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Sociology of Urban Areas books:
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https://www.amazon.com/Gang-Leader-Day-Sociologist-Streets/dp/014311493X
True story, that's how it worked in the Robert Taylor homes. The gang leaders, building managers, and police had an uneasy truce.
If someone did some stupid shit that was out of line, the gang leaders would make sure to quietly rat out the perpetrator via the building crew.
I'm pretty sure that the recent rise in random street violence is directly related to the breakup/gentrification of the project homes. It's no different from the mafia or yakuza - once the central power is broken up, there are lots of low level thugs scrambling for money/power and nobody to keep them in line.
i remember reading a book by an anthropologist on black milwaukee. i forgot what its called. he found that, if i recall, 1/2 of black people in that city have been evicted at some point and chronically homeless because of the fucked up housing system. it's apocalyptic levels of exploitation and segregation there
edit: book is called <em>Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City</em> by Matthew Desmond
not sure if you're serious but, free transport and specifically decommoditzing transportation is a great step towards leveling the playing field for poorer people. the reason why we don't have free transportation in America is because of politics, partly motivated by auto industry and partly motivated by socioeconomic/race factors.
a lot of countries around the world offer free or partially free public transportation - e.g. anyone over 60 in taiwan can ride the bus for free.
if you're interested in how cities and transportation got to where we are today, look up Jane Jacobs and her book, or watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fwf5h3MIdRs.
Yep. Way more than you ever wanted to know about why free parking is bad here: https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193236496X
Brief overview of book here: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/business/economy/15view.html
I'd highly recommend the High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup (RIP) on this subject. Great, pioneering book about how we fail to deal with the huge externalities of personal automobiles.
Read "Devil in the White City". It alternates between HH Holmes and the World's Fair.
This had been on my list of books to read for a while:
https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193236496X
"Shoup proposes new ways for cities to regulate parking – namely, charge fair market prices for curb parking, use the resulting revenue to pay for services in the neighborhoods that generate it, and remove zoning requirements for off-street parking."
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Lots of Vancouverites need to understand the true cost of the government giving away so much land without user fees. I suggest reading the seminal tome The High Cost of Free Parking
>free parking has contributed to auto dependence, rapid urban sprawl, extravagant energy use, and a host of other problems. Planners mandate free parking to alleviate congestion but end up distorting transportation choices, debasing urban design, damaging the economy, and degrading the environment. Ubiquitous free parking helps explain why our cities sprawl on a scale fit more for cars than for people, and why American motor vehicles now consume one-eighth of the world's total oil production. But it doesn't have to be this way. Shoup proposes new ways for cities to regulate parking – namely, charge fair market prices for curb parking, use the resulting revenue to pay for services in the neighborhoods that generate it, and remove zoning requirements for off-street parking. Such measures, according to the Yale-trained economist and UCLA planning professor, will make parking easier and driving less necessary. Join the swelling ranks of Shoupistas by picking up this book today. You'll never look at a parking spot the same way again.
Most parking lots are sized for the 4th busiest day of the year. Which means 360 days of the year it's just a massive expanse of asphalt doing nothing except making people who didn't drive there walk farther.
Source: https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193236496X
Thanks for the video; I'll have to watch it later.
I noticed the Globe article this morning. Jeff Speck ("Mr. Walkability", and a Brookline resident- https://www.amazon.com/Walkable-City-Downtown-Save-America/dp/0865477728) apparently designed or helped design the project
Check out the book The Devil in the White City
Its a really fascinating look at the World's fair in Chicago with going into H. H. Holmes as well. Now I'll warn you, it's a thick book that focuses more on the World's Fair, but it was super interesting.
That's bullshit. Read about the development of New York's freeway system under the guidance of Robert Moses in the last century, captured in Robert Caro's Power Broker. Every time Moses went back to the "We need to build more highways" well, it just made the problem of traffic worse, and it was never, *never* about making things better for the city, but to secure his legacy and keep his authority / power intact.
The solution -- better support and improvement for public transit -- is what the city needed, but Moses vision of the city and its needs -- more freeways -- was a product of his own narrow imagination, dated by decades by the time he really got going with freeways. It was something for rich folk.
There's a nice pop-ecology book on this very subject, The Triumph of the City. As you can guess from the title, the author concludes that yes, moving to NYC is a very green thing to do. The book is about the ecological impact of cities in general, but he cites lots of data about NYC in particular, since it's such a prototypical example of city living.
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The ubiquity of mass transit was one major reason of course, but there were other surprising examples, like (IIRC) the piles of trash bags stacked on the curb. The same volume of trash, he argues, generated by a suburb, would be spread out over a much larger area, requiring more garbage-trucks-miles to collect, generating more emissions, etc. Many of the arguments come down to: if you're going to have 8 million people in the first place, better to put them all in one place (at least from an environmental perspective). I'm not qualified to judge the book's arguments scientifically, but it was a fun read, and the arguments at least sounded plausible.
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The author would probably encourage you to get a tote bag for the bodega. :)
Lead Paragraphs:
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is not the world’s first pandemic, and it is unlikely to be the last. In recent years, there have been actual or potential pandemics in 2002 (severe acute respiratory syndrome), 2009 (H1N1 influenza), 2012 (Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus), and 2014 (Ebola). The new normal seems to be an actual or potential epidemic every 2 to 3 years.
Loss of life is one devastating effect of regular pandemics and economic damage is another. Consider what happens to the economy if pandemics occur regularly. Close association of individuals with different perspectives is <strong>a key to productivity</strong>. Large, dense cities are the most innovative areas, and the most innovative companies are those that bring disparate people together. If cities become ground zero for pandemics, fewer people will probably choose to live in them. And with that will come a decline in national vitality.
Preventing recurrent pandemics is a major public health challenge. To meet this challenge, society will need to act domestically and globally.
A story about H.H. Holmes, “America’s First Serial Killer” told in the cadence, rhyme scheme and ~meter of the song ‘Alexander Hamilton’ by Lin Manuel Miranda. Because, why not?
More or less historically accurate. If you’re interested in this guy, check out Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. Also a good story if, for some reason, you’re really into park design and American municipal politics of the 19th century.
Happy Friday!
Check out: Gang Leader for a Day: https://www.amazon.com/Gang-Leader-Day-Sociologist-Streets/dp/014311493X -- the dealers don't make much money at all. They are kickin' the money to people up the food chain.
The Devil in the White City by Eric Larson. 50% of the book follows the elaborate and seemingly impossible construction of the Chicago World Fair and 50% follows the construction of serial killer H.H. Holmes' kill house. Cited on countless "100 books to read in a lifetime" articles.
Edit: Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Devil-White-City-Madness-Changed/dp/0375725601
I would respectfully disagree and say, unfortunately, the pit goes so much deeper.
https://www.amazon.com/Evicted-Poverty-Profit-American-City/dp/0553447459
Yes. If anyone is interested in reading more about what CT has discussed in the last paragraph, I encourage you to read the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City."
>... Now, if you're brand-new to the series, you can be forgiven for not getting much, if any, of that from the experience of actually watching "The Wire" pilot. Though it has some roots in previous TV shows -- most specifically NBC's "Homicide," which was based on Simon's non-fiction book (and which Simon himself wrote for in its later years) -- for the most part, "The Wire" took a very different approach to narrative from any series in American history, so much so that it essentially had to teach you how to watch it. The cast is huge -- and the season one cast is tiny in comparison to later seasons, which would bring in new characters from the Baltimore docks, City Hall, schools, newspapers, homeless community, etc. -- and almost everyone you meet will play a key role in the unfolding storylines.
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>Back in 2002, I would say it took me at least three or four episodes to get even a tenuous grasp of who all these people are, what they're about, to whom they owe their loyalty, etc. (If you are, in fact, watching the series for the first time -- or even for the first time in a long time -- I'd strongly suggest watching at least that many in a concentrated burst before attempting to move to a weekly schedule, even though that's the rate at which I'll be doing these reviews.)...
The Devil in the White City by Eric Larson. 50% of the book follows the elaborate and seemingly impossible construction of the Chicago World Fair and 50% follows the construction of serial killer H.H. Holmes' kill house. Cited on countless "100 books to read in a lifetime" articles.
Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Devil-White-City-Madness-Changed/dp/0375725601
Jeff Speck has some good introductory writing on the topic. Check out Step 5 of Part II under the heading "Keep it complicated"
That PDF is kinda janky, so here's an Amazon link if you're interested: https://www.amazon.com/Walkable-City-Downtown-Save-America/dp/0865477728/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=walkable+city&qid=1563914434&s=gateway&sr=8-1
Excerpt: > Welcome to the world of risk homeostasis, a very real place that exists well outside the blinkered gaze of the traffic engineering profession. Risk homeostasis describes how people automatically adjust their behavior to maintain a comfortable level of risk. It explains why poisoning deaths went up after childproof caps were introduced—people stopped hiding their medicines—and why the deadliest intersections in America are typically the ones you can navigate with one finger on the steering wheel and a cellphone at your ear. [9]
Eliminate single family zoning. Build more housing. Lots more housing. Build it on small lots. Lend money to motivated residents to improve their dwellings, or build new dwellings, or start businesses to provide services to new residents.
Don't build parking.
If you remove the causes of artificial scarcity, prevent cataclysmic change from superblock developments constructed by one or two highly capitalized out-of-town developers, and allow access to capital for residents the neighborhoods will improve on their own with much more demographic growth than demographic replacement.
The Devil in the White City may get a bit too macabre for your last criteria, but it's a fantastic read. It tells the story of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and, in parallel, the story of H. H. Holmes, a prolific serial killer who built a murder hotel.
It's a fantastic thriller of a book that somehow makes the planning and construction of the city as interesting as the rise and fall of the serial killer. It goes into the details about the construction of the place, the architecture and architects, racial tensions, etc. It's really good.
The reason that a lot of the ins and outs of criminal investigation are hard to come by is that if the bad guys know exactly what the good guys are doing, they can use that to try to get away with additional crimes.
You can get some of the basics from books like this. But you aren't going to get a ton of in depth stuff in all likelihood.
i worked at cito in 21! you’re not giving me much to go on lmao. who were your rayado rangers? that may help me narrow it down
was it by any chance The Devil in the White City?
You my friend are 100% right. People like to use the standard trope of blame the developer/landlord. In reality, it should be blame the NIMBY's. Anyone interested in the topic should read this book. It explains why cities like NYC, London, and Mumbai are so expensive. It's the restrictive zoning passed to protect the NIMBYs.
Not saying all zoning is bad, I think Canadian cities did a much better job of reducing suburban sprawl, but ironically we make it so that today you couldn't even build the 100-year-old building that everyone likes in the same spot.
Maybe not the type of Progressives that San Francisco has: Book: San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities. Much exaggerated as a generalization, but applies well to S.F.
Do you not believe that people locked up in mental wards are force fed drugs?
The solution isn't a harder government hand, its a smart approach. Look I agree with your desire for a safer streets, id just rather achieve it though other methods. first lets try better solutions like the ones proposed in San Fransicko, then lets maybe actually allow people to protect themselves....