"Using examples from architecture, film, literature, and the visual arts, this wide-ranging book examines the place and significance of New York City in the urban imaginary between 1890 and 1940. In particular, Imagining New York City considers how and why certain city spaces--such as the skyline, the sidewalk, the slum, and the subway--have come to emblematize key aspects of the modern urban condition. In so doing, the book also considers the ways in which cultural developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries set the stage for more recent responses to a variety of urban challenges facing the city, such as post-disaster recovery, the renewal of urban infrastructure, and the remaking of public space"--

Paris, Berlin, London, Singapore, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles -- these define "the city" in the world's consciousness. James Donald takes us on a psychic journey to these places that have inspired artists, writers, architects, and filmmakers for centuries. Considering the cultural and political implications of the "urban imaginary, " Donald explores the pleasures and challenges of modern living, contending that the imagined city remains the best lens for a future of democratic community. How can we think of Chicago without recalling the grittiness of The Asphalt Jungle's back alleys, or of London without the dank, foggy atmosphere so often evoked by Dickens? When de Certeau explores what it means to walk through a city, or Foucault dissects the elements of the modern attitude, what are they telling us about modernity itself? Through a discussion of these and many other questions about urban thought, Donald demonstrates how artists and social critics have seen the city as the locus not just of vanity, squalor, and injustice, but also of civilized society's highest aspirations. Imagining the modern City also looks at how artists have shaped cities through their creation of public spaces, sculpture, and architecture -- art forms that help determine our ideas about our place in the urban environment. Planners and architects such as Otto Wagner, Le Corbusier, and Bernard Tschumi present us with real and possible cities, showing a way forward to alternative social futures, Donald asserts. The modern city provides both a culturally resonant imagined space and a physical place for the everyday life of its residents. Imagining the Modern City is a rich and dazzling exploration of theways cities stir and shape our consciousness.

Say "New England" and you likely conjure up an image in the mind of your listener: the snowy woods or stone wall of a Robert Frost poem, perhaps, or that quintessential icon of the region--the idyllic white village. Such images remind us that, as Joseph Conforti notes, a region is not just a territory on the ground. It is also a place in the imagination. This ambitious work investigates New England as a cultural invention, tracing the region's changing identity across more than three centuries. Incorporating insights from history, literature, art, material culture, and geography, it shows how succeeding generations of New Englanders created and broadcast a powerful collective identity for their region through narratives about its past. Whether these stories were told in the writings of Frost or Harriet Beecher Stowe, enacted in historical pageants or at colonial revival museums, or conveyed in the pages of a geography textbook or Yankee magazine, New Englanders used them to sustain their identity, revising them as needed to respond to the shifting regional landscape.

Using examples from architecture, film, literature, and the visual arts, this wide-ranging book examines the significance of New York City in the urban imaginary between 1890 and 1940. In particular, Imagining New York City considers how and why certain city spaces-such as the skyline, the sidewalk, the slum, and the subway-have come to emblematize key aspects of the modern urban condition. In so doing, Christoph Lindner also considers the ways in which cultural developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries set the stage for more recent responses to a variety of urban challenges facing the city, such as post-disaster recovery, the renewal of urban infrastructure, and the remaking of public space.

The city has always been a locus of research and discussion within the debates of modernity and, more recently, postmodernity. This volume brings together some of the most recent and exciting work on the city from within sociology and cultural studies. The book is organised around the following major themes: the theoretical imagination; ethnic diversity and the politics of difference; memory and nostalgia; and the complex and complimentary narrative of the city ways.While these representations bring the past and the present together, the final section of the book elaborates the present and future in relation to the idea of the virtual city. Hence, the world of cyberspace not only recasts our imaginaries of space and communication, but has a profound effect on the sociological imagination itself.

For more than a century, Times Square has mesmerized the world with the spectacle of its dazzling supersigns, its theaters, and its often-seedy nightlife. New York City’s iconic crossroads has drawn crowds of revelers, thrill-seekers, and other urban denizens, not to mention lavish outpourings of advertising and development money. Many have hotly debated the recent transformation of this legendary intersection, with voices typically falling into two opposing camps. Some applaud a blighted red-light district becoming a big-budget, mainstream destination. Others lament an urban zone of lawless possibility being replaced by a Disneyfied, theme-park version of New York. In Money Jungle, Benjamin Chesluk shows that what is really at stake in Times Square are fundamental questions about city life—questions of power, pleasure, and what it means to be a citizen in contemporary urban space. Chesluk weaves together surprising stories of everyday life in and around the Times Square redevelopment, tracing the connections between people from every level of this grand project in social and spatial engineering: the developers, architects, and designers responsible for reshaping the urban public spaces of Times Square and Forty-second Street; the experimental Midtown Community Court and its Times Square Ink. job-training program for misdemeanor criminals; encounters between NYPD officers and residents of Hell’s Kitchen; and angry confrontations between city planners and neighborhood activists over the future of the area. With an eye for offbeat, telling details and a perspective that is at once sympathetic and critical, Chesluk documents how the redevelopment has tried, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, to reshape the people and places of Times Square. The result is a colorful and engaging portrait, illustrated by stunning photographs by long-time local photographer Maggie Hopp, of the street life, politics, economics, and cultural forces that mold America’s urban centers.

Sure to put youngsters in a New York state of mind, this book of more than 100 doodles introduces them to the city that never sleeps through local and unique illustrations and activities, from the classic (coloring the lights on top of the Empire State Building) and the fun (creating a subway car) to the just plain wacky (doodling a giant cockroach). The book's convenient size makes it a perfect souvenir for tiny-tot tourists and little locals alike, and the projects require no previous drawing skills—just imagination. In addition to five doodle challenges, the book also incorporates QR codes to offer readers free doodles online.