Story and sustainability : planning, practice, and possibility for American cities / edited by Barbara Eckstein and James A. Throgmorton.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Eckstein, Barbara J.

Throgmorton, James A.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

City planning--United States.

City planning.

United States.

Sociology, Urban--United States.

Sociology, Urban.

Physical Description:

viii, 267 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, [2003]

Summary:

Story and Sustainability explores the role of story in planning theory and practice, with the goal of creating U.S. cities able to balance competing claims for economic growth, environmental health, and social justice. In the book, urban practitioners and scholars from fields as diverse as American studies, English, geography, history, planning, and criminal justice reflect critically on the traditional exclusionary power of storytelling and on its potential to facilitate the transformations of imagination, theory, and practice necessary to create sustainable, democratic american cities. The book begins with an editors' introduction identifying story, sustainable U.S. cities, and democracy as the three key themes. Part I advances and refines these concepts, connects them to contemporary U.S. urban planning, and provides tools that can be used when reading and interpreting the texts in part II. Part II exemplifies, amplifies, and modifies the key themes and arguments through the presentation of eight texts: theoretical and experiential, academic and nonacademic, expository and narrative, and familiar and unfamiliar. The combined focus on story and urban sustainability makes this book a unique contribution to planning literature.

Contents:

Introduction: Blueprint Blues / Barbara Eckstein, James A. Throgmorton 1

I Storytelling, Sustainability, Democracy, and the American City 9

1 Making Space: Stories in the Practice of Planning / Barbara Eckstein 13

2 Imagining Sustainable Places / James A. Throgmorton 39

3 Democracy, Storytelling, and the Sustainable City / Robert A. Beauregard 65

II Raising Questions/Raising Cain 79

4 The Old Neighborhood / Carlo Rotella 87

5 Ceola's Vision, Our Blessing: The Story of an Evolving Community-University Partnership in East St. Louis, Illinois / Kenneth M. Reardon 113

6 Dreaming the Sustainable City: Organizing Hope, Negotiating Fear, Mediating Memory / Leonie Sandercock 143

7 In Search of a New Landfill Site / Michael Berkshire 167

8 Narrative and Other Tools / Seymour J. Mandelbaum 185

9 The Peninsula / Karin Franklin 195

10 Tales of a Geographer-Planner / Edward W. Soja 207

11 The Meanest Streets / Joe Barthel 227.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [249]-259) and index.

ISBN:

0262050706

0262550431

OCLC:

51059145