David Ward examines the geographical relationship between migrants and the inner city and the creation of slums and ghettos.

This social history and community study documents the events surrounding the attempt by community members, activists, and VISTA architects to resist the planned construction of a community college in the neighborhood of Uptown. The planner and architect are seldom envisioned as advocates for the urban poor. However, during the 1960s, New Left planners and architects began working with marginalized groups in cities to design alternatives to urban renewal projects. This was part of a national advocacy planning movement that was taking shape in urban areas like Chicago. Inspired by critics of the Rational-comprehensive model of planning, advocacy planners opposed the imposition of projects on neighborhoods often with no collaboration from residents. One example of this resistance was Hank Williams Village—a multi-purpose housing and commercial redevelopment project modeled after a southern town. The Village was an attempt to prevent the displacement of thousands of southern whites by the planned construction of a community college in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. While the plan for the Village failed to win support of the local urban renewal board, the work performed by the young VISTA architects became instrumental in their subsequent career trajectories and thus served as formative personal and professional experience.

On Cecil B. de Mille - his life and works.

The Handbook of Urban Studies provides the first comprehensive, up-to-date account of the urban condition, relevant to a wide readership from academics to researchers and policymakers. It provides a theoretically and empirically informed account embracing all the different disciplines contributing to urban studies. Leading authors identify key issues and questions and future trends for further research and present their findings so that, where appropriate, they are relevant to the needs of policymakers. Using the city as a unifying structure, the Handbook provides an holistic appreciation of urban structure and change, and of the theories by which we understand the structure, development and changing character

The Concept of the Foreign investigates the diverse and consequential uses of the concept of the foreign--a formidable and hitherto untheorized force in everyday discourse and practice. This highly original work--whose experimental nature moves beyond traditional academic bounds--undertakes to theorize the meanings, deployments, and consequences of 'foreignness', a term largely overlooked by academic debates. Innovative in format, the book comprises an introductory theoretical dialogue and seven essays, each authored by a scholar from a different discipline--anthropology, literary theory, psychology, philosophy, social work, history, and women's studies-who investigate how his/her disciplines engage and define the concept of the foreign. Drawing out literal and metaphorical meanings of 'foreignness' this wide-ranging volume offers much to scholars of postcolonial, gender, and cultural studies seeking new approaches to the study of alterity.

Between 1845 and 1855, 2 million Irish men and women fled their famine-ravaged homeland, many to settle in large British and American cities that were already wrestling with a complex array of urban problems. In this innovative work of comparative urban history, Matthew Gallman looks at how two cities, Philadelphia and Liverpool, met the challenges raised by the influx of immigrants. Gallman examines how citizens and policymakers in Philadelphia and Liverpool dealt with such issues as poverty, disease, poor sanitation, crime, sectarian conflict, and juvenile delinquency. By considering how two cities of comparable population and dimensions responded to similar challenges, he sheds new light on familiar questions about distinctive national characteristics--without resorting to claims of "American exceptionalism." In this critical era of urban development, English and American cities often evolved in analogous ways, Gallman notes. But certain crucial differences--in location, material conditions, governmental structures, and voluntaristic traditions, for example--inspired varying approaches to urban problem solving on either side of the Atlantic.

As this century draws to a close and the new one approaches, the United States is still struggling with serious and persistent social problems. These troubling dilemmas, including poverty, homelessness, discrimination, and severe inequity, afflict some subgroups of the population more than others, and it is the plight of these at-risk groups—childr

This book provides the first account of the invention of the tramp as a social type in the United States between the 1870s and the 1930s. Tim Cresswell considers the ways in which the tramp was imagined and described and how, by World War II, it was being reclassified and rendered invisible. He describes the "tramp scare" of the late nineteenth century and explores the assumption that tramps were invariably male and therefore a threat to women. Cresswell also examines tramps as comic figures and looks at the work of prominent American photographers which signaled a sympathetic portrayal of this often-despised group. Perhaps most significantly, The Tramp in America calls into question the common assumption that mobility played a central role in the production of American identity. “This is an effective, and sometimes touching, account of how a social phenomenon was created, classified and reclassified. The quality of the writing, the excellent illustrations and the high production standards give this reasonably-priced hardback a chance of appealing to a general audience . . . an important contribution to American studies, providing new perspectives on the significance of mobility and rootlessness at an important time in the development of the nation. Cresswell successfully illuminates the history of a disadvantaged and marginal group, while providing a lens by which to focus on the thinking and practices of the mainstream culture with which they dealt. As such, this book represents a considerable achievement.”—Cultural Geographies “An important book. Cresswell has made an important contribution to a homelessness literature still lacking a more sophisticated theoretical edge. Clearly written, beautifully illustrated and with a strong argument throughout, the book deserves to be widely read by students and practitioners alike.”—Progress in Human Geography

Do ominous reports of an emerging "underclass" reveal an unprecedented crisis in American society? Or are social commentators simply rediscovering the tragedy of recurring urban poverty, as they seem to do every few decades? Although social scientists and members of the public make frequent assumptions about these questions, they have little information about the crucial differences between past and present. By providing a badly needed historical context, these essays reframe today's "underclass" debate. Realizing that labels of "social pathology" echo fruitless distinctions between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, the contributors focus not on individual and family behavior but on a complex set of processes that have been at work over a long period, degrading the inner cities and, inevitably, the nation as a whole. How do individuals among the urban poor manage to survive? How have they created a dissident "infrapolitics?" How have social relations within the urban ghettos changed? What has been the effect of industrial restructuring on poverty? Besides exploring these questions, the contributors discuss the influence of African traditions on the family patterns of African Americans, the origins of institutions that serve the urban poor, the reasons for the crisis in urban education, the achievements and limits of the War on Poverty, and the role of income transfers, earnings, and the contributions of family members in overcoming poverty. The message of the essays is clear: Americans will flourish or fail together.