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This chapter considers the cultural ecology of composite animals. Paleolithic and Neolithic societies sometimes created durable images of composite beings, and the few surviving candidates have often been accorded great prominence in modern interpretations. Yet they remain strikingly isolated. If the popularity of minimally counterintuitive images is to be explained by their core cultural content and its appeal to universal cognitive biases, the question that arises is: Why did composite figures fail so spectacularly to “catch on” across the many millennia of innovation in visual culture that precede the onset of urban life? Much hinges here upon our conceptualization of the “counterintuitive” and its role in cultural transmission. To determine what kind of “cultural ecology” the composite animal belongs to, the chapter examines composites in early dynastic Egypt before discussing the relationship between the spread of urban civilization and the widespread transmission of images depicting composite beings.

This chapter argues that the crime decline documented in this study requires a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between urban life and urban crime in the 21st century. Most of the high rate of life-threatening violence and predatory crime that observers have regarded as an inherent element of the structure and social content of polyglot big cities in the United States is not a necessary outgrowth of modern urban life. The chapter is organized around four topics. The first section revisits the data presented in Chapter 1 to argue that the scope of New York's decline is singular because its variability undermines conventional assumptions about the link between urban populations and urban crime rates. The second section then contrasts previous assumptions about the malleability and variability of urban crime with the experience in New York City since 1990. The third section provides preliminary data on the impact of crime policies and crime rates on minority populations. The final section considers the implications of what we are learning about the malleability of urban crime for criminological theories about crime causation and distribution and for social theories about modern urban life.

This chapter describes the traditionally strong antagonism between stereotypical conceptions of urban and rural life, and the particular political significance with which it became invested under the circumstances of the Weimar Republic. The main goal is to examine how the cultural tensions of the time are reflected in the depiction of Berlin on the one hand and provincial society on the other.

This chapter examines crime in New York City, but uses New York as a laboratory for new theories about the linkage between crime and social structure in urban American life. New York City received a double dose of crime decline in the 1990s, with serious crimes such as murder, robbery, and auto theft dropping by more than 70%. The chapter first explores the size and character of the city's crime decline, comparing what happened in New York City with the national pattern. Second, it estimates the incremental portion of the city's total crime decline that might be the subject of a separate evaluation. Third, it probes the particular history of the city during the 1990s, searching for atypical social or policy shifts that might qualify as the explanation of the city's incremental crime decline. Fourth, it addresses the lessons to be learned from the city's adventures in the 1990s. The city stands as an example of dramatic changes in the rate and risk of violent crime without major social, economic, or ecological changes.

This chapter presents powerful images and accounts that chronicle contemporary urban life in Mexico. The images discussed were captured by the photographer Maya Goded. These photographs and narratives chronicle the desolation of death, the world of the child and the bleak world of prostitution. In addition to these, the woman’s prison, the attractions of lucha libre (masked wrestling), the national lottery and games of chance, and the mass rallies of the Zapatistas, are painted vibrantly through chronicles and accounts. In these chronicles and photographs, the theme of poverty and the failure of the government to address the needs of the marginalized people form the unifying voice of these accounts. Prostitution, wrestling and the lottery became means for the people to escape poverty and the humdrum of everyday lives marked with difficulties. And the mistreatment of children, the trafficking of the rights of women in prisons and the lack of systematic identification of the victims of death reflect the failure of the government to produce laws and services that protect its people. However, despite the bleakness of the photographs and the chronicles presented herein, they nevertheless reflect the resilience of the Mexicans in surviving the challenges of life despite the feeling of being marginalized.

This chapter isolates seven important lessons that can be derived from the known facts regarding crime in the 1990s and provides a brief summary of the evidence for each. These lessons are as follows. The crime decline was real, was national in scope, and was larger and longer than any documented decline in the twentieth century. The crime decline of the 1990s was a classic example of multiple causation, with none of the many contributing causes playing a dominant role. It will not be possible to comprehend what caused declining crime in the United States until more is known about the parallel crime decline in Canada. New York City had a crime decline during the 1990s almost twice the national average, and the city's downtrend has continued through 2004, making it a natural laboratory for studying the effects of a lower crime environment on urban life. Two kinds of parochialism have hampered the effort to understand the effects that social and criminal justice factors have on crime rates: firstly, the failure by many investigators to consider data and insights outside their narrow disciplinary perspective; and, secondly, the failure to consider events outside the United States. Since the national crime decline ended in 2000, rates have stayed near the lowest levels of the 1990s. But there are indications that crime rates could drop further, perhaps much further, without major changes in the American social framework. Finally, whatever else is now known about crime in America, the most important lesson of the 1990s was that major changes in rates of crime can happen without major changes in the social fabric.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. The period 1660-1722 saw political debate and discord become a normal part of English urban life. National politics impinged far more on townspeople's lives than in the 16th century, when few parliamentary elections were contested, so there was no need to place issues before the electors. The clear-cut division between Tories and Whigs was thrown into turmoil by James II, but it reappeared in late 1688 as Whigs and Tories jostled for power under the new king. During the 18th century, some corporations became notorious for self-seeking oligarchy and corruption but such vices were less apparent in the early part of the century.

This book provides a window into the world of eighteenth-century London for all who are interested in history, literature, and the city. It invites students and teachers to take a walk along the dirty, crowded, but fascinating streets of London. It recovers one of the most lively, funny, and thought-provoking statements about urban life: John Gay's poem Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716). It does all of these things by linking a passionate conviction about scholarship to a very simple idea: that the best way to connect people with different points of view is to read the same text — in this case, Gay's poem. The book offers nine different interpretations of the poem from nine writers who are specialists in the eighteenth century. The notes to the poem offer many surprises about eighteenth-century London and help the reader to understand ways of speaking in Gay's city — its slang, allusions, stories, and rhymes. Topics such as biography, sharing of public spaces, cultural geography, poverty, pollution, plague, and gender.

This chapter introduces the digitally augmented city as a major focus of current design research and practice. It critically examines the impact that the entanglement of networked information technologies with the urban realm has produced and discusses this in reference to extant literature. The entanglement of networked information technologies and urban environments has changed cities and urban life, and it has changed how we think about cities. Over the past two decades, a profusion of terms have been coined by scholars and practitioners to describe aspects of this changing urban condition. Networked city, real-time city, virtual city, smart city, hybrid city, responsive city, and ad hoc city are terms that are at times used lightly but that have underlying concepts that can help us capture more of the current urban condition and point to ways of working with it.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the changing relationship between state and society in the U.S.A., particularly the political construction of urban life in San Francisco, California during the period from 1850 to 1900. This book argues that American political development cannot be reduced to, or explained by, historical changes in civil society. It also attempts to reconstruct the normal operation of urban political culture in San Francisco in order to find the general patterns not only for that city but for other major American cities as well.