Suburbs
A Very Short Introduction
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Narrated by:
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Mike Lenz
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By:
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Carl Abbott
About this listen
We live in the suburban era. Well over half of all Americans and two-thirds of Canadians live in suburbs. Tracts of suburban bungalows ring Sydney and Melbourne. Suburban apartments rise on the outskirts of Paris, Prague, Singapore, and Beijing. Nearly everyone has a strong opinion about suburbs. Folks who love dense cities scorn "suburbia," while people who like big yards dislike bustling sidewalks and subways. Social scientists argue whether suburbs are losing their luster or if a supposed back-to-the-city trend is a mirage—a debate that has been exacerbated by uncertainty over the effects of COVID-19.
This Very Short Introduction tackles two central questions: What is the history behind a suburbanizing world? What does the suburban trend mean for society, politics, and culture? Two chapters describe the ways that the new technologies of streetcars, trains, automobiles, and internet have allowed the compact cities of Britain and the United States to grow into sprawling metropolitan regions. The following chapters explore the vertical suburbs of Europe and East Asia, improvised or do-it-yourself suburbs in both North America and Latin America, and suburbs as places of employment. The book concludes by exploring criticism and praise of suburbs in popular sociology, fiction, film, and the Americanization of twenty-first-century suburbs around the globe.
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Story
In this remarkable challenge to conventional thinking about the environment, David Owen argues that the greenest community in the United States is not Portland, Oregon, or Snowmass, Colorado, but New York City.
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A stupid and dangerously short sighted view
- By Gare&Sophia on 11-13-12
By: David Owen
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A History of Future Cities
- By: Daniel Brook
- Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
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A pioneering exploration of four cities where East meets West and past becomes future: St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai. Every month, five million people move from the past to the future. Pouring into developing-world “instant cities” like Dubai and Shenzhen, these urban newcomers confront a modern world cobbled together from fragments of a West they have never seen. Do these fantastical boomtowns, where blueprints spring to life overnight on virgin land, represent the dawning of a brave new world? Or is their vaunted newness a mirage?
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Engaging and Memorable
- By Marcus Vorwaller on 04-15-14
By: Daniel Brook
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The Great Reset
- How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity
- By: Richard Florida
- Narrated by: Eric Conger
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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We tend to view prolonged economic downturns, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Long Depression of the late 19th century, in terms of the crisis and pain they cause. But history teaches us that these great crises also represent opportunities to remake our economy and society and to generate whole new eras of economic growth and prosperity.
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glorification of City Life
- By Ryan Riggs on 11-25-20
By: Richard Florida
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Behemoth
- A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World
- By: Joshua B. Freeman
- Narrated by: Stephen Bowlby
- Length: 13 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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We live in a factory-made world: modern life is built on three centuries of advances in factory production, efficiency, and technology. But giant factories have also fueled our fears about the future since their beginnings, when William Blake called them "dark Satanic mills". Many factories that operated over the last two centuries - such as Homestead, River Rouge, and Foxconn - were known for the labor exploitation and class warfare they engendered, not to mention the environmental devastation caused by factory production.
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Get rid of the fake accents
- By J. R. Valery on 03-13-18
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Fulfillment
- Winning and Losing in One-Click America
- By: Alec MacGillis
- Narrated by: Danny Gavigan
- Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Alec MacGillis’ Fulfillment is not another inside account or exposé of our most conspicuously dominant company. Rather, it is a literary investigation of the America that falls within that company’s growing shadow. As MacGillis shows, Amazon’s sprawling network of delivery hubs, data centers, and corporate campuses epitomizes a land where winner and loser cities and regions are drifting steadily apart, the civic fabric is unraveling, and work has become increasingly rudimentary and isolated.
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Missing some important angles
- By D. Zimmerle on 08-19-21
By: Alec MacGillis
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City of the Century
- The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America
- By: Donald L. Miller
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 24 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Here, witness Chicago's growth from a desolate fur-trading post in the 1830s to one of the world's most explosively alive cities by 1900. Donald Miller's powerful narrative embraces it all: Chicago's wild beginnings, its reckless growth, its natural calamities (especially the Great Fire of 1871), its raucous politics, its empire-building businessmen, its world-transforming architecture, its rich mix of cultures, its community of young writers and journalists, and its staggering engineering projects.
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A STORY THAT TRIES TOO HARD....AND FAILS
- By The Louligan on 02-01-15
By: Donald L. Miller
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Happy City
- Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
- By: Charles Montgomery
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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After decades of unchecked sprawl, more people than ever are moving back to the city. Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or worse for our happiness? Are subways, sidewalks, and tower dwelling improvements on the car dependence of sprawl?
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Great book-terrible narrator
- By Amazon Customer on 02-04-19
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City
- A Guidebook for the Urban Age
- By: P. D. Smith
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 13 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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For the first time in the history of our planet, more than half the population - 3.3 billion people - is now living in cities. City is the ultimate guidebook to our urban centers - the signature unit of human civilization. With erudite prose, this unique work of metatourism explores what cities are and how they work. It covers history, customs and language, districts, transport, money, work, shops and markets, and tourist sites, creating a fantastically detailed portrait of the city through history and into the future.
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Commuters companion
- By Anna on 05-19-13
By: P. D. Smith
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China, Inc.
- By: Ted C. Fishman
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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China today is visible everywhere: In the news, in the economic pressures battering America, in the workplace, and in every trip to the store. Provocative, timely, and essential, this dramatic account of China's growing dominance as an industrial super-power by journalist Ted C. Fishman explains how the profound shift in the global economic order has occurred, and why it already affects us all.
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Just read the Amazon reviews befor buying it ...
- By Dan on 08-10-05
By: Ted C. Fishman
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities
- 50th Anniversary Edition
- By: Jane Jacobs, Jason Epstein - introduction
- Narrated by: Donna Rawlins
- Length: 18 hrs
- Unabridged
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Thirty years after its publication, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning....[It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments."
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Fantastic text, dull on audio
- By Meghan on 02-13-15
By: Jane Jacobs, and others
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A Brief History of Motion
- From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
- By: Tom Standage
- Narrated by: Liam Gerrard
- Length: 8 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Tom Standage's fleet-footed and surprising global histories have delighted fans and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Now, he returns with a provocative account of an overlooked form of technology - personal transportation - and explores how it has shaped societies and cultures over millennia. Beginning around 3,500 BCE with the wheel - a device that didn't catch on until a couple thousand years after its invention - Standage zips through the eras of horsepower, trains, and bicycles, revealing how each successive mode of transit embedded itself in the world we live in.
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Great listen
- By CKerb on 11-09-21
By: Tom Standage