Surviving City Hall

With humour and humanity, Surviving City Hall reveals the workings of the municipal world based on author Donna Macdonald's nineteen years as a city councillor. Wrestling with ground squirrels, dealing with dogs and grappling with the Three Bears of Governance, Macdonald offers an insider's view into how things work at city hall in a call to citizens in communities of all shapes and sizes. From the table where council members make decisions—to lock out city workers, detoxify a workplace issue, permit high density development and ban dogs downtown—to the richness of community life, including meetings, memorials, meat banquets and rallies for the protection of endangered animals, this book is a big-hearted take on small-town politics. It's also a reflection on leadership and on democracy, and how we could do both better. Macdonald ponders women's participation in local governance, why it's critical and what the barriers are that can dissuade women from engaging more fully in the governance of their communities.

With humour and humanity, Surviving City Hall reveals the workings of the municipal world based on author Donna Macdonald's nineteen years as a city councillor. Wrestling with ground squirrels, dealing with dogs and grappling with the Three Bears of Governance, Macdonald offers an insider's view into how things work at city hall in a call to citizens in communities of all shapes and sizes. From the table where council members make decisions--to lock out city workers, detoxify a workplace issue, permit high density development and ban dogs downtown--to the richness of community life, including meetings, memorials, meat banquets and rallies for the protection of endangered animals, this book is a big-hearted take on small-town politics. It's also a reflection on leadership and on democracy, and how we could do both better. Macdonald ponders women's participation in local governance, why it's critical and what the barriers are that can dissuade women from engaging more fully in the governance of their communities.

The rise to power of one of Canada's most progressive municipal movements in recent memory. When it was dreamed up in the early 2000s by a transportation bureaucrat with a quixotic dream of bringing tramways back to the streets of Montreal, few expected Projet Montréal to go anywhere. But a decade and a half later, the party was a grassroots powerhouse with an ambitious agenda that had taken power at city hall--after dumping its founder, barely surviving a divisive leadership campaign and earning the ire of motorists across Quebec. Projet Montréal aspired to transform Montreal into a green, human-scale city with few, if any equal in North America. Equal parts reportage, oral history and memoir, Saving the City chronicles what the party did right, where it failed, and where it's headed. Written from the perspective of someone who worked for Projet Montréal's administration for almost a decade, Daniel Sanger's book draws on dozens of interviews with other actors in the party and on the municipal scene, past and present. A highly readable history of Montreal municipal politics over the past 30 years, Saving the City will also discuss issues of interest to city-dwellers across Canada. Are political parties at the municipal level a good thing? Is Montreal's borough system a model for other big cities? What are the best ways to control urban car use? What is the optimum width for a sidewalk? The best kind of street tree? And why free parking is a terrible idea.

This book takes you on a unique journey through American history, taking time to consider the forces that shaped the development of various cities and regions, and arrives at an unexpected conclusion regarding sustainability. From the American Dream to globalization to the digital and information revolutions, we assume that humans have taken control of our collective destinies in spite of potholes in the road such as the Great Recession of 2007-2009. However, these attitudes were formed during a unique 100-year period of human history in which a large but finite supply of fossil fuels was tapped to feed our economic and innovation engine. Today, at the peak of the Oil Age, the horizon looks different. Cities such as Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas are situated where water and other vital ecological services are scarce, and the enormous flows of resources and energy that were needed to create the megalopolises of the 20th century will prove unsustainable. Climate change is a reality, and regional impacts will become increasingly severe. Economies such as Las Vegas, which are dependent on discretionary income and buffeted by climate change, are already suffering the fate of the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Finite resources will mean profound changes for society in general and the energy-intensive lifestyles of the US and Canada in particular. But not all regions are equally vulnerable to these 21st-century megatrends. Are you ready to look beyond “America’s Most Livable Cities” to the critical factors that will determine the sustainability of your municipality and region? Find out where your city or region ranks according to the forces that will impact our lives in the next years and decades. Find out how: ·resource availability and ecological services shaped the modern landscape ·emerging megatrends will make cities and regions more or less livable in the new century ·your city or region ranks on a “sustainability” map of the United States ·urban metabolism puts large cities at particular risk ·sustainability factors will favor economic solutions at a local, rather than global, level ·these principles apply to industrial economies and countries globally. This book should be cited as follows: J. Day, C. Hall, E. Roy, M. Moersbaecher, C. D'Elia, D. Pimentel, and A. Yanez. 2016. America's most sustainable cities and regions: Surviving the 21st century megatrends. Springer, New York. 348 p.

Seen through the eyes of parents, mainly mothers, City survivors tells the eye-opening story of what it is like to bring up children in troubled city neighbourhoods. The book provides a unique insider view on the impact of neighbourhood conditions on family life and explores the prospects for families from the point of view of equality, integration, schools, work, community, regeneration and public services. City Survivors is based on yearly visits over seven years to two hundred families living in four highly disadvantaged city neighbourhoods, two in East London and two in Northern inner and outer city areas. Twenty four families, six from each area, explain over time from the inside, how neighbourhoods in and of themselves directly affect family survival. These twenty four stories convey powerful messages from parents about the problems they want tackled, and the things that would help them. The main themes explored in the book are neighbourhood, community, family, parenting, incomes and locals, the need for civic intervention. The book offers original and in-depth, qualitative evidence in a readable and accessible form that will be invaluable to policy-makers, practitioners, university students, academics and general readers interested in the future of families in cities.

Surviving the Rising Sun is the story of an American family in the Philippines during the Japanese occupation in World War II. The author was a teenage girl when she was interned in Santo Tomas Prison Camp for over three years, along with her parents, grandmother, and uncle. After Liberation, her grandmother was awarded the Medal of Freedom for her work in aiding the military prisoners in other camps in the Manila area. This book includes diary entries, letters, notes, newspaper articles and over one hundred pictures.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, built at what was once the hypocenter of an atomic blast, is the most visible sign of the city's renaissance as a force for peace in 21st century politics. But it is not the only reminder of the spirit of Hiroshima. Less well-known are the scores of ?survivors? dotting the metropolitan landscape. These treasured trees, shrubs, and groves date from before the bombing on August 6th 1945. They were spared from annihilation, and are now carefully tended by the schools, homes, temples, and shrines entrusted by fate with their care. Based on a three-year stay in the city by the authors, this pictorial journey into the heart of Hiroshima documents more than 50 sites and 75 trees. There are maps, bilingual place names and addresses, snapshots of local culture, and overviews of each species of plant. Never-before published translations of essays by the a-bomb survivor Tamiki Hara are also included as meditations on the meaning of peace in difficult times.

This is an autobiography. Describes the life of Elemér Mihályi from early childhood, through school years, medical school and work as a doctor during the siege of Budapest and in a Russian prison camp. After this he abandoned medical practice and for the rest of his life was engaged in scientific research, first in Budapest, then in Stockholm and finally in the USA; for the last 30 years in the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. The tumultuous events in Central Europe between the World Wars and after form the background of the history of his family. Romania occupied Transylvania in 1920 and an oppressive, chauvinistic regime followed. This was alleviated in the northern half when this was returned to Hungary, however after the war Romanian rule was restored for the whole province. The author escaped to Hungary, but soon Communism was slowly encroaching this country. Again he had to leave and by good luck arrived to America. Beside the historical facts all of this is illustrated by numerous anecdotal events, more than by an analytical approach. All the episodes are true, from the life of the author, given without embellishments or omissions.