University of Chicago Press: New Titles in History: Urban History

Marking Modern Times

Alexis McCrossen — Wed, 01 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The public spaces and buildings of the United States are home to many thousands of timepieces—bells, time balls, and clock faces—that tower over urban streets, peek out from lobbies, and gleam in store windows. And in the streets and squares beneath them, men, women, and children wear wristwatches of all kinds. Americans have decorated their homes with clocks and included them in their poetry, sermons, stories, and songs. And as political instruments, social tools, and cultural symbols, these personal and public timekeepers have enjoyed a broad currency in art, life, and culture.

In Marking Modern Times, Alexis McCrossen relates how the American preoccupation with time led people from across social classes to acquire watches and clocks. While noting the difficulties in regulating and synchronizing so many timepieces, McCrossen expands our understanding of the development of modern time discipline, delving into the ways we have standardized time and describing how timekeepers have served as political, social, and cultural tools in a society that doesn’t merely value time, but regards access to time as a natural-born right, a privilege of being an American.

City Water, City Life

Carl Smith — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

A city is more than a massing of citizens, a layout of buildings and streets, or an arrangement of political, economic, and social institutions. It is also an infrastructure of ideas, an embodiment of the beliefs, values, and aspirations of the people who created it. In City Water, City Life, celebrated historian Carl Smith explores this infrastructure of ideas through an insightful examination of the development of the first successful waterworks systems in Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago between the 1790s and the 1860s.

In this period the United States began its rapid transformation from rural to urban. Through an analysis of a broad range of verbal and visual sources, Smith shows how the discussion, design, and use of waterworks reveal how Americans framed their conceptions of urban democracy and how they understood the natural and the built environment, individual health and the well-being of society, and the qualities of time and history. As citizens debated matters of thirst, finance, and health, they also negotiated abstract questions of secular and sacred, real and ideal, immanent and transcendent, practical and moral.

By examining the place of water in the nineteenth-century consciousness, Smith illuminates how city dwellers perceived themselves during the great age of American urbanization. But City Water, City Life is more than a history of urbanization. It is also a refreshing meditation on water as a necessity, as a resource for commerce and industry, and as an essential—and central—part of how we define our civilization.

Purging the Poorest

Lawrence J. Vale — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The building and management of public housing is often seen as a signal failure of American public policy, but this is a vastly oversimplified view. In Purging the Poorest, Lawrence J. Vale offers a new narrative of the seventy-five-year struggle to house the “deserving poor.”

In the 1930s, two iconic American cities, Atlanta and Chicago, demolished their slums and established some of this country’s first public housing. Six decades later, these same cities also led the way in clearing public housing itself. Vale’s groundbreaking history of these “twice-cleared” communities provides unprecedented detail about the development, decline, and redevelopment of two of America’s most famous housing projects: Chicago’s Cabrini-Green and Atlanta’s Techwood /Clark Howell Homes. Vale offers the novel concept of design politics to show how issues of architecture and urbanism are intimately bound up in thinking about policy. Drawing from extensive archival research and in-depth interviews, Vale recalibrates the larger cultural role of public housing, revalues the contributions of public housing residents, and reconsiders the role of design and designers.

Chasing Warsaw

Monika Grubbauer; Joanna Kusiak — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Warsaw is one of the most dynamically developing cities in Europe, and its rich history has marked it as an epicenter of many modes of urbanism: Tzarist, modernist, socialist, and—in the past two decades—aggressively neoliberal. Focusing on Warsaw after 1990, this volume explores the interplay between Warsaw’s past urban identities and the intense urban change of the ’90s and ’00s. Chasing Warsaw departs from the typical narratives of post-socialist cities in Eastern Europe by contextualizing Warsaw’s unique transformation in terms of both global change and the shifting geographies of centrality and marginality in contemporary Poland.