In recent decades a growing number of middle-class parents have considered sending their children to—and often end up becoming active in—urban public schools. Their presence can bring long-needed material resources to such schools, but, as Linn Posey-Maddox shows in this study, it can also introduce new class and race tensions, and even exacerbate inequalities. Sensitively navigating the pros and cons of middle-class transformation, When Middle-Class Parents Choose Urban Schools asks whether it is possible for our urban public schools to have both financial security and equitable diversity. Drawing on in-depth research at an urban elementary school, Posey-Maddox examines parents’ efforts to support the school through their outreach, marketing, and volunteerism. She shows that when middle-class parents engage in urban school communities, they can bring a host of positive benefits, including new educational opportunities and greater diversity. But their involvement can also unintentionally marginalize less-affluent parents and diminish low-income students’ access to the improving schools. In response, Posey-Maddox argues that school reform efforts, which usually equate improvement with rising test scores and increased enrollment, need to have more equity-focused policies in place to ensure that low-income families also benefit from—and participate in—school change.

Richard Florida, one of the world's leading urbanists and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, confronts the dark side of the back-to-the-city movement In recent years, the young, educated, and affluent have surged back into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. and yet all is not well. In The New Urban Crisis, Richard Florida, one of the first scholars to anticipate this back-to-the-city movement, demonstrates how the forces that drive urban growth also generate cities' vexing challenges, such as gentrification, segregation, and inequality. Meanwhile, many more cities still stagnate, and middle-class neighborhoods everywhere are disappearing. We must rebuild cities and suburbs by empowering them to address their challenges. The New Urban Crisis is a bracingly original work of research and analysis that offers a compelling diagnosis of our economic ills and a bold prescription for more inclusive cities capable of ensuring prosperity for all.

The classic historical interpretation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America sees this period as a political search for order by the middle class, culminating in Progressive Era reforms. In The Middle-Class City, John Hepp examines transformations in everyday middle-class life in Philadelphia between 1876 and 1926 to discover the cultural roots of this search for order. By looking at complex relationships among members of that city's middle class and three largely bourgeois commercial institutions—newspapers, department stores, and railroads—Hepp finds that the men and women of the middle class consistently reordered their world along rational lines. According to Hepp, this period was rife with evidence of creative reorganization that served to mold middle-class life. The department store was more than just an expanded dry goods emporium; it was a middle-class haven of order in the heart of a frenetic city—an entirely new way of organizing merchandise for sale. Redesigned newspapers brought well-ordered news and entertainment to middle-class homes and also carried retail advertisements to entice consumers downtown via train and streetcar. The complex interiors of urban railroad stations reflected a rationalization of space, and rail schedules embodied the modernized specialization of standard time. In his fascinating investigation of similar patterns of behavior among commercial institutions, Hepp exposes an important intersection between the histories of the city and the middle class. In his careful reconstruction of this now vanished culture, Hepp examines a wide variety of sources, including diaries and memoirs left by middle-class women and men of the region. Following Philadelphians as they rode trains and trolleys, read newspapers, and shopped at department stores, he uses their accounts as individualized guidebooks to middle-class life in the metropolis. And through a creative use of photographs, floor plans, maps, and material culture, The Middle-Class City helps to reconstruct the physical settings of these enterprises and recreate everyday middle-class life, shedding new light on an underanalyzed historical group and the cultural history of twentieth-century America.

​This book seeks to understand the urban transformation of Amsterdam over a 40-year period. In addition to charting social and economic changes associated with gentrification, it analyses the electoral dynamics and middle-class politics that have underpinned Amsterdam’s change to a middle-class city.

Middle-class School Choice in Urban Spaces examines government-funded public schools from a range of perspectives and scholarship in order to examine the historical, political and economic conditions of public schooling within a globalized, post-welfare context. In this book, Rowe argues that post-welfare policy conditions are detrimental to government-funded public schools, as they engender consistent pressure in rearticulating the public school in alignment with the market, produce tensions in serving the more historical conceptualizations of public schooling, and are preoccupied by contemporary profit-driven concerns. Chapters focus on public schooling from different global perspectives, with examples from Chile and the US, to examine how various social movements encapsulate ideologies around public schooling. Rowe also draws upon a rich, five-year ethnographic study of campaigns lobbying the Victorian State Government in Australia for a brand-new, local-specific public school. Critical attention is paid to the public school as a means to achieve empowerment and overcome discrimination, and both a local and global lens are used to identify how parents choose the public school, the values they attach to it, and the strategies they use to obtain it. Also considered, however, are how quality gaps, distances and differences between public schools threaten to undermine the democracy of education as a means for individuals to be socially mobile and escape poverty. This book makes an important contribution to our understanding of global social movements and activism around public education. As such, it will be of key interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the field of education, specifically those working on school choice, class and identity, as well as educational geography.

The classic historical interpretation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America sees this period as a political search for order by the middle class, culminating in Progressive Era reforms. In The Middle-Class City, John Hepp examines transformations in everyday middle-class life in Philadelphia between 1876 and 1926 to discover the cultural roots of this search for order. By looking at complex relationships among members of that city's middle class and three largely bourgeois commercial institutions—newspapers, department stores, and railroads—Hepp finds that the men and women of the middle class consistently reordered their world along rational lines. According to Hepp, this period was rife with evidence of creative reorganization that served to mold middle-class life. The department store was more than just an expanded dry goods emporium; it was a middle-class haven of order in the heart of a frenetic city—an entirely new way of organizing merchandise for sale. Redesigned newspapers brought well-ordered news and entertainment to middle-class homes and also carried retail advertisements to entice consumers downtown via train and streetcar. The complex interiors of urban railroad stations reflected a rationalization of space, and rail schedules embodied the modernized specialization of standard time. In his fascinating investigation of similar patterns of behavior among commercial institutions, Hepp exposes an important intersection between the histories of the city and the middle class. In his careful reconstruction of this now vanished culture, Hepp examines a wide variety of sources, including diaries and memoirs left by middle-class women and men of the region. Following Philadelphians as they rode trains and trolleys, read newspapers, and shopped at department stores, he uses their accounts as individualized guidebooks to middle-class life in the metropolis. And through a creative use of photographs, floor plans, maps, and material culture, The Middle-Class City helps to reconstruct the physical settings of these enterprises and recreate everyday middle-class life, shedding new light on an underanalyzed historical group and the cultural history of twentieth-century America.

Middle-Class Life in Victorian Belfast vividly reconstructs the social world of upper middle-class Belfast from c.1830 to 1890. Using extensive primary material, the book draws a rich portrait of Belfast's middle-class society, covering themes of civic activism, working lives, philanthropy, associational culture, evangelicalism, recreation, marriage and family life.