[PDF] Radical Suburbs eBook

Author : Amanda Kolson Hurley
Publisher : Arcadia Publishing
Page : 134 pages
File Size : 29,62 MB
Release : 2019-04-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1948742373

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America’s suburbs are not the homogenous places we sometimes take them for. Today’s suburbs are racially, ethnically, and economically diverse, with as many Democratic as Republican voters, a growing population of renters, and rising poverty. The cliche of white picket fences is well past its expiration date. The history of suburbia is equally surprising: American suburbs were once fertile ground for utopian planning, communal living, socially-conscious design, and integrated housing. We have forgotten that we built suburbs like these, such as the co-housing commune of Old Economy, Pennsylvania; a tiny-house anarchist community in Piscataway, New Jersey; a government-planned garden city in Greenbelt, Maryland; a racially integrated subdivision (before the Fair Housing Act) in Trevose, Pennsylvania; experimental Modernist enclaves in Lexington, Massachusetts; and the mixed-use, architecturally daring Reston, Virginia. Inside Radical Suburbs you will find blueprints for affordable, walkable, and integrated communities, filled with a range of environmentally sound residential options. Radical Suburbs is a history that will help us remake the future and rethink our assumptions of suburbia.

Author : Amanda Kolson Hurley
Publisher :
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 24,9 MB
Release : 2019-04-09
Category : History
ISBN : 9781948742368

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Award-winning journalist explores the other side of America's suburbs

Author : Justin McGuirk
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 34,28 MB
Release : 2015-10-13
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1781688680

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What makes the city of the future? How do you heal a divided city? In Radical Cities, Justin McGuirk travels across Latin America in search of the activist architects, maverick politicians and alternative communities already answering these questions. From Brazil to Venezuela, and from Mexico to Argentina, McGuirk discovers the people and ideas shaping the way cities are evolving. Ever since the mid twentieth century, when the dream of modernist utopia went to Latin America to die, the continent has been a testing ground for exciting new conceptions of the city. An architect in Chile has designed a form of social housing where only half of the house is built, allowing the owners to adapt the rest; Medellín, formerly the world’s murder capital, has been transformed with innovative public architecture; squatters in Caracas have taken over the forty-five-story Torre David skyscraper; and Rio is on a mission to incorporate its favelas into the rest of the city. Here, in the most urbanised continent on the planet, extreme cities have bred extreme conditions, from vast housing estates to sprawling slums. But after decades of social and political failure, a new generation has revitalised architecture and urban design in order to address persistent poverty and inequality. Together, these activists, pragmatists and social idealists are performing bold experiments that the rest of the world may learn from. Radical Cities is a colorful journey through Latin America—a crucible of architectural and urban innovation.

Author : Samuel Alexander
Publisher : Springer
Page : 219 pages
File Size : 31,67 MB
Release : 2018-09-21
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9811321310

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This book addresses a central dilemma of the urban age: how to make the vast suburban landscapes that ring the globe safe and sustainable in the face of planetary ecological crisis. The authors argue that degrowth, a planned contraction of economic overshoot, is the only feasible principle for suburban renewal. They depart from the anti-suburban sentiment of much environmentalism to show that existing suburbia can be the centre-ground of transition to a new social dispensation based on the principle of self-limitation. The book offers a radical new urban imaginary, that of degrowth suburbia, which can arise Phoenix like from the increasingly stressed cities of the affluent Global North and guide urbanisation in a world at risk. This means dispensing with much contemporary green thinking, including blind faith in electric vehicles and high-density urbanism, and accepting the inevitability and the benefits of planned energy descent. A radical but necessary vision for the times.

Author : Stanley Kurtz
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 197 pages
File Size : 21,72 MB
Release : 2012-08-02
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1101601671

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When Barack Obama told “Joe the Plumber” that he wanted to “spread the wealth around,” he wasn’t just using a figure of speech. Since the 2008 campaign, Stanley Kurtz has established himself as one of Barack Obama’s most effective and well-informed critics. He was the first to expose the extent of Obama’s ties to radicals such as Bill Ayers and ACORN. Now Kurtz reveals new evidence that the administration’s talk about helping the middle class is essentially a smoke screen. Behind the scenes, plans are under way for a serious push toward wealth redistribution, with the suburban middle class—not the so-called one percent—bearing the brunt of it. Why haven’t we heard more about policies that will lead to redistribution? In part, of course, because controversies over Obamacare, unemployment, and the exploding budget deficit have taken the media spot­light. But the main reason, according to Kurtz, is that Obama doesn’t want to tip his hand about his second term. He knows that his plans will alienate the moderate swing voters who hold the key to his reelection. Drawing on previously overlooked sources, Kurtz cuts through that smoke screen to reveal what’s really going on. Radicals from outside the administration—including key Obama allies from his early community organizing days—have been quietly influ­encing policy, in areas ranging from edu­cation to stimulus spending. Their goal: to increase the influence of America’s cities over their suburban neighbors so that even­tually suburban independence will vanish. In the eyes of Obama’s former mentors—fol­lowers of leftist radical Saul Alinsky—suburbs are breeding grounds for bigotry and greed. The classic American dream of a suburban house and high quality, locally controlled schools strikes them as selfishness, a waste of resources that should be redirected to the urban poor. The regulatory groundwork laid so far is just a prelude to what’s to come: substantial redistribution of tax dollars. Over time, cities would effectively swallow up their surround­ing municipalities, with merged school dis­tricts and forced redistribution of public spending killing the appeal of the suburbs. The result would be a profound transforma­tion of American society. Kurtz shows the unbroken line of continuity from Obama’s community organizing roots to his presidency. And he reveals why his plan to undermine the suburbs means so much to him personally. Kurtz’s revelations are sure to be hotly dis­puted. But they are essential to helping vot­ers make an informed choice about whether to reward the president with a second term.

Author : Richard K. Rein
Publisher : Island Press
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 41,91 MB
Release : 2022-01-13
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1642831700

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"William H. Whyte's curiosity compelled him to question the status quo--whether helping to make Fortune Magazine essential reading for business leaders, warning of "groupthink" in his bestseller The Organization Man, or standing up for Jane Jacobs as she advocated for the vitality of city life and public space. This compelling biography sheds light on Whyte's bold way of thinking, ripe for rediscovery at a time when we are reshaping our communities into places of opportunity and empowerment for all citizens" -- Backcover.

Author : Jason Diamond
Publisher : Coffee House Press
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 30,58 MB
Release : 2020-08-25
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1566895901

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For decades the suburbs have been where art happens despite: despite the conformity, the emptiness, the sameness. Time and again, the story is one of gems formed under pressure and that resentment of the suburbs is the key ingredient for creative transcendence. But what if, contrary to that, the suburb has actually been an incubator for distinctly American art, as positively and as surely as in any other cultural hothouse? Mixing personal experience, cultural reportage, and history while rejecting clichés and pieties and these essays stretch across the country in an effort to show that this uniquely American milieu deserves another look.

Author : Charles L. Marohn, Jr.
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 30,43 MB
Release : 2019-10-01
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1119564816

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A new way forward for sustainable quality of life in cities of all sizes Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he co-founded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem. Inside, you’ll learn why inducing growth and development has been the conventional response to urban financial struggles—and why it just doesn’t work. New development and high-risk investing don’t generate enough wealth to support itself, and cities continue to struggle. Read this book to find out how cities large and small can focus on bottom-up investments to minimize risk and maximize their ability to strengthen the community financially and improve citizens’ quality of life. Develop in-depth knowledge of the underlying logic behind the “traditional” search for never-ending urban growth Learn practical solutions for ameliorating financial struggles through low-risk investment and a grassroots focus Gain insights and tools that can stop the vicious cycle of budget shortfalls and unexpected downturns Become a part of the Strong Towns revolution by shifting the focus away from top-down growth toward rebuilding American prosperity Strong Towns acknowledges that there is a problem with the American approach to growth and shows community leaders a new way forward. The Strong Towns response is a revolution in how we assemble the places we live.

Author : Jean Anyon
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 245 pages
File Size : 46,71 MB
Release : 2014-03-14
Category : Education
ISBN : 1136202218

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The core argument of Jean Anyon’s classic Radical Possibilities is deceptively simple: if we do not direct our attention to the ways in which federal and metropolitan policies maintain the poverty that plagues communities in American cities, urban school reform as currently conceived is doomed to fail. With every chapter thoroughly revised and updated, this edition picks up where the 2005 publication left off, including a completely new chapter detailing how three decades of political decisions leading up to the “Great Recession” produced an economic crisis of epic proportions. By tracing the root causes of the financial crisis, Anyon effectively demonstrates the concrete effects of economic decision-making on the education sector, revealing in particular the disastrous impacts of these policies on black and Latino communities. Going beyond lament, Radical Possibilities offers those interested in a better future for the millions of America’s poor families a set of practical and theoretical insights. Expanding on her paradigm for combating educational injustice, Anyon discusses the Occupy Wall Street movement as a recent example of popular resistance in this new edition, set against a larger framework of civil rights history. A ringing call to action, Radical Possibilities reminds readers that throughout U.S. history, equitable public policies have typically been created as a result of the political pressure brought to bear by social movements. Ultimately, Anyon’s revelations teach us that the current moment contains its own very real radical possibilities.

Author : Caroline Dove
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 195 pages
File Size : 27,79 MB
Release : 2020-05-31
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1000033457

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Radical Housing explores the planning, technical, financial, health-based and social background for developing multi-generational homes and co-living. Abundantly illustrated with case studies and plans from projects across the UK and abroad, this book inform sand inspires the delivery of alternative approaches to affordable and flexible housing, and is an essential text for architecture practitioners, students, and community groups.