Urban Sociology

Zwei Hörbücher in einer Box! 1. "Psychologie der Massen": Was passiert mit dem Individuum, wenn es sich in einer Gruppe wiederfindet? Wie ist es zu erklären, dass intelligente Menschen sich in der Masse zu Dingen hinreißen lassen, die sie als Einzelne niemals tun würden? Gustave le Bon beschrieb 1895 in seinem Standardwerk diese Mechanismen. Es ist erstaunlich und spricht für den Autor, dass die eingängig erklärte Analyse zeitlos wirkt und die Hörer den Eindruck gewinnen, das Buch sei tatsächlich viel jünger. 2. "Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse": Was ist eine Masse?

The Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world's largest maker of glass tableware, was the base on which Lancaster's society was built. As Glass House unfolds, bankruptcy looms. With access to the company and its leaders, and Lancaster's citizens, Alexander shows how financial engineering took hold in the 1980s, accelerated in the 21st century, and wrecked the company.

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.

Since cities emerged 10,000 years ago, they have become one of the most impressive artifacts of humanity. But their evolution has been anything but linear - cities have gone through moments of radical change, turning points that redefine their very essence. In this book a renowned architect and urban planner who studies the intersection of cities and technology argues that we are in such a moment. The authors explain some of the forces behind urban change and offer new visions.

Survived physical abuse. Witnessed community violence. Conquered the streets. Saved by education. This is Dr. Maysa Akbar’s story. A story of overcoming urban trauma. It’s easy to look down at urban communities and wonder why economic and social disparities still exist when so many people of color, despite facing severe adversity, have done better.

White Americans have long been comfortable in the assumption that they are the cultural norm. Now that notion is being challenged, as white people wrestle with what it means to be part of a fast-changing, truly multicultural nation. Facing chronic economic insecurity, a popular culture that reflects the nation’s diverse cultural reality, a future in which they will no longer constitute the majority of the population, and with a Black president in the White House, whites are growing anxious.

A vividly written and timely polemic tackling the burning injustices shaping British society today, Fortress London argues that to address Britain’s manifold problems, we need first to end the hegemony of its capital. Enriched by a vast array of interviews and statistics, it will examine how our individual destinies, from childhood to death, are determined by the disproportionate power of London.

Amid increasing hardship and limited employment options, poor urban youth are developing creative online strategies to make ends meet. Using such social media platforms as YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram, they're capitalizing on the public's fascination with the ghetto and gang violence. But with what consequences? Ballad of the Bullet follows the Corner Boys, a group of 30 or so young men on Chicago's South Side who have hitched their dreams of success to the creation of "drill music" (slang for "shooting music").

Childhood friends from Trinidad, Colin Warner and Carl King grew into men on opposite sides of prison bars after Colin was arrested for murder in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. With no evidence against him, Colin was wrongfully convicted and wrongfully imprisoned for more than two decades. But time and walls could not break the friends' bond. Carl's extraordinary resolve, sacrifice, and courage were Colin's last rays of hope in a harrowing struggle for freedom and justice.

Dr. Sampson Davis looks at the health-care crisis in the inner city from a rare perspective: as a doctor who works on the front line of emergency medical care in the poor urban neighborhood where he grew up. He also offers practical advice for those living in such communities, where conditions like asthma, heart disease, strokes, obesity, and AIDS are disproportionately endemic. As someone who has struggled with many of the issues troubling his patients, Dr. Davis is able to write with empathy.

Imperial San Francisco is the epic saga of how all great cities parasitize their hinterlands for the sake of those elites who own and run them by using the mass media at their command to shape the thought of those who unwittingly serve their interests. Using San Francisco as an example of how cities employ remote control technology to exploit water, energy, natural resources, and labor from an expansive imperium, it takes the listener from ancient Rome to the University of California’s role in the creation of nuclear weaponry and its first use.

It is easy to be depressed if you live in a neighborhood that has few supportive resources available or is marred by gun violence. We are able to diagnose people with depression, but how does one heal a neighborhood? This City Is Killing Me brings policy and psychology together. Through case studies, Jonathan Foiles opens up his therapy door to allow us to overhear the stories of individual poor Chicagoans. Through statistics and the example of Chicago, he teaches us how policy decisions have contributed to these individuals’ suffering.

"Bodegas: Urban Children Health Matters" delves deep into the complex interplay between these corner stores and the health outcomes of Urban children residing in urban settings. As the subsequent chapters will elucidate, while these stores offer an array of goods, the preponderance of sugary, fatty, and processed foods poses critical challenges. For many Urban families, especially those in underserved neighborhoods, bodegas are sometimes the most accessible — or even the only — food sources available.

For the first time in the history of our planet, more than half the population - 3.3 billion people - is now living in cities. City is the ultimate guidebook to our urban centers - the signature unit of human civilization. With erudite prose, this unique work of metatourism explores what cities are and how they work. It covers history, customs and language, districts, transport, money, work, shops and markets, and tourist sites, creating a fantastically detailed portrait of the city through history and into the future.

In Saving Our Cities, William W. Goldsmith shows how cities can be places of opportunity rather than places with problems. With strongly revived cities and suburbs, working as places that serve all their residents, metropolitan areas will thrive, thus making the national economy more productive, the environment better protected, the citizenry better educated, and the society more reflective, sensitive, and humane.

The origins of gentrification date back to World War I - only it was sometimes known as “remodeling” then. Dennis Gale’s insightful book The Misunderstood History of Gentrification provides a recontextualization of American gentrification, planning, and policymaking. He argues that gentrification must be understood as an urban phenomenon with historical roots in the very early 20th century.

American cities are distinct from almost all others in the degree to which freeways and freeway travel dominate urban landscapes. In The Drive for Dollars, Brian D. Taylor, Eric A. Morris, and Jeffrey R. Brown tell the largely misunderstood story of how freeways became the centerpiece of US urban transportation systems, and the crucial, though usually overlooked, role of fiscal politics in bringing freeways about.

How do we draw the lines between "good" and "bad" neighborhoods? How do we know “ghettos”? This book questions the widely held assumption that divisions between urban areas are reflections of varying amounts of crime, deprivation, and other social, cultural, and economic problems. Using Ogden, Utah, as a case study, Pepper Glass argues that urban reputations are “moral frontiers” that uphold and create divides between who is a good and respectable - or a bad and vilified - member of a community.

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.

Social scientists have long argued over the links between crime and place. The authors of Communities and Crime provide an intellectual history that traces how varying images of community have evolved over time and influenced criminological thinking and criminal justice policy.