Urban Ills

Twenty-first-Century Complexities of Urban Living in Global Contexts

Edited by Carol Camp Yeakey, Vetta L. Sanders Thompson, Anjanette Wells

Hardback - £108.00

Publication date:

13 December 2013

Length of book:

366 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739186367

Urban Ills: Twenty First Century Complexities of Urban Living in Global Contexts is a collection of original research focused on critical challenges and dilemmas to living in cities. Volume 2 is devoted to the myriad issues involving urban health and the dynamics of urban communities and their neighborhoods. The editors define the ecology of urban living as the relationship and adjustment of humans to a highly dense, diverse, and complex environment. This approach examines the nexus between the distribution of human groups with reference to material resources and the consequential social, political, economic, and cultural patterns which evolve as a result of the sufficiency or insufficiency of those material resources. They emphasize the most vulnerable populations suffering during and after the recession in the United States and around the world, and the chapters examine traditional issues of housing and employment with respect to these communities.
The chapters cover all of the 'social problems' that impact urban life, from housing shortages (chapter 4) to immigrant integration in suburbs (chapter 25) to gentrification (chapter 10) to the decline in public schools (chapter 12). There is even a chapter on human trafficking (chapter 14). The editors include a study of post-Hurricane Katrina Lower Ninth Ward problems for low-income residents in New Orleans (chapter 29). . . .This social problems approach connected to the editors' interest in social justice drives this wide-ranging two volumes of mostly academic research on the ups and downs of the 20th-century urban U.S. . . .Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students in sociology and business; professional urban planners interested in understanding a wide array of urban social ills.