Urban Sociology

For nearly 70 years, the suburbs were as American as apple pie. But in recent years things have started to change. An epic housing crisis revealed existing problems with this unique pattern of development, while the steady pull of long-simmering economic, societal and demographic forces has culminated in a Perfect Storm that has led to a profound shift in the way we desire to live. In The End of the Suburbs journalist Leigh Gallagher traces the rise and fall of American suburbia from the stately railroad suburbs that sprung up outside American cities in the 19th and early 20th centuries to current-day sprawling exurbs.

There is currently an epidemic of 'affluenza' throughout the world - an obsessive, envious, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses - that has resulted in huge increases in depression and anxiety among millions. Over a nine-month period, bestselling author Oliver James travelled around the world to try and find out why. He discovered how, despite very different cultures and levels of wealth, affluenza is spreading.

Winner of France's 2004 Prix de Flore for his memoir The Romanian: Story of an Obsession, Bruce Benderson has gained international respect for his controversial opinions and original take on contemporary society. In this collection of essays, Benderson directs his exceptional powers of observation toward some of the most debated, as well as some of the most neglected, issues of our day.

On the 50th anniversary of her murder, Kevin Cook presents the real Kitty Genovese. She was a vibrant young woman - unbeknownst to most, a lesbian - a bartender working (and dancing) her way through the colorful, fast-changing New York of the ’60s, a cultural kaleidoscope marred by the Kennedy assassination, the Cold War, and race riots. Downtown, Greenwich Village teemed with beatniks, folkies, and so-called misfits like Kitty and her lover. Kitty Genovese evokes the Village’s gay and lesbian underground with deep feeling and colorful detail.

Empire City tells the story of the dreams that inspired the changes in the landscape and the problems that eluded solution. Author David Scobey paints a remarkable panorama of New York's uneven development, a city-building process careening between obsessive calculation and speculative excess. Envisioning a new kind of national civilization, “bourgeois urbanists” attempted to make New York the nation's pre-eminent city.

Exploring the power of naming to shape experience and our sense of place, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro traces the ways in which native Lenape, Dutch settlers, British invaders, and successive waves of immigrants have left their marks on New York City’s map. He excavates the roots of many names, from Brooklyn to Harlem, that have gained iconic meaning worldwide. He interviews the last living speakers of Lenape, visits the harbor’s forgotten islands, lingers on street corners named for ballplayers and saints, and meets linguists who study the estimated 800 languages now spoken in New York.

Portrait to Landscape: A Landscape Strategy to Reframe Our Future is a groundbreaking book that calls for a transformative shift in our relationship with the natural world. Written by a renowned landscape architect, this book offers a new perspective on our place in the world and a compelling vision for a regenerative future. In an era plagued by environmental disasters and global challenges, the book argues that our exploitative and fragmented relationship with nature is at the root of these issues.

Imagine you are a hunter-gatherer some 12,000 years ago. You've got a choice - carry on foraging or plant a few seeds and move to one of those new-fangled settlements down the valley. What you won't know is that urban life is short and riddled with dozens of new diseases; your children will be shorter and sicklier than you are; they'll be plagued with gum disease and stand a decent chance of violent death at the point of a spear. Why would anyone choose this? But choose they did.

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to How the Other Half Lives and learn about the conditions of abject poverty that the residents of the slums of New York at the end of the 19th century had to endure.

This book is the first anthology to explore the connection between race and the suburbs in American cinema from the end of World War II to the present. It builds upon the explosion of interest in the suburbs in film, television, and fiction in the last fifteen years, concentrating exclusively on the relationship of race to the built environment. Race and the Suburbs in American Film is a stimulating resource for considering the manner in which race is foundational to architecture and urban geography, which is reflected, promoted, and challenged in cinematic representations.

At the end of the 1976 football season, more than forty Harvard athletes went to Boston's Combat Zone to celebrate. In the city's adult entertainment district, drugs and prostitution ran rampant, violent crime was commonplace, and corrupt police turned the other way. At the end of the night, Italian American star athlete Andy Puopolo, raised in the city's North End, was murdered in a stabbing. Three African American men were accused of the crime. His murder made national news and led to the eventual demise of the city's red-light district.

Le città europee sono più di un luogo fisico, più della somma dei loro edifici, sono l'esito di una "intenzione estetica" che nasce dalla quotidianità dei cittadini. Marco Romano ripercorre le origini storiche di questa lunga ricerca della bellezza, individuando così il contributo fondamentale, sebbene poco raccontato, che le donne hanno dato a questo sviluppo. È stato infatti l'intuito e il desiderio femminile a suggerire ieri come oggi molte soluzioni che hanno dato forma alle nostre città, dalle capitali ai villaggi.

As the United Kingdom left the European Union, during a period of international and domestic turmoil, London found itself at a turning point. This critical moment presents an opportunity to look back, with a distinctive perspective, a focus on London in its national and, perhaps even more importantly, its international contexts, rather than on the city in isolation. It is the interactions of London that Black considers, and he does so in order to address the question as to why London became the foremost international city, how it sustained that position and what its future holds.

To the best of my knowledge understandably when I first saw the New Yorkers, I was in a state of euphoria concerning the awesome lifestyles of the great people on Earth. I choked out a few words the first time I interacted with them. I immediately realized there is so much more to explore about their characteristics and to create a highly readable novel about them to the world's profundity of their lifestyles.

In the tradition of works like Random Family and Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Sudhir Venkatesh’s The Tomorrow Game is a deeply reported chronicle of families surviving in a Southside Chicago community. At the heart of the story are two teenagers: Marshall Mariot, an introverted video gamer and bike rider, and Frankie Paul, who leaves foster care to direct his cousin’s drug business while he’s in prison.