This revised edition examines major redevelopment efforts in New York and London to uncover the forces behind these investment cycles and the role that public policy can play in moderating market instability. It chronicles the progress of three development projects in New York and three in London.

Contributions by Carl Abbott, Jacob Babb, Marleen S. Barr, Michael Fuchs, John Glover, Stephen Joyce, Sarah Lahm, James McAdams, Cynthia J. Miller, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Chris Pak, María Isabel Pérez Ramos, Stefan Rabitsch, J. Jesse Ramírez, A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Andrew Wasserman, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, and Robert Yeates Metropolis, Gotham City, Mega-City One, Panem’s Capitol, the Sprawl, Caprica City—American (and Americanized) urban environments have always been a part of the fantastic imagination. Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror focuses on the American city as a fantastic geography constrained neither by media nor rigid genre boundaries. Fantastic Cities builds on a mix of theoretical and methodological tools that are drawn from criticism of the fantastic, media studies, cultural studies, American studies, and urban studies. Contributors explore cultural media across many platforms such as Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, the Arkham Asylum video games, the 1935 movie serial The Phantom Empire, Kim Stanley Robinson’s fiction, Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One, the vampire films Only Lovers Left Alive and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Water Knife, some of Kenny Scharf’s videos, and Samuel Delany’s classic Dhalgren. Together, the contributions in Fantastic Cities demonstrate that the fantastic is able to “real-ize” that which is normally confined to the abstract, metaphorical, and/or subjective. Consequently, both utopian aspirations for and dystopian anxieties about the American city become literalized in the fantastic city.

The Second Edition has been rewritten to provide additional coverage of topics such as urban development and third world cities as well as social issues including homelessness, jobs/housing mismatch and transportation disadvantages. It has also been updated with 1990 Census data.

Planners face a controversial task because their professional role requires them to be spokespersons for the public interest. In a welter of conflicting pictures and voices, how might the public interest be discovered? Once identified, how might it be expressed so that competing publics attend to it? There are no easy answers, but the experience of planners today suggests ways of working and innovations of promise.The focus on planning practice prompted the editors to analyze images that are now at work in our cities. For Vale and Warner, all city design and constructions offer material that people should include in images of their environment. The built and building city are part of the experience of all city dwellers; it is theirs to incorporate, interpret, or ignore. Essays included in this text trace the interplay between physical objects of planners and architects and the social experience and outlooks of image makers and their audiences.Imaging the City explores urban image making from civic boosterism of medieval cities to iconic imagery of Times Square. Vale and Warner bring together urban historians, geographers, city planners, architects, and cultural commentators to analyze the creation of urban imagery from the signature skyscrapers of Kuala Lumpur to the re-creation of the South Bronx and the use of city images in film, literature, television, and on the Internet. Urban dwellers, urban planners, architects, municipal officials, sociologists, urban historians - all will perceive their worlds with a heightened sense of awareness after reading this book.

Have the last two decades produced a New York composed of two separate and unequal cities? As the contributors to Dual City reveal, the complexity of inequality in New York defies simple distinctions between black and white, the Yuppies and the homeless. The city's changing economic structure has intersected with an increasingly diversified population, providing upward mobility for some groups while isolating others. As race, gender, ethnicity, and class become ever more critical components of the postindustrial city, the New York experience illuminates not just one great city, or indeed all large cities, but the forces affecting most of the globe. "The authors constitute an impressive assemblage of seasoned scholars, representing a wide array of pertinent disciplines. Their product is a pioneering volume in the social sciences and urban studies...the 20-page bibliography is a major research tool on its own." —Choice

In Star Territory Gordon Fraser charts how the project of rationalizing the cosmos enabled the nineteenth-century expansion of U.S. territory and explores the alternative and resistant cosmologies of free and enslaved Blacks and indigenous peoples.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1871.