The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring A City Back
By Kay S. Hymowitz
Published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers ($18.50)
Only a few decades ago, Brooklyn was a 71-square-mile left-for-dead city wedged between the East River, the New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean. Today, the borough is considered to be one of the coolest places on earth, home to trendsetters, celebrities, “one percenters” and a large population of postindustrial and creative-class winners. In The New Brooklyn, Kay Hymowitz, the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal, recounts the dramatic transformation of the once crumbling borough. Devoting separate chapters to Park Slope, Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Hymowitz identifies the government policies and the young, educated white and black middle-class communities responsible for creating a wave of new business, safe and lively streets, and one of the most desirable urban environments in the world.
Taking a look at Brownsville, the growing Chinatown of Sunset Park, and Caribbean Canarsie, Hymowitz also grapples with the question of whether the borough’s new wealth can help long disadvantaged minorities and the current generation of immigrants, many of whom will need more skills than their predecessors to thrive in a postindustrial economy.
The New Brooklyn’s portraits of dramatic urban transformation (also called gentrification), and its sometimes controversial effects, offers remedies pertinent to “phoenix” cities coming back to life across the United States and around the world.
Magnetic City: A Walking Companion to New York
By Justin Davidson
Published by Spiegel & Grau ($13.99)
From New York magazine’s architecture critic and Pulitzer Prize−winner Justin Davidson, comes a walking and reading guide to New York City—a historical, cultural, architectural and personal approach to seven neighborhoods through Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx. For nearly a decade, Davidson has explained the ever-changing city of New York to his readers, introducing new buildings, interviewing architects, tracking the way the transforming urban landscape shapes who New Yorkers are. Now, his extensive knowledge is bound into the pages of a book.
An insider’s guide to the architecture and planning on New York, it includes maps, photographs, essays on the evolution of the city and original insights from the men and women who built the city and lived in it—designers, visionaries, artist, writers. Davidson’s New York comes to life as he tells the stories behind some of the city’s landmarks and street corners. The book is structured around seven walking tours: the Financial District, the World Trade Center, the Seaport and the Brooklyn waterfront, Chelsea and the Highline, 42nd Street, the Upper West Side, and the South Bronx and Sugar Hill. Each itinerary is a trip you can take by foot, subway or bike…or a journey you can take in your mind without having to leave your apartment. Magnetic City offers first-time visitors and permanent residents a new way to see New York, exploring the new possibilities that can be found around almost any street corner—if you know where to look.
Sharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities
By Duncan McLaren and Julian Agyeman
Published by MIT Press ($24)
People are moving into cities worldwide at an unprecedented rate. Meanwhile, technology is allowing people to reinvent their lives—how they connect, consume, work, travel, learn, etc. The future of humanity is urban, and the nature of urban space enables—and demands—sharing of resources, goods and services, experiences. Yet traditional forms of sharing have been undermined in modern cities by social fragmentation and commercialization. In Sharing Cities, Duncan McLaren, an environmentalist, and Julian Agyeman, a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, argue that the merging of cities’ highly networked physical space with new technologies and forms of sharing gives cities the opportunity to connect smart technology to justice, solidarity and sustainability.
McLaren and Agyeman propose a new “sharing paradigm,” which goes beyond the popular idea of the “sharing economy”—seen in such ventures as Uber and TaskRabbit—to envision models of sharing that are also collective, encouraging trust and collaboration. They challenge us to ask: What does a truly “smart and sustainable” city look like, and how does this model overlap with the sharing economy? Do current approaches to the sharing economy factor in the values of economic and social justice—and if so, to what degree? They show how sharing could shift values and norms, enable civic engagement and political activism, and rebuild shared urban spaces. In this book, they set out a case for understanding cities as shared spaces, and acting to share them fairly—a powerful alternative to conventional “race-to-the-bottom” narratives of competition, enclosure, and division.
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