"Unrivaled in scope. An essential work for urban historical archaeologists."--Adrian Praetzellis, author of Dug to Death "An engaging and astonishingly comprehensive work that reveals just how much our knowledge of America's cities and the lives of city dwellers has been enriched through urban archaeology."--Mary C. Beaudry, coeditor of Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement American cities have been built, altered, redeveloped, destroyed, reimagined, and rebuilt for nearly 300 years in order to accommodate growing and shrinking populations and their needs. Urban archaeology is a unique subfield with its own peculiar challenges and approaches to fieldwork. Understanding the social forces that influenced the development of American cities requires more than digging; it calls for the ability to extrapolate from limited data, an awareness of the dynamics that drive urban development, and theories that can build bridges to connect the two. At the forefront of this exciting field of research, Nan Rothschild and Diana Wall are well suited to introduce this fascinating topic to a broad readership. Following a brief introduction, the authors offer specific case studies of work undertaken in New York, Philadelphia, Tucson, West Oakland, and many other cities. Ideal for undergraduates, The Archaeology of American Cities utilizes the material culture of the past to highlight recurring themes that reflect distinctive characteristics of urban life in the United States.

Winner of the Bancroft Prize In twenty-first-century America, some cities are flourishing and others are struggling, but they all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. Cities have limited tools to address these problems, and many must rely on the private market to support the public good. It wasn’t always this way. For almost three decades after World War II, even as national policies promoted suburban sprawl, the federal government underwrote renewal efforts for cities that had suffered during the Great Depression and the war and were now bleeding residents into the suburbs. In Saving America’s Cities, the prizewinning historian Lizabeth Cohen follows the career of Edward J. Logue, whose shifting approach to the urban crisis tracked the changing balance between government-funded public programs and private interests that would culminate in the neoliberal rush to privatize efforts to solve entrenched social problems. A Yale-trained lawyer, rival of Robert Moses, and sometime critic of Jane Jacobs, Logue saw renewing cities as an extension of the liberal New Deal. He worked to revive a declining New Haven, became the architect of the “New Boston” of the 1960s, and, later, led New York State’s Urban Development Corporation, which built entire new towns, including Roosevelt Island in New York City. Logue’s era of urban renewal has a complicated legacy: Neighborhoods were demolished and residents dislocated, but there were also genuine successes and progressive goals. Saving America’s Cities is a dramatic story of heartbreak and destruction but also of human idealism and resourcefulness, opening up possibilities for our own time.

Alan J. Karcher takes a critical look at how and why the boundary lines of New Jersey's 566 municipalities were drawn, pointing to the irrationality of these excessive divisions.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "James and Deborah Fallows have always moved to where history is being made.... They have an excellent sense of where world-shaping events are taking place at any moment" —The New York Times • The basis for the HBO documentary streaming on HBO Max For five years, James and Deborah Fallows have travelled across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, the America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems—from economic dislocation to the opioid scourge—but it is also crafting solutions, with a practical-minded determination at dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics. At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallowses describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves. Their view of the country is as complex and contradictory as America itself, but it also reflects the energy, the generosity and compassion, the dreams, and the determination of many who are in the midst of making things better. Our Towns is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself.

What if scrapping one flawed policy could bring US cities closer to addressing debilitating housing shortages, stunted growth and innovation, persistent racial and economic segregation, and car-dependent development? It’s time for America to move beyond zoning, argues city planner M. Nolan Gray in Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. With lively explanations and stories, Gray shows why zoning abolition is a necessary—if not sufficient—condition for building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. The arbitrary lines of zoning maps across the country have come to dictate where Americans may live and work, forcing cities into a pattern of growth that is segregated and sprawling. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Reform is in the air, with cities and states across the country critically reevaluating zoning. In cities as diverse as Minneapolis, Fayetteville, and Hartford, the key pillars of zoning are under fire, with apartment bans being scrapped, minimum lot sizes dropping, and off-street parking requirements disappearing altogether. Some American cities—including Houston, America’s fourth-largest city—already make land-use planning work without zoning. In Arbitrary Lines, Gray lays the groundwork for this ambitious cause by clearing up common confusions and myths about how American cities regulate growth and examining the major contemporary critiques of zoning. Gray sets out some of the efforts currently underway to reform zoning and charts how land-use regulation might work in the post-zoning American city. Despite mounting interest, no single book has pulled these threads together for a popular audience. In Arbitrary Lines, Gray fills this gap by showing how zoning has failed to address even our most basic concerns about urban growth over the past century, and how we can think about a new way of planning a more affordable, prosperous, equitable, and sustainable American city.

Evaluates the impact of equity investments in five cities during the 1990s.

Illustrated with eighty vintage city postcards made between the turn of the twentieth century and through the 1970's (with the emphasis on the first four decades), historical geographer, John A Jakle turns his attention to early-twentieth-century nocturnal views of America's cities and to the role of the picture postcard in popular culture. 'Postcard images', the author writes, offered important visual 'fixes' -- mental templates for visualising cities -- the vista of a downtown street at night, or a bird's eye view of a vividly lit downtown, or the dramatic lighting of monuments and other architectural landmarks. As a result, the popularity and proliferation of the penny postcard influenced how Americans thought about cities as landscape displays.