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By the 1970s, Atlantic City had become almost a parody of the American Dream. The city's neighborhoods were now made up of cracked sidewalks, houses desperate for new paint, and storefronts barricaded with steel bars. Along the Boardwalk, Going Out of Business signs stretched across the fronts of once-elegant linen shops; movie marquees advertised films long gone. Atlantic City locals and faithful visitors have varying theories for the city's decline. Their narratives of decay give insight into the complexity of urban problems and are interesting for how they link seemingly mundane and unrelated shifts in commerce and technology to changes in people's leisure choices and vacation desires.

This book has discussed academic debates and practices in urban environmental education. It has highlighted challenges and opportunities facing the field of environmental education in general and educators working in urban areas in particular. It has examined how the unique features of cities—as places facing major environmental and justice issues yet also as hubs of innovation—influence environmental education goals and implementation. Urban planning, social justice, climate change, and social-ecological systems resilience are areas environmental education has addressed in the past, but which are becoming increasingly salient for environmental education in cities. This afterword urges environmental educators to: First, challenge the urban/rural binary by recognizing and critiquing processes such as urban decay, suburban sprawl, migration, and gentrification. Second, spend time in the field—or, more accurately, in the streets— in order to understand urban settings in a deeper, more embodied way.

Chapter 1 presents an overview of the historical context in which hip hop emerged. The first section describes the social and economic context of the South Bronx during the 1970s, drawing on scholarship from history and sociology, journalistic accounts, and historical documentaries. The second section provides story lines about the most popular social activities engaged in by youth at the time: graffiti-writing, DJing, and dancing. The final section provides an explanation of how, within a chaotic social environment, these somewhat divergent social activities were linked together to begin forming the new entity. It also explores the historical role of Kool DJ Herc. By focusing on Herc, it demonstrates how sociologists can refrain from portraying actors as heroic and self-motivated yet still acknowledge their pivotal role as historical figures.

This chapter discusses the measurement of the recovery of the seven weak market cities featured in this volume. It explains that urban recovery is the progress of overcoming the problems associated with economic restructuring and industrial decline, such as population loss, job losses, urban decay, and increasing social deprivation, and that it is the outcome of complex interaction of different factors. The chapter evaluates whether the recovery in the selected cities was real and if it could be supported by measurable evidence. It provides the overall ranking of the seven cities on quantitative and qualitative measures.

The third chapter examines the story of Detroit’s rebirth through both a reliance on its storied past and the possibilities of the future through an examination of a wildly successful commercial starring Eminem. It provides the connective tissue between the storied past of Detroitas as a location of workers and the contemporary narrative of a city on the rise. At its center is the mythic tale provided by the 2011 Chrysler “Born of Fire” commercial. The narrative tale of a rebirth of a city, and by extension the American auto industry, in the face of epic decline makes the story of Detroit the ultimate comeback tale—a phoenix rising from the ashes of destruction.