Urban parks such as New York City's Central Park provide vital public spaces where city dwellers of all races and classes can mingle safely while enjoying a variety of recreations. By coming together in these relaxed settings, different groups become comfortable with each other, thereby strengthening their communities and the democratic fabric of society. But just the opposite happens when, by design or in ignorance, parks are made inhospitable to certain groups of people. This pathfinding book argues that cultural diversity should be a key goal in designing and maintaining urban parks. Using case studies of New York City's Prospect Park, Orchard Beach in Pelham Bay Park, and Jacob Riis Park in the Gateway National Recreation Area, as well as New York's Ellis Island Bridge Proposal and Philadelphia's Independence National Historical Park, the authors identify specific ways to promote, maintain, and manage cultural diversity in urban parks. They also uncover the factors that can limit park use, including historical interpretive materials that ignore the contributions of different ethnic groups, high entrance or access fees, park usage rules that restrict ethnic activities, and park "restorations" that focus only on historical or aesthetic values. With the wealth of data in this book, urban planners, park professionals, and all concerned citizens will have the tools to create and maintain public parks that serve the needs and interests of all the public.

This offers a varied perspective on the popular health/illness category of nerves. Relationships between gender and nerves are investigated in terms of biology and epidemiology, interpersonal and social relations, social construction of gender, affective and symbolic qualities of nerves.

Robert B. Textor Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology, American Anthropological Association, 2000 Honorable Mention, Victor Turner Award, Society for Humanistic Anthropology, 2001 Leeds Prize, Society of Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology, 2001 Friendly gossip, political rallies, outdoor concerts, drugs, shoeshines, and sex-for-sale-almost every aspect of Latin American life has its place and time in the public plaza. In this wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary study, Setha M. Low explores the interplay of space and culture in the plaza, showing how culture acts to shape public spaces and how the physical form of the plaza encodes the social and economic relations within its city. Low centers her study on two plazas in San Jose, Costa Rica, with comparisons to public plazas in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. She interweaves ethnography, history, literature, and personal narrative to capture the ambiance and meaning of the plaza. She also uncovers the contradictory ethnohistories of the European and indigenous origins of the Latin American plaza and explains why the plaza is often a politically contested space.

In step with the growing interest in place attachment, this volume examines the phenomena from the perspective of several disciplines-including anthropology, folklore, and psychology-and points towards promising directions of future research.

This book originates in two symposia held during 1985 at the annual meetings of the Society for Applied Anthropology and the Environmental Design Research Association.

"Theorizing the City has become fundamental reading for those students of urban society and culture who wish to better understand twentieth-century city forms and spaces, as well as why certain race, gender, age, and class inequalities continue to be manifested today." -- Alejandro Lugo, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "Using rich comparative material, this volume presents an intriguing anthropological vision of how cities are shaped. A major addition to a comparative anthropology of cities." --Judith Goode, co-editor of The New Poverty Studies "These informative essays make clear that anthropology has much to offer to urban theory and policy debates." --Nancy Foner, author of From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration Anthopological perspectives are not often represented in urban studies, even though many anthropologists have been contributing actively to theory and research on urban poverty, racism, globalization, and architecture. Theorizing the City corrects this omission. Following a brief history of urban anthroplogy, emphasizing developments in the field during the 1990s, this volume presents twelve ethnographies of major cities in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Five images of the city--the divided city, the contested city, the global city, the modernist city, and the postmodern city--serve as frameworks for the essays. Each section highlights current research trends such as poststructural studies of race, class, and gender in the urban context; political economic studies of transnational culture; and studies of the symbolic meanings and social production or urban spaces. Setha M. Low is professor of environmental psychology and anthopology and director of the Public Space Research Group at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture.