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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—Japonica Brown-Saracino paints a colorful portrait of how residents new and old, from wealthy gay homeowners to Portuguese fishermen, think about gentrification. The new breed of gentrifiers, Brown-Saracino finds, e...
How ordinary urban objects influence our behavior, exacerbate inequality, and encourage social change Assumptions about human behavior lie hidden in plain sight all around us, programmed into the design and regulation of the material objects we encounter on a daily basis. In the Midst of Things takes an in-depth look at the social lives of five objects commonly found in the public spaces of New York City and its suburbs, revealing how our interactions with such material things are our primary point of contact with the social, political, and economic forces that shape city life. Drawing on groundbreaking fieldwork and a wealth of original interviews, Mike Owen Benediktsson shows how we are in...
Sociologists have long noted that dynamism is an essential part of the urban way of life. However, walking as a significant social activity and crucial research method (in spite of its ubiquity as part of urban life) has often been overlooked. This volume considers walking in the city from a variety of perspectives, in a variety of places and with a variety of methods, to engage with the question of how walking can contribute to the sociological imagination and reveal sociological knowledge. Bringing together new research on sites across Europe, Walking in the European City addresses the nature of everyday mobility in contemporary urban settings, shedding light not only on the ways in which ...
Researching City Life: An Urban Field Methods Text-Reader examines the city from a street level perspective and provides readers with tools to conduct research on urbanism—the everyday experiences of people in cities. Contending that culture is central to understanding urbanism, editors Tyler Schafer and Michael Ian Borer address qualitative research in cities and how it provides insights unable to be captured via quantitative methods. Carefully selected and edited readings cover participant observation, interviewing, narrative analysis, visual and sensory methods, and methods for (re)presenting the city. Each section includes an introduction from the editors, a Reflection Essay from one of the authors, and exercises that prompt hands-on experience.
Daniel Monti, Michael Ian Borer, and Lyn C. Macgregor provide a thorough and comprehensive survey of the contemporary urban world that is accessible to students with Urban People and Places: The Sociology of Cities, Suburbs, and Towns. This new title will give balanced treatment to both the process by which cities are built (i.e., urbanization) and the ways of life practiced by people that live and work in more urban places (i.e., urbanism) unlike most core texts in this area. Whereas most texts focus on the socio-economic causes of urbanization, this text analyses the cultural component: how the physical construction of places is, in part, a product of cultural beliefs, ideas, and practices and also how the culture of those who live, work, and play in various places is shaped, structured, and controlled by the built environment. Inasmuch as the primary focus will be on the United States, global discussion is composed with an eye toward showing how U.S. cities, suburbs, and towns are different and alike from their counterparts in Africa, Asia, and Central and South America.
After a generation of pathbreaking scholarship that has reoriented and enlightened our perception of the American city, the two volumes of the Encyclopedia of American Urban History offer both a summary and an interpretation of the field. With contributions from leading academics in their fields, this authoritative resource offers an interdisciplinary approach by covering topics from economics, geography, anthropology, politics, and sociology.
An unforgettable pilgrimage through America's oldest major league ballpark The Green Monster. Pesky's Pole. The Lone Red Seat. Yawkey Way. To baseball fans this list of bizarre phrases evokes only one place: Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox. Built in 1912, Fenway Park is Americas oldest major league ballpark still in use. In Faithful to Fenway, Michael Ian Borer takes us out to Fenway where we sit in cramped wooden seats (often with obstructed views of the playing field), where there is a hand-operated scoreboard and an average attendance of 20,000 fewer fans than most stadiums, and where every game has been sold out since May of 2003. There is no Hard Rock Café (like Toronto's Skydo...