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The City at Stake tells the dramatic story of how the nation's second-largest city completed a major reform of its government in the face of a deeply threatening movement for secession by the San Fernando Valley. How did Los Angeles, a diverse city with an image of unstructured politics and fragmented government, find a way to unify itself around a controversial set of reforms? Los Angeles government nearly collapsed in political bickering over charter reform, which generated the remarkable phenomenon of two competing charter reform commissions. Out of this nearly impossible tangle, reformers managed to knit a new city charter that greatly expanded institutions for citizen participation and addressed long-standing weaknesses in the role of the mayor. The new charter, pursued by a Republican mayor, won its greatest support from liberal whites who had long favored reform measures. Written by an urban scholar who played a key role in the charter reform process, the book offers both a theoretical perspective on the process of institutional reform in an age of diversity, and a firsthand, inside-the-box look at how major reform works. The new afterword by the author analyzes the 2005 election of Los Angeles's first modern Latino mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, a milestone in the development of urban reform coalitions in an age of immigration and ethnic diversity.
The first novel in a YA fantasy romance series featuring “vampires with bite and girls who bite back. A witty, exhilarating and fresh take on an old tale” (Kelley Armstrong). On her sixteenth birthday, Solange Drake is going to die . . . But that’s okay. As the only daughter ever born to an ancient vampire dynasty, Solange’s sweet sixteen just means she will fully come into her own as an immortal. Unfortunately, it also means a lot of people both dead and undead are now watching her. Especially Kieran Black—a vengeful agent with an anti-vampire league who blames Solange’s family for his father’s death. Luckily, Solange has her human best friend, Lucy, who tries to help her have as normal a life as possible, despite her overprotective brothers and the politics of the undead realm. But when Solange is abducted by a power-hungry vampire queen, it will take all her friends—as well as the daring and dangerous Kieran—to rescue her before she loses her eternal life . . . In this “action-packed” (School Library Journal) story of love, loyalty, and blood ties, Alyxandra Harvey kicks off a saga of thrills with a nail-biter—and a neck-biter—that will have readers eager to devour the rest of the series. Hearts at Stake is the 1st book in the Drake Chronicles, which also includes Blood Feud and Out for Blood.
Unlike so many other cities around the country, Columbus citizens gave a firm "no" to the proposal that public money be used to build an arena to attract an expansion professional hockey team and a soccer stadium to keep a professional franchise. Yet, both structures are now a permanent part of Columbuss landscape. High Stakes is the inside story of how a coalition of the city's movers and shakers successfully did an end-run around the electorate to build these sports complexes. As it turned out, everybody appears to have won: taxpayers were relieved of any funding obligation, the coalition got the new facilities, and the new arena jumpstarted downtown redevelopment. Now, the Columbus case is being touted as the model of how to use professional sports to improve a city's downtown with minimal taxpayer expense. [Publisher web site].
The life of Edward Hunter Snow (1865–1932), a leader in second-generation Mormon Utah, closely paralleled the early-twentieth-century development of the West. Born in St. George, Utah, to Julia Spencer and Mormon apostle Erastus Snow, Edward Hunter Snow was instrumental both in the development of southern Utah and in the growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during a period of rapid change. In Edward Hunter Snow, the first biography of the man, noted western and Mormon historian Thomas G. Alexander presents Snow as a servant of family, church, state, and nation. Offering insights into the LDS Church around the turn of the twentieth century, Alexander narrates the events of Snow’s missions to the American South, including encounters with the Ku Klux Klan in the 1880s, and to New York. As president of the St. George Stake and church leader, Snow sought to reshape the LDS Church’s place in Utah—confining its influence to religious and cultural practices and avoiding politics. Although he was involved in numerous causes throughout his life, Snow was especially dedicated to education. A graduate of what is now Brigham Young University, he worked to ensure that the state’s children would have access to quality education. Snow founded what is now Dixie State College and, as a state senator, introduced legislation to establish what is now Southern Utah University. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, Snow helped St. George grow from an isolated cotton colony to an important stop on the main automobile route from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. Alexander shows that rugged, southwestern Utah’s flowering into cultural and commercial maturity was due to the foresight and dedication of second-generation pioneers like Edward Hunter Snow.
The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Century Urban Design is a fully illustrated descriptive and explanatory history of the development of urban design ideas and paradigms of the past 150 years. The ideas and projects, hypothetical and built, range in scale from the city to the urban block level. The focus is on where the generic ideas originated, the projects that were designed following their precepts, the functions they address and/or afford, and what we can learn from them. The morphology of a city—its built environment—evolves unselfconsciously as private and governmental investors self-consciously erect buildings and infrastructure in a pragmatic, piecemeal manner to meet their own ends. Philosophers, novelists, architects, and social scientists have produced myriad ideas about the nature of the built environment that they consider to be superior to those forms resulting from a laissez-faire attitude to urban development. Rationalist theorists dream of ideal futures based on assumptions about what is good; empiricists draw inspirations from what they perceive to be working well in existing situations. Both groups have presented their advocacies in manifestoes and often in the form of generic solutions or illustrative designs. This book traces the history of these ideas and will become a standard reference for scholars and students interested in the history of urban spaces, including architects, planners, urban historians, urban geographers, and urban morphologists.