The Fate Of Cities

The first major comprehensive treatment of urban revitalization in 35 years. Examines the federal government's relationship with urban America from the Truman through the Clinton administrations. Provides a telling critique of how, in the long run, government turned a blind eye to the fate of cities.

Amirli (Emirli) is a Turkmen district of the Province of Salahaddin in Iraq. It is one of the Turkmen regions well known in Iraq due to its history, geographic location, and important events that took place therein. Amirli lies at the South end of what could be considered the Turkmen Plain, composed of Altınköprü, Kirkuk, Tazehurmatu, Dakuk, and Tuzhurmatu. Given its geographical position, Amirli occupies a strategic position as it connects the Turkmen region, at its southern end, to the Arab region. Throughout history, Amirli has always been one of the places where Turks had chosen to settle inside Iraq. For years, Turkmens in Amirli had earned their living as shepherds and through agricultural activities. Nevertheless, since the beginning of the 1990s and especially after 2003, its inhabitants have started to prefer working as servants in public institutions. The Turkish dialect spoken in Amirli (Turkmen language), is very similar to that spoken in Bayat villages. The Turkmen language spoken in Bestamlı and some Bayat villages is the dialect most similar to that of Amirli. The language spoken in Amirli differs to a certain extent from the dialects of Kirkuk, Tal Afar, and Tuzhurmatu. The people of Amirli are known for their adherence to cultural values. Amirli, which is located far away from big cities, has closer tribal/family ties compared to other Turkmen regions except for Tal Afar. People of Amirli have been excluded from the local and central governments by the rulers who governed Iraq for a long time. Amirli, which had been a subdistrict under Tuzhurmatu District until 29 January, 1976, was separated from Kirkuk province and was placed under Salahaddin province in line with the policies targeting demographic change carried out by the Baath regime. In this way, the purpose was to distance Amirli and other Turkmen regions from Turkmens living in Kirkuk province. Besides, during the Baath regime, many Turkmens of Amirli were accused of being members of the Islamic Dawa Party, and some were forced to leave the country. Since 2003, Turkmens of Amirli have tried to be active in the provinces of Baghdad and Salahaddin. Today, the population of the district center of Amirli, which is totally composed of Turkmens, is estimated to be around 23 thousand. The total population of the district, including the villages, is estimated to be more than 45 thousand. Amirli has often been on the agenda in Iraq due to terrorist attacks. Having been based in the Hamrin Mountains to the south, west, and east of the district, terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and ISIS have carried out hundreds of attacks against the people of the district. For this reason, Amirli shared a similar fate with Tuzhurmatu.

[FOR HISTORY CATALOGS]Drawing on the pronouncements of public commentators, this book portrays the 20th century history of U.S. cities, focusing specifically on how commentators crafted a discourse of urban decline and prosperity peculiar to the post-World War II era. The efforts of these commentators spoke to the foundational ambivalence Americans have toward their cities and, in turn, shaped the choices Americans made as they created and negotiated the country's changing urban landscape. [FOR GEOG/URBAN CATALOGS]Freely crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book uses the words of those who witnessed the cities' distress to portray the postwar discourse on urban decline in the United States. Up-dated and substantially re-written in stronger historical terms, this new edition explores how public debates about the fate of cities drew from and contributed to the choices made by households, investors, and governments as they created and negotiated America's changing urban landscape.

Imagine your home is bombed one Sunday afternoon by a horde of enemy planes. Imagine your family has gone and you are left behind. This is the fate of five-year-old Peter and two teenagers Yuri and Tanya. Imagine being ordered to leave school to fight the terrifying Nazis in WWII. Imagine you are right in the middle of a battle; it's you or them – you have no choice. This is the fate of Vlad and his three classmates. The battlefield is the city of Stalingrad, the pride of Russia. Germany's Adolf Hitler wants the city badly, but Josef Stalin refuses to let go. Nobody has managed to stop the triumphant Nazi invasion across Europe. It all depends on one city – Stalingrad – her citizens, her soldiers and her children.

How Bill de Blasio’s mayoral victory triggered a seismic shift in the nation’s urban political landscape—and what it portends for our cities in the future In November 2013, a little-known progressive stunned the elite of New York City by capturing the mayoralty by a landslide. Bill de Blasio’s promise to end the “Tale of Two Cities” had struck a chord among ordinary residents still struggling to recover from the Great Recession. De Blasio’s election heralded the advent of the most progressive New York City government in generations. Not since the legendary Fiorello La Guardia in the 1930s had so many populist candidates captured government office at the same time. Gotham, in other words, had been suddenly reclaimed in the name of its people. How did this happen? De Blasio’s victory, journalist legend Juan González argues, was not just a routine change of government but a popular rebellion against corporate-friendly policies that had dominated New York for decades. Reflecting that broader change, liberal Democrats Bill Peduto in Pittsburgh, Betsy Hodges in Minneapolis, and Martin Walsh of Boston also won mayoral elections that same year, as did insurgent Ras Baraka in Newark the following year. This new generation of municipal leaders offers valuable lessons for those seeking grassroots reform.

We live in a self-proclaimed Urban Age, where we celebrate the city as the source of economic prosperity, a nurturer of social and cultural diversity, and a place primed for democracy. We proclaim the city as the fertile ground from which progress will arise. Without cities, we tell ourselves, human civilization would falter and decay. In Cities in the Urban Age, Robert A. Beauregard argues that this line of thinking is not only hyperbolic—it is too celebratory by half. For Beauregard, the city is a cauldron for four haunting contradictions. First, cities are equally defined by both their wealth and their poverty. Second, cities are simultaneously environmentally destructive and yet promise sustainability. Third, cities encourage rule by political machines and oligarchies, even as they are essentially democratic and at least nominally open to all. And fourth, city life promotes tolerance among disparate groups, even as the friction among them often erupts into violence. Beauregard offers no simple solutions or proposed remedies for these contradictions; indeed, he doesn’t necessarily hold that they need to be resolved, since they are generative of city life. Without these four tensions, cities wouldn’t be cities. Rather, Beauregard argues that only by recognizing these ambiguities and contradictions can we even begin to understand our moral obligations, as well as the clearest paths toward equality, justice, and peace in urban settings.

This study examines how cities have become an area of significant historical debate about late antiquity, challenging accepted notions that it is a period of dynamic change and reasserting views of the era as one of decline and fall.

Once a thriving metropolis on the banks of the Mississippi, St. Louis, Missouri, is now a ghostly landscape of vacant houses, boarded-up storefronts, and abandoned factories. The Gateway City is, by any measure, one of the most depopulated, deindustrialized, and deeply segregated examples of American urban decay. "Not a typical city," as one observer noted in the late 1970s, "but, like a Eugene O'Neill play, it shows a general condition in a stark and dramatic form." Mapping Decline examines the causes and consequences of St. Louis's urban crisis. It traces the complicity of private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, and federal housing policies in the "white flight" of people and wealth from the central city. And it traces the inadequacy—and often sheer folly—of a generation of urban renewal, in which even programs and resources aimed at eradicating blight in the city ended up encouraging flight to the suburbs. The urban crisis, as this study of St. Louis makes clear, is not just a consequence of economic and demographic change; it is also the most profound political failure of our recent history. Mapping Decline is the first history of a modern American city to combine extensive local archival research with the latest geographic information system (GIS) digital mapping techniques. More than 75 full-color maps—rendered from census data, archival sources, case law, and local planning and property records—illustrate, in often stark and dramatic ways, the still-unfolding political history of our neglected cities.