Lee Anne Fennell explores the relationship between home ownership and neighbourhood, arguing that the desire for active participation in local affairs is directly linked to conern about property values. She looks at how critical issues of neighbourhood control & community composition might be addressed through this link.

Stick ball, stoop sitting, pickle barrel colloquys: The neighborhood occupies a warm place in our cultural memory—a place that Kenneth A. Scherzer contends may have more to do with ideology and nostalgia than with historical accuracy. In this remarkably detailed analysis of neighborhood life in New York City between 1830 and 1875, Scherzer gives the neighborhood its due as a complex, richly textured social phenomenon and helps to clarify its role in the evolution of cities. After a critical examination of recent historical renderings of neighborhood life, Scherzer focuses on the ecological, symbolic, and social aspects of nineteenth-century community life in New York City. Employing a wide array of sources, from census reports and church records to police blotters and brothel guides, he documents the complex composition of neighborhoods that defy simple categorization by class or ethnicity. From his account, the New York City neighborhood emerges as a community in flux, born out of the chaos of May Day, the traditional moving day. The fluid geography and heterogeneity of these neighborhoods kept most city residents from developing strong local attachments. Scherzer shows how such weak spatial consciousness, along with the fast pace of residential change, diminished the community function of the neighborhood. New Yorkers, he suggests, relied instead upon the "unbounded community," a collection of friends and social relations that extended throughout the city. With pointed argument and weighty evidence, The Unbounded Community replaces the neighborhood of nostalgia with a broader, multifaceted conception of community life. Depicting the neighborhood in its full scope and diversity, the book will enhance future forays into urban history.

Housing and Home Unbound pioneers understandings of housing and home as a meeting ground in which intensive practices, materials and meanings tangle with extensive economic, environmental and political worlds. Cutting across disciplines, the book opens up the conceptual and empirical study of housing and home by exploring the coproduction of the concrete and the abstract, the intimate and the institutional, the experiential and the collective. Exploring diverse examples in Australia and New Zealand, contributors address the interleaving of money and materials in the digital commodity of real estate, the neoliberal invention of housing as a liquid asset and source of welfare provision, and the bundling of car and home in housing markets. The more-than-human relations of housing and home are articulated through the role of suburban nature in the making of Australian modernity, the marketing of nature in waterfront urban renewal, the role of domestic territory in subversive social movements such as Seasteading and Tiny Houses, and the search for home comfort through low-cost energy efficiency practices. The transformative politics of housing and home are explored through the decolonizing of housing tenure, the shaping of housing policy by urban social movements, the lived importance of marginal spaces in Indigenous and other housing, and the affective lessons of the ruin. Beginning with the diverse elements gathered together in housing and home, the text opens up the complex realities and possibilities of human dwelling.

This book departs from the premise that context represents a complex relational configuration which can no longer be conceived as an analytic prime but rather requires a parts-whole perspective to capture its inherent dynamism. The edited volume presents a collection of papers which examine the connectedness between context, contextualization and entextualization. They address the questions how meaning and speech acts are situated in context, how both are influenced by context, how context influences speech acts and meaning, how context is imported into the discourse, and how context is entextualized in discourse. The papers cover institutional and non-institutional contexts, the language of Greek laws, political discourse, confrontational media discourse and task-oriented face-to-face and back-to-back interactions. They reflect current moves in pragmatics and discourse analysis to cross disciplinary and methodological boundaries by integrating relevant premises and insights, in particular cognition, adaptive action, negotiation of meaning, sequentiality, recipient design and genre.

From the award-winning author of All the Broken Pieces and Serafina's Promise comes a breathtaking new novel that is her most transcendent and widely accessible work to date. The day Grace is called from the slave cabins to work in the Big House, Mama makes her promise to keep her eyes down. Uncle Jim warns her to keep her thoughts tucked private in her mind or they could bring a whole lot of trouble and pain. But the more Grace sees of the heartless Master and hateful Missus, the more a rightiness voice clamors in her head-asking how come white folks can own other people, sell them on the auction block, and separate families forever. When that voice escapes without warning, it sets off a terrible chain of events that prove Uncle Jim's words true. Suddenly, Grace and her family must flee deep into the woods, where they brave deadly animals, slave patrollers, and the uncertainty of ever finding freedom. With candor and compassion, Ann E. Burg sheds light on a startling chapter of American history--the remarkable story of runaways who sought sanctuary in the Great Dismal Swamp--and creates a powerful testament to the right of every human to be free.

How things are divided up or pieced together matters. Half a bridge is of no use at all. Conversely, many things would do more good if they could be divided up differently: Perhaps you would prefer a job that involves a third less work and a third less pay or a car that materializes only when needed and is priced accordingly? Difficulties in “slicing” and “lumping” shape nearly every facet of how we live and work—and a great deal of law and policy as well. Lee Anne Fennell explores how both types of challenges—carving out useful slices and assembling useful lumps—surface in myriad contexts, from hot button issues like conservation and eminent domain to developments in the sharing economy to personal struggles over work, money, time, diet, and exercise. Yet the significance of configuration is often overlooked, leading to missed opportunities for improving our lives. With a technology-fueled entrepreneurial explosion underway that is dividing goods, services, and jobs in novel ways, and as urbanization and environmental threats raise the stakes for assembling resources and cooperation, this is an especially exciting and crucial time to confront questions of slicing and lumping. The future of the city, the workplace, the marketplace, and the environment all turn on matters of configuration, as do the prospects for more effective legal doctrines, for better management of finances and health, and more. This book reveals configuration’s power and potential—as a unifying concept and as a focus of public and private innovation.

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