Snowbelt Cities

"A major contribution to the literature on changing US regionalism, the volume is handsomely produced and thoroughly documented." --Choice "... useful and well researched... " --American Politics Review "This is an excellent book for use in the course on comparative urban development... It is a book that should be read by any urbanist who believes that a historical orientation is the best prelude for understanding the future of urban development into the 21st century." --Urban Studies Specialists in urban history and urban affairs join forces to compare the recent political histories of twelve major northeastern and midwestern cities. These excellent essays delineate intricate patterns of political competition among leaders of competing groups, who generally agree on a pro-business, pro-growth agenda, as in the Sunbelt. The realtive power of nonbusiness groups, however, sets these northern cities apart from those of the Sunbelt and has formed the basis of the Snowbelt's postwar politics.

The income of blacks in most northern industrial states today is lower relative to the income of whites than in 1949.Fusfeld and Bates examine the forces that have led to this state of affairs and find that these economic relationships are the product of a complex pattern of historical development and change in which black-white economic relation­ships play a major part, along with pat­terns of industrial, agricultural, and technological change and urban develop­ment. They argue that today's urban racial ghettos are the result of the same forces that created modern Amer­ica and that one of the by-products of American affluence is a ghettoized racial underclass. These two themes, they state, are es­sential for an understanding of the prob­lem and for the formulation of policy. Poverty is not simply the result of poor education, skills, and work habits but one outcome of the structure and func­tioning of the economy. Solutions re­quire more than policies that seek to change people: they await a recognition that basic economic relationships must be changed.

This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture offers a current and authoritative reference to urbanization in the American South from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, surveying important southern cities individually and examining the various issues that shape patterns of urbanization from a broad regional perspective. Looking beyond the post-World War II era and the emergence of the Sunbelt economy to examine recent and contemporary developments, the 48 thematic essays consider the ongoing remarkable growth of southern urban centers, new immigration patterns (such as the influx of Latinos and the return-migration of many African Americans), booming regional entrepreneurial activities with global reach (such as the rise of the southern banking industry and companies such as CNN in Atlanta and FedEx in Memphis), and mounting challenges that result from these patterns (including population pressure and urban sprawl, aging and deteriorating infrastructure, gentrification, and state and local budget shortfalls). The 31 topical entries focus on individual cities and urban cultural elements, including Mardi Gras, Dollywood, and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

The revised and updated third edition of The Making of Urban America includes seven new articles and a richly detailed historiographical essay that discusses the vast urban history literature added to the canon since the publication of the second edition. The authors’ extensively revised introductions and the fifteen reprinted articles trace urban development from the preindustrial city to the twentieth-century city. With emphasis on the social, economic, political, commercial, and cultural aspects of urban history, these essays illustrate the growth and change that created modern-day urban life. Dynamic topics such as technology, immigration and ethnicity, suburbanization, sunbelt cities, urban political history, and planning and housing are examined. The Making of Urban America is the only reader available that covers all of U.S. urban history and that also includes the most recent interpretive scholarship on the subject.

An explanation of why some US cities are better at educational reform than others. It relates education to politics, showing how the whole village can be mobilized to better educate tomorrow's citizens. It is based on an 11-city study of civic capacity and urban education.

Chicago and New York share similar backgrounds but have had strikingly different fates. Tracing their fortunes from the 1930s to the present day, Ester R. Fuchs examines key policy decisions which have influenced the political structures of these cities and guided them into, or clear of, periods of economic crisis.