When Crack Was King offers an account of the crack cocaine era and a community's resilience, told through a cast of characters whose lives illuminate the rise and fall of the epidemic. Journalist Donovan X. Ramsey provides an exacting analysis beginning with the myths inspired by Reagan's war on drugs.

The book follows four individuals: Elgin Swift, who represents American industry and ambition and is the son of a crack-addicted father; Lennie Woodley, a former crack addict and sex worker; Kurt Schmoke, the longtime mayor of Baltimore and an advocate of decriminalization; and Shawn McCray, community activist and a founding member of Newark's most legendary group of drug traffickers.

With riveting research and the voices of survivors, this book is a crucial reevaluation of the era and a powerful argument for providing historically violated communities with the resources they deserve.

In Reclaiming the Discarded, Kathleen M. Millar offers an evocative ethnography of Jardim Gramacho, a sprawling garbage dump on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, where roughly two thousand self-employed workers known as catadores collect recyclable materials. While the figure of the scavenger sifting through garbage seems iconic of wageless life today, Millar shows how the work of reclaiming recyclables is more than a survival strategy or an informal labor practice.

Rather, the stories of catadores show how this work is inseparable from conceptions of the good life and from human struggles to realize these visions within precarious conditions of urban poverty. By approaching the work of catadores as highly generative, Millar calls into question the category of informality, common conceptions of garbage, and the continued normativity of wage labor. In so doing, she illuminates how waste lies at the heart of relations of inequality and projects of social transformation.

Jeff Speck has dedicated his career to determining what makes cities thrive. And he has boiled it down to one key factor: walkability.

The very idea of a modern metropolis evokes visions of bustling sidewalks, vital mass transit, and a vibrant, pedestrian-friendly urban core. But in the typical American city, the car is still king, and downtown is a place that's easy to drive to but often not worth arriving at.

Making walkability happen is relatively easy and cheap; seeing exactly what needs to be done is the trick. In this essential new book, Speck reveals the invisible workings of the city, how simple decisions have cascading effects, and how we can all make the right choices for our communities.

Bursting with sharp observations and real-world examples, giving key insight into what urban planners actually do and how places can and do change, Walkable City lays out a practical, necessary, and eminently achievable vision of how to make our normal American cities great again.

Building Together: Case Studies in Participatory Planning and Community Building offers a comprehensive exploration of neighborhood developments across various regions including North and South America, Europe, and Africa, covering a span of over forty years. This book is a seminal work on the community-based design practices of participatory planning and advocacy architecture.

Through a series of case studies, the authors, Roger Katan and Ron Shiffman, illustrate the challenges, opportunities, and rewards that come with grassroots collaboration. These case studies are carefully selected for their practical lessons and range in scale from regional urban planning to smaller architectural projects, covering areas as diverse as Harlem, Greenpoint, and the greater New York Metropolitan region to sites in coastal Colombia, southern France, and Burkina Faso, Africa.

Designed to appeal to a wide audience, including community development specialists, faculty and students of planning, architecture, community health, and the social sciences, as well as practicing professionals and decision-makers in economic development and community-based organizations, Building Together is a crucial resource for those interested in creating a more humane and healthy city through participatory democracy.

Teresa Caldeira's pioneering study of fear, crime, and segregation in S�o Paulo poses essential questions about citizenship and urban change in contemporary democratic societies. Focusing on S�o Paulo, and using comparative data on Los Angeles, she identifies new patterns of segregation developing in these cities and suggests that these patterns are appearing in many metropolises.

The book provides a brilliant analysis of the dynamics of urban fear and its impact on the city's geography. Caldeira's work is recognized for its theoretical boldness, rich ethnography, and specific historical insights. It addresses the many challenges and obstacles that government and civil society face in new democracies, shedding light on authoritarian continuity under political reform.

When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness, and death that centres on the lives of the women and children of a hillside favela. Bringing her readers to the impoverished slopes above the modern plantation town of Bom Jesus de Mata, where she has worked on and off for 25 years, Nancy Scheper-Hughes follows three generations of shantytown women as they struggle to survive through hard work, cunning and triage.

It is a story of class relations told at the most basic level of bodies, emotions, desires and needs. Most disturbing – and controversial – is her finding that mother love, as conventionally understood, is something of a bourgeois myth, a luxury for those who can reasonably expect, as these women cannot, that their infants will live.

Sarmiento, proscrito por la tiranía rosista y exiliado por dos veces en Chile, fue periodista brillante, político y polemista literario. "Facundo" es una biografía concebida como historia, historia de las guerras civiles de su patria centradas en la figura de Juan Facundo Quiroga, el más famoso, cruel, violento y despiadado caudillo de las guerras civiles argentinas. El desarrollo de los acontecimientos impulsó a Sarmiento a unir el tema biográfico a la realidad presente, denunciando a su enemigo Rosas.

Street Fight delves into the challenges and triumphs of creating more livable cities with a focus on improved transportation and the integration of bicycles into urban environments. It's a compelling narrative about the transformation of urban spaces to enhance the quality of life for their inhabitants.