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Water Lords presents the untold story of drinking water and its carriers in Beijing from the imperial Qing to the Republican period. It adds an ecological perspective to existing studies by foregrounding water as a distinctive force that shaped urban life in the realms of technology, society, and politics. With this book, Lei Zhang makes a new and meaningful contribution to the field of Chinese environmental history by attending to water as a daily necessity and examining the previously neglected arrangements that provided urban denizens with predictable access to this critical resource.

Dass Räumlichkeit nicht nur als neutraler Rahmen interpretiert werden kann, zeigen deutsch-jüdische Selbstzeugnisse während des Nationalsozialismus und insbesondere die Geschichte der Stadt Breslau. Diese beherbergte damals die drittgrößte jüdische Gemeinschaft Deutschlands. Die Beziehung zwischen ‚Arier‘ und ‚Jude‘ im ‚Dritten Reich‘ war tatsächlich im und durch den Raum strukturiert. Die raumpolitischen Eingriffe – von der Schrumpfung bis hin zur Zerstörung der jüdischen Gemeinschaft Breslaus – regten zum Schreiben an. Diese bisher relativ wenig beachteten Breslauer Tagebücher und Autobiographien bieten wichtige Einblicke in den Zusammenhang zwischen nationalsozialistischer Raumnutzung und Ausgrenzung von ‚Gemeinschaftsfremden‘. Zentral für diese Arbeit ist die Erfahrung des sich verändernden Raumes und dessen Wiedergabe im autobiographischen Narrativ. Ziel ist, einen Beitrag zum Verständnis der Darstellung der deutsch-jüdischen Stadterfahrung in Breslauer Selbstzeugnissen während des ‚Dritten Reiches‘ zu leisten.

The first English translation of a lost classic that reinvents the flaneur in Berlin.Franz Hessel (1880–1941), a German-born writer, grew up in Berlin, studied in Munich, and then lived in Paris, where he moved in artistic and literary circles. His relationship with the fashion journalist Helen Grund was the inspiration for Henri-Pierre Roche's novel Jules et Jim (made into a celebrated 1962 film by Francois Truffaut). In collaboration with Walter Benjamin, Hessel reinvented the Parisian figure of the flaneur. This 1929 book—here in its first English translation—offers Hessel's version of a flaneur in Berlin.In Walking in Berlin, Hessel captures the rhythm of Weimar-era Berlin, recording the seismic shifts in German culture. Nearly all of the essays take the form of a walk or outing, focusing on either a theme or part of the city, and many end at a theater, cinema, or club. Hessel deftly weaves the past with the present, walking through the city's history as well as its neighborhoods. Even today, his walks in the city, from the Alexanderplatz to Kreuzberg, can guide would-be flaneurs.Walking in Berlin is a lost classic, known mainly because of Hessel's connection to Benjamin but now introduced to readers of English. Walking in Berlin was a central model for Benjamin's Arcades Project and remains a classic of “walking literature” that ranges from Surrealist perambulation to Situationist “psychogeography.” This MIT Press edition includes the complete text in translation as well as Benjamin's essay on Walking in Berlin, originally written as a review of the book's original edition.“An absolutely epic book, a walking remembrance.”—Walter Benjamin

Städte als Spiegel der NS-Herrschaft. Im städtischen Raum wurden soziale Beziehungen und Hierarchien der NS-Gesellschaft in Form von Milieus, Infrastrukturen und Inszenierungen sichtbar: Straßenzüge und Verkehrswege, öffentliche Gebäude und Versammlungsplätze eröffneten oder verschlossen soziale Räume. In der NS-Forschung bedienten sich erst einzelne Studien raumbezogener Untersuchungsansätze. Daher präsentiert der Band eine Bilanz neuer Forschungen. Durch welche Semantiken, Symbole und Zukunftsentwürfe wurden Städte im Nationalsozialismus als soziale Räume konzipiert? Wie prägten Stadtverwaltungen das Leben in der NS-Gesellschaft? Welche Praktiken des Einschließens und Ausgrenzens lassen sich im städtischen Raum beobachten? Der Band diskutiert solche Fragen in Beiträgen zum Wohnungsbau, zur Stadtplanung, zur Gewalt im städtischen Raum, zur kommunalen Finanz- und Sozialpolitik und zur Umcodierung städtischer Räume.

In Native to the Republic, Minayo Nasiali traces the process through which expectations about living standards and decent housing came to be understood as social rights in late twentieth-century France. These ideas evolved through everyday negotiations between ordinary people, municipal authorities, central state bureaucrats, elected officials, and social scientists in postwar Marseille. Nasiali shows how these local-level interactions fundamentally informed evolving ideas about French citizenship and the built environment, namely that the institutionalization of social citizenship also created new spaces for exclusion. Although everyone deserved social rights, some were supposedly more deserving than others.From the 1940s through the early 1990s, metropolitan discussions about the potential for town planning to transform everyday life were shaped by colonial and, later, postcolonial migration within the changing empire. As a port and the historical gateway to and from the colonies, Marseille's interrelated projects to develop welfare institutions and manage urban space make it a particularly significant site for exploring this uneven process. Neighborhood debates about the meaning and goals of modernization contributed to normative understandings about which residents deserved access to expanding social rights. Nasiali argues that assumptions about racial, social, and spatial differences profoundly structured a differential system of housing in postwar France. Native to the Republic highlights the value of new approaches to studying empire, membership in the nation, and the welfare state by showing how social citizenship was not simply constituted within'imagined communities'but also through practices involving the contestation of spaces and the enjoyment of rights.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Manchester University.Faced with economic decline, unprecedented levels of unemployment and new forms of political extremism during Britain's last great economic crash, politicians and planners in Liverpool and Manchester responded by investing in dramatic and ambitious programmes of urban regeneration. Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918-1939 is the first book to provide the hitherto unknown story of the innovative transformation of these cities.Charlotte Wildman challenges academic scholarship in British history, which associates the post-1918 period with the emasculation of local government and the decline of civic culture. She shows that local politicians, planners, architects, businessmen and even religious leaders embraced innovative trends in creating distinct forms of urban modernities, which particularly changed the way women experienced the transformed city. Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918-1939 offers a complex, interactive and multipolar interpretation of the ways cities develop, pointing to new methods and ways of understanding both interwar Britain and urban history more generally. At a time of debate and discussion about devolution and decentralisation of government, this book makes an opportune contribution to debates about urban governance and regionalism in contemporary Britain.

My Old Neighborhood Remembered is a lyrical remembrance of neighborhood life that has vanished from the culture.Best-selling author Avery Corman vividly recreates the vibrant, colorful neighborhood where he grew up – in the Bronx of the 1940s and 1950s. He recalls candy stores and bookmakers, egg creams and double feature movies, street games like stickball and Johnny- on-the-pony, school days of a different era, social mores that have disappeared.His was the generation of children of the home front during World War II, and he recounts how the war was embedded in daily life, and how children became literate through newspaper coverage of the war, and through Dick and Jane and comic books. He remembers in his neighborhood a deep sense of community and shared experience.My Old Neighborhood Remembered is a memoir that is urban history. Featured are 16 vintage photographs. Avery Corman also discusses the factors that altered the Bronx, in a decline that was particularly rapid and vast, before the area began to rebuild.As the author of Kramer vs. Kramer, a common assumption has been that Avery Corman was himself divorced; he was not. He was, however, a child of divorce at a time and place when divorce was rare, an experience woven through the narrative.My Old Neighborhood Remembered is told with the storytelling skills that have made Avery Corman a critically acclaimed author whose books have been published throughout the world.

Originally a tribute to Robert E. Lee, Richmond's Monument Avenue grew to its zenith in the early twentieth century as a place of wealth and privilege. Richmond native and child of Monument Avenue Patricia Hass has collected the loving memories of those who shared a childhood among the River City's elite. These pages are filled with recollections of warm afternoons playing in the shadows of the monuments and visits to neighborhood institutions such as Reuben's Deli and the Capitol Theatre. While the children played, their families entertained famous houseguests such as David Niven, Lord and Lady Astor and Winston Churchill. Enter each historic home along the avenue and travel back to a time now lost to memory.

This book presents a cultural history of modern Iran from the point of view of Shiraz, a city famous for its poetry and its traditions of scholarship. Exploring the relationship among history, poetry and politics, the book analyses how Shiraz came to be defined as the country's cultural capital, and explains how Iranians have used the concept of culture as a way of thinking about themselves, their past and their relationship with the rest of the world.Weaving together a theoretical approach with extensive ethnographic research, the book suggests a model to integrate broad concerns with a nuanced analysis of Iran's cultural traditions and practices. The author's interdisciplinary approach sheds light on how contemporary Iranians relate to classical Persian poetry; on the relationship between expressive forms and the political imagination; and on the different ways teachers, professors, cultural managers, poets and scholars think and work. He describes how history and poetry are the two dominant modes to talk about the past, present and future of the town and demonstrates that the question of knowledge is crucial to an understanding of the political and existential dimensions of life in Iran today. This book will be a major contribution to the current effort to move away from nationalist views of Iranian history and culture, and as such will be of great interest to scholars of cultural anthropology, history, Middle Eastern studies and Iranian studies.

The twentieth century in Europe was an urban century: it was shaped by life in, and the view from, the street. Women were not liberated in legislatures, but liberated themselves in factories, homes, nightclubs, and shops. Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini made themselves powerful by making cities ungovernable with riots rampaging through streets, bars occupied one-by-one. New forms of privacy and isolation were not simply a by-product of prosperity, but because people planned new ways of living, new forms of housing in suburbs and estates across the continent. Our proudest cultural achievements lie not in our galleries or state theatres, but in our suburban TV sets, the dance halls, pop music played in garages, and hip hop sung on our estates. In Streetlife, Leif Jerram presents a totally new history of the twentieth century, with the city at its heart, showing how everything distinctive about the century, from revolution and dictatorship to sexual liberation, was fundamentally shaped by the great urban centres which defined it.

In 1938, under the direction of novelist and historian Lyle Saxon, The Federal Writers'Project of the Works Progress Administration produced this delightfully detailed portrait of New Orleans. Containing recipes, photographs and folklore, it is consistently hailed as one of the best books produced about the city. Remarkably, many of the sites and attractions the WPA chronicled in 1938 are still around today.

London incessantly generates and incites cultural responses, pre-eminently in the interconnected domains of literature and film. This book demonstrates that those responses have been sustained as vital experiments and engagements in configuring the city and its inhabitants. Including essays by prominent cultural, literary and film historians this volume forms an original and incisive contribution to ongoing debates about the city's intricate cultural history and its construction through both language and image, as a crucial site of identity, desire, exile and displacement.

The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South provides the first detailed examination of the Universal Negro Improvement Association's rise, maturation, and eventual decline in the urban South between 1918 and 1942. It examines the ways in which Southern black workers fused locally-based traditions, ideologies, and strategies of resistance with the Pan-African agenda of the UNIA to create a dynamic and multifaceted movement. A testament to the multidimensionality of black political subjectivity, Southern Garveyites fashioned a politics reflective of their international, regional, and local attachments. Moving beyond the usual focus on New York and the charismatic personality of Marcus Garvey, this book situates black workers at the center of its analysis and aims to provide a much-needed grassroots perspective on the Garvey movement. More than simply providing a regional history of one of the most important Pan-African movements of the twentieth century, The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South demonstrates the ways in which racial, class, and spatial dynamics resulted in complex, and at times competing articulations of black nationalism.

A multifaceted cultural study of suburbanization in the United States, and Detroit in particular, during the postwar suburban boom. Dreaming Suburbia is a cultural and historical interpretation of the political economy of postwar American suburbanization. Questions of race, class, and gender are explored through novels, film, television and social criticism where suburbia features as a central theme. Although suburbanization had important implications for cities and for the geo-politics of race, critical considerations of race and urban culture often receive insufficient attention in cultural studies of suburbia. This book puts these questions back in the frame by focusing on Detroit, Dearborn and Ford history, and the local suburbs of Inkster and Garden City. Covering such topics as the political and cultural economy of suburban sprawl, the interdependence of city and suburb, and local acts of violence and crises during the 1967 riots, the text examines the making of a physical place, its cultural effects and social exclusions. The perspectives of cultural history, American studies, social science, and urban studies give Dreaming Suburbia an interdisciplinary appeal.

Situating post-WWII New York literature within the material context of American urban history, this work analyzes how literary movements such as the Beat Generation, the New York poets and Black Arts Moment criticized the spatial restructuring of post-WWII New York City.

This collection of 12 new essays will tell the story of how the gradual transformation of industrial society into service-driven postindustrial society affected black life and culture in the city between 1900 and 1950, and it will shed light on the development of those forces that wreaked havoc in the lives of African Americans in the succeeding epoch. The book will examine the black urban experience in the northern, southern and western regions of the U.S. and will be thematically organized around the themes of work, community, city buliding, and protest. the analytic focus will be on the efforts of African Americans to find work and build communities in a constant ly changing economy and urban environments, tinged with racism,hostility, and the notions of white supremacy. Some chapters will be based on original research, while others will represent a systhesis of existing literature on that topic.