Showing posts with label urban history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label urban history. Show all posts

Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Politics and Culture in Modern America) Review

Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Politics and Culture in Modern America)
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Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Politics and Culture in Modern America) ReviewColin Gordon has put together an excellent reference for those interested in the economic history of St. Louis over the last 80 years, but with lessons that could easily apply to any other central city in the United States. We've all seen anecdotal evidence of these problems in run-down inner city neighborhoods, empty buildings in inner suburbs, and gleaming new parking lots in the outer suburbs, but Gordon uses data to back up these assumptions.
The book is roughly 1/2 maps and 1/2 text - and strikes the right balance at that. The maps serve to illustrate visually the scope and scale of "white flight," poor planning decisions, and the lunacy of a fractured metro government. While the city atrophies, suburbs further and further away compete for the same employers, the same stores, and the same residents.
While Gordon shies from making many overall conclusions based on the data and focuses more on presenting the history of what happened - this book provides a model blueprint for civic, business, and academic leaders to understand what to avoid in promoting "growth."Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Politics and Culture in Modern America) Overview
Once a thriving metropolis on the banks of the Mississippi, St. Louis, Missouri, is now a ghostly landscape of vacant houses, boarded-up storefronts, and abandoned factories. The Gateway City is, by any measure, one of the most depopulated, deindustrialized, and deeply segregated examples of American urban decay. "Not a typical city," as one observer noted in the late 1970s, "but, like a Eugene O'Neill play, it shows a general condition in a stark and dramatic form."Mapping Decline examines the causes and consequences of St. Louis's urban crisis. It traces the complicity of private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, and federal housing policies in the "white flight" of people and wealth from the central city. And it traces the inadequacy—and often sheer folly—of a generation of urban renewal, in which even programs and resources aimed at eradicating blight in the city ended up encouraging flight to the suburbs. The urban crisis, as this study of St. Louis makes clear, is not just a consequence of economic and demographic change; it is also the most profound political failure of our recent history.Mapping Decline is the first history of a modern American city to combine extensive local archival research with the latest geographic information system (GIS) digital mapping techniques. More than 75 full-color maps—rendered from census data, archival sources, case law, and local planning and property records—illustrate, in often stark and dramatic ways, the still-unfolding political history of our neglected cities.


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Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco Review

Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco
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Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco ReviewThere is certainly no dearth of historical work on sexuality and San Francisco, but Sides' contribution proves to be both productive and revelatory--in short, Sides has seriously moved urban and sexual history forward (he goes beyond the 1990s). And he has moved it well: Erotic City is truly a page turner!
Building on the work of historians such as Nan Boyd (see: Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965), Sides not only maps San Francisco in terms of the still-resonant political and cultural developments that have taken place there since the WWII, but he does so by bringing readers to the streets, from neighborhood to neighborhood, so that we can witness the way in which the city was shaped by its many sexual "revolutions." What's more, Sides brings "heterosexuality" back into the postwar historiography of sexual geography in an artful way--before you know it, you've been transplanted from a discussion of pornography, to leather S/M clubs, to radical feminism, so that the reading experience comes to mirror rapidly changing cityscape itself.
One of many interesting details Sides marshals (a concept which comes up only very briefly in Marc Stein's City Of Sisterly And Brotherly Loves: Lesbian And Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972) is that gay men were, for the Castro, the foot soldiers of gentrification--a point which has hitherto lacked sufficient attention in urban histories of sexuality. All told, Sides details the way in which the shifting spatial relations of power in the Erotic City were active in the production of sexuality and sexual experiences (in the most broad sense--read the book) as well as the way in which the city hosted and even created the conditions for the emergence of sexual identities, political factions, social and judicial controversies, and even revolutionary public health measures. And that emergent sexuality in turn left it's mark (for better and for worse) on the city.
All said, Erotic City is a tour-de-force tour of a city that you thought you knew.Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco Overview

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Historic Preservation and the Livable City Review

Historic Preservation and the Livable City
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Historic Preservation and the Livable City Review
Everything old is new again. This book tells us why. Not since Jane Jacobs' THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES has a book so clearly drawn out the things that make a city livable. Turns out a lot of it has to do with a sense of time and place.

I learned a lot about myself and where I live (Greenwich Village). Though I guess the target audience is also planners, economic development people, preservationists, housing people, etc. - professionals whose job is making a city work and thrive. But this book is a gift for curious and innocent city dwellers like me who half killed themselves restoring old housing stock because it felt more like a place to live than some modern sheetrock box. Now I understand a lot more about why I did it.

The authors are also out to change opinions. The main argument is that heritage (historic) preservation needs to be integrated into the planning and upkeep of cities as an integral part of creating and maintaining livable environments, not treated as an impediment. Turns out it's actually cheaper in many cases to restore existing sturdy housing stock than to bulldoze it for structural crap. (No wonder luxury Park Avenue housing always advertises itself as "pre-war," code for plaster, not quarter-inch sheetrock.)

The book also provides a library's worth of case studies of cities across the country that have seen the light and renovated and saved their architectural heritage. This annotated catalogue (with a treasure trove of photos) is itself reason enough to include the book in any collection of record. It also convincingly argues for cities to include sustainability and heritage preservation in any comprehensive planning, cutting across all the different agencies involved. Given how historic preservation enriches us all, it should be a starting point, not an afterthought.

This book tells us in detail where we've been. I hope it also tells us where we're going.
Thomas Hoover
www.thomashoover.info
Historic Preservation and the Livable City OverviewFor both the preservation professional and urban planner, this book shows how preservation is a key to the creation of livable cities. The author Eric Allison, the founder and coordinated of the graduate historic preservation program at Pratt Institute in New York City, offers tools and case studies that preservationists and planners can learn from in implementing preservation projects or plans in cities large and small. This book is a must read for anyone working in or interested in these fields and the creation and maintenance of livable cities.

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