Títulos en Urbana

The tech boom of our time is changing San Francisco at warp speed. Famously home to artists and activists, and known as the birthplace of the Beats, the Black Panthers, and the LGBTQ movement, the Bay Area has been transformed by Silicon Valley. But the richer the region gets, the more unequal and less diverse it becomes, and the cracks in the city's facade begin to show. Inspired by Studs Terkel's classic works of oral history, writer Cary McClelland has spent years interviewing people at the epicenter of the Bay Area's rapid change: tech innovators, venture capitalists, coders, homeless advocates, pawn brokers, prosecutors, public defenders....

When a middle-class kid from the suburbs was caught using Facebook to distribute firearms bought legally at Indiana gun shows to notorious gangsters across the border - was he a kingpin or a scapegoat? David Lewisbey received perhaps the harshest sentence ever in a gun-trafficking trial. A college student from the suburban outskirts of Chicago, he allegedly embodied the enterprising swagger of his favorite rap lyrics, moving weapons for stacks of cash. John H. Richardson tours Chicago’s gun-soaked South Side with Lewisbey’s clientele and meets with the “Big Man” himself to unpack the truth.

After the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald by a white police officer, Chicagoans demanded change. Can a new state’s attorney, the first black woman to hold the position, bring real reform to a broken system? With a brick on her desk from the Cabrini-Green housing project where she spent her childhood, Kim Foxx must adapt her hard-won ideals to the realities of criminal justice in Chicago. In this intimate narrative by award-winning author Steve Bogira, Foxx reveals: “My mother taught me how to be a hustler. Hustle in the sense of work hard, grind - find a way out of no way.”

More than two decades after Darrell Cannon was tortured into a false confession of murder, he was finally released from prison with hardly an apology. He wasn’t the only one with a story to tell. Award-winning author Natalie Y. Moore reveals the fight for justice and reparations engineered by Chicago’s Black People Against Police Torture movement. More than one hundred African Americans were brutalized by Chicago Police Department Commander Jon Burge’s sadistic, state-sanctioned “interrogation” ring that operated within the department for decades.

It’s easy to get lost in Chicago’s Cook County Jail, the size of seventy-two football fields. For many released into the harsh elements beyond the walls, it can be impossible to find their way home. This haunting and powerful narrative reveals the intentionally disorienting tactics of the system and how the punishments meted out to prisoners, their families, and even innocent victims extend beyond the cages. Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, the award-winning author of Crook Country, exposes the moral, spiritual, legal, and psychological wasteland - inside and out - of the nation’s largest jail.

One prisoner’s ninety-year murder conviction becomes another prisoner’s crusade in this ongoing true account of an unlikely friendship forged behind bars and the enduring power of hope. For seventeen years and counting, Robert Chattler has made good on his promise to help exonerate his former cellmate, Lee Harris, who he believes was baited and duped by Chicago PD and buried by the false testimony of a bribed witness. In this emotional story of courage and trust, suspicion and sacrifice, Tori Marlan reveals the uncanny friendship powering an impassioned fight for justice.

In their new audiobook, The New Localism, urban experts Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak reveal where the real power to create change lies and how it can be used to address our most serious social, economic, and environmental challenges.

No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together". To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it". To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide-ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias.

In the early 80s, Mark Fleischman reopened Studio 54, the world's most glamorous and notorious nightclub, after it was closed down by the State of New York. Ten thousand people showed up that night, ready to restart the party that abruptly ended after the raid in 1978 landed its former owners in jail. Inside Studio 54 invites you to revisit the happening scenes of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, the post-Pill, pre-AIDS era of free love, consequence-free sex, and seemingly endless partying. Following Fleischman as he built connections that lead him to Studio 54.

In Extreme Cities, Ashley Dawson argues that cities are ground zero for climate change, contributing the lion's share of carbon to the atmosphere, while also lying on the frontlines of rising sea levels. Today, the majority of the world's megacities are located in coastal zones, yet few of them are adequately prepared for the floods that will increasingly menace their shores. Instead, most continue to develop luxury waterfront condos for the elite and industrial facilities for corporations. These not only intensify carbon emissions, but also place coastal residents at greater risk.

As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. Underlying this trend is a single idea: The belief that our existence is understandable through computation, and more data is enough to help us build a better world. In reality, we are lost in a sea of information, increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. Author James Bridle surveys the history of art, technology, and information systems and reveals the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime.

The future of our cities is not what it used to be. The modern-city model that took hold globally in the twentieth century has outlived its usefulness. It cannot solve the problems it helped to create - especially global warming. Fortunately, a new model for urban development is emerging in cities to aggressively tackle the realities of climate change. In Life After Carbon, urban sustainability consultants Pete Plastrik and John Cleveland assemble this global pattern of urban reinvention from the stories of 25 "innovation lab" cities across the globe.

For more than a century, the city of Atlanta has been associated with Black achievement in education, business, politics, media, and music, earning it the nickname "the Black Mecca." Atlanta's long tradition of Black education dates back to Reconstruction, and produced an elite that flourished in spite of Jim Crow, rose to leadership during the civil rights movement, and then took power in the 1970s by building a coalition between White progressives, business interests, and Black Atlantans. But Atlanta's political leadership has consistently mishandled the Black poor.

The Voucher Promise examines the Housing Choice Voucher Program, colloquially known as "Section 8", and how it shapes the lives of families living in a Baltimore neighborhood called Park Heights. Eva Rosen tells stories about the daily lives of homeowners, voucher holders, renters who receive no housing assistance, and the landlords who provide housing.

After his wife’s death, retired cop Walter "Pops" Washington has made a home for his ex-felon son in his sprawling, rent-controlled, Riverside Drive apartment. Will a long-simmering feud with the NYPD cause him to lose his home and the family he’s built there?

Physical infrastructure in the United States is crumbling. The American Society of Civil Engineers has, in its latest report, given American roads and bridges a grade of D and C+, respectively, and has described roughly 65,000 bridges in the United States as 'structurally deficient'. This crisis - and one need look no further than the I-35W bridge collapse in Minnesota to see that it is indeed a crisis - shows little sign of abating short of a massive change in attitude amongst politicians and the American public.

The country's leading transport expert describes how the driverless vehicle revolution will transform highways, cities, workplaces and laws not just here, but across the globe. Our time at the wheel is done. Driving will become illegal, as human drivers will be demonstrably more dangerous than...

From a Harvard scholar and former Obama official, a powerful proposal for curtailing violent crime in America Urban violence is one of the most divisive and allegedly intractable issues of our time. But as Harvard scholar Thomas Abt shows in Bleeding Out, we actually possess all the tools...

For readers of On Trails, this is an incisive, utterly engaging exploration of walking: how it is fundamental to our being human, how we've designed it out of our lives, and how it is essential that we reembrace it. "I'm going for a walk." How often has this phrase been uttered by someone with a...

The new dating craze among the divorced, recently broken up with, and frustrated singles of Los Angeles starts with the creation of “the List.” The converted swear by it—just write down everything you want in a partner, and the cosmos will provide. But could such a simple, old-fashioned technique actually work? Enter Jade, who investigates this increasingly popular path to a soul mate, with charming and hilarious effects, tracing the history of list making—and learning about dating and love along the way.