Despite the best hopes of the past half century, black urban pathologies persist in America. The inner cities remain concentrations of the uneducated, unemployed, underemployed, and unemployable. Many fail to stay in school and others choose lives of drugs, violence, and crime. Most do not marry, leading to single-parent households and children without a father figure. The cycle repeats itself generation after generation. It is easy to argue that nothing works, given the policy failures of the past. For Lewis D. Solomon, fatalism is not acceptable. A complex and interrelated web of issues plague inner-city black males: joblessness; the failure of public education; crime, mass incarceration, and drugs; the collapse of married, two-parent families; and negative cultural messages. Rather than abandon the black urban underclass, Solomon presents strategies and programs to rebuild lives and revitalize America's inner cities. These approaches are neither government oriented nor dependent on federal intervention, and they are not futuristic. Focusing on rehabilitative efforts, Solomon describes workforce development, prisoner reentry, and the role of nonprofit organizations. Solomon's strategies focus on the need to improve the quality of America's workforce through building human capital at the socioeconomic bottom. The goal is to enable more people to fend for themselves, thereby weaning them from dependency on public sector handouts. Solomon shows a path forward for inner-city black males.

Despite the best hopes of the past half century, black urban pathologies persist in America. The inner cities remain concentrations of the uneducated, unemployed, underemployed, and unemployable. Many fail to stay in school and others choose lives of drugs, violence, and crime. Most do not marry, leading to single-parent households and children without a father figure. The cycle repeats itself generation after generation. It is easy to argue that nothing works, given the policy failures of the past. For Lewis D. Solomon, fatalism is not acceptable. A complex and interrelated web of issues plague inner-city black males: joblessness; the failure of public education; crime, mass incarceration, and drugs; the collapse of married, two-parent families; and negative cultural messages. Rather than abandon the black urban underclass, Solomon presents strategies and programs to rebuild lives and revitalize America’s inner cities. These approaches are neither government oriented nor dependent on federal intervention, and they are not futuristic. Focusing on rehabilitative efforts, Solomon describes workforce development, prisoner reentry, and the role of nonprofit organizations. Solomon’s strategies focus on the need to improve the quality of America’s workforce through building human capital at the socioeconomic bottom. The goal is to enable more people to fend for themselves, thereby weaning them from dependency on public sector handouts. Solomon shows a path forward for inner-city black males.

As America's most dysfunctional big city, Detroit faces urban decay, population losses, fractured neighborhoods with impoverished households, an uneducated, unskilled workforce, too few jobs, a shrinking tax base, budgetary shortfalls, and inadequate public schools. Looking to the city's future, Lewis D. Solomon focuses on pathways to revitalizing Detroit, while offering a cautiously optimistic viewpoint. Solomon urges an economic development strategy, one anchored in Detroit balancing its municipal and public school district's budgets, improving the academic performance of its public schools, rebuilding its tax base, and looking to the private sector to create jobs. He advocates an overlapping, tripartite political economy, one that builds on the foundation of an appropriately sized public sector and a for-profit private sector, with the latter fueling economic growth. Although he acknowledges that Detroit faces a long road to implementation, Solomon sketches a vision of a revitalized economic sector based on two key assets: vacant land and an unskilled labor force. The book is divided into four distinct parts. The first provides background and context, with a brief overview of the city's numerous challenges. The second examines Detroit's immediate efforts to overcome its fiscal crisis. It proposes ways Detroit can be put on the path to financial stability and sustainability. The third considers how Detroit can implement a new approach to job creation, one focused on the for-profit private sector, not the public sector. In the fourth and final part, Solomon argues that residents should pursue a strategy based on the actions of individuals and community groups rather than looking to large-scale projects.

America in the Age of Trump is a bracing, essential look at the failure of a great nation to meet the needs of its people and the challenges of the age—and the resulting collapse of public trust in government, as well as a pervasive crisis of national values, from broken families to a loss of faith in the American idea itself. This crisis of values occurs just as the country faces an unprecedented array of fiscal, economic, social, and national-security challenges: out-of-control federal spending, frighteningly large deficits, massive gaps of income and opportunity, cultural division, and a dangerous world in which American power seems increasingly incidental. In America in the Age of Trump, Douglas E. Schoen and Jessica Tarlov offer a definitive and unique assessment of a nation in turmoil, looking beneath well-known problems to identify underlying yet poorly understood causes. Readers will confront the crises, one by one: of trust, values, and governance; of education, economic opportunity, and fiscal solvency; of national security, domestic tranquility, and race relations. America in the Age of Trump gathers in one place a clear and comprehensive evaluation of the fundamental issues confronting the American future while offering bold, fresh approaches to meeting these challenges. Other books have described the specter of American decline, but none has been so comprehensive in its diagnosis or forward-looking—and non-ideological—in its remedies, explaining how we might yet overcome national self-doubt to reclaim our traditional optimism, reassert our place in the world, and secure a prosperous future for our citizens.

The Japanese urban alleyway, which was once part of people’s personal spatial sphere and everyday life has been transformed by diverse and competing interests. Marginalised through the emergence of new forms of housing and public spaces, re-appropriated by different fields, and re-invented by the contemporary urban design discourse, the social meaning attached to the roji is being re-interpreted by individuals, subcultures and new social movements. The book will introduce and discuss examples of urban practices which take place within the dynamic urban landscape of contemporary Tokyo to portray the life cycle of an urban form being rediscovered, commodified and lost as physical space.

An encyclopedic reference of African American history and culture.

Michael Porter has argued that a sustainable economic base can be created in the inner city only if it has been created elsewhere: through private, for-profit, initiatives and investment based on economic self-interest and genuine competitive advantage-not through artificial inducements, charity, or government. Porter's ideas have prompted endorsement as well as criticism. More importantly, they have inspired a search for new solutions to inner city distress as well as a reassessment of current approaches. The Inner City defines a core debate in the United States over the future of a racially divided urban America. It is of inestimable importance to policy analysts, government officials, African American studies scholars, urban studies specialists, sociologists, and all those concerned with inner city revitalization.