Place Matters (Studies in Government & Public Policy) - Hardcover
Three distinguished scholars challenge us to put the urban crisis back on the national agenda, both as a moral challenge to our conscience and an economic challenge to America's prosperity and our families' pocketbooks. Focusing on the growing concentration of poverty in our cities and older suburbs and the mounting costs of suburban sprawl, they argue that these problems have political origins and can thus be resolved through political means--but only if we fully understand the power of place.
Despite modern telecommunications--faxes, linked computers, etc.--where we live shapes our lives and fortunes as much as ever. Place affects our access to jobs and public services (especially education), our access to shopping and culture, our level of personal security, the availability of medical services, and even the air we breathe. Economic segregation is increasing in American metropolitan areas--the rich and poor continue to move apart from one another. This has devastating effects on those who are forced to live in areas of concentrated poverty. But it also imposes costs, often unrecognized, on middle class and rich families who in their effort to escape the problems of concentrated poverty, undermine the quality of their own lives by suffering the effects of unrestricted sprawl.
The central thesis of Place Matters is that economic segregation between rich and poor and the growing sprawl of American cities and suburbs are not solely the result of individual choices in free markets. Rather, these problems have been powerfully shaped by short-sighted government policies. The first order of business must be to overhaul those policies. In the process, both urban and suburban citizens will gain a keener awareness that they are all ultimately bound by common interests and share a common fate.
Not simply another polemic on the plight of the inner-city poor, Place Matters provides a practical road map for reform based on penetrating analyses of economic and demographic trends, voting patterns, and congressional politics. While "sounding the alarm," it also provides guidance and hope for elected officials at local, state, and federal levels, as well as policy makers, scholars, teachers, community activists, business leaders, economists, social workers, and the urban clergy.
This book is part of the Studies in Government and Public Policy series.
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From the Back Cover:
"A brilliant and important piece of work. Deeply informed, penetrating in its analysis of the problems of economic segregation and spatial inequalities, and bold yet practical in its search for solutions and proposals for reform. Place Matters is one of the best books of applied social science I have ever read and is certain to have a major impact on thinking and discourse about urban problems over the next generation."--Richard Edward DeLeon, author of Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Francisco, 1975-1991
About the Author:
Peter Dreier, Dr. E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Program at Occidental College, is coauthor of Regions That Work: How Cities and Suburbs Can Grow Together.
John Mollenkopf is professor of political science and sociology and director of the Center for Urban Research at CUNY Graduate Center. His books include A Phoenix in the Ashes: The Rise and Fall of the Koch Coalition in New York City Politics, The Contested City, and Rethinking the Urban Agenda.
Todd Swanstrom is professor of public policy at Saint Louis University. He is the author of The Crisis of Growth Politics: Cleveland, Kucinich, and the Challenge of Urban Populism, the coauthor of City Politics, and coeditor of Beyond the City Limits.
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- PublisherUniversity Press of Kansas
- Publication date2001
- ISBN 10 0700611347
- ISBN 13 9780700611348
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages349
- Rating
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