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Over the past decades the nation state lost its political primacy by processes of devolution, Europeanisation and globalisation, which in turn enhanced municipal autonomy. Why do some cities seek to sidestep the state and widen their sphere of action? Bridging political geography, local politics and urban sociology, this book gives a new perspective on the state’s weakening authority and the parallel rise of cities as political actors. The author considers the tensions between central states and European cities, giving a new perspective to students and researchers in the social sciences.
Examines the life stories and perspectives about freedom in relation to the figures depicted in an infamous Reconstruction-era political cartoon
The liberal governance of the nineteenth-century state and city depended on the "rule of freedom." As a form of rule it relied on the production of certain kinds of citizens and patterns of social life, which in turn depended on transforming both the material form of the city (its layout, architecture, infrastructure) and the ways it was inhabited and imagined by its leaders, citizens and custodians. Focusing mainly on London and Manchester, but with reference also to Glasgow, Dublin, Paris, Vienna, colonial India, and even contemporary Los Angeles, Patrick Joyce creatively and originally develops Foucauldian approaches to historiography to reflect on the nature of modern liberal society. His consideration of such "artifacts" as maps and censuses, sewers and markets, public libraries and parks, and of civic governments and city planning, are intertwined with theoretical interpretations to examine both the impersonal, often invisible forms of social direction and control built into the infrastructure of modern life and the ways in which these mechanisms shape cultural and social life and engender popular resistance.
A City within a City examines the civil rights movement in the North by concentrating on the struggles for equality in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Historian Todd Robinson studies the issues surrounding school integration and bureaucratic reforms as well as the role of black youth activism to detail the diversity of black resistance. He focuses on respectability within the African American community as a way of understanding how the movement was formed and held together. And he elucidates the oppositional role of northern conservatives regarding racial progress. A City within a City cogently argues that the post-war political reform championed by local Republicans transformed the city's racial geography, creating a racialized "city within a city," featuring a system of "managerial racism" designed to keep blacks in declining inner-city areas. As Robinson indicates, this bold, provocative framework for understanding race relations in Grand Rapids has broader implications for illuminating the twentieth-century African American urban experience in secondary cities.
An endlessly entertaining portrait of the city of Amsterdam and the ideas that make it unique, by the author of the acclaimed Island at the Center of the World Tourists know Amsterdam as a picturesque city of low-slung brick houses lining tidy canals; student travelers know it for its legal brothels and hash bars; art lovers know it for Rembrandt's glorious portraits. But the deeper history of Amsterdam, what makes it one of the most fascinating places on earth, is bound up in its unique geography-the constant battle of its citizens to keep the sea at bay and the democratic philosophy that this enduring struggle fostered. Amsterdam is the font of liberalism, in both its senses. Tolerance for free thinking and free love make it a place where, in the words of one of its mayors, "craziness is a value." But the city also fostered the deeper meaning of liberalism, one that profoundly influenced America: political and economic freedom. Amsterdam was home not only to religious dissidents and radical thinkers but to the world's first great global corporation. In this effortlessly erudite account, Russell Shorto traces the idiosyncratic evolution of Amsterdam, showing how such disparate elements as herring anatomy, naked Anabaptists parading through the streets, and an intimate gathering in a sixteenth-century wine-tasting room had a profound effect on Dutch-and world-history. Weaving in his own experiences of his adopted home, Shorto provides an ever-surprising, intellectually engaging story of Amsterdam.
"This study examines the dialetic of metropolitan spatial stratification during the era of civil rights in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Focusing primarily on the color of space, this dissertation challenges conventional notions of 'de facto' metropolitan development and illustrates how the construction of segregated space in Grand Rapids materialized not as a natural result of housing migration patterns, but instead as a consequence of discriminatory structural forces combined with a firm pattern of white hostility... In short, this dissertation conceptualizes space as a racial category that is actively constructed and reconstructed by individuals within the confines of specific structural mechanisms, which ultimately produced a landscape of inequality."--Abstract, pages viii-ix.
Winner of the Bancroft Prize In twenty-first-century America, some cities are flourishing and others are struggling, but they all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. Cities have limited tools to address these problems, and many must rely on the private market to support the public good. It wasn’t always this way. For almost three decades after World War II, even as national policies promoted suburban sprawl, the federal government underwrote renewal efforts for cities that had suffered during the Great Depression and the war and were now bleeding residents into the suburbs. In Saving America’s Cities, the prizewinning historian Lizabeth Cohen follows the career of Edward J. Logue, whose shifting approach to the urban crisis tracked the changing balance between government-funded public programs and private interests that would culminate in the neoliberal rush to privatize efforts to solve entrenched social problems. A Yale-trained lawyer, rival of Robert Moses, and sometime critic of Jane Jacobs, Logue saw renewing cities as an extension of the liberal New Deal. He worked to revive a declining New Haven, became the architect of the “New Boston” of the 1960s, and, later, led New York State’s Urban Development Corporation, which built entire new towns, including Roosevelt Island in New York City. Logue’s era of urban renewal has a complicated legacy: Neighborhoods were demolished and residents dislocated, but there were also genuine successes and progressive goals. Saving America’s Cities is a dramatic story of heartbreak and destruction but also of human idealism and resourcefulness, opening up possibilities for our own time.
This publication explores the contested territory between the state and corporate drive to 'securitise' urban space – and the principle of the city as a site for enacting open civil society, participatory democracy, and the freedom of speech and assembly. Starting from the disputed redevelopment of the Oslo Government Quarter since its attack in 2011, the book functions as a broader discursive platform mediating opposing positions at the intersection of architecture/urbanism and security/democracy. The book interposes essays, interviews, site drawings, a lexicon of terms, and photo-essays documenting fieldwork in the UK, USA, Israel, Palestine and Spain. Contributors include: S. Graham, M. Sorkin, D.Harvey, G. Agamben, Y. Yasky, L. Lambert, CPNI, R. V. Clarke, J. Coaffee, and O. Newman.
This memoir of life as a committed pedestrian in a beautiful Southern city explores the many joys and benefits of walking as a way of life. Raised on the notion that driving is the essence of freedom, many of us still cling to the belief that the American Dream is defined by a house in the suburbs and a car in the garage. But in Why I Walk, Kevin Klinkenberg shares a very different dream life—and a very different kind of freedom. A few years ago, Kevin moved to Savannah, Georgia, from Kansas City, Missouri. In large part, he chose his new home because he was seeking a truly walkable place to live. Going beyond the typical arguments against suburbia, he shows how walking on a daily basis has improved his health, finances, social life, and sense of personal freedom. By focusing directly on the real, measurable advantages of choosing to be a pedestrian, Why I Walk makes a convincing case for ending our love affair with the automobile—and rekindling the romance of walking.
Gilded Age cities offered extraordinary opportunities to women--but at a price. As clerks, factory hands, and professionals flocked downtown to earn a living, they alarmed social critics and city fathers, who warned that self-supporting women were just steps away from becoming prostitutes. With in-depth research possible only in a mid-sized city, Sharon E. Wood focuses on Davenport, Iowa, to explore the lives of working women and the prostitutes who shared their neighborhoods. The single, self-supporting women who migrated to Davenport in the years following the Civil War saw paid labor as the foundation of citizenship. They took up the tools of public and political life to assert the respectability of paid employment and to confront the demon of prostitution. Wood offers cradle-to-grave portraits of individual girls and women--both prostitutes and "respectable" white workers--seeking to reshape their city and expand women's opportunities. As Wood demonstrates, however, their efforts to rewrite the sexual politics of the streets met powerful resistance at every turn from men defending their political rights and sexual power.