"At once cautionary and hopeful, Designing Modern Childhoods is an indispensable and incisive analysis of the special role of the built environment in both opening and foreclosing good futures for kids around the globe." -Michael Sorkin, director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at the City College of New York "From Turkish schools to New Zealand playgrounds and American summer camps, these essays offer a fresh and challenging take on the modern city from the perspective of its most overlooked residents." -Dell Upton, professor of art history, University of California, Los Angeles "This book takes the reader on a richly detailed and imaginative journey into the changing organization and meanings of childhood." -Barrie Thorne, professor of sociology, gender, and women's studies, University of California, Berkeley "This imaginative and original collection will play an important role in enhancing a growing interest in the history and sociology of childhood." -Peter Stearns, provost and professor of history, George Mason University In Designing Modern Childhoods, architectural historians, social historians, social scientists, and architects examine the history and design of places and objects such as schools, hospitals, playgrounds, houses, cell phones, snowboards, and even the McDonald's Happy Meal. Special attention is given to how children use and interpret the spaces, buildings, and objects that are part of their lives, becoming themselves creators and carriers of culture. The authors extract common threads in children's understandings of their material worlds, but they also show how the experience of modernity varies for young people across time, through space, and according to age, gender, social class, race, and culture. The foreword by Paula S. Fass and epilogue by John R. Gillis add additional depth to this comprehensive examination. Marta Gutman is an associate professor in the School of Architecture, Urban Design, and Landscape Architecture at the City College of New York/CUNY. Ning de Coninck-Smith is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Sociology at the School of Education-Arhus University.

American cities are constantly being built and rebuilt, resulting in ever-changing skylines and neighborhoods. While the dynamic urban landscapes of New York, Boston, and Chicago have been widely studied, there is much to be gleaned from west coast cities, especially in California, where the migration boom at the end of the nineteenth century permanently changed the urban fabric of these newly diverse, plural metropolises.
In "A City for Children," Marta Gutman focuses on the use and adaptive reuse of everyday buildings in Oakland, California, to make the city a better place for children. She introduces us to the women who were determined to mitigate the burdens placed on working-class families by an indifferent industrial capitalist economy. Often without the financial means to build from scratch, women did not tend to conceive of urban land as a blank slate to be wiped clean for development. Instead, Gutman shows how, over and over, women turned private houses in Oakland into orphanages, kindergartens, settlement houses, and day care centers, and in the process built the charitable landscape--a network of places that was critical for the betterment of children, families, and public life. The industrial landscape of Oakland, riddled with the effects of social inequalities and racial prejudices, is not a neutral backdrop in Gutman's story but an active player. Spanning one hundred years of history, "A City for Children "provides a compelling model for building urban institutions and demonstrates that children, women, charity, and incremental construction, renovations, alterations, additions, and repurposed structures are central to the understanding of modern cities.