Jane Jacobs was born on May 4, 1916, and she died on April 26, 2006, just a few weeks before her ninetieth birthday. She achieved widespread fame with the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961. In 1968, frustrated at the short-sighted urban policies of the United States and horrified that her two sons would be drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, she moved from New York City to Toronto. She spent the rest of her life in Toronto, writing and speaking widely on the possibilities of urban economics, life, culture, and civilization. She was always an independent author and scholar, without any formal affiliation with a college or university. Jane Jacobs' life teaches us that: 1) there's a lot of hope and optimism in Canadian urbanism, particularly when compared to the U.S.; 2) you don't need a fancy credential or a university job to be a brilliant scholar, and 3) being passionate about cities and urban life will help you live a long and healthy life.
Reflect, for a moment, on the quote from Jane Jacobs' Dark Age Ahead. Even institutions full of caring and creative individuals sometimes do things that undermine the collective mission. In public universities, the tension is usually worst at the point identified by Jacobs -- the tradeoff between "the minimum work required" versus "human beings with burning questions." Compared to a generation ago, fewer resources are devoted to the fundamental missions of public universities: most classes have more students, educators are under greater pressure to do research, chase grant money, and publish books and articles, and more and more students have to go into debt or work to earn their way through college or university. Everybody's pressed for time. Students have to adopt a strategy of triage to achieve an efficient allocation of the time and energy devoted to learning. Teachers often wind up doing the same thing -- marching through a best-selling textbook, and giving exams composed from the pre-packaged questions in the automated "test banks" produced by the dominant textbook publishers. The unfortunate result is the kind of situation Jacobs describes in her book.
It doesn't have to be this way, of course. You are not raw material for the university to process as efficiently as possible, and you do have many burning questions and confusions about the world. Part of this course provides an opportunity for you to do original work in which you explore some of these questions. In contrast to the examinations in this course -- which of necessity must distinguish correct from incorrect answers and be processed as efficiently as possible -- the projects are much more about creativity and the production of new knowledge. This means that you need to forget about the test-taking mindset, and find a topic that really excites and interests you. In practical terms, you'll need that excitement to give you the energy to do the work required to finish a written project amidst all your other obligations. But there's a much more idealistic issue as well: if you can identify a topic that really fascinates you, it maximizes the potential that you'll be able to build something that will be of lasting value to you and others. Many of the students who have taken this course in previous years wrote projects that eventually got published and reached a wide audience.
Building is all around us. Cities are always under construction. A lot of this construction is visible in the urban landscape itself -- as in the image above, a high-rise hotel rising a bit further each day amidst a ballet of construction cranes and a beautiful choreography of skilled-trades workers dancing across the ever-expanding structure of concrete and steel. But there are other kinds of construction that are hard to see (at least until you learn how to look). The way individuals and groups experience cities and urban life is always changing; our individual and collective knowledge of cities -- past, present, and future -- is always being built and rebuilt; and the relations between the way we think about urbanity and the way we act are constantly in flux.
For this course, you're asked to complete an independent written project, in which you build something creative, interesting, and useful. Creativity is encouraged and rewarded, although marks also depend on careful thinking, rigorous logic, and good writing. You have a lot of freedom in your choice of the burning questions you wish to explore in project. The project options listed on this page will be presented, along with more detailed guidance and suggestions, by the Teaching Assistants in the discussion sections for this course. If you cannot find anything in these projects that ignites your interest and enthusiasm, then take a look at this, or look through the notes at the end of each chapter of the course textbook, or talk with your Teaching Assistant, or talk to me after class, or stop by for a chat during my office hours, or use the telephone and call me.
Projects must be submitted according to the instructions on the syllabus, and should conform to the general guidelines. Further guidance and suggestions for the projects will be offered in the discussion sections.
"Are we anxious to find ways, even if they are expensive, to do far more than now for the education of the talented? Are we ready to support a considerable number of universities as centers for research and professional education where the spiritual inheritance of the free world may be preserved and fostered? And not only to support them financially but guard them against the traditional enemies of learning: that is to say, mobilize public opinion to beat off attacks by the forces of ignorance, prejudice, and intolerance? These are the basic questions, to my mind, that must be answered by the citizens of this nation. It is not too much to say that the future of the free world for the balance of this century depends to a large extent on the answers given." James Bryant Conant (1956). The Citadel of Learning. New Haven: Yale University Press, quote from pp. 78-79.
Miami, November 2008 (Elvin Wyly)
"Credentialing, not educating, has become the primary business of North American universities. ... The more credentialing became a growth industry, the more it dominated education, from the viewpoints of both teachers and students. Teachers could not help despairing of classes whose members seemed less interested in learning than in doing the minimum work required to get by and get out. Enthusiastic students could not help despairing of institutions that seemed to think of them as raw material to process as efficiently as possible rather than as human beings with burning questions and confusions about the world and doubts about why they were sinking time and money into this prelude to their working lives." Jane Jacobs (2004). Dark Age Ahead. Toronto: Vintage Canada, p. 44, 62.
Projects
Urban Studies 200 / Geography 250
Examples
Here are a few examples of creative and rigorous projects submitted by students who have taken this course before. Copyrights reserved by respective authors, posted with permission.
M. Patrick Warshawski (2012). The Google-ized Earth-City. [Urban Studies 200 project submission.] Vancouver, BC: Urban Studies Program, University of British Columbia.
Jeremy Adderly (2011). Stormy Skies Over Madrid. [Urban Studies 200 project submission.] Vancouver, BC: Urban Studies Program, University of British Columbia.
Michael Thornton (2008). Five Corners and the Forces That Shape It. [Urban Studies 200 project submission.] Vancouver, BC: Urban Studies Program, University of British Columbia.
Isabell Krupp (2008). As Though Living, Branches Droop from Mossy Trunks... [Urban Studies 200 project submission.] Vancouver, BC: Urban Studies Program, University of British Columbia.
Evan Landman (2008). Mentally Mapping a New Urbanist Utopia of Spatial Form in Portland, Oregon. [Urban Studies 200 Project Submission.] Vancouver, BC: Urban Studies Program, University of British Columbia.
Other Options: Brainstorm
Below is my scratch pad for other project ideas. Don't be intimidated by all this stuff -- this is optional reading, designed to get you thinking creatively. You may also want to take a peek at this.
- "The connections have always been there..." After reading the lecture notes on urban community, what should we make of this? Narrate the conversation if Ferdinand, Emile, Louis, Ed Soja, and Barbara Phillips got together and talked about this: “The connections have always been there, with Facebook and social media. But this has been a shared experience by everyone on campus.”
--Michael Macagnone, editor in chief of The Pitt News, on the sense of community amidst a long threat of bombings on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh in early 2012.
See Jennifer Preston (2012). "Group Says it Has Ceased Bomb Threats on Campus." New York Times, April 24.
What might be the ethical implications when authorities begin to use facial recognition technologies -- and they will -- as part of their investigations? Mitchell Gray was a student in our Urban Studies Program several years ago, so his thinking inevitably shapes how I see these things. See
Mitchell Gray (2003). "Urban Surveillance and Panopticism: Will We Recognize the Facial Recognition Society?" Surveillance & Society 1(3), 314-330.
Your mission: help us figure out what has changed. What, if anything, is new with the acceleration of social networking technologies -- and social practices -- over the past decade? There have been advances, too, in gathering information through and about these evolving social networks. See, for example,
James Bamford (2012). "The NSA is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)." Wired, March 15.
Should we be optimistic or fearful for cities? For community? For society? Which ones?
- Re:Connect. Interesting in planning? Do you have a few graphic design skills? Sketch out a design for re-use of Vancouver's Georgia Street Viaduct -- or the entire "Eastern Core" section east of the downtown zone. Offer up a sketch, and write out an interpretation/explanation that connects your proposal to relevant urban theories. Use Phillips as a starting point for urban theories and policy debates, and consult these resources to get started on alternative possibilities.
- Occupied Urbanism. I just returned from a conference at Georgetown Law School in Washington, DC. I managed to catch just a bit of the "Occupy DC" mobilization that has been gaining momentum, along with similar efforts in dozens of other cities, that began with a small protest called "Occupy Wall Street." Here's a small sample of images of the DC event. These fast-moving events need your brilliance and creativity as urbanists. What does this movement tell us about social-science debates -- and that distinction we learned between struggles in the city and struggles of the city? Might the Occupy movement achieve a blurring of these distinctions? It began, after all, in the urban icon of Western capitalism -- Wall Street -- but it has very quickly broadened to a wide range of coalitions, interests, and priorities. The movement seems to be using cities as a launch-pads for broader critical questions about economy, politics, and democracy.
If you're interested in this topic for a project, then I'd recommend three steps. First, crack open Barbara Phillips' City Lights textbook, and page through the table of contents. Second, drink from whatever electronic firehose of news and information you regularly drink from; below is a small sample of links to get you started. Third, explore the connections. What do these events tell us about urban theory, urban history, or urban politics? And what might urban theory contribute to these events?
Here's a small sample of questions that occur to me. First, what potential is there for 2011 to become 1968? (See Watts, 2001). Second, if 1968 is not the right historical comparison, how about 1848? (See Phillips, 2009, Chapter 11). Third, how have conservative responses to Occupy Wall Street reflected and reinforced what Phillips (2009, pp. 348-349) diagnoses as the "Dream Up, Blame Down" ethos of American views on social class? Fourth, how do you interpret the current events in light of Phillips' (2009, pp. 507-510) cautious assessment that electronic communications and social-media organizing have changed the rules of the game for urban political power: "Perhaps .... But the evidence is not yet in." (Phillips, 2009, p. 509). Phillips cites evidence that these tools seem to change how people participate, but have little effect on who participates. Can you find any evidence to confirm or refute this hypothesis?
Another random thought: organizers mobilized to produce and distribute a newspaper -- playfully titled "The Occupied Wall Street Journal" -- to outline the movement's demands and keep people up to date on fast-breaking events; this makes me think that this movement is a valuable opportunity for a media analysis project. Consider such questions as: as the protests have spread from a very small event in New York's financial district to more than fifty cities (so far), how has media coverage responded? Are there any notable differences in how the events are covered and interpreted in small-town newspapers, versus the large daily-circulation papers in the big cities? (To answer this kind of question, of course, you'd have to screen out the stories that are distributed to multiple papers -- the Associated Press, Reuters, Angence France-Press, and the other wire services; or else you could use the fact that a small-town paper chose to reprint a wire-service story as evidence -- while not making the mistake of thinking that an AP story in Butte, Montana was actually written by a local reporter).
Rachel Donadio and Elizabeth A. Harris (2011). "Rallies Across the Globe Protest Economic Policies." New York Times, October 15.
"We can see that for a long time we allowed our political engagement also to be outsourced. We want it back. We are not communists. If communism means the system which collapsed in 1990, remember that today those communists are the most efficient ruthless capitalists. In China today we have capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American capitalism but doesn’t need democracy. Which means when you criticize capitalism, don’t allow yourselves to be blackmailed that you are against democracy. The marriage between democracy and capitalism is over."
- Megamachines. In the spring of 1962, Lewis Mumford was invited to deliver a series of lectures at the City College of New York. Some of the main themes of his talks that spring eventually wound up forming the basis for "The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development," published several years later. Mumford's central argument was that our twentieth-century obsession with science and technology had led us to misinterpret human history -- especially urban history. The machines of the industrial revolution that transformed the world between 1750 and 1850 may have been important, Mumford agreed; but they were nothing compared to the giant mega-machines that built the first large cities of the ancient world. The reason why we had forgotten about the ancient megamachine was simple: it was comprised of individual human bodies, thousands upon thousands of them, ordered by kings and generals to work together as a giant, sophisticated machine. Once the workers died, the machine was invisible.
These days, every time I see an advertisement for "Megastructures" on the Discovery Channel, every time I see an account of the latest giant urban construction project in Vancouver or New York or Beijing or Dubai, I think of Mumford's way of studying the relations between urban society and urban technology. Here's an idea for a project: Read one chapter of Mumford's book, considering the way he interprets machines, technologies, and the use of political power. Then use Mumford's approach to analyze an urban "megaproject" you find interesting. The latest interesting example I've come across is Masdar, in the United Arab Emirates. What parallels might we find between the migrant workers of the U.A.E. and Mumford's description of the "taskmasters and soldiers," both essential for the megamachine? How have the imperatives of kings and military generals been replaced by the orders given by international investors and capital markets -- or might some kinds and generals still be important?
Lewis Mumford (1966). The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World. Excerpt, pp. 188-211. On reserve at the GIC, Geography Building Room 112.
Nicolai Ouroussoff (2010). "In Arabian Desert, a Sustainable City Rises." New York Times, September 25.
- The Rahmbo Machine. The all-time classic case of the "city political machine" was Tammany Hall, in New York City in the late nineteenth century. Then the paradigmatic case became Chicago, especially under the leadership of Richard J. Daley, from the mid-1950s until his death in office in 1976. If that name sounds familiar, it's because his son -- Richard M. Daley -- eventually won Da Mayor's office, and finally surpassed his father's record-setting twenty-one years in office before announcing in September 2010 that he would not run for re-election.
Daley's announcement immediately prompted widespread speculation that Rahm Emanuel might make a run for the Mayor's office. Emanuel served as an aide to U.S. President Bill Clinton, and then represented a Chicago district in the U.S. Congress while leading an ultimately successful campaign to strengthen Democrats' majority power. Then he served as Chief of Staff for the first two years of Barack Obama's Presidential Administration. There are scores of stories about Emanuel that are, shall we say, quite vivid and colorful. He's a hard-charging political strategist who is, um, not shy. One of the more widely-cited stories is that he has a plaque in his office, given to him by another politician who was always impressed by his strategic and frequent use of profanity; the plague listed Emanuel's name, with the title, "Assistant Deputy Secretary of Go Fuck Yourself." Others see a resemblance to Sylvester Stallone's character in the film Rambo, and thus "Rahmbo" is widely discussed in the corridors of power in Washington, DC.
Emanuel announced, on October 1, 2010, his intention to leave the White House and run for the office of Mayor of Chicago. City Mayoral offices are usually used as stepping stones to higher office: it's rare for someone to be heavily involved in national politics and then decide to make a play for a place in City Hall. Chicago is one of those big cities where the Mayor's office might indeed be a step "up" compared to many Federal political positions. Rahm won the election in February, 2011.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to answer this question: What does Rahm Emanuel's race for the Mayor's office in Chicago tell us about the contemporary city political machine? Study the Chicago Mayoral campaign of the fall of 2010 in advance of the February election, and consider this: what does the candidate field -- including Rahm Emanuel, Danny Davis, and Luis Guitierrez along with many other contenders -- tell us about the survival and evolution of machine politics? Or, study the first few months of Rahm's majoral administration, to see who he put in place, and analyze the similarities and contrasts with the text and lecture perspectives on city political machines.
Here is just one tiny thing to get you started on Rahm, and then don't forget the citations in the city political machines lecture.
- Louis Wirth on FaceBook. Louis Wirth's "Urbanism as a Way of Life" is a classic that inspired and shaped generations of students fascinated with how cities changed human relations and people's experience of daily life. Read Wirth's classic article slowly, and carefully. Then read the profile of Mark Zuckerberg, and write a paper that addresses the following question: if Wirth were alive today, and he decided to sit down and rewrite his article to analyze the implications of social networking technologies like FaceBook, Google Plus, and all those other new sites, what would he write?
If you choose this project, avoid the temptation to write all the details you know and love about how facebook works. Put your effort into thinking about the underlying meaning of the social relations made possible by all those little details. How would Wirth regard the consequences for peoples' experience of contemporary urban life?
A.G. Sulzberger (2011). "In Small Towns, Gossip Moves to the Web, and Turns Vicious." New York Times, September 19.
Jenna Wortham (2011). "Shunning Facebook, and Living to Tell About It." New York Times, December 13.
"He first read the Aeneid while he was studying Latin in high school, and he recounted the story of Aeneas's quest and his desire to build a city that, he said, quoting the text in English, "knows no boundaries in time and greatness." (Vargas, 2010, p. 64).
- "What a Disaster: No one will Destroy Our Cities!" Mike Davis is one of the most insightful and procovative urban thinkers of the past generation. Several years ago, he include a delightful chapter in his book, Ecology of Fear, that reviewed and sythensized dozens of books that featured the destruction of the city he knew best: Los Angeles. The chapter, "The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles," is interesting in its own right, but it's also an extraordinary model of how to stack up a bunch of books on your desk and look through them closely enough to classify them into distinct genres. There's a lot of interest in this topic, particularly when attention shifts from books to cinema. Most humorously, a Globe and Mail commentary expresses dejection and annoyance that Canada's big cities haven't (yet?) been destroyed in film. "The fact that Canada hasn't been attacked on film has an implicit, dispiriting message," Thomas Rogers (2011, p. 1) writes: "The rest of the world just doesn't care about us, or about that giant antenna we built in downtown Toronto."
You have three missions: 1) read Mike Davis's chapter, 2) choose a city, and 3) review the ways the city is portrayed in "disaster" stories -- either in novels, or in films. You don't need to review as many books as Davis, but your review should discuss at least four or five books or screenplays.
Mike Davis (1998). "The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles." In Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Thomas Rogers (2011). "What a Disaster! No One Will Destroy Our Cities." Globe and Mail, August 23, R1, R2.
Writing the City with Light
Here's something you might find of interest. Glance through the captions for the figures in the second half of the manuscript. Each one of these captions might be useful as an example for one way to approach the 'writing the city with light' project.
SCHOLARLY SOURCES
Susan A. Phillips (2001). "El Nuevo Mundo: The Landscape of Latino Los Angeles; Photographs by Camilo José Vergara." American Anthropologist 103(1), 175-188.
Geoffrey DeVerteuil (2004). "The Changing Landscapes of Southwest Montreal: A Visual Account." Canadian Geographer 48(1), 76-82.
James D. Sidaway (2002). "Photography as Geographical Fieldwork." Journal of Geography in Higher Education 26(1), 95-103.
José van Dijck (2008). "Digital Photography: Communication, Identity, Memory." Visual Communication 7, 57-76.
Martin H. Krieger (2004). "Taking Pictures in the City." Journal of Planning Education and Research 24, 213-215.
Brian Human (1999). "Kodachrome Icons: Photography, Place, and the Theft of Identity." International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 11(2, 3), 80-84.
Anders Lund Hansen (2008). "Walking Through a Liquid Forest of Symbols / Space Wars." Liminalities 4(1), 1-6.
VIDEOS AND ANIMATIONS
Camilo José Vergara (2006). "Guest Lecture, Camilo José Vergara." Lecture 2, MIT Course, "Sensing Place: Photography as Inquiry." Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Camilo José Vergara and Howard Gillette (2006). "Invincible Cities." Website and photograph collection. Camden, NJ: Department of History, Rutgers University-Camden.
Historypin is one of a growing number of "geotagging" tools permitting locational referencing of photographic images. Once you choose your own photograph to use for the 'Writing the City with Light' project, you may find it interesting to compare your image with others, wherever and whenever possible, that are available on Historypin.
Nicholas Dahmann (2011). "Flying Back in Los Angeles." Los Angeles: University of Southern California. Or see the link on the Huffington Post. I met Nicholas a few years ago on a visit to USC; his urban-photographic imagination is impressive indeed, don't you think?
JOURNALISTS' REPORTS
A.G. Sulzberger (2010). "For Kodachrome Fans, Road Ends at Photo Lab in Kansas." New York Times, December 29.
WEBSITES AND BLOGS AND SUCH
Yves Marchand and Romaine Meffre (2011). "Detroit in Ruins." The Guardian / The Observer, January 2.
"Worlde" graphic created courtesy of methods developed by Jonathan Feinberg, http://www.wordle.net, from raw text available at http://www.geog.ubc.ca/~ewyly; September 15, 2010.
Useful references on analyzing city power networks
Lori Culbert and Chad Skelton (2010). "How Cash Flows in Civic Elections." Vancouver Sun, April 30, A1, A10, A11.
British Columbia (2011). Vancouver Charter, current to October 26. Victoria: Queen's Printer, Province of British Columbia.
"Follow the Money."
This is the famous advice offered by the figure dubbed "Deep Throat," Bob Woodward's confidential source when he was investigating the campaign dirty tricks and money-laundering that would come to be known as Watergate. The line was instantly memorable to those who followed the revelations in the Washington Post or who read the subsequent book coauthored by a college-dropout copy boy and a Yalie "prima donna" who was also "a veteran of the Navy officer corps." (Bernstein and Woodward, 1974, p. 15). Woodward had sophistication, connections, and "Establishment credentials," while Bernstein was hungry and driven; and Bernstein wrote well and quickly. The "follow the money" line got a much wider audience, of course, with the film version, with Dustin Hoffman playing Bernstein and Robert Redford playing Bob Woodward; Hal Holbrooke played Deep Throat, which we now know was W. Mark Felt, then acting associate director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (see Woodward, 2005).
How many hundreds of thousands of today's senior journalists were first inspired to go into the field by these coauthors, whose pen-name was uttered most eloquently in Jason Robards's irresistable gravel bark? "Woodstein! Get in here!"
For us, Felt's advice offers one way to begin studying the role of power networks in the city. And of course the events taking place in this city, and many other cities, also provide an opportunity to ask how community power interacts with the power connections amongst political officials, growth machine elites, and evolving coalitions among various groups of voters, property owners, companies, labor unions, and other institutions. Look through Phillips, City Lights, chapters 14 and 15, and consider using campaign contributions or other flows of money as a way of exploring urban political power.
References
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward (1974). All the President's Men. New York: Warner Books.
Bob Woodward (2005). The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat. New York: Simon & Schuster.
CopyLeft 2012 Elvin K. Wyly
Except where otherwise noted, this site is
City Media Analysis
Useful references on the methods of media analysis
Peter Dreier (2005). "How the Media Compound Urban Problems." Journal of Urban Affairs 27(2), 193-201.
Sikee Lee and Nicholas Blomley (2013). "Making News and Making Space: Framing Vancouver's Downtown Eastside." The Canadian Geographer 57(2), 119-132.
Sarah Macharia, Dermot O'Connor, and Lilian Ndangam (2010). Who Makes the News? Global Media Monitoring Project, 2010 Report. London: World Association for Christian Communication.
The Media Fields Journal: Critical Explorations in Media and Space, is published by the graduate students in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Other useful tools
There are lots of curious tools out there, and some of these can be useful for media analysis. One is worldle, which draws graphic representations of any text you feed in. An example -- created from the main text I wrote for the front page of my website -- is shown below. You may want to use this to supplement other things you do in a media analysis, but keep in mind that the technique is not, in itself, very analytical. Don't just throw a bunch of text in and draw a playful picture -- you need to analyze the results carefully, to tell a story about media representations of a particular city, neighborhood, or urban process. The trend analysis and content analyses described in the background paper take a bit more time than the quick two-second wordle -- but these other techniques are much more suited to give you the kind of information you need to tell significant stories about these representations.
For an extended discussion of "content clouds" along with a pair of excellent illustrations of how to use the technique to explore interesting urban and regional contrasts, see this:
Another useful tool
In late 2010, Google and a team of academic researchers released a preliminary version of a tool that draws on the corporate behemoth's ongoing book-scanning project. The "NGram Viewer" provides an easy way to search the giant database of books published between 1800 and 2000 that are included in Google's scanning project. Below is a sample, showing graphs of the proportions of books published in English in which appear the following words: positivism, poststructuralism, urbanization, and globalization.
The tool is fascinating and addictive, although caution is certainly required to interpret the results. Graphing word occurrances cannot tell us whether the terms are used as neutral, analytical descriptions, as nasty epithets, or as excited terms of praise. Particularly for specialized, new terms introduced to the language, there is a fairly predictable cycle: from initial introduction and obscurity, to a slow spread that gathers momentum in waves of popularity, to saturation, and perhaps eventual decline. Even so, this new tool does make it possible to look out across a vast landscape of discussion in and through books -- a vast landscape that exceeds the capacity of reading and the duration of the human lifespan. Just be careful, and don't slip too deeply into addiction that you neglect the fundamental value of ... actually taking the time to read a book!
For information on the project, see Patricia Cohen (2010). "In 500 Billion Words, a New Window on Culture." New York Times, December 16.
To play around with the tool, go to the Ngram viewer.
City Book Review
Here's a small sample of good urban book reviews. Some of them are longer than what you'll need to do, and many of them are more detailed. But hopefully there's a little bit here that will inspire you as you work on your own review.
Larry Ford (2010). "Review of Lawrence Herzog, Return to Center: Culture, Public Space, and City Building in a Golden Era. Austin: University of Texas Press." Social & Cultural Geography 11(7), 720-724.
Manuel Aalbers (2011). "Review Essay: Safe as Houses!" International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(4), 873-878.
David Harvey (1999). "Review of Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear." Harvard Design Magazine 8, Summer, 1-3.
Ilse Helbrecht (2011). "Review of Mick Smith, Joyce Davidson, Laura Cameron, and Liz Bondi, Eds., Emotion, Place, and Culture." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(3), 678-680.
Jill Lepore (2010). "The Uprooted: Chronicling the Great Migration." The New Yorker, September 6, 76-80.