From the palace hotels of the elite to cheap lodging houses, residential hotels have been an element of American urban life for nearly two hundred years. Since 1870, however, they have been the target of an official war led by people whose concept of home does not include the hotel. Do these residences constitute an essential housing resource, or are they, as charged, a public nuisance? Living Downtown, the first comprehensive social and cultural history of life in American residential hotels, adds a much-needed historical perspective to this ongoing debate. Creatively combining evidence from biographies, buildings and urban neighborhoods, workplace records, and housing policies, Paul Groth provides a definitive analysis of life in four price-differentiated types of downtown residence. He demonstrates that these hotels have played a valuable socioeconomic role as home to both long-term residents and temporary laborers. Also, the convenience of hotels has made them the residence of choice for a surprising number of Americans, from hobo author Boxcar Bertha to Calvin Coolidge. Groth examines the social and cultural objections to hotel households and the increasing efforts to eliminate them, which have led to the seemingly irrational destruction of millions of such housing units since 1960. He argues convincingly that these efforts have been a leading contributor to urban homelessness. This highly original and timely work aims to expand the concept of the American home and to recast accepted notions about the relationships among urban life, architecture, and the public management of residential environments.

As ecology becomes the new engineering, the projection of landscape as infrastructure—the contemporary alignment of the disciplines of landscape architecture, civil engineering, and urban planning— has become pressing. Predominant challenges facing urban regions and territories today—including shifting climates, material flows, and population mobilities, are addressed and strategized here. Responding to the under-performance of master planning and over-exertion of technological systems at the end of twentieth century, this book argues for the strategic design of "infrastructural ecologies," describing a synthetic landscape of living, biophysical systems that operate as urban infrastructures to shape and direct the future of urban economies and cultures into the 21st century. Pierre Bélanger is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Co-Director of the Master in Design Studies Program at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. As part of the Department of Landscape Architecture and the Advansed Studies Program, Bélanger teaches and coordinates graduate courses on the convergence of ecology, infrastructure and urbanism in the interrelated fields of design, planning and engineering. Dr. Bélanger is author of the 35th edition of the Pamphlet Architecture Series from Princeton Architectural Press, GOING LIVE: from States to Systems (pa35.net), co-editor with Jennifer Sigler of the 39th issue of Harvard Design Magazine, Wet Matter, and co-author of the forthcoming volume ECOLOGIES OF POWER: Mapping Military Geographies & Logistical Landscapes of the U.S. Department of Defense. As a landscape architect and urbanist, he is the recipient of the 2008 Canada Prix de Rome in Architecture and the Curator for the Canada Pavilion ad Canadian Exhibition, "EXTRACTION," at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale (extraction.ca).

This popular dance school was formed in 1955 in Baraboo after local appliance and tire store owner Tony Canepa tap-danced at the Sauk County Fairgrounds as the Mystery Merchant. Upon learning his identity, friends and neighbors begged him to give their children dance lessons. The handsome Canepa was a dancer at the University of Wisconsin. His svelte wife, Alberta, had taken dancing lessons from the third grade through high school. Eventually the dancing duo had 11 children of their own, and as the dancing school grew, so did the dancing Canepa family. Over 3,500 students have learned to dance from the Canepa family. This volume depicts the yearly dance recitals that were staged to benefit St. Marys Ringling Hospital, the Circus World Museum, and Camp Wawbeek, an Easter Seal Society camp for handicapped children located in Wisconsin Dells. There are also many photographs of the Canepa family, who as a troupe performed professionally for over 25 years. This popular dance school was formed in 1955 in Baraboo after local appliance and tire store owner Tony Canepa tap-danced at the Sauk County Fairgrounds as the Mystery Merchant. Upon learning his identity, friends and neighbors begged him to give their children dance lessons. The handsome Canepa was a dancer at the University of Wisconsin. His svelte wife, Alberta, had taken dancing lessons from the third grade through high school. Eventually the dancing duo had 11 children of their own, and as the dancing school grew, so did the dancing Canepa family. Over 3,500 students have learned to dance from the Canepa family. This volume depicts the yearly dance recitals that were staged to benefit St. Marys Ringling Hospital, the Circus World Museum, and Camp Wawbeek, an Easter Seal Society camp for handicapped children located in Wisconsin Dells. There are also many photographs of the Canepa family, who as a troupe performed professionally for over 25 years.