Inequality increases, instability grows, communities fragment: this is the fate of a city in the wake of globalization--but is globalization really the cause? Proposing a new perspective on politics, globalization, and the city, this provocative book argues that such urban problems result in part from U.S. policies that can be changed. William Sites develops the concept of primitive globalization, identifying a pattern of reactive politics--ad hoc measures to subsidize business, displace the urban poor, and dismantle the welfare state--that uproots social actors (corporations, citizens, urban residents) and facilitates a damaging, short-term-oriented type of international integration. In light of this theory, Sites examines the transformation of New York City since the 1970s, focusing on the logic of political action at national, local, and neighborhood levels. In the process, the story of late twentieth-century New York and its Lower East Side community emerges as something different: not a tale of globalist transformation or of local resurgence but a distinctly American case, one in which urban politics and the state, in their own right, exacerbate inequality and community fragmentation within the city.

Following decades of neglect and decline, many US cities have undergone a dramatic renaissance. From New York to Nashville and Pittsburgh to Portland governments have implemented innovative redevelopment strategies to adapt to a globally integrated, post-industrial economy and cope with declining industries, tax bases, and populations. However, despite the prominence of new amenities in revitalized neighborhoods, spectacular architectural icons, and pedestrian friendly entertainment districts, the urban comeback has been highly uneven. Even thriving cities are defined by a bifurcated population of creative class professionals and a low-wage, low-skilled workforce. Many are home to diverse and thriving immigrant communities, but also contain economically and socially segregated neighborhoods. They have transformed high-profile central city brownfields, but many disadvantaged neighborhoods continue to grapple with abandoned and environmentally contaminated sites. As urban cores boom, inner-ring suburban areas increasingly face mounting problems, while other shrinking cities continue to wrestle with long-term decline. The Great Recession brought additional challenges to planning and development professionals and community organizations alike as they work to maintain successes and respond to new problems. It is crucial that students of urban revitalization recognize these challenges, their impacts on different populations, and the implications for crafting effective and equitable revitalization policy. Urban Revitalization: Remaking Cities in a Changing World will be a guide in this learning process. This textbook will be the first to comprehensively and critically synthesize the successful approaches and pressing challenges involved in urban revitalization. The book is divided into five sections. In the introductory section, we set the stage by providing a conceptual framework to understand urban revitalization that links a political economy perspective with an appreciation of socio-cultural factors in explaining urban change. Stemming from this, we will explain the significance of revitalization and present a summary of the key debates, issues and conflicts surrounding revitalization efforts. Section II will examine the historical causes for decline in central city and inner-ring suburban areas and shrinking cities and, building from the conceptual framework, discuss theory useful to explain the factors that shape contemporary revitalization initiatives and outcomes. Section III will introduce students to the analytical techniques and key data sources for urban revitalization planning. Section IV will provide an in-depth, criticaldiscussion of contemporary urban revitalization policies, strategies, and projects. This section will offer a rich set of case studies that contextualize key themes and strategic areas across a range of contexts including the urban core, central city neighborhoods, suburban areas, and shrinking cities. Lastly, Section V concludes by reflecting on the current state of urban revitalization planning and the emerging challenges the field must face in the future. Urban Revitalization will integrate academic and policy research with professional knowledge and techniques. Its key strength will be the combination of a critical examination of best practices and innovative approaches with an overview of the methods used to understand local situations and urban revitalization processes. A unique feature will be chapter-specific case studies of contemporary urban revitalization projects and questions geared toward generatingclassroom discussion around key issues. The book will be written in an accessible style and thoughtfully organized to provide graduate and upper-level undergraduate students with a comprehensive resource that will also serve as a reference guide for professionals

The destruction of the World Trade Center complex on 9/11 set in motion a chain of events that fundamentally transformed both the United States and the wider world. In Power at Ground Zero, Lynne Sagalyn offers the definitive account of one of the greatest reconstruction projects in modern world history: the rebuilding of lower Manhattan after 9/11.

The compelling story of the politics, policies, and personalities that made Times Square's revitalization possible. The spectacularly successful transformation of Times Square has become a model for other cities. From its beginning as Longacre Square, Times Square's commercialism, signage, cultural diversity, and social tolerance have been deeply embedded in New York City's psyche. Its symbolic role guaranteed that any plan for its renewal would push the hot buttons of public controversy: free speech, property-taking through eminent domain, development density, tax subsidy, and historic preservation. In Times Square Roulette, Lynne Sagalyn debunks the myth of an overnight urban miracle performed by Disney and Mayor Giuliani, to tell the far more complex and commanding tale of a twenty-year process of public controversy, nonstop litigation, and interminable delay. She tells how the troubled execution of the original redevelopment plan provided a rare opportunity to rescript it. And timing was all: the mid-1990s saw rising international corporate interest in the city was a mecca for mass-market entertainment and synergistic merchandising. Sagalyn details the complex relationship between planning and politics and the role of market forces in shaping Times Square's redevelopment opportunities. She shows how policy was wedded to deal making and how persistent individuals and groups forged both.

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg claims to run the city like a business. In Bloomberg's New York, Julian Brash applies methods from anthropology, geography, and other social science disciplines to examine what that means. He describes the mayor's attitude toward governance as the Bloomberg Way--a philosophy that holds up the mayor as CEO, government as a private corporation, desirable residents and businesses as customers and clients, and the city itself as a product to be branded and marketed as a luxury good. Commonly represented as pragmatic and nonideological, the Bloomberg Way, Brash argues, is in fact an ambitious reformulation of neoliberal governance that advances specific class interests. He considers the implications of this in a blow-by-blow account of the debate over the Hudson Yards plan, which aimed to transform Manhattan's far west side into the city's next great high-end district. Bringing this plan to fruition proved surprisingly difficult as activists and entrenched interests pushed back against the Bloomberg administration, suggesting that despite Bloomberg's success in redrawing the rules of urban governance, older political arrangements--and opportunities for social justice--remain.

There's a story behind every apartment sale, every building development, and each real estatetransaction in New York City. And many of those stories involve the uber-wealthy behaving badly-the blood sport that is New York real estate is defined by billion-dollar feuds. THE NEW KINGSOF NEW YORK: Renegades, Moguls, Gamblers and the Remaking of the World's MostFamous Skyline, by journalist Adam Piore (The Real Deal; April 12, 2022; hardcover $29.95),charts the extraordinary transformation of America's greatest city from a near-bankrupt urbancombat zone into the land of Billionaires' Row and Hudson Yards-a luxury playground for theglobal 1 percent-and provides an inside look at the bombastic developers behind the biggest realestate deals of this century.The first two decades of the twenty-first century were a giddy, hyperbolic era of dizzying highs anddeep, dark lows. The headlines told the story: the largest residential and commercial development inNorth America, the largest condo conversion in the history of the world, the most expensivepenthouse sale in the city, the most lucrative office skyscraper sale in history, the tallest condo everbuilt. Yet 2020 brought in a new era: 95 percent of Manhattan's office space sat empty amid apandemic, retail stores were boarded up, and restaurants went belly-up.THE NEW KINGS OF NEW YORK offers a behind-the-scenes picture of what it's like tooperate at the highest levels of the industry, and how some of the skyline-transforming deals wereaccomplished. And it features the larger-than-life characters behind the deals.Written and published by the team behind The Real Deal, New York's preeminent real estate-focusedpublication, THE NEW KINGS OF NEW YORK is a book about the history of the city, thedawn of New York real estate's second gilded age, the opportunists who sought to exploit it, and theadventures they had along the way. It is a look at where we have come from as we consider where togo next.