Captured By The City

Captured by the City: Perspectives in Urban Culture Studies is a collection of eighteen essays on urban places, people, and phenomena. In it, cities in North America, Europe, and Asia offer themselves as dynamic encounters to those who study them and to those who live in them on a daily basis. Different disciplines-Sociology, Anthropology, Performance Studies, Architectural History, Linguistics, Media Studies, Documentary Poetics, to name just a few-intersect here to help shape a unique field of inquiry-that of Urban Culture Studies. This multi-perspectival approach grants us a more wholesome understanding of how we inscribe cities and how cities inscribe us in return: as we plan, inhabit, remember them-in reality or in dreams.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the St. Louis Street Department generated one of the most extensive troves of photographs ever taken of the city. Ostensibly created to document municipal challenges and improvements, the images inadvertently captured richly detailed scenes of everyday life. Largely led by Charles Clement Holt (1866-1925), St. Louis's photography operation expanded until it produced about six thousand images per year in 1914. Many of these photographs were lost, but a city historian salvaged a collection of three hundred glass plate negatives in the 1950s, which are now in the Missouri Historical Society collections. This small, but superb, group of photographs provides a wealth of information on the visual culture of St. Louis during a period of rapid transformation. Capturing the City is the first book to examine these photographs, placing the people and landscapes depicted within the broader context of a swiftly urbanizing and industrializing metropolis. Collected and analyzed here by Joseph Heathcott and Angela Dietz, the compelling images in Capturing the City reveal the national trend among cities to use the camera as a documentary tool. Reformers Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine imagined the camera as a truth-telling instrument and used their photographs to mobilize public consciousness. Across the nation, cities used photographers to document slums, workhouses, and crime scenes, as well as municipal improvements like street lighting, pavement, and model housing. In this vein, Holt and his staff showcased both the challenges and the successes of government action in St. Louis. Consistent with their Progressive-era peers, their efforts contributed to the record of ongoing public works while shaping the narrative of urban progress itself.

This illustrated guide is unique. Fans of Miami Vice, Scarface, Burn Notice, and 80s Miami movies will appreciate it. The guide will also interest students of Miami history and Art Deco as well as those nostalgic about Miami in the 80s. It explains for the first time that these shows are really a time capsule of long gone Miami scenes. They serve as a record of when Miami was 1980s America on steroids. Burn Notice, an innovative show in its own right, followed Miami Vice's lead. When compared to similar scenes from Vice, recent TV shows reveal the distinctiveness of the 80s. These TV shows also provide a window into today's Miami. The guide shows where views of long gone iconic locations and typical Miami scenes can be found on the DVDs. The value of Miami Vice to South Florida is explained. Personal observations are provided by the author who lived there during the Vice years. All music played on Miami Vice is listed as well as key locations in all Vice, movies, and recent TV episodes.

How London was bought and sold by the Super-Rich, and what it means for the rest of us Who owns London? Today, the city is the epicentre of the world’s financial markets, an elite cultural hub, and a place to hide one’s wealth. In Alpha City, Rowland Atkinson tells the story of eager developers, sovereign wealth, and grasping politicians, all of which paved the way for the plutocratic colonisation of the cityscape. Atkinson moves through the gated communities and the mega-houses of the urban elite, charting how the rich live and their influence on the disturbing rise in evictions and displacements from the city. The book, fully updated, also looks at the capital’s prospects in the aftermath of Brexit and the pandemic, showing how the super-rich may capitalise on the crisis, increasing inequality and hardship.

One of the most troubling consequences of the 2008 global financial collapse was the midstream abandonment of several large-scale speculative urban and suburban projects. The resulting scars on the landscape, large subdivisions with only marked-out plots and half-finished roads, are the subject of The City That Never Was, an eye-opening look at what happens when development, particularly what the author calls "speculative urbanization" is out of sync with financial reality. Presenting historical and recent examples from around the world—from the sprawl of the US Sun Belt and the unoccupied towns of western China, to the "ghost estates" of Ireland—and focusing on case studies in Spain, Marcinkoski proposes an ecologically based model in place of the capricious economic and political factors that typically drive development today.

'In March 2015, I was tasked by Pravin Gordhan, the minister responsible for local government, to root out corruption in the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality in the Eastern Cape. Over the following eighteen months, I led the investigations and orchestrated the crackdown as the "hatchet man" for the metro's new Mayor, Danny Jordaan. This is my account of kickbacks, rigged contracts and a political party at war with itself.' How to Steal a City is the gripping insider account of this intervention, which lays bare how Nelson Mandela Bay metro was bled dry by criminal syndicates, and how factional politics within the ruling party abetted that corruption. As a former senior state official and local government 'fixer', Crispian Olver was no stranger to dodgy politicians and broken organisations. Yet what he found in Nelson Mandela Bay went far beyond rigged contracts, blatant conflicts of interest and garden-variety kickbacks. The city's administration had evolved into a sophisticated web of front companies, criminal syndicates and compromised local politicians and officials. The metro was effectively controlled by a criminal network closely allied to a dominant local ANC faction. What Olver found was complete state capture – a microcosm of what has taken place in national government. Olver and his team initiated a clean-up of the administration, clearing out corrupt officials and rebuilding public trust. Then came the ANC's doomed campaign for the August 2016 local government elections. Having lost its way in factional battles and corruption, the divided party went down to a humiliating defeat in its traditional heartland. Olver paid a high price for his work in Nelson Mandela Bay. Intense political pressure and even threats to his personal safety took a toll on his mental and physical health. When his political support was withdrawn, he had to flee the city as the forces stacked against him took their revenge. This is his story.

It has been said in China that a city without a wall would be as inconceivable as a house without a roof. Even the smallest village invariably had some form of defensive wall, while the Great Wall of China was an attempt to build a barrier along the most vulnerable border of the entire country. Yet the finest examples of walled communities were China's walled cities, whose defensive architecture surpassed anything along the Great Wall. This book traces the evolution of the walled city from the 3,000 year old remains of the beaten earth walls of the Shang dynasty to the huge stone fortifications of the Ming dynasty. Stephen Turnbull, expert military historian, reveals the defensive structures from all the major ancient Chinese cities, and discusses how they protected entire communities, and not just castle dwellers, with colour artwork reconstructions, maps and archive photographs.