Book Club for urban core oriented books

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KCPowercat
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Book Club for urban core oriented books

Post by KCPowercat »

Went to the library before my trip and picked up "Comeback Cities" which documents how and why city neighborhoods are making a comeback and the challenges we still face.

Anyways, great great....not very exciting but a lot of good information.

So what other books can you recommend that you've read that deals with urban core/downtown type issues?
http://downtownkcmo.blogspot.com

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chrizow
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Book Club for urban core oriented books

Post by chrizow »

Suburban Nation.

Cities without Suburbs.

The Not-So-Big House.

Metropolitics.
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Book Club for urban core oriented books

Post by KCPowercat »

cities w/o suburbs was mentioned heavily. That dealt with expanding city limits to pull in higher tax base, correct? Same with Metropolitics.
http://downtownkcmo.blogspot.com

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Book Club for urban core oriented books

Post by chrizow »

basically. Metropolitics is also cool because it documements intra-metro migration patterns and things like that. cool maps too. Cities Without Suburbs indeed talks about the tax base and the like, but it's also great as a documentation of how suburbs came to be. i thumbed through another "suburb" book at Borders last week that looked quite good, though the name escapes me. i'll try to find it.
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Book Club for urban core oriented books

Post by staubio »

I really enjoyed "Geography of Nowhere," which chronicles the evolution of cities in clever prose.

We should start a KC Skyscrapers book club and pass these around. It would give us still more to discuss.
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Book Club for urban core oriented books

Post by KCPowercat »

chriz....comback cities kind of dismisses that thought that the city has to gain tax base. It sounds like a good counterpoint to those books you mentioned....it focuses more on neighborhood residents picking themselves up. South Bronx is the major project they point to.
http://downtownkcmo.blogspot.com

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Book Club for urban core oriented books

Post by Brooksider »

A good book I read was "The Old Neighborhood" by Ray Suarez from NPR and now PBS. It's about what cities used to be like before folks fled to the suburbs and why it happened. KC is mentioned a few times and there is an entire chapter on St. Louis.
Suburban Sprawl - Cut down all of the trees and name the streets after them.
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Book Club for urban core oriented books

Post by chrizow »

^

that sounds really awesome! :)
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Re: Book Club for urban core oriented books

Post by carfreekc »

KCPowercat wrote:So what other books can you recommend that you've read that deals with urban core/downtown type issues?
Cities Back from the Edge: New Life for Downtown by Roberta Brandes Gratz is excellent. She was the keynote speaker at Mid-America Regional Council's annual meeting a couple of years ago.

About Gratz: http://www.pps.org/info/placemakingtool ... rs/rbgratz

A classic must-read, if you haven't already, is Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I submitted that one as a suggestion for the "book shelf" on the library parking garage, but sadly it does not appear to have made their cut. It should have.

A book group is an excellent suggestion and would solve the problem of what to do for an eventual follow-up kcskyscrapers event!
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Book Club for urban core oriented books

Post by kcteen »

"Cupcake Land" is a must find.

It was written specifically about the suburbanization (sp?) of the kansas city area, but applies to everywhere. It is funny as well, if i remember correctly. Its an essay, probably 20-40 pages, i'll try to find a source. its a must read.
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Book Club for urban core oriented books

Post by kcteen »

update: cant find a copy, but it was written by Richard Rhodes (pulizter winner from KC area). Here is something about the essay,
Richard Rhodes called the spread-out metropolis "Cupcake Land."

A place "well-scrubbed and bland," as the author described his hometown in a 1987 essay. A city once fueled by the sweat of farmers and the soot of locomotives now was defined by spotless kitchens, built-on garages and "pristine curb spaces... where cars in urban neighborhoods would be parked."

Rhodes, who would soon win a Pulitzer Prize for a book on the atomic bomb, profiled a polite but passionless place where standing ovations were routine. A place wary of risk takers. A place proud to conform and be average, where marketing companies flocked to test new products.

His critique was gross in its generalities and hardly appreciated by local boosters. But longtime residents could relate.

"Kansas City was a paradise once, or so it seemed to me when I was a boy in the years just after World War II," he recalled. The city of Rhodes' memory was a vigorous urban mass sprung from a rural landscape. Only the fine homes and manicured lawns south of the Country Club Plaza -- home to fiction's Mr. and Mrs. Bridge -- defied the hurly-burly Rhodes felt in his Kansas City.

"I could and did roam the city unescorted at the age of eight," he wrote. "Ladies hung washboards over the backs of chairs on sunny afternoons and used rainwater and vinegar to wash their waist-length hair; on summer evenings roaring with locusts, lawn chairs came out and people called across front yards. "And then the suburbs arose, Cupcake Land, and sweetened Kansas City's plain-spoken urban soul.... What the hell happened to my town?"
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Book Club for urban core oriented books

Post by KC0KEK »

American Dreamscape, The Wealth Of Cities, The New City-State and Crabgrass Frontier are good. Although American Dreamscape and Crabgrass Frontier focus on suburban issues, they're still useful for analyses of, for example, why people left downtowns and what it might take to bring them back.
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Re: Book Club for urban core oriented books

Post by trailerkid »

kcteen wrote: Sat Jul 10, 2004 9:04 pm update: cant find a copy, but it was written by Richard Rhodes (pulizter winner from KC area). Here is something about the essay,
Richard Rhodes called the spread-out metropolis "Cupcake Land."

A place "well-scrubbed and bland," as the author described his hometown in a 1987 essay. A city once fueled by the sweat of farmers and the soot of locomotives now was defined by spotless kitchens, built-on garages and "pristine curb spaces... where cars in urban neighborhoods would be parked."

Rhodes, who would soon win a Pulitzer Prize for a book on the atomic bomb, profiled a polite but passionless place where standing ovations were routine. A place wary of risk takers. A place proud to conform and be average, where marketing companies flocked to test new products.

His critique was gross in its generalities and hardly appreciated by local boosters. But longtime residents could relate.

"Kansas City was a paradise once, or so it seemed to me when I was a boy in the years just after World War II," he recalled. The city of Rhodes' memory was a vigorous urban mass sprung from a rural landscape. Only the fine homes and manicured lawns south of the Country Club Plaza -- home to fiction's Mr. and Mrs. Bridge -- defied the hurly-burly Rhodes felt in his Kansas City.

"I could and did roam the city unescorted at the age of eight," he wrote. "Ladies hung washboards over the backs of chairs on sunny afternoons and used rainwater and vinegar to wash their waist-length hair; on summer evenings roaring with locusts, lawn chairs came out and people called across front yards. "And then the suburbs arose, Cupcake Land, and sweetened Kansas City's plain-spoken urban soul.... What the hell happened to my town?"
Cool to see others interested in Richard Rhodes. Seems to be one of (the most?) profound and prolific writers ever born in the area. Kinda funny (but not surprising) he's not seen as a hometown hero. Maybe he was a little too truthful for our business-oriented town.

Cupcake Land appears in The Inland Ground, which was published by the University of Kansas Press in 1970: https://kansaspress.ku.edu/978070060499 ... nd-ground/
Buy @ KU Bookstore:
https://www.kubookstore.com/Inland-Grou ... quantity=1

Copies are also available at KC Public Library Central Library and Plaza Branch: https://kclibrary.bibliocommons.com/v2/ ... 120C435668

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Re: Book Club for urban core oriented books

Post by moderne »

So much of what he wrote about KC more than 50 years ago is still true. About people here do not have time for high culture because they are too busy mowing their vast lawn and watching football. And about the statuary on the Plaza not having balls.
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Re: Book Club for urban core oriented books

Post by smh »

Appreciate the Richard Rhodes recommendation. I knew about and read the essay Cupcake Land many many years ago, but did not know about the book. Ordered it from KU and look forward to giving it a read.
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Re: Book Club for urban core oriented books

Post by moderne »

In Arcadia et ergo sum, and all you want to know about the history of Unity S.o.C.
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