Social Cities

Award-winning journalist Alexis Madrigal sculpts an intricate tableau of the city of Oakland that is at once a groundbreaking big-idea book, a deeply researched work of social and political history, and an intimate portrait of an essential American city that has been at the crossroads of the defining themes of the twenty-first century. Oakland’s stories encompass everything from Silicon Valley’s prominence and the ramifications of a compulsively digital future to the underestimated costs of technological innovation on local communities.

Here is the inspiring story of how Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, alongside a team of researchers, parents, friends, and community leaders, discovered that the children of Flint, Michigan, were being exposed to lead in their tap water - and then battled her own government and a brutal backlash to expose that truth to the world. Paced like a scientific thriller, What the Eyes Don’t See reveals how misguided austerity policies, broken democracy, and callous bureaucratic indifference placed an entire city at risk.

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.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the most dramatic and dangerous period of the Cold War. What's less well known is that the city of Miami, mere miles away, was a pivotal, though less well known, part of Cold War history. With its population of Communist exiles from Cuba, its strategic value for military operations, and its lax business laws, Miami was an ideal environment for espionage. Covert City tells the history of how the entire city of Miami was constructed in the image of the US-Cuba rivalry.

In Anna Clark's full account of this American tragedy, The Poisoned City recounts the gripping story of Flint’s poisoned water through the people who caused it, suffered from it, and exposed it. It is a chronicle of one town, but could also be about any American city, all made precarious by the neglect of infrastructure and the erosion of democratic decision making. Places like Flint are set up to fail - and for the people who live and work in them, the consequences can be fatal.

In this heartfelt and absorbing novel, Valdes-Rodriguez opens up the lives of six upwardly mobile Latina friends in their late 20's. These women, who come from widely varied backgrounds, meet at Boston University and, after graduating, reunite every six months to share their stories. Facing the complications and pressures of everyday lives, the Social Club offers a chance to meet regularly, dish, dine, and help each other over the bumpy course of life and love.

How Real Estate Developers Think considers developers from three different perspectives. Brown profiles the careers of individual developers to illustrate the character of the entrepreneur; considers the roles played by innovation, design, marketing, and sales in the production of real estate; and examines the risks and rewards that motivate developers as people.

Two political titans forge a modern city and a vibrant public sector in this history of strong leadership at a time of national crisis. City of Ambition is a brilliant history of the New Deal and its role in the making of modern New York City. The story of a remarkable collaboration between Franklin Roosevelt and Fiorello La Guardia, this is a case study in creative political leadership in the midst of a devastating depression.

City of Big Shoulders links key events in Chicago's development, from its marshy origins in the 1600's to today's robust metropolis. Robert G. Spinney presents Chicago in terms of the people whose lives made the city - from the tycoons and the politicians, to the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from all over the world. In this revised and updated second edition that brings Chicago's story into the 21st century, Spinney sweeps his historian's gaze across the colorful and dramatic panorama of the city's explosive past.

In the fall of 1871, Chicagoans knew they were due for the “big one”—a massive, uncontrollable fire that would decimate the city. It had been bone-dry for months, and a recent string of blazes had nearly outstripped the fire department’s already scant resources. Then, on October 8, a minor fire broke out in the barn of Irishwoman Kate Leary. A series of unfortunate mishaps and misunderstandings along with insufficient preparation and a high south-westerly wind combined to set the stage for an unmitigated catastrophe.

In this eye-opening work of economic theory, Jane Jacobs argues that it is cities—not nations—that are the drivers of wealth. Challenging centuries of economic orthodoxy, in Cities and the Wealth of Nations the beloved author contends that healthy cities are constantly evolving to replace imported goods with locally produced alternatives, spurring a cycle of vibrant economic growth. Intelligently argued and drawing on examples from around the world and across the ages, here Jacobs radically changes the way we view our cities—and our entire economy.

Feminist City: A Field Guide combines memoir, feminist theory, pop culture, and geography to expose what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built right into our cities, homes, and neighbourhoods. Focusing on gendered experiences of the city, the books grapples with the challenge of claiming urban space amongst barriers designed to keep women “in their place”. From the geography of rape culture to the politics of snow removal, the city is an ongoing site of gendered struggle. Yet the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping new social relations....

That was where she needed to be, in a field of purple flowers, where no one could bother her. She would sit there until the confusion left her head and the stink of the camp left her nostrils. Shauzia has a dream. She dreams of getting away from the refugee camp in Pakistan and travelling to France. There she knows she would find a better life, away from the war in her home country of Afghanistan...But escape is not so easy. Once she leaves the camp, she has no money, no food - and only her dog Jasper for company. But Shauzia is determined to find a new future for herself...

In Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City, two moms living in the bluest of cities offer practical guidance, parenting strategies, and humorous commentary to help parents immunize their children against Woke infection. In whichever zip code or tax bracket you dwell, there’s hope for parents who seek to indoctrinate their kids into conservatism—that is, kids who understand historical, economic, and biological reality. This book coaches parents in the how, when, and who of teaching children to think about the world rightly.

A riveting, groundbreaking account of how the war on crime has torn apart inner-city communities. Forty years in, the tough-on-crime turn in American politics has spurred a prison boom of historic proportions that disproportionately affects Black communities. It has also torn at the lives of those on the outside. As arrest quotas and high-tech surveillance criminalize entire blocks, a climate of fear and suspicion pervades daily life, not only for young men entangled in the legal system but for their family members and working neighbors.

City of Inmates explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and Black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration.

From the wrought ironwork of the Eiffel Tower to the flourishing art nouveau movement, the Belle Époque is remembered as a golden age for Parisian culture. Beneath the veneer of elegance, however, fin de siècle Paris was a city at war with itself. In City of Light, City of Shadows, Mike Rapport uncovers a Paris riven by social anxieties and plagued by overlapping epidemics of poverty, political extremism, and anti-Semitism.

Inner-city Black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence; in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. How you dress, talk, and behave can have life-or-death consequences, with young people particularly at risk. The most powerful force counteracting this code and its reign of terror is the strong, loving, decent family, and we meet many heroic figures in the course of this narrative.

The Eden Project is a timely and thought-provoking corrective to the generalized fantasies about relationships that permeate our culture. This is not a practical guide on how to fix a relationship, but rather a challenge to greater personal responsibility in relationships, a call for individual growth as opposed to seeking rescue through others.

Discover how - and why - Black, Indigenous, and people of color in America experience societal, economic, and infrastructural inequality throughout history covering everything from Columbus’ arrival in 1492 to the War on Drugs to the Black Lives Matter movement.