Product Description: Information shapes urban spaces in ways that most people rarely stop to consider. From data-driven planning to grassroots activism to influencing the routes we walk, bike, and drive, new information technologies are helping city dwellers to leverage information in new ways...read more

There are nearly 20,000 general-purpose municipal governments―cities―in the United States, employing more people than the federal government. About twenty of those cities received charters of incorporation well before ratification of the U.S. Constitution, and several others were established urban centers more than a century before the American Revolution. Yet despite their estimable size and prevalence in the United States, city government and politics has been a woefully neglected topic within the recent study of American political development. The volume brings together some of the best of both the most established and the newest urban scholars in political science, sociology, and history, each of whom makes a new argument for rethinking the relationship between cities and the larger project of state-building. Each chapter shows explicitly how the American city demonstrates durable shifts in governing authority throughout the nation’s history. By filling an important gap in scholarship the book will thus become an indispensable part of the American political development canon, a crucial component of graduate and undergraduate courses in APD, urban politics, urban sociology, and urban history, and a key guide for future scholarship.

Product Description: Much of today's heated academic discussion about social capital is either theoretical in nature or revolves around national survey data, neither of which adequately explains the specific social networks that actually sustain life in cities...read more

Product Description: Using the urbanized area that spreads across northern New Jersey and around New York City as a case study, this book presents a convincing explanation of metropolitan fragmentation--the process by which suburban communities remain as is or break off and form separate political entities...read more