Crisis Cities blends critical theoretical insight with a historically-grounded comparative study to examine the redevelopment efforts following the 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina disasters. Based on years of research in the two cities, Gotham and Greenberg contend that New York and New Orleans have emerged as paradigmatic crisis cities, representing a free-market approach to post-disaster redevelopment that is increasingly dominant for crisis-stricken cities around the world. This mode of urbanization emphasizes the privatization of disaster aid, devolution of recovery responsibility to the local state, use of tax incentives and federal grants to spur market-centered redevelopment, and utopian branding campaigns to market the redeveloped city for business and tourism. Meanwhile, it eliminates "low-income" and "public benefit" standards that once underlay emergency provisions. Focusing on the pre- and post-history of disaster, Gotham and Greenberg show how this approach exacerbates the uneven landscapes of risk and resiliency that helped produce crisis in the first place, while potentially reproducing the conditions for future crisis. At the same time, they highlight the expanding coalitions that formed following 9/11 and Katrina to contest these inequities and envision a more just and sustainable urban future.

An original work on American cities and the ongoing "urban crisis". Using the metaphor of the socially constructed organization of space, Bartlett takes a broad view of the evolution of urban America, from its historical roots to the present; he then examines the way in which current policies have responded to, and affected the organization of space (covering housing, transportation, government and other urban problems). He concludes with a look to the future of American cities, how they will impact and be impacted on by changing commercial and labor markets, by the problems of poverty and cultural change. In an epilogue, he explores possible ways to overcome the "social dilemmas", while recognizing the difficulty of this undertaking. A thoroughly unique perspective to the study of cities, this book is about how space is used in America and how it changes as the "logic of location" evolves historically. Starting with the assumption that cities are fundamentally unnatural" phenomena, it unravels the interactions of technological advances that have made them possible and policies that have given them shape.

A symposium entitled "Can the Cities Survive?" was held in February 1976 at Washington University, St. Louis. The symposium was coordinated primarily by students in the Urban Studies Program. Urban governments face almost every weakness in the national economic and social systems: widespread unemployment, racial segregation, and income inequality. Rather than deal with the problems themselves, government attempts to deal programmatically with the resultant pathologies: crime, housing abandonment, and fiscal insolvency. These pathologies are collectively entitled the "urban crisis." Events such as these seem to occur with some regularity in the United States. In only a decade, we have had an energy crisis, a constitutional crisis (Watergate), and now a tax crisis. Yet these events, as the urban crisis, are the disruptive and shocking results of long-neglected problems: unplanned development and use of energy resources, the growth of presidential power, and an outdated and inequitable taxing structure. If we are to deal with the urban crisis, the national government must provide the resources, leadership, and planning to combat the problems connected with race and poverty in the cities.

While the problems facing our cities increase in number and magnitude, there are few coordinated mechanisms in place for effecting change. In an effort to bridge existing gaps in communication and information, Burton A. Weisbrod and James C. Worthy, in conjunction with Northwestern University's Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, organized a conference to address these issues. The Urban Crisis collects the papers from this conference, opening a dialogue between academicians and practitioners and offering a blueprint for improving both the process and the substance of policy.