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Author: James T. Lemon
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1556356943
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
On the agricultural frontier and through technological progress, Europeans and others and their descendants have sought to fulfill their dreams of improvement. Through businesses, governments, and other bodies, city dwellers expedited these desires by organizing settlements, communications, trade, finance, and manufacturing. In turn, cities grew mightily. To assess the present condition of cities, Liberal Dreams and Nature's Limits focuses on five large North American cities at various times in the past --Philadelphia (about 1760), New York (1860), Chicago (1910), Los Angeles (1950), and Toronto (1975). Life inside these cities--specifically the economy, society and politics, public services, land development, and the geographies of circulation, workplaces, and residential districts--is the central concern of this book. Another concern is drawing contrasts and similarities between the American and Canadian urban experiences. North Americans, most now living in cities, face the challenge of a social frontier--how to maintain civility in a near-stagnant economy. Despite recent advances in cyberspace, nature has imposed limits on technical progress defined by speed, convenience, and comfort; Promethean gains through creative destruction are no longer possible. Increased preoccupation with money, status, and safety suggests that the striving inspired by liberalism is still appealing. Yet without growth, liberal dreams cannot be fulfilled. To ensure work, income equity, and a degree of freedom in thought and action, citizens and leaders in both countries will have to commit themselves as never before to managing fairness through social democracy. Sustainable cities are not possible otherwise.
Author: James T. Lemon
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1556356943
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Get Book
Book Description
On the agricultural frontier and through technological progress, Europeans and others and their descendants have sought to fulfill their dreams of improvement. Through businesses, governments, and other bodies, city dwellers expedited these desires by organizing settlements, communications, trade, finance, and manufacturing. In turn, cities grew mightily. To assess the present condition of cities, Liberal Dreams and Nature's Limits focuses on five large North American cities at various times in the past --Philadelphia (about 1760), New York (1860), Chicago (1910), Los Angeles (1950), and Toronto (1975). Life inside these cities--specifically the economy, society and politics, public services, land development, and the geographies of circulation, workplaces, and residential districts--is the central concern of this book. Another concern is drawing contrasts and similarities between the American and Canadian urban experiences. North Americans, most now living in cities, face the challenge of a social frontier--how to maintain civility in a near-stagnant economy. Despite recent advances in cyberspace, nature has imposed limits on technical progress defined by speed, convenience, and comfort; Promethean gains through creative destruction are no longer possible. Increased preoccupation with money, status, and safety suggests that the striving inspired by liberalism is still appealing. Yet without growth, liberal dreams cannot be fulfilled. To ensure work, income equity, and a degree of freedom in thought and action, citizens and leaders in both countries will have to commit themselves as never before to managing fairness through social democracy. Sustainable cities are not possible otherwise.
Author: Edmund P. Fowler
Publisher: Guernica Editions
ISBN: 1550711946
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 120
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Book Description
In North America, we are generally desensitised to our surroundings, whether they are buildings or forests. This lack of awareness makes it easier to accept the fact that cities, towns, and suburbs are all built for us, not by us. It also makes sensible urban planning or policy difficult. The results have not been pretty. Cities are dysfunctional in part because we have built them in ways that pollute our ecosphere, something that harms our health in a direct way. Ecological stupidity is also economic stupidity, and North American urban development is incomprehensibly expensive. But cities also don't work socially: their design discourages casual public contact, which is the source of strong local communities and of self-confident collective action. Fowler points to numerous examples of humans who have transcended this culture of separation.
Author: Gene Desfor
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 081655112X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
Pollution of air, soil, and waterways has become a primary concern of urban environmental policy making, and over the past two decades there has emerged a new era of urban policy that links development with ecological issues, based on the notion that both nature and the economy can be enhanced through technological changes to production and consumption systems. This book takes a new look at this application of "ecological modernization" to contemporary urban political-ecological struggles. Considering policy processes around land-use in urban watersheds and pollution of air and soil in two disparate North American "global cities," it criticizes the dominant belief in the power of markets and experts to regulate environments to everyone’s benefit, arguing instead that civil political action by local constituencies can influence the establishment of beneficial policies. The book emphasizes ‘subaltern’ environmental justice concerns as instrumental in shaping the policy process. Looking back to the 1990s—when ecological modernization began to emerge as a dominant approach to environmental policy and theory—Desfor and Keil examine four case studies: restoration of the Don River in Toronto, cleanup of contaminated soil in Toronto, regeneration of the Los Angeles River, and air pollution reduction in Los Angeles. In each case, they show that local constituencies can develop political strategies that create alternatives to ecological modernization. When environmental policies appear to have been produced through solely technical exercises, they warn, one must be suspicious about the removal of contention from the process. In the face of economic and environmental processes that have been increasingly influenced by neo-liberalism and globalization, Desfor and Keil’s analysis posits that continuing modernization of industrial capitalist societies entails a measure of deliberate change to societal relationships with nature in cities. Their book shows that environmental policies are about much more than green capitalism or the technical mastery of problems; they are about how future urban generations live their lives with sustainability and justice.
Author: Craig E. Colten
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807147818
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Strategically situated at the gateway to the Mississippi River yet standing atop a former swamp, New Orleans was from the first what geographer Peirce Lewis called an "impossible but inevitable city." How New Orleans came to be, taking shape between the mutual and often contradictory forces of nature and urban development, is the subject of An Unnatural Metropolis. Craig E. Colten traces engineered modifications to New Orleans's natural environment from 1800 to 2000 and demonstrates that, though all cities must contend with their physical settings, New Orleans may be the city most dependent on human-induced transformations of its precarious site. In a new preface, Colten shows how Hurricane Katrina exemplifies the inability of human artifice to exclude nature from cities and he urges city planners to keep the environment in mind as they contemplate New Orleans's future. Urban geographers frequently have portrayed cities as the antithesis of nature, but in An Unnatural Metropolis, Colten introduces a critical environmental perspective to the history of urban areas. His amply illustrated work offers an in-depth look at a city and society uniquely shaped by the natural forces it has sought to harness.
Author: Carolyn Whitzman
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 9780774858830
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Suburb, Slum, Urban Village examines the relationship between image and reality for one city neighbourhood – Toronto’s Parkdale. Carolyn Whitzman tracks Parkdale’s story across three eras: its early decades as a politically independent suburb of the industrial city; its half-century of ostensible decline toward becoming a slum; and its post-industrial period of transformation into a revitalized urban village. This book also shows how Parkdale’s image influenced planning policy for the neighbourhood. Whitzman demonstrates that image and reality have not always correlated for Parkdale. Parkdale’s changing image stood in stark contrast to its real social conditions. Nevertheless, this image became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as it contributed to increasingly discriminatory planning practices for Parkdale in the late twentieth century.
Author: Matthew Gandy
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262303612
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 566
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Book Description
An interdisciplinary account of the environmental history and changing landscape of New York City. In this innovative account of the urbanization of nature in New York City, Matthew Gandy explores how the raw materials of nature have been reworked to produce a "metropolitan nature" distinct from the forms of nature experienced by early settlers. The book traces five broad developments: the expansion and redefinition of public space, the construction of landscaped highways, the creation of a modern water supply system, the radical environmental politics of the barrio in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the contemporary politics of the environmental justice movement. Drawing on political economy, environmental studies, social theory, cultural theory, and architecture, Gandy shows how New York's environmental history is bound up not only with the upstate landscapes that stretch beyond the city's political boundaries but also with more distant places that reflect the nation's colonial and imperial legacies. Using the shifting meaning of nature under urbanization as a framework, he looks at how modern nature has been produced through interrelated transformations ranging from new water technologies to changing fashions in landscape design. Throughout, he considers the economic and ideological forces that underlie phenomena as diverse as the location of parks and the social stigma of dirty neighborhoods.
Author: Thomas F. McIlwraith
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1461639603
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 515
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Book Description
This classic text retains the superb scholarship of the first edition in a thoroughly revised and accessibly written new edition. With both new and updated essays by distinguished American and Canadian authors, the book provides a comprehensive historical overview of the formation and growth of North American regions from European exploration and colonization to the second half of the twentieth century. Collectively the contributors explore the key themes of acquisition of geographical knowledge, cultural transfer and acculturation, frontier expansion, spatial organization of society, resource exploitation, regional and national integration, and landscape change. With six new chapters, redrawn maps, a new introduction that explores scholarly trends in historical geography since publication of the first edition, and a new final chapter guiding students to the basic sources for historical geographic enquiry, North America will be an indispensable text in historical geography courses.
Author: Carl A. Maida
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN: 0759112452
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
When densely populated urban areas face severe crises—natural disasters, epidemics, sudden unemployment, massive immigration—they often find that established mechanisms cannot respond adequately to the problems. Carl Maida argues that solutions to these problems tend to be developed within the affected communities themselves. In Pathways through Crisis, he draws on his two decades of work in ethnography and with crisis centers in the Los Angeles area to study the kinds of informal organizations that arise at the grass-roots level in order to deal with severe crises. This ground-breaking examination of responses to urban disaster suggests how both informal and formal organizations can be developed to serve people under extreme duress.
Author: Gary L. Gaile
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780199295869
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 854
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Book Description
Geography in America at the Dawn of the 21st Century surveys American geographers' current research in their specialty areas and tracks trends and innovations in the many subfields of geography. As such, it is both a 'state of the discipline' assessment and a topical reference. It includes an introduction by the editors and 47 chapters, each on a specific specialty. The authors of each chapter were chosen by their specialty group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). Based on a process of review and revision, the chapters in this volume have become truly representative of the recent scholarship of American geographers. While it focuses on work since 1990, it additionally includes related prior work and work by non-American geographers. The initial Geography in America was published in 1989 and has become a benchmark reference of American geographical research during the 1980s. This latest volume is completely new and features a preface written by the eminent geographer, Gilbert White.
Author: Laurel Sefton MacDowell
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774821043
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Throughout history most people have associated northern North America with wilderness, abundant fish and game, snow-capped mountains, and endless forest and prairie. Canada's contemporary picture gallery, however, contains more disturbing images � deforested mountains, empty fisheries, and melting ice caps. Adopting both a chronological and a thematic approach, Laurel MacDowell examines human interactions with the land, and the origins of our current environmental crisis, from First Peoples to the Kyoto Protocol. This richly illustrated exploration of the past from an environmental perspective will change the way Canadians and others around the world think about � and look at � Canada.
