingtonian magazine since 1990. He has received a number of awards for investigative journalism and feature writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. He has taught journalism at Georgetown University and American University. His work has appeared in Esquire, Regardie's, Outside, Philadelphia Magazine, National Geographic Traveler, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, and other newspapers. Jaffe was born and raised in Philadelphia and began his journalism career with the Rutland (Vermont) Herald. He is the co-author of Dream City: Race, Power and the Decline of Washington, D.C. He lives in Clarke County, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughters. Tom Sherwood is a reporter for NBC4 in Washington, specializing in politics and the District of Columbia government. Tom also is a commentator for WAMU 88.5 public radio and a columnist for the Current Newspapers. Tom has twice been honored as one of the Top 50 Journalists in Washington by Washingtonian magazine. He began his journalism career at The Atlanta Constitution and covered local and national politics for The Washington Post from 1979 to 1989. He is the co-author of Dream City: Race, Power and the Decline of Washington, D.C. A native of Atlanta, he currently resides in Washington, D.C. and has one son, Peyton.
Why are cities centers of power? A sociological analysis of urban politics In this brilliant, very original survey of the politics and meanings of urban landscapes, leading sociologist Göran Therborn offers a tour of the world’s major capital cities, showing how they have been shaped by national, popular, and global forces. Their stories begin with the emergence of various kinds of nation-state, each with its own special capital city problematic. In turn, radical shifts of power have impacted on these cities’ development, in popular urban reforms or movements of protest and resistance; in the rise and fall of fascism and military dictatorships; and the coming and going of Communism. Therborn also analyzes global moments of urban formation, of historical globalized nationalism, as well as the cities of current global image capitalism and their variations of skyscraping, gating, and displays of novelty. Through a global, historical lens, and with a thematic range extending from the mutations of modernist architecture to the contemporary return of urban revolutions, Therborn questions received assumptions about the source, manifestations, and reach of urban power, combining perspectives on politics, sociology, urban planning, architecture, and urban iconography. He argues that, at a time when they seem to be moving apart, there is a strong link between the city and the nation-state, and that the current globalization of cities is largely driven by the global aspirations of politicians as well as those of national and local capital. With its unique systematic overview, from Washington, D.C. and revolutionary Paris to the flamboyant twenty- first-century capital Astana in Kazakhstan, its wealth of urban observations from all the populated continents, and its sharp and multi-faceted analyses, Cities of Power forces us to rethink our urban future, as well as our historically shaped present.
Reigning theories of urban power suggest that in a world dominated by footloose transnational capital, cities have little capacity to effect social change. In City Power, Richard C. Schragger challenges the existing assumptions, arguing that cities can govern, but only if we let them. In the past decade, city leaders across the country have raised the minimum wage, expanded social services, and engaged in social welfare redistribution. These cities have not suffered capital flight. In fact, many are experiencing an economic renaissance. Schragger argues that city policies are not limited by the demands of mobile capital, but instead by constitutional restraints serving the interests of state and federal officials. Maintaining weak cities is a political choice. In this new era of global capital, the power of cities is more relevant to citizen well-being than ever before. A dynamic vision of city politics for our new urban age, City Power reveals how cities can govern despite these constitutional limits - and why we should want them to.