Gentrifier opens up a new conversation about gentrification, one that goes beyond the statistics and the clichés, and examines different sides of a controversial, deeply personal issue. In this lively yet rigorous book, John Joe Schlichtman, Jason Patch, and Marc Lamont Hill take a close look at the socioeconomic factors and individual decisions behind gentrification and their implications for the displacement of low-income residents. Drawing on a variety of perspectives, the auth...

America is becoming a class-based society.It is now conventional wisdom to focus on the wealth of the top 1 percent-especially the top 0.01 percent-and how the ultra-rich are concentrating income and prosperity while incomes for most other Americans are stagnant. But the most important, consequential, and widening gap in American society is between the upper middle class and everyone else.Reeves defines the upper middle class as those whose incomes are in t...

In recent years, the young, educated, and affluent have surged back into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. And yet all is not well, Richard Florida argues in The New Urban Crisis. Florida, one of the first scholars to anticipate this back-to-the-city movement in his groundbreaking The Rise of the Creative Class, demonstrates how the same forces that power the growth of the world's superstar cities also generate their vexing challenges: gentri...

"The just city is one in which equity, democracy, and diversity are important considerations. This is in contrast with the city as growth machine. Fainstein examines three cities: New York, London, and Amsterdam. She provides a history of post–World War II planning and then focuses on fairly recent cases of development in each. Her goals, though modest, are important if growing inequality in urban areas is to be reversed. Recommended."― ChoiceFor mu...

This hard-hitting but fair assessment of Nova Scotia and the Maritimes will shock and surprise many Maritimers who have been conditioned to think that the east coast of Canada is one of the most livable regions in the country. Author Peter Moreira, a native Maritimer who returned home after working overseas for more than a decade, offers a straightforward analysis of why the region has fallen so far behind the rest of the country in terms of most economic and social indicators. Backwater i...

How do we build cities where we aren't just living within the same urban space, but living together?Greater Toronto is now home to a larger proportion of foreign-born residents than any other major global metropolis. Not surprisingly, city officials rarely miss an opportunity to tout the region’s ethno-cultural neighbourhoods. Yet there’s strong evidence that the GTA is experiencing widening socio-economic disparities that have produced worrisome divisions. We say that ‘diversity i...

Cultural policy is changing. Traditionally, cultural policies have been concerned with providing financial support for the arts, for cultural heritage and for institutions such as museums and galleries. In recent years, around the world, interest has grown in the creative industries as a source of innovation and economic dynamism. This book argues that an understanding of the nature of both the economic and the cultural value created by the cultural sector is essential to good policy-makin...

An in-depth look at America's changing gay neighborhoodsGay neighborhoods, like the legendary Castro District in San Francisco and New York's Greenwich Village, have long provided sexual minorities with safe havens in an often unsafe world. But as our society increasingly accepts gays and lesbians into the mainstream, are "gayborhoods" destined to disappear? Amin Ghaziani provides an incisive look at the origins of these unique cultural enclaves, the reasons why the...

Short-listed for the 2012 Speaker’s AwardOne hundred years ago, the City of Brantford advertised itself as the most important manufacturing centre in Canada. During the century that followed, its industrial economy boomed, faltered, and finally collapsed. By the end of the twentieth century, Brantford was known for unemployment, hard luck, and the infamy of having "the worst downtown in Canada." For twenty years the downtown was in steep decline. Significant attempts at ur...

Although millions of people in the United States love to ride bicycles for exercise or leisure, statistics show that only 1% of the total U.S. population ride bicycles for transportation—and barely half as many use bikes to commute to work. In his original and exciting book, One Less Car, Zack Furness examines what it means historically, culturally, socioeconomically, and politically to be a bicycle transportation advocate/activist.Presenting an underground subculture of b...

Newcomers to older neighborhoods are usually perceived as destructive, tearing down everything that made the place special and attractive. But as A Neighborhood That Never Changes demonstrates, many gentrifiers seek to preserve the authentic local flavor of their new homes, rather than ruthlessly remake them. Drawing on ethnographic research in four distinct communities—the Chicago neighborhoods of Andersonville and Argyle and the New England towns of Provincetown and Dresden—Japo...

Who makes our cities, and what part do everyday users have in the design of cities? This book powerfully shows that city-making is a social process and examines the close relationship between the social and physical shaping of urban environments.With cities taking a growing share of the global population, urban forms and urban experience are crucial for understanding social injustice, economic inequality and environmental challenges. Current processes of urbanization too often cont...