A revisionist interdisciplinary study of the transformation of England into an imperial power between 1550 and 1850.

Here is a book that makes sense of the L.A. riots, homelessness, tax giveaways, and the other big urban issues that are back in the national spotlight. In this streamlined and updated new edition of his classic book, The Dependent City, Paul Kantor now focuses on economic development and social welfare policies to reveal the key dilemmas of American urban politics. Returning to a political economy theme, Kantor explores how city governments have struggled to escape and accommodate the reality of their economic dependency in the policies that they've pursued. Revisiting cities across the nation, Kantor finds not only that they have become more dependent but also that the character of this dependency has changed and deepened. Exploring local regimes in the Frostbelt and Sunbelt and in suburbia, he finds that they frequently act more like captives of big business rather than as representatives of citizens. Local attempts to promote social justice increasingly run up against a wall of economic dependency created by federal policies and business power. This book signals how American cities can find ways of overcoming this dependency by working together with states and the federal government to promote healthy, democratic urban politics. The Dependent City Revisited is an accessible, provocative supplement for a wide variety of courses in urban studies and political economy as well as stimulating reading for anyone who is interested in understanding America's urban mosaic.

The supposed rationality of the urban planning of the Modern Movement encompassed a variety of attitudes towards history, technology and culture, from the vision of Berlin as an American metropolis, through the dispute between the urbanists and disurbanists in the Soviet Union to the technocratic and austere vision of Le Corbusier. After the Second World War, architects attempted to reconcile these utopian visions to the practical problems of constructing - or reconstructing - urban environments, from Piero Bottoni at the Quartiere Trienale 8 in Milan in 1951 to Lucio Costa at Bras'lia in 1957. In the 1970s, the collapse of Modernism brought about universial condemnation of Modern urbanism; urban planning,and rationality itself, were thrown into doubt. However, such a wholesale condemnation hides the complex realities underlying these Modern cities. The contributors define some of the theoretical foundations of Modern urban planning, and reassess the successes and the failures of the built results. The book ends with contrasting views of the inheritance of Modern urbanism in the United States and the Netherlands.

A revision of The unheavenly city. Bibliography: p. [291]-292.

Writings on the metropolis generally foreground illimitability, stressing thereby that the urban ultimately remains both illegible and unintelligible. Instead, the purpose of this interdisciplinary study is to demonstrate that mentality as a tool offers orientation in the urban realm. Nora Pleßke develops a model of urban mentality to be employed for cities worldwide. Against the background of the Spatial Turn, she identifies dominant urban-specific structures of London mentality in contemporary London novels, such as Monica Ali's »Brick Lane«, J.G. Ballard's »Millennium People«, Nick Hornby's »A Long Way Down«, and Ian McEwan's »Saturday«.

Lowentahal looks at the benefits and burdens of the past, how we study the past, and how we change it.