The American City

"Grady Clay looks hard at the landscape, finding out who built what and why, noticing who participates in a city's success and who gets left in a 'sink,' or depressed (often literally) area. Clay doesn't stay in the city; he looks at industrial towns, truck stops, suburbs—nearly anywhere people live or work. His style is witty and readable, and the book is crammed with illustrations that clarify his points. If I had to pick up one book to guide my observations of the American scene, this would be it."—Sonia Simone, Whole Earth Review "The emphasis on the informal aspects of city-shaping—topographical, historical, economic and social—does much to counteract the formalist approach to American urban design. Close-Up...should be required reading for anyone wishing to understand Americans and their cities."—Roger Cunliffe, Architectural Review "Close-Up is a provocative and stimulating book."—Thomas J. Schlereth, Winterthur Portfolio "Within this coherent string of essays, the urban dweller or observer, as well as the student, will find refreshing strategies for viewing the environmental 'situations' interacting to form a landscape."—Dallas Morning News "Clay's Close-Up, first published in 1973, is still a key book for looking at the real American city. Too many urban books and guidebooks concentrate on the good parts of the city....Clay looks at all parts of the city, the suburbs, and the places between cities, and develops new terms to describe parts of the built environment—fronts, strips, beats, stacks, sinks, and turf. No one who wants to understand American cities or to describe them, should fail to know this book. The illustrations are of special interest to the guidebook writer."—American Urban Guidenotes

This comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to urban planning and design in America analyzes key projects initiated in 250 U.S. urban areas and details which strategies and programs were successful and which failed. New to the Second Edition: * New sections on stadiums, entertainment centers, business improvement districts, tax credit housing * Checklists and tables for field use * A review of recent failures and successes This classic reference, fully revised for the new millennium, provides proven strategies for professionals and invaluable real-world insights for students.

It's time for America to move beyond zoning, argues city planner M. Nolan Gray in Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. With lively explanations, Gray shows why zoning abolition is a necessary--if not sufficient--condition for building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. Gray lays the groundwork for this ambitious cause by clearing up common misconceptions about how American cities regulate growth and examining four contemporary critiques of zoning (its role in increasing housing costs, restricting growth in our most productive cities, institutionalizing racial and economic segregation, and mandating sprawl). He sets out some of the efforts currently underway to reform zoning and charts how land-use regulation might work in the post-zoning American city. Arbitrary Lines is an invitation to rethink the rules that will continue to shape American life--where we may live or work, who we may encounter, how we may travel. If the task seems daunting, the good news is that we have nowhere to go but up

Urban redevelopment in American cities is neither easy nor quick. It takes a delicate alignment of goals, power, leadership and sustained advocacy on the part of many. Rebuilding the American City highlights 15 urban design and planning projects in the U.S. that have been catalysts for their downtowns—yet were implemented during the tumultuous start of the 21st century. The book presents five paradigms for redevelopment and a range of perspectives on the complexities, successes and challenges inherent to rebuilding American cities today. Rebuilding the American City is essential reading for practitioners and students in urban design, planning, and public policy looking for diverse models of urban transformation to create resilient urban cores.

"In his magisterial Great American City, Robert J. Sampson puts social scientific data behind an argument that we all feel and experience everyday: the neighborhood you live in has a big effect on your life and the city you live in. Not only does your neighborhood determine where your nearest hospital is, what kind of schools your children can attend, or how many police officers you might encounter (and how they respond to you), it affects how you feel, how you think about the world and your place in it. Like many sociologists before him, Sampson looks to Chicago to make his insightful interventions, based on extensive data collected across the city's diverse neighborhoods. This edition includes a new afterword by Sampson reflecting on changes in Chicago and the country that have occurred since the book was initially published. He notes the increase in gun violence, both among civilians and police killings of civilians, as well as steady or growing rates of segregation despite an increase in diversity. With these changes have come new research, much of it a continuation or elaboration of the work in Great American City. He updates readers on the status of the research initiative that serves as the basis of Great American City, the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), and summarizes how scholars have taken up his work. Many of these scholars have new tools at their disposal with the rise of big data; Sampson remarks on these changes in the field"--

Benefiting from Montreal's remarkable archival records, Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton use an ingenious sampling of twelve surnames to track the comings and goings, births, deaths, and marriages of the city's inhabitants. The book demonstrates the importance of individual decisions by outlining the circumstances in which people decided where to move, when to marry, and what work to do. Integrating social and spatial analysis, the authors provide insights into the relationships among the city's three cultural communities, show how inequalities of voice, purchasing power, and access to real property were maintained, and provide first-hand evidence of the impact of city living and poverty on families, health, and futures. The findings challenge presumptions about the cultural "assimilation" of migrants as well as our understanding of urban life in nineteenth-century North America. The culmination of twenty-five years of work, Peopling the North American City is an illuminating look at the humanity of cities and the elements that determine whether their citizens will thrive or merely survive.

Eye-opening and thoroughly engaging, this is an indispensible look at American urban/suburban society and its future. In The Great Inversion, Alan Ehrenhalt, one of our leading urbanologists, reveals how the roles of America’s cities and suburbs are changing places—young adults and affluent retirees moving in, while immigrants and the less affluent are moving out—and addresses the implications of these shifts for the future of our society. Ehrenhalt shows us how the commercial canyons of lower Manhattan are becoming residential neighborhoods, and how mass transit has revitalized inner-city communities in Chicago and Brooklyn. He explains why car-dominated cities like Phoenix and Charlotte have sought to build twenty-first-century downtowns from scratch, while sprawling postwar suburbs are seeking to attract young people with their own form of urbanized experience.