First there was downtown. Then there were suburbs. Then there were malls. Then Americans launched the most sweeping change in 100 years in how they live, work, and play. The Edge City.

More Info About Edge City: A Comic Strip Collection by Terry and Patty LaBan Edge City is the first cartoon to feature the Ardins, a Jewish family maneuvering to balance relationships and tradition with dual careers, overbooked kids, long commutes, and pervasive high-tech gadgetry. The Ardins are a hip Jewish-American family leading mile-a-minute lives with two kids, two careers, two cats, and several computers. This family epitomizes our decentralized, high-tech world where everything is literally a click away-everything but the time to enjoy a peaceful moment. The first book collection of Edge City introduces readers to husband, father, weekend rocker, and busy courier service owner Len and his constantly self-improving wife Abby, whose titles include professional therapist, mom to children Colin and Carly, and daughter to active older adults Morris and Edna. Edge City is nationally syndicated to papers ranging from the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Houston Chronicle.

"A love song for the city . . . [this] volume, attractivelypackaged and richly illustrated, is really a cookbook for downtownrevitalization." --Wall Street Journal In this pioneering book on successful urban recovery, two urbanexperts draw on their firsthand observations of downtown changeacross the country to identify a flexible, effective approach tourban rejuvenation. From transportation planning and sprawlcontainment to the threat of superstore retailers, they address ahost of key issues facing our cities today. Roberta Brandes Gratz (New York, NY), an award-winning journalistand urban critic, is author of the urban design classic The LivingCity. A former staff reporter for the New York Post, Gratz haswritten for the New York Times Magazine and other publications.Norman Mintz (New York, NY) has played a leading role in the fieldof downtown revitalization for more than twenty-five years. He isDesign Director at the 34th Street Partnership in New York City anda consultant on downtown revitalization across the country.

Why do people stay in a struggling city? City on the Edge explores this question through the lives of five people in Syracuse, New York, a quintessential rust-belt metropolis. Once a booming industrial center with a dynamic civic life and prominence on the world stage, Syracuse has endured decades of crime, drugs, economic depression, absent-minded political leadership, and population decline. Michael Streissguth spent more than three years interviewing a young survivor of the streets, a refugee from Cuba, an urban farmer, a community activist, and a city elder, who shared their stories as they found ways to make life work against sometimes formidable odds. He also contextualizes their extended commentary and storytelling with secondary characters and various episodes, such as a tragic Father's Day riot and the trial that followed. The result is an eye-opening look at life in America in the twenty-first century, where people strive to turn their ideas, frustrations, and disadvantages into new hope for themselves and the city where they live.

Concrete floors and concrete walls, buildings that pierce the sky, taxicabs and subway corridors, a steady din of noise. These things, along with a virtually unrivaled collection of museums, galleries, performance venues, media outlets, international corporations, and stock exchanges make New York City not only the cultural and financial capital of the United States, but one of the largest and most impressive urban conglomerations in the world. With distinctions like these, is it possible to imagine the city as any more than this? City at the Water's Edge invites readers to do just that. Betsy McCully, a long-time urban dweller, argues that this city of lights is much more than a human-made metropolis. It has a rich natural history that is every bit as fascinating as the glitzy veneer that has been built atop it. Through twenty years of nature exploration, McCully has come to know New York as part of the Lower Hudson Bioregion-a place of salt marshes and estuaries, sand dunes and barrier islands, glacially sculpted ridges and kettle holes, rivers and streams, woodlands and outwash plains. Here she tells the story of New York that began before the first humans settled in the region twelve thousand years ago, and long before immigrants ever arrived at Ellis Island. The timeline that she recounts is one that extends backward half a billion years; it plumbs the depths of Manhattan's geological history and forecasts a possible future of global warming, with rising seas lapping at the base of the Empire State Building. Counter to popular views that see the city as a marvel of human ingenuity diametrically opposed to nature, this unique account shows how the region has served as an evolving habitat for a diversity of species, including our own. The author chronicles the growth of the city at the expense of the environment, but leaves the reader with a vision of a future city as a human habitat that is brought into balance with nature.

An engaging account of the uniquely creative spirit and bustling cultural ecology of contemporary Los Angeles How did Los Angeles start the 20th century as a dusty frontier town and end up a century later as one of the globe's supercities - with unparalleled cultural, economic, and technological reach? In City at the Edge of Forever, Peter Lunenfeld constructs an urban portrait, layer by layer, from serendipitous affinities, historical anomalies, and uncanny correspondences. In its pages, modernist architecture and lifestyle capitalism come together via a surfer girl named Gidget; Joan Didion's yellow Corvette is the brainchild of a car-crazy Japanese-American kid interned at Manzanar; and the music of the Manson Family segues into the birth of sci-fi fandom. One of the book's innovations is to brand Los Angeles as the alchemical city. Earth became real estate when the Yankees took control in the nineteenth century. Fire fueled the city's early explosive growth as the Southland's oil fields supplied the inexhaustible demands of drivers and their cars. Air defined the area from WWII to the end of the Cold War, with aeronautics and aerospace dominating the region's industries. Water is now the key element, and Southern California's ports are the largest in the western hemisphere. What alchemists identify as the ethereal fifth element, or quintessence, this book positions as the glamour of Hollywood, a spell that sustains the city but also needs to be broken in order to understand Los Angeles now. Lunenfeld weaves together the city's art, architecture, and design, juxtaposes its entertainment and literary histories, and moves from restaurant kitchens to recording studios to ultra-secret research and development labs. In the process, he reimagines Los Angeles as simultaneously an exemplar and cautionary tale for the 21st century.

Winner, 1995 American Sociological Association Robert E. Park Award? Projecting fantasies of wealth and excess, Miami, "America's Riviera," occupies a unique place in our national imagination. Uncovering the hidden story of this dreamlike place, Portes and Stepick explore the transformations of Miami from a light-hearted tourist resort to a troubled, complex city.