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History of the Urban Environment
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series Editors: Martin V. Melosi, University of Houston Joel A. Tarr, Carnegie Mellon UniversitySeries Editors: Martin V. Melosi, University of Houston Joel A. Tarr, Carnegie Mellon University
The History of the Urban Environment series features books that examine the historical impact of urbanization, showcasing the best scholarship within the field of urban environmental history, and presents issues that matter most to general readers interested in the environment. Books in the series consider the history of the human-built environment from a broad range of perspectives—geographical, technological, ecological, cultural, and social—in both domestic and international contexts. It presents studies that highlight the environmental challenges faced by specific urban centers, as well as works that combine theoretical and practical approaches to important urban environmental topics.The History of the Urban Environment series features books that examine the historical impact of urbanization, showcasing the best scholarship within the field of urban environmental history, and presents issues that matter most to general readers interested in the environment. Books in the series consider the history of the human-built environment from a broad range of perspectives—geographical, technological, ecological, cultural, and social—in both domestic and international contexts. It presents studies that highlight the environmental challenges faced by specific urban centers, as well as works that combine theoretical and practical approaches to important urban environmental topics.
Coastal Metropolis Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 264
ISBN: 9780822946526
Pub Date: 15 May 2021
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series: History of the Urban Environment
Illustrations: 32 b&w
Description:
Built on an estuary, New York City is rich in population and economic activity but poor in available land to manage the needs of a modern city. Since consolidation of the five boroughs in 1889, New York has faced innumerable challenges, from complex water and waste management issues, to housing and feeding millions of residents in a concentrated area, to dealing with climate change in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, and everything in between. Any consideration of sustainable urbanism requires understanding how cities have developed the systems that support modern life and the challenges posed by such a concentrated population.
Germany's Urban Frontiers Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780822946410
Pub Date: 28 Mar 2021
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series: History of the Urban Environment
Illustrations: 18 b&w
Description:
In an era of transatlantic migration, Germans were fascinated by the myth of the frontier. Yet, for many, they were most likely to encounter frontier landscapes of new settlement and the taming of nature not in far-flung landscapes abroad, but on the edges of Germany’s many growing cities. Germany’s Urban Frontiers is the first book to examine how nineteenth-century notions of progress, community, and nature shaped the changing spaces of German urban peripheries as the walls and boundaries that had so long defined central European cities disappeared.
A Mighty Capital Under Threat Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780822946106
Pub Date: 30 Sep 2020
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series: History of the Urban Environment
Illustrations: 10 maps
Description:
Demographically, nineteenth-century London, or what Victorians called the “new Rome,” first equaled, then superseded its ancient ancestor. By the mid-eighteenth century, the British capital had already developed into a global city. Sustained by its enormous empire, between 1800 and the First World War London ballooned in population and land area.
Environment and Urbanization in Modern Italy Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 246
ISBN: 9780822945932
Pub Date: 12 May 2020
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series: History of the Urban Environment
Illustrations: 64 b&w
Description:
From the second half of the 1940s, when postwar reconstruction began in Italy, there were three notable driving forces of environmental change: the uncontrollable process of urban drift, fueled by considerable migratory flows from the countryside and southern regions toward the cities where large-scale productive activities were beginning to amass; unruly industrial development, which was tolerated since it was seen as the necessary tribute to be paid to progress and modernization; and mass consumption. In his fourth book, Federico Paolini presents a series of essays ranging from the uses of natural resources, to environmental problems caused by means of transport, to issues concerning environmental politics and the dynamics of the environment movement. Paolini concludes the book with a forecast about the environmental problems that will emerge in the public debate of the twenty-first century.
Motor City Green Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 246
ISBN: 9780822945727
Pub Date: 03 Mar 2020
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series: History of the Urban Environment
Illustrations: 43 b&w
Description:
Motor City Green is a history of green spaces in metropolitan Detroit from the late nineteenth- to early twenty-first century. The book focuses primarily on the history of gardens and parks in the city of Detroit and its suburbs in southeast Michigan. Cialdella argues Detroit residents used green space to address problems created by the city’s industrial rise and decline, and racial segregation and economic inequality.
Unnatural Resources Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780822945710
Pub Date: 29 Oct 2019
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series: History of the Urban Environment
Description:
Unnatural Resources explores the intersection of energy production and environmental regulation in Appalachia after the oil embargo of 1973. The years from 1969 to 1973 saw the passage of a number of laws meant to protect the environment from human destruction, and they initially enjoyed broad public popularity. However, the oil embargo, which caused lines and fistfights at gasoline stations, refocused Americans’ attention on economic issues and alerted Americans to the dangers of relying on imported oil.
Inevitably Toxic Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 280
ISBN: 9780822966128
Pub Date: 18 Jun 2019
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series: History of the Urban Environment
Illustrations: 13 b&w
Description:
Not a day goes by that humans aren’t exposed to toxins in our environment - be it at home, in the car, or workplace. But what about those toxic places and items that aren’t marked? Why are we warned about some toxic spaces’ substances and not others?
Slick Policy Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 248
ISBN: 9780822965329
Pub Date: 30 Apr 2018
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series: History of the Urban Environment
Illustrations: 12 b&w Illustrations
Description:
In January 1969, the blowout on an offshore oil platform off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, and the resulting oil spill proved to be a transformative event in pollution control and the nascent environmental activism movement. It accelerated the advancement of federal government policies and would change the way the federal government managed environmental pollution. Over the next three years, Congress worked to pass laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act, and revolutionized the way that the United States dealt with environmental pollution.
Refining Nature Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 192
ISBN: 9780822965206
Pub Date: 30 Nov 2017
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series: History of the Urban Environment
Illustrations: 11 b&w Illustrations
Description:
The Standard Oil Company emerged out of obscurity in the 1860s to capture 90 percent of the petroleum refining industry in the United States during the Gilded Age. John D. Rockefeller, the company’s founder, organized the company around an almost religious dedication to principles of efficiency.
Rivers Lost, Rivers Regained Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 368
ISBN: 9780822944591
Pub Date: 26 Apr 2017
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series: History of the Urban Environment
Description:
Many cities across the globe are rediscovering their rivers. After decades or even centuries of environmental decline and cultural neglect, waterfronts have been vamped up and become focal points of urban life again; hidden and covered streams have been daylighted while restoration projects have returned urban rivers in many places to a supposedly more natural state. This volume traces the complex and winding history of how cities have appropriated, lost, and regained their rivers.
Negotiated Landscape, A Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 360
ISBN: 9780822964179
Pub Date: 12 Jul 2016
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series: History of the Urban Environment
Description:
A Negotiated Landscape examines the transformation of San Francisco's iconic waterfront from the eve of its decline in 1950 to the turn of the millennium. What was once a major shipping port is now best known for leisure and entertainment. To understand this landscape Jasper Rubin not only explores the built environment but also the major forces that have been at work in its redevelopment.
City on Fire Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 216
ISBN: 9780822964186
Pub Date: 31 May 2016
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series: History of the Urban Environment
Description:
By the mid-nineteenth century, efforts to modernize and industrialize Mexico City had the unintended consequence of exponentially increasing the risk of fire while also breeding a culture of fear. Through an array of archival sources, Anna Rose Alexander argues that fire became a catalyst for social change, as residents mobilized to confront the problem. Advances in engineering and medicine soon fostered the rise of distinct fields of fire-related expertise while conversely, the rise of fire-profiteering industries allowed entrepreneurs to capitalize on crisis.
Weeds Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 280
ISBN: 9780822964025
Pub Date: 29 Jan 2016
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series: History of the Urban Environment
Description:
As long as humans have existed, theyÆve worked and competed with plants to shape their surroundings. As cities developed and expanded, their diverse spaces were covered with and colored by weeds. In Weeds, Zachary J.
Epidemics, Empire, and Environments Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 328
ISBN: 9780822944461
Pub Date: 21 Dec 2015
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series: History of the Urban Environment
Description:
Throughout the nineteenth century, cholera was a global scourge against human populations. Practitioners had little success in mitigating the symptoms of the disease, and its causes were bitterly disputed. What experts did agree on was that the environment played a crucial role in the sites where outbreaks occurred.
Power on the Hudson Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 328
ISBN: 9780822963059
Pub Date: 05 Aug 2014
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series: History of the Urban Environment
Description:
The beauty of the Hudson River Valley was a legendary subject for artists during the nineteenth century. They portrayed its bucolic settings and humans in harmony with nature as the physical manifestation of God’s work on earth. More than a hundred years later, those sentiments would be tested as never before.
Energy Capitals Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780822962663
Pub Date: 01 Apr 2014
Imprint: University of Pittsburgh Press
Series: History of the Urban Environment
Description:
Fossil fuels propelled industries and nations into the modern age and continue to powerfully influence economies and politics today. As Energy Capitals demonstrates, the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels has proven to be a mixed blessing in many of the cities and regions where it has occurred.With case studies from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Norway, Africa, and Australia, this volume views a range of older and more recent energy capitals, contrasts their evolutions, and explores why some capitals were able to influence global trends in energy production and distribution while others failed to control even their own destinies.
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