Back to the City

Back to the City
Author: Shirley Bradway Laska
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2016-06-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1483142205

Back to the City: Issues in Neighborhood Renovation focuses on the policies, social issues, and approaches involved in the residential revitalization of inner cities. The book first offers information on an urban land institute survey of private-market housing renovation in central cities and reinvestment by long-time residents and newcomers. Considerations include character of neighborhood renewal, reasons for reinvestment timing, and an overview of the experience on private renewal. The selection also takes a look at the racial and socioeconomic changes in central-city housing, as well as changes in racial successions, limited support for urban revitalization, and characteristics of transition households. The publication reviews the case studies done at neighborhood resettlements in Washington, D.C., New Orleans, Columbus, Seattle, Charleston, and Philadelphia. Topics include residential mobility of new homeowners; neighborhoods in transitions; displacement; satisfaction with the neighborhood; contrasting conceptions of the neighborhood; and historic preservation and neighborhood. The selection is a dependable reference for geographers, urban planners, and sociologists.

Migrant City

Migrant City
Author: Les Back
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2018-06-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134709757

Migrant City tells the story of contemporary London from the perspective of thirty adult migrants and two sociologists. Connecting migrants’ private struggles to the public issues at stake in the way mobility is regulated, channelled and managed in a globalised world, this volume explores what migration means in a world that is hyper connected – but where we see increasingly mobile, invasive and technologically sophisticated forms of border regulation and control. Migrant City is an innovative collaborative ethnography based on research with migrants from a wide variety of social backgrounds, spanning in some cases a decade. It utilises recollections, photographs, poems, paintings, journals and drawings to explore a wide range of issues. These range from the impact of immigration control and surveillance on everyday life, to the experience of waiting for the Home Office to process their claims and the limits this places on their lives, to the friendships and relationships with neighbours that help to make London a home. This title will appeal to students, scholars, community workers and general readers interested in migration, race and ethnicity, social exclusion, globalisation, urban sociology, and inventive social research methods.

Coming Back to the City

Coming Back to the City
Author: Anuradha Kumar
Publisher:
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2019-10-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9789389231533

Stories from the great metropolis--home to the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved. In Parel's Jupiter Mills chawl, one of the few remaining ones in Mumbai, live many long-time residents: Pooja, restless and trapped in an unhappy marriage, finds joy in her flourishing dabba service and attempts at learning English. Pooja's husband Mahesh whose only dream is to zip through the streets in his boss's yellow Mercedes-Benz. Dr Joshi who has hidden away two paintings: one of a murder he witnessed, and the other a striking portrait of Pooja. And Vasudha, a scheming single mother who hopes to give her daughter a better life in this treacherous city. In the parallel Mumbai of high-rises live the affluent few: Suhel, a confirmed bachelor, who finds himself falling in love--first with a portrait and then its subject, Pooja. Ghatge, Mahesh's boss and an upcoming politician of dubious repute. A young and disturbed journalist Raina Gupta who opens up old wounds when she interviews veteran activist Neera Joshi about the mill-workers' strike of the 1980s and her scandalous affair with its assassinated leader. And Dr Sneha Desai, a successful but lonely radiologist, fighting to restart her sex-education classes for adolescents in a municipal school. In the Mumbai of mills and malls where everything--especially land--is at a premium, the chawl becomes the target of greedy real-estate barons and sleazy politicians, thus bringing together this interconnected cast of characters. As vast and diverse as Mumbai itself, Coming Back to the City draws us effortlessly, completely into the lives of the people who animate the maximum city, even as they are consumed by it--people caught in a web of unexpected love, desperate ambition and endless, addictive optimism.

Salvation City

Salvation City
Author: Sigrid Nunez
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2010-09-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101443391

“A NOVEL FOR LIFE AFTER THE PANDEMIC…Scratches a particular imaginative itch that we are all experiencing at the precipice of a new era." -- The New Yorker From the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend comes a moving and eerily relevant novel that imagines the aftermath of a pandemic virus as seen through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy uncertain of his destiny. His family's sole survivor after a flu pandemic has killed large numbers of people worldwide, Cole Vining is lucky to have found refuge with the evangelical Pastor Wyatt and his wife in a small town in southern Indiana. As the world outside has grown increasingly anarchic, Salvation City has been spared much of the devastation, and its residents have renewed their preparations for the Rapture. Grateful for the shelter and love of his foster family (and relieved to have been saved from the horrid, overrun orphanages that have sprung up around the country), Cole begins to form relationships within the larger community. But despite his affection for this place, he struggles with memories of the very different world in which he was reared. Is there room to love both Wyatt and his parents? Are they still his parents if they are no longer there? As others around him grow increasingly fixated on the hope of salvation and the new life to come through the imminent Rapture, Cole begins to conceive of a different future for himself, one in which his own dreams of heroism seem within reach. Written in Sigrid Nunez's deceptively simple style, Salvation City is a story of love, betrayal, and forgiveness, weaving the deeply affecting story of a young boy's transformation with a profound meditation on the meaning of belief and heroism.

Back to Barbary Lane

Back to Barbary Lane
Author: Armistead Maupin
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2016-12-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062683020

By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Armistead Maupin's bestselling Tales of the City novels—the fourth, fifth and sixth of which are collected in this second omnibus volume—stand as an incomparable blend of great storytelling and incisive social commentary on American culture from the seventies through the first two decades of the new millennium. “Tearing through [the tales] one after the other, as I did, allows instant gratification; it also lets you appreciate how masterfully they're constructed. No matter what Maupin writes next, he can look back on the rare achievement of having built a little world and made it run.”— Walter Kendrick, Village Voice Literary Supplement Armistead Maupin's uproarious and moving Tales of the City novels have earned a unique niche in American literature and are considered indelible documents of cultural change from the seventies through the first two decades of the new millennium. The nine classic comedies, some of which originally appeared as serials in San Francisco newspapers, won Maupin critical acclaim around the world and enthralled legions of devoted fans. Back to Barbary Lane comprises the second omnibus of the series—Babycakes (1984), Significant Others (1987), and Sure of You (1989)—continuing the saga of the tenants, past and present, of Mrs. Madrigal's beloved apartment house on Russian Hill. While the first trilogy celebrated the carefree excesses of the seventies, this volume tracks its hapless, all-too-human cast across the eighties—a decade troubled by plague, deceit, and overweening ambition. Like its companion volumes, 28 Barbary Lane and Goodbye, Barbary Lane, Back to Barbary Lane is distinguished by what The Guardian of London has called "some of the sharpest and most speakable dialogue you are ever likely to read."

Back to the Postindustrial Future

Back to the Postindustrial Future
Author: Felix Ringel
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2018-03-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1785337998

How does an urban community come to terms with the loss of its future? The former socialist model city of Hoyerswerda is an extreme case of a declining postindustrial city. Built to serve the GDR coal industry, it lost over half its population to outmigration after German reunification and the coal industry crisis, leading to the large-scale deconstruction of its cityscape. This book tells the story of its inhabitants, now forced to reconsider their futures. Building on recent theoretical work, it advances a new anthropological approach to time, allowing us to investigate the postindustrial era and the futures it has supposedly lost.

City of Miracles

City of Miracles
Author: Robert Jackson Bennett
Publisher: Del Rey
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2017-05-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0553419749

Revenge. It’s something Sigrud je Harkvaldsson is very, very good at. Maybe the only thing. So when he learns that his oldest friend and ally, former Prime Minister Shara Komayd, has been assassinated, he knows exactly what to do—and that no mortal force can stop him from meting out the suffering Shara’s killers deserve. Yet as Sigrud pursues his quarry with his customary terrifying efficiency, he begins to fear that this battle is an unwinnable one. Because discovering the truth behind Shara’s death will require him to take up arms in a secret, decades-long war, face down an angry young god, and unravel the last mysteries of Bulikov, the city of miracles itself. And—perhaps most daunting of all—finally face the truth about his own cursed existence.

The Rock Cries Out

The Rock Cries Out
Author: Steve Stockman
Publisher: Relevant Media Group
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2004
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780972927659

Steve Stockman, author of the international hit Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2, explores the music of twelve artists who haven't necessarily professed a Christian faith but whose work is undergirded with issues, questions and insights that are very much biblical. If you look closely, their music is saturated with spiritual context and redemptive messages that can teach life-changing truth to the believer and spiritual seeker alike. Is God speaking through these unlikely prophets? If so, are you listening? Book jacket.

The New Brooklyn

The New Brooklyn
Author: Kay S. Hymowitz
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2017-01-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1442266589

Featured in The New York Times Book Review Only a few decades ago, the Brooklyn stereotype well known to Americans was typified by television programs such as “The Honeymooners” and “Welcome Back, Kotter”—comedies about working-class sensibilities, deprivation, and struggles. Today, the borough across the East River from Manhattan is home to trendsetters, celebrities, and enough “1 percenters” to draw the Occupy Wall Street protests across the Brooklyn Bridge. “Tres Brooklyn,” has become a compliment among gourmands in Parisian restaurants. In The New Brooklyn, Kay Hymowitz chronicles the dramatic transformation of the once crumbling borough. Devoting separate chapters to Park Slope, Williamsburg, Bed Stuy and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Hymowitz identifies the government policies and young, educated white and black middle class enclaves responsible for creating thousands of new businesses, safe and lively streets, and one of the most desirable urban environments in the world. Exploring Brownsville, the growing Chinatown of Sunset Park, and Caribbean Canarsie, Hymowitz also wrestles with the question of whether the borough’s new wealth can lift up long disadvantaged minorities, and the current generation of immigrants, many of whom will need more skills than their predecessors to thrive in a postindustrial economy. The New Brooklyn’s portraits of dramatic urban transformation, and its sometimes controversial effects, offers prescriptions relevant to “phoenix” cities coming back to life across the United States and beyond its borders.

Bring Nature Back to the City

Bring Nature Back to the City
Author: Ernst Wohlitz
Publisher:
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2016-11
Genre: Nature conservation
ISBN: 9781920217617

Discusses aspects of urban nature conservation that will resonate with advisors to local government, people interested in bringing back nature to our cities and anyone with a keen interest in nature.