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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social groups & communities > Urban communities
This volume brings a plurality of approaches, from political economic to Foucauldian, to bear on the broad range of contestations around urban neoliberalism. The contributors explore the range of resistant agency and reveal the heterogeneity of intersecting power relations that movements mobilize against.
Read Chapter One. "a]it will alter - or perhaps confirm - your thinking about
'public religion' and how traditional and immigrant congregations
address (or don't) member and community needs and attitudes and
actions towardslarger social issuesa]an obvious choice for
religious andcongregational studies and urban sociology programs.
It is alsovaluable reading for any cleric or layperson interested
in howcontemporary urban religious collectives are shaped by and
help shape the lives of their own members, surrounding communities,
and the larger society." "Rich in cultural analysis, thick description, maps,
photographs, and anecdotes, this book should be read by scholars,
policy makers, religious leaders, and anyone who wishes to better
understand one of the most exciting stories on the American urban
landscape at the turn of a new century." "This book presents the initial results of a team-based
ethnographic study aimed at understanding better the richness of
religious life in the multiplicity of communities that make up
modern Chicago." "The highly successful result of a team-based, ethnographic
approach to understanding the diversity-racial, ethnic, cultural,
economic-of Chicago's religious communities, exploring important
questions about religion's public role in the metropolis. A must
read for those interested in the religious diversity and pluralism
of American society or contemporary urban restructuring." "An interesting example of the challenge immigrants face as they
attempt to emulate established American institutions while
retaining those elements that allow them to function as cohesive
communities of ethnic and religious identity." "Reaches across the boundaries of private faith and public
action, of traditional turf and challenging new populations, of
older generations and restless youth, of growing ethnic/religious
groups where there can be no majority, and, as yet, no consensus .
. . Uncomfortable but essential reading." "Furnishes a rich and diverse insight into the changing American
metropolis. Unlike virtually any other book I have read, it does so
by examining how church leaders and members cope with these
changes. In the end, we get stories not merely of churches and
religious change, but of how a major social institution helps
people of diverse faiths and backgrounds survive and succeed in the
modern American metropolis." American cities are in the midst of fundamental changes. De-industrialization of large, aging cities has been enormously disruptive for urban communities, which are being increasingly fragmented. Though often overlooked, religious organizations are important actors, both culturally and politically in the restructuring metropolis. Public Religion and Urban Transformation provides a sweeping view of urban religion in response to thesetransformations. Drawing on a massive study of over seventy-five congregations in urban neighborhoods, this volume provides the most comprehensive picture available of urban places of worship-from mosques and gurdwaras to churches and synagogues-within one city. Revisiting the primary site of research for the early members of the Chicago School of urban sociology, the volume focuses on Chicago, which provides an exceptionally clear lens on the ways in which religious organizations both reflect and contribute to changes in American pluralism. From the churches of a Mexican American neighborhood and of the Black middle class to communities shared by Jews, Christians, Hindus, and Muslims and the rise of "megachurches," Public Religion and Urban Transformation illuminates the complex interactions among religion, urban structure, and social change at this extraordinary episode in the history of urban America.
The Gay Village in Montreal is a vibrant and unique neighborhood born in the 1980s. It serves as the locus of much of the social life of LGBTQ persons, and is the site of many celebrations including annual pride activities such as the Divers/Cite arts and music festival, Community Day, and the Pride parade. As a result, it has become a popular draw for tourists from around the world. Montreal's Gay Village explores the neighborhood from a variety
of vantage points and attempts to answer many salient questions
about its origins, name, residents, and more: When and why did the
Village emerge as a gay neighborhood? This scholarly profile explores the answer to these and many other questions regarding this unique, internationally known community.
White working class areas are often seen as entrenched and immobile, threatened by the arrival of 'outsiders'. This major new study of class and place since 1930 challenges accepted wisdom, demonstrating how emigration as well as shorter distance moves out of such areas can be as suffused with emotion as moving into them. Both influence people's sense of belonging to the place they live in. Using oral histories from residents of three social housing estates in Norwich, England, the book also tells stories of the appropriation of and resistance to state discourses of community; and of ambivalent, complex and shifting class relations and identities. Material poverty has been a constant in the area, but not for all residents, and being defined as 'poor' is an identity that some actively resist.
African Americans have suffered intensely at the hands of America's dominant group, but the roles played by urban planning, land use policy, and the free market are not well known. Presenting a new conceptual approach, this book considers their "locking effect" on African Americans, showing, for instance, that one-acre zoning and similar policies in upscale neighborhoods lock African Americans out while market mechanisms in decaying neighborhoods lock them in. Arguing that the locking effect leads to the disenfranchisement of African Americans, Bobo shows how wealth is channeled to the dominant group and African Americans' life choices are denuded, creating a volatile situation. Although classical economic theory holds that a free market allocates scarce resources in the best interest of society, in reality market mechanisms do not work to the advantage of African Americans. Nor does public regulation of land use operate in their interest, although public policy is presumed to produce equitable and favorable outcomes for all members of society. This book explores how a combination of government regulation of land use and free market forces have created the locking effect, which has cultivated and sustained a process of disenfranchisement of African Americans.
This book was first published in 1943.
Although the city as a central entity did not simply disappear with the Fall of the Roman Empire, the development of urban space at least since the twelfth century played a major role in the history of medieval and early modern mentality within a social-economic and religious framework. Whereas some poets projected urban space as a new utopia, others simply reflected the new significance of the urban environment as a stage where their characters operate very successfully. As today, the premodern city was the locus where different social groups and classes got together, sometimes peacefully, sometimes in hostile terms. The historical development of the relationship between Christians and Jews, for instance, was deeply determined by the living conditions within a city. By the late Middle Ages, nobility and bourgeoisie began to intermingle within the urban space, which set the stage for dramatic and far-reaching changes in the social and economic make-up of society. Legal-historical aspects also find as much consideration as practical questions concerning water supply and sewer systems. Moreover, the early modern city within the Ottoman and Middle Eastern world likewise finds consideration. Finally, as some contributors observe, the urban space provided considerable opportunities for women to carve out a niche for themselves in economic terms.
This monograph presents a simple, innovative approach for the measurement and short-term prediction of highway travel times based on the fusion of inductive loop detector and toll ticket data. The methodology is generic and not technologically captive, allowing it to be easily generalized for other equivalent types of data. The book shows how Bayesian analysis can be used to obtain fused estimates that are more reliable than the original inputs, overcoming some of the drawbacks of travel-time estimations based on unique data sources. The developed methodology adds value and obtains the maximum (in terms of travel time estimation) from the available data, without recurrent and costly requirements for additional data. The application of the algorithms to empirical testing in the AP-7 toll highway in Barcelona proves that it is possible to develop an accurate real-time, travel-time information system on closed-toll highways with the existing surveillance equipment, suggesting that highway operators might provide their customers with such an added value with little additional investment in technology.
Given the rapid urbanisation of the world's population, the converse phenomenon of shrinking cities is often overlooked and little understood. Yet with almost one in ten post-industrial US cities shrinking in recent years, efforts by government and anchor institutions to regenerate these cities is gaining policy urgency, with the availability and siting of affordable housing being a key concern. This is the first book to look at the reasons for the failure (and success) of affordable housing experiences in the fastest shrinking cities in the US. Applying quantitative and GIS analysis using data from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, the authors make recommendations for future place-based siting practices, stressing its importance for ensuring more equitable urban revitalisation. The book will be a valuable resource for academic researchers and students in urban studies, housing and inequality, as well as policy makers.
Urban Ills: Twenty First Century Complexities of Urban Living in Global Contexts is a collection of original research focused on critical challenges and dilemmas to living in cities. Volume 2 is devoted to the myriad issues involving urban health and the dynamics of urban communities and their neighborhoods. The editors define the ecology of urban living as the relationship and adjustment of humans to a highly dense, diverse, and complex environment. This approach examines the nexus between the distribution of human groups with reference to material resources and the consequential social, political, economic, and cultural patterns which evolve as a result of the sufficiency or insufficiency of those material resources. They emphasize the most vulnerable populations suffering during and after the recession in the United States and around the world, and the chapters examine traditional issues of housing and employment with respect to these communities.
Exploring the complex dynamics of twenty-first century spatial sociality, this volume provides a much-needed multi-dimensional perspective that undermines the dominant image of Northern Ireland as a conflict-ridden place. Despite touching on memories of "the Troubles" and continuing unionist-nationalist tensions, the volume refuses to consider people in the region as purely political beings, or to understand processes of placemaking solely through ethnic or national contestations and territoriality. Topics such as the significance of friendship, gender, and popular culture in spatial practices are considered, against the backdrop of the growing presence of migrants, refugees and diasporic groups.
As an insight into contemporary British society, Fairness, Class and Belonging in Contemporary England is a timely ethnographic exploration of the ways in which the 'white', 'English' 'working classes' in a north Manchester neighbourhood expressed feelings of being 'ignored' and 'neglected' by local and national governments. Providing important insights into the implications of policy-making, the book focuses on local idioms and individual articulations of 'fairness', exploring governmental ideologies and policies of 'equality' to question the disparate connotations concerning these topics. Discussing what it means to be both 'fair' and a good English person and what this means for 'belonging' in this part of northern England, it seeks to specify how each narrative of 'belonging' and 'fairness' is marked and changed by the interlocking concerns and effects of geographical origin, familiarity between individuals and groups, political orientations, ethnicities, genders and shared histories of racial and cultural imaginations.
One of the major growth fields of the past quarter century, American urban history has generated a rich and diverse literature spanning a number of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. In this time of transition, historians and practitioners alike can benefit greatly from assessing the contributions of the field. This valuable reference work takes a critical approach to existing literature. Dealing with various related avenues of the field which have not always been closely linked together, these essays provide a basis for new synthesis and reinterpretation, as well as for judgment about the lasting effects of the American urban experience.
This is an ethnographic study of predominantly Puerto Rican low-income people on the Lower East Side of Manhattan who have been involved in the rehabilitation of abandoned buildings through sweat-equity urban homesteading from 1978 to 1993. The study combines a portrait of homesteading in a contemporary urban environment with an analysis of homesteading in the context of economic and political developments at the local, state, and national levels. As participant-observer of the rehabilitation efforts, von Hassell was impressed with the ingenuity and initiative of poor and working-class people. She came to the conclusion that housing as a central factor in poverty amelioration must be interpreted with other factors such as labor, education, and health care, and that despite internal conflicts the project could have been more successful if it had received local political, governmental, and social services support.
Astana, the capital city of the post-Soviet Kazakhstan, has often been admired for the design and planning of its futuristic cityscape. This anthropological study of the development of the city focuses on every-day practices, official ideologies and representations alongside the memories and dreams of the city's longstanding residents and recent migrants. Critically examining a range of approaches to place and space in anthropology, geography and other disciplines, the book argues for an understanding of space as inextricably material-and-imaginary, and unceasingly dynamic - allowing for a plurality of incompatible pasts and futures materialized in spatial form.
This volume examines how urban stakeholders in China - particularly city governments and social actors - tackle China's urban environmental crisis. The volume's case studies speak to important interdisciplinary themes such as new tools and instruments of urban green governance, climate change and urban carbon consumption, green justice, digital governance, public participation, social media, social movements, and popular protest. It lays out a unique theoretical framework for examining and discussing urban green governance. The case studies are based on extensive fieldwork that examines governance failures, challenges, and innovations from across China, including the largest cities. They show that numerous policies, experiments, and reforms have been put in place in China - mostly on a pragmatic basis, but also as a result of both strategic policy design, civil participation, and protest. The book highlights how China's urban governments bring together diverse programmatic building blocks and instruments, from China and elsewhere. Written by experts and researchers from different disciplines at leading universities in China and the Nordic countries in Europe, this volume will be of interest to researchers and students who are interested in Chinese politics, especially urban politics, governance issues, and social movements. Both students and teachers will find the theoretical perspectives and case studies useful in their coursework.The unique green governance perspective makes this a work that is empirically and theoretically interesting for those working with urban political and environmental studies and urbanization worldwide.
Following the ground-breaking Performance and the City, this new volume explores what it means to create and experience urban performance - as both an aesthetic and a political practice - in the burgeoning world cities built by globalization and neoliberal capital. Featuring work by artists as well as scholars, written from multiple disciplinary perspectives, and including dozens of photographs as well as a photo essay by Nicholas Whybrow, Performance and the Global City will appeal to readers interested in urban studies, theatre and performance, geography, sociology, and globalization studies.
Lived diversities: Space, place and identities in the multi-ethnic city is a timely and important book, which focuses on multi-ethnic interaction in an inner city area. Addressing difficult issues that are often simplistically and negatively portrayed it challenges the stereotypical denigration of inner city life, and Muslim communities in particular. Using well-crafted historical, political and contextual explanations the book provides a nuanced account of contemporary multi-ethnic coexistence. This invaluable contribution to our understanding of the politics and practice of multicultural coexistence is a must-read for students and practitioners interested in ethnic diversity, urban policy and the politics of place and space.
Our street-level economy is undergoing dramatic change. Retailers are reeling from the rise of e-commerce, rising rents, and increasing storefront vacancies, along with a cultural shift from material to experiential consumerism. Today, the COVID-19 pandemic is contributing to economic upheaval as commercial corridors and the small businesses they house face sweeping closures, bankruptcy, and job losses. Streetlife brings together scholars who have been trying to make sense of the changing retail landscape at street level and what it means for urbanism's future. Streetlife pays special attention to the varied responses and policies that have emerged to address the competing realities of small business loss and neighbourhood needs. With case studies from the United States, as well as contributions covering Canada and Europe, this book demystifies the logic behind street-level urban retail and calls for better plans, designs, policies, and innovations to bolster sales. Streetlife shows that now, more than ever before, we need to understand what makes our storefronts tick, what awaits them, and what we can do as planners, designers, developers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers to maintain retail as integral to urban lifestyle.
Life in Bangkok for young people is marked by profound, interlocking changes and transitions. This book offers an ethnographic account of growing up in the city's slums, struggling to get by in a rapidly developing and globalizing economy and trying to fulfil one's dreams. At the same time, it reflects on the issue of agency, exploring its negative potential when exercised by young people living under severe structural constraint. It offers an antidote to neoliberal ideas around personal responsibility, and the assumed potential for individuals to break through structures of constraint in any sustained way.
Public transport in low-income Asian (LIA) cities fails to meet people's mobility needs, generates high greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and worsens social exclusion. Following successful Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) projects in Bogota and Curitiba, LIA countries promoted BRT in their large to medium-sized cities. However, the political and institutional structure distinctive to LIA cities makes their implementation difficult. This book investigates policy tensions by examining the planning and attempted implementation of BRT projects, taking Bandung and Surabaya in Indonesia as case studies. It analyses BRT to understand how power and communication gaps in institutional relationships between different actors at multiple levels of governance create conflict, and concludes that top-down policies and funding mechanisms cause tension in intergovernmental relationships. It also found that BRT solutions generated socio-political tension arising from the socio-economic realities and local political dynamics that shaped city structure, mobility patterns and capacity in resolving conflicts. The superimposed BRT solution generated discursive tension because conflicting discourses were not aligned with local economic, social, and environmental issues. The book highlights the need to take into consideration the vital role of local social and political actors, institutions and planning processes as they respond to and shape policies that are imposed by higher levels.
This reference work provides a summary of historical and contemporary aspects of urbanization in Africa. The volume is organized in three parts. The first part provides a historical overview of urbanization in Africa from ancient civilizations to the present day. The second part provides detailed studies of urbanization in fifteen highly urbanized African countries. Each chapter in this section is devoted to one country, and the chapters are arranged alphabetically for convenient access. Countries profiled are located in different regions of the continent, and each has an urban population of at least 500,000 people. The third part of the volume includes chapters on topics of special importance to African urbanization, such as economics and demographics. The chapters are written by expert contributors and provide current references. The volume concludes with a selected bibliography.
Many forces threaten the viability of town centers. One of them is trade concentration in which family businesses are replaced by large, vertically integrated retail enterprises. Town centers, once locations of a rich variety of street stores in the hands of a local and independent merchant community, are being supplanted by monolithic and decentralized commercial zones. This process is documented in contemporary Germany for two towns, one grounded in a market economy and the other, until recently, socialistically based. In both cases, trade concentration is a prevailing force-- a pattern that is not only found in post-industrialized nations, but also in developing countries in Latin America and Asia and is indicative of an emerging global culture. |
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