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Chapters: Geography of Gilbert, Arizona, Geography of Mesa, Arizona, Geography of Phoenix, Arizona, Geography of Scottsdale, Arizona, Geography of Tempe, Arizona, Geography of Tucson, Arizona, Tanque Verde, Arizona, Oro Valley, Arizona, Tempe Town Lake, F. Q. Story Neighborhood Historic District, Piestewa Peak, Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza, Papago Park, Camelback Mountain, Mount Lemmon, Saguaro National Park, Tempe Butte, Encanto Park, Sabino Canyon, Sentinel Peak, Patriots Square Park, South Mountain Park, Mummy Mountain, Cañada Del Oro, Tanque Verde Falls, Lehi, Arizona, Sunnyslope Mountain, Hole-In-The-Rock, Santa Rita Mountains, Mccormick Ranch, Cortez Lake, Colossal Cave, Phoenix Mountains Park and Recreation Area, Steele Indian School Park Pond, Higley, Arizona, Armory Park Historic Residential District, Tortolita Mountains, Water Ranch Lake, Desert West Lake, Pima Canyon, Tucson Mountains, Troon, Arizona, Thimble Peak, Dobson Ranch, Arizona, Bear Canyon, Sutherland Trail, Tumamoc Hill. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 137. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Oro Valley, Arizona -The area of Oro Valley has been inhabited discontinuously for nearly two thousand years by various groups of people. The Native American Hohokam tribe lived in the Honeybee Village in the foothills of the Tortolita Mountains on Oro Valley's far north side around 500 AD. Hohokam artifacts continue to be discovered in the Honeybee Village that the Hohokam inhabited continuously for nearly 700 years, and studied by archaeologists around the globe. Early in the 16th century, Native American tribes known as the Apache arrived in the southern Arizona area, including Oro Valley. These tribes inhabited the region only a few decades prior to the arrival of the Spanish Conquistadors, including Francisco Coronado...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=106718 ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Cities of the United States, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 112 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.Provides a wide range of hard-to-locate data to answer questions concerning American cities. Includes thorough coverage of the area's largest or fastest-growing cities, or those with a particular historical, political, industrial or commercial significance. ... Read more

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All 12 monthly issues from this year, bound together in attractive leatherette cover matching volumes from other years. ... Read more

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Phoenix is known as the "Valley of the Sun," while Tucson is referred to as "The Old Pueblo." These nicknames epitomize the difference in the public's perception of each city. Phoenix continues to sprawl as one of America's largest and fastest-growing cities. Tucson has witnessed a slower rate of growth, and has only one quarter of Phoenix's population. This was not always the case. Prior to 1920, Tucson had a larger population. How did two cities, with such close physical proximity and similar natural environments develop so differently?

Desert Cities examines the environmental circumstances that led to the starkly divergent growth of these two cities. Michael Logan traces this significant imbalance to two main factors: water resources and cultural differences. Both cities began as agricultural communities. Phoenix had the advantage of a larger water supply, the Salt River, which has four and one half times the volume of Tucson's Santa Cruz River. Because Phoenix had a larger river, it received federal assistance in the early twentieth century for the Salt River project, which provided water storage facilities. Tucson received no federal aid. Moreover, a significant cultural difference existed. Tucson, though it became a U.S. possession in 1853, always had a sizable Hispanic population. Phoenix was settled in the 1870s by Anglo pioneers who brought their visions of landscape development and commerce with them.

By examining the factors of watershed, culture, ethnicity, terrain, political favoritism, economic development, and history, Desert Cities offers a comprehensive evaluation that illuminates the causes of growth disparity in two major southwestern cities and provides a model for the study of bi-city resource competition. ... Read more

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From Matamoros to Tijuana, Mexican border cities have long evoked for their neighbors to the north images of cheap tourist playgrounds and, more recently, industrial satellites of American industry.These sensationalized and simplified perceptions fail to convey the complexity and diversity of urban form and function—and of cultural personality—that characterize these places.The Mexican Border Cities draws on extensive field research to examine eighteen settlements along the 2,000-mile border, ranging from towns of less than 10,000 people to dynamic metropolises of nearly a million.The authors chronicle the cities' growth and compare their urban structure, analyzing them in terms of tourist districts, commercial landscapes, residential areas, and industrial and transportation quarters.Arreola and Curtis contend that, despite their proximity to the United States, the border cities are fundamentally Mexican places, as distinguished by their cultural landscapes, including town plan, land-use pattern, and building fabric.Their study, richly illustrated with over 75 maps and photographs, offers a provocative and insightful interpretation of the geographic anatomy and personality of these fascinating—and rapidly changing—communities. ... Read more

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Pollution of air, soil, and waterways has become a primary concern of urban environmental policy making, and over the past two decades there has emerged a new era of urban policy that links development with ecological issues. This book takes a new look at this application of "ecological modernization" to contemporary urban political-ecological struggles. It criticizes the dominant belief in the power of markets and experts to regulate environments to everyone's benefit, arguing instead that civil political action by local constituencies can influence the establishment of beneficial policies. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Cities of the United States, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 116 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.Provides a wide range of hard-to-locate data to answer questions concerning American cities. Includes thorough coverage of the area's largest or fastest-growing cities, or those with a particular historical, political, industrial or commercial significance. ... Read more

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When the American West represented the country's frontier, many of its cities may have seemed little more than trading centers to serve the outlying populace.Now the nation's most open and empty region is also its most heavily urbanized, with 80 percent of Westerners living in its metropolitan areas.The process of urbanization that had already transformed the United States from a rural to an urban society between 1815 and 1930 has continued most clearly and completely in the modern West, where growth since 1940—spurred by mobilization for World War II—has constituted a distinct era in which Western cities have become national and even international pacesetters.The Metropolitan Frontier places this last half-century of Western history in its urban context, making it the first comprehensive overview of urban growth in the region.Integrating the urban experience of all nineteen Western states, Carl Abbott ranges for evidence from Honolulu to Houston and from Fargo to Fairbanks to show how Western cities organize the region's vast spaces and connect them to the even larger sphere of the world economy.His survey moves from economic change to social and political response, examining the initial boom of the 1940s, the process of change in the following decades, and the ultimate impact of Western cities on their environments, on the Western regional character, and on national identity.Today, a steadily decreasing number of Western workers are engaged in rural industries, but Western cities continue to grow.As ecological and social crises begin to affect those cities, Abbott's study will prove required reading for historians, geographers, sociologists, urban planners, and all citizens concerned with America's future. ... Read more

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United States Capitol Cities Fact Files





Too many people? Look it up here.
Average income, look here.
Poverty rate? It is here.
And so much more……

What do you need to know???


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"When I first broached the matter of writing his autobiography to John H. Cady, two things had struck me particularly. One was that of all the literature about Arizona there was little that attempted to give a straight, chronological and intimate description of events that occurred during the early life of the Territory, and, second, that of all the men I knew, Cady was best fitted, by reason of his extraordinary experiences, remarkable memory for names and dates, and seniority in pioneership, to supply the work that I felt lacking.

Some years ago, when I first came West, I happened to be sitting on the observation platform of a train bound for the orange groves of Southern California. A lady with whom I had held some slight conversation on the journey turned to me after we had left Tucson and had started on the long and somewhat dreary journey across the desert that stretches from the "Old Pueblo" to "San Berdoo," and said:

"Do you know, I actually used to believe all those stories about the 'wildness of the West.' I see how badly I was mistaken."

She had taken a half-hour stroll about Tucson while the train changed crews and had been impressed by the-to the casual observer-sleepiness [Pg 6]of the ancient town. She told me that never again would she look on a "wild West" moving picture without wanting to laugh. She would not believe that there had ever been a "wild West"-at least, not in Arizona. And yet it is history that the old Territory of Arizona in days gone by was the "wildest and woolliest" of all the West, as any old settler will testify.

There is no doubt that to the tourist the West is now a source of constant disappointment. The "movies" and certain literature have educated the Easterner to the belief that even now Indians go on the war-path occasionally, that even now cowboys sometimes find an outlet for their exuberant spirits in the hair-raising sport of "shooting up the town," and that even now battles between the law-abiding cattlemen and the "rustlers" are more or less frequent. When these people come west in their comfortable Pullmans and discover nothing more interesting in the shape of Indians than a few old squaws selling trinkets and blankets on station platforms, as at Yuma; when they visit one of the famous old towns where in days gone by white men were wont to sleep with one eye and an ear open for marauding Indians, and find electric cars, modern office buildings, paved streets crowded with luxurious motors, and the inhabitants nonchalantly pursuing the even tenor of their ways garbed in habiliments strongly suggestive of Forty-fourth street and Broadway; when they come West and note these signs of an [Pg 7]advancing and all-conquering civilization, I say, they invariably are disappointed. One lady I met even thought "how delightful" it would be "if the Apaches would only hold up the train!" It failed altogether to occur to her that, in the days when wagon-trains were held up by Apaches, few of those in them escaped to tell the gruesome tale. And yet this estimable lady, fresh from the drawing-rooms of Upper-Radcliffe-on-the-Hudson and the ballroom of Rector's, thought how "delightful" this would be! Ah, fortunate indeed is it that the pluck and persistence of the pioneers carved a way of peace for the pilgrims of today!" ... Read more

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What makes a city endure and prosper?In this masterful survey of a thousand years of urban architecture, Wolfgang Braunfels identified certain themes common to cities as different as Siena and London, Munich and Venice.Most important is an architecture that expresses the city's personality and most particularly its political personality.Braunfels describes and classifies scores of cities--cathedral cities, city-state, maritime cities, imperial cities--and examines the links between their political and architectural histories.Lavishly illustrated with city plans, bird's-eye views, early renderings, and modern photographs, this book will delight and instruct architects, urban planners, historians, and travelers. ... Read more

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"Sprawl" is one of the ugliest words in the American political lexicon. Virtually no one wants America's rural landscapes, farmland, and natural areas to be lost to bland, placeless malls, freeways, and subdivisions. Yet, few of America's fast-growing rural areas have effective rules to limit or contain sprawl.

Oregon is one of the nation's most celebrated exceptions. In the early 1970s Oregon established the nation's first and only comprehensive, statewide system of land use planning and largely succeeded in confining residential and commercial growth to urban areas while preserving the state's rural farmland, forests, and natural areas. Despite repeated political attacks, the state's planning system remained essentially politically unscathed for three decades. In the early and mid-2000s, however, the Oregon public appeared disenchanted, voting repeatedly in favor of statewide ballot initiatives that undermined the ability of the state to regulate growth. One of America's most celebrated "success stories" in the war against sprawl appeared to crumble, inspiring property rights activists in numerous other western states to launch copycat ballot initiatives against land use regulation.

This is the first book to tell the story of Oregon's unique land use planning system from its rise in the early 1970s to its near-death experience in the first decade of the 2000s. Using participant observation and extensive original interviews with key figures on both sides of the state's land use wars past and present, this book examines the question of how and why a planning system that was once the nation's most visible and successful example of a comprehensive regulatory approach to preventing runaway sprawl nearly collapsed.

Planning Paradise is tough love for Oregon planning. While admiring much of what the state's planning system has accomplished, Walker and Hurley believe that scholars, professionals, activists and citizens engaged in the battle against sprawl would be well advised to think long and deeply about the lessons that the recent struggles of one of America's most celebrated planning systems may hold for the future of land use planning in Oregon and beyond. ... Read more

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In this thoughtful and highly readable book, Noël Sturgeon illustrates the myriad and insidious ways in which American popular culture depicts social inequities as “natural” and how our images of “nature” interfere with creating solutions to environmental problems that are just and fair for all. Why is it, she wonders, that environmentalist messages in popular culture so often “naturalize” themes of heroic male violence, suburban nuclear family structures, and U.S. dominance in the world? And what do these patterns of thought mean for how we envision environmental solutions, like “green” businesses, recycling programs, and the protection of threatened species?

Although there are other books that examine questions of culture and environment, this is the first book to employ a global feminist environmental justice analysis to focus on how racial inequality, gendered patterns of work, and heteronormative ideas about the family relate to environmental questions. Beginning in the late 1980s and moving to the present day, Sturgeon unpacks a variety of cultural tropes, including ideas about Mother Nature, the purity of the natural, and the allegedly close relationships of indigenous people with the natural world. She investigates the persistence of the “myth of the frontier” and its extension to the frontier of space exploration. She ponders the popularity (and occasional controversy) of penguins (and penguin family values) and questions assumptions about human warfare as “natural.”

The book is intended to provoke debates—among college students and graduate students, among their professors, among environmental activists, and among all citizens who are concerned with issues of environmental quality and social equality. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Book Review: Environmentalism in Popular Culture
When I was a university student in the '80s and '90s, I got to observe firsthand the growth in popularity of a field loosely known as "cultural studies," with its promotion of a "new" field of political inquiry which it called "identity politics."As a prospective graduate student, I was accepted into a department which advertised its practice of what it called "critical/cultural studies."So I was at least familiar with cultural studies as an academic trend.Later in life, I became more focused upon environmental topics.

Noel Sturgeon's "Environmentalism in Popular Culture" has combined the "cultural studies" and environmentalist interests in an interesting, politically-committed book.This book is subtitled "Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural," which should tell you a good amount about its proclaimed method: "global feminist environmental justice analysis."Sturgeon's central idea is that

US environmentalists use popular narrative tropes to get their message across in ways that they think will be widely effective.But they do not often critically examine what relationship these stories have to the long-standing use of arguments from the natural that have promoted inequality and supported conquest throughout US political and social history.It is crucial, therefore, to examine the negative implications and effects of environmentalist deployment of certain narratives about nature, given that some of these narratives are simultaneously used to uphold troubling ideas about US power, heterosexist and sexist concepts of families and sexuality, and racist ideas about indigenous and Global South peoples.(7)

Thus what follows in the rest of this book is a sort of mythography of these "popular narrative tropes."In constructing this mythography, Sturgeon examines a wide variety of different media presentations: from advertising pitches (which employ "environmental" tropes) to films ("King Kong," "Dances With Wolves, "Hidalgo") to science fiction ("2001: A Space Odyssey," "The Day After Tomorrow") to Disney movies for children to specifically environmentalist nonfiction such as "An Inconvenient Truth."

The tropes that Sturgeon selects for her analysis are probably the most important part of this book.Sturgeon reveals the American "frontier" myth as persisting past the close of the actual physical frontier, and two iconic figures stand out as emblems of this "frontier" myth.The first is the trope of the Ecological Indian, who is both Pocahontas (Disney version) and Iron Eyes Cody in the famous "Keep America Beautiful" antilittering ad campaign in the '70s.The Ecological Indian is a symbol of pristine purity, untainted by the ugly realities of imperialism but still standing (in a symbolic, unreal sense) against the imperialists.The other "frontier" myth is that of space exploration as a benign form of colonialism, as reflected in space opera.There are, of course, plenty of examples of each of these "frontier" myths.

The "frontier myth," here, is of course a justification of the imperialist conquest of the Old West, though in the modern era such a myth is given an environmentalist twist as the "Ecological Indian," the myth of Native American purity, now presumably deceased, which is ostensibly re-dramatized in order to sponsor the preservation of nature without really getting the "White Man" to substantially change his ways.

The space exploration myth is here used to explore the connection between the "frontier" attitude of science fiction writers, and Reagan's "Strategic Defense Initiative" for the militarization of space, which contributes to the population of near-Earth orbit with lots of "space junk," dangerous debris moving quickly in high-Earth orbit.Militarized "wastelands" in space are said to be analogues of previous militarized wastelands on Earth.

When Sturgeon reflects upon children's movies (and other texts), she considers "superhero" narratives of "saving the Earth" which do not consider the corporate/ government "business as usual" context in which the Earth (really, ecosystem complexity) is in fact endangered.

An interlude in this book about polar environments, both North and South, dramatizes the extent to which penguins are (in movie narratives in "The March of the Penguins" and "Happy Feet"), depicted as "popular symbols that conflate heterosexist family values and the need to resist environmental threats" (136), and another movie, about northern polar locals, which examines the real relations between abrupt climate change and the disappearance of sophisticated ways of "living off the land" among indigenous people living in the Arctic Circle area.

Ultimately Sturgeon wishes to transition readers from social critiques of media images to a systematic critique of "the metabolism of man and nature" (to borrow Marx's phrase).She hopes that environmentalism will "move beyond individual modifications of ways of living to address the systematic, institutionalized structures that maintain inequality and promote environmental devastation."(182)

But these structures are not really addressed here, not to the extent to which we can understand the hypertrophy in "the metabolism of man and nature."Sturgeon is too busy trying to bring identity politics into the conversation, and in doing so, she critiques media participation in mythic structures which have contributed to environmental devastation (e.g. the suburban nuclear family, the colonial frontier).Indeed, we would do well to reject such mythic structures, and to know them when we see them in the mass media.

Mass media hopes that we might "save the Earth," however, were never anything but a fiction.Sturgeon is in a bit of a rush to proclaim that the critiques of racism, sexism, and heterosexism have a contribution to make to the critique of "the metabolism of man and nature" under capitalist, industrial conditions, without specifying too carefully what that latter critique really is.Perhaps we are intended to find out about metabolic critique by reading other books.Many of my previous diaries here are about the metabolic critique of capitalism, incl. book reviews.Certainly Sturgeon has been reading titles on much of that list -- she's got Joan Martinez-Alier prominently on her reading list, for instance.

Even so, books such as Sturgeon's are fun to read.Previous books on "green" criticism have gotten bogged down in lengthy lists of categories: this one moves carefully from cultural reference to cultural reference in ways which really entertain the reader while inviting her to think carefully about her exposure to entertainment industry messages.Recommended.

Stunning
Environmentalism in Popular Culture is a necessary challenge of ideas many of us may look upon with positive energy, but which require be pushed further. Equally, Sturgeon scripts a thought-provoking thesis on how ideas of personal responsibility and individualism have eclipsed ideas of corporate responsibility and social accountability, mainly through persistent messaging presupposing the righteousness of the unregulated free market and the inherent danger of anything approaching the commons as a Communist fantasy.

This volume offers up an appraisal of green business that should be fundamental to anyone's understanding of such evolutions in capital. Benevolence comes with it many hooks, and Environmentalism in Popular Culture unabashedly calls out the cynicism in which some of the noted benevolence is rooted. Sturgeon is furthermore clear in how North American chauvinism colors green business' interactions with the Third World, presupposing at once mysticism and helplessness, while failing to offer a lens to Western dominance for such happenings. The result of these ideologies coming to roost is soft capital, in the form of green business, partners with the hardline factions of globalization to present suffering as the natural order of life. Individuals, as the logic goes, are alone responsible for their own lot, not the governments and corporations which engineered societies to their own benefit. Enter theories that are but a hair more sophisticated than eugenics and one is left with the lucky, the cunning and the strong flourishing in a world where regulation is scorned as a roadblock to money rather than a guard for the public interest. What's more, a focus on individuals simply recycling, buying green and purchasing hybrid cars eludes what Sturgeon calls "social justice in a global context." ... Read more

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In this eclectic and interdisciplinary study, Joseph Scarpaci documents changes in far-flung corners of the Latin American metropolis using a broad palette of tools: urban morphology profiles, an original land-use survey of 30,000 doorways in nine historic districts, numerous photographs, and a review of the political, economic, and globalizing forces at work in historic districts. ... Read more

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Before the 1930s, landscapes of the American Southwest represented the migrant's dream of a stable and bountiful homeland. Around the time of the Great Depression, however, the Southwest suddenly became integrated into a much larger economic and cultural system. Audrey Goodman examines how--since that time--these southwestern landscapes have come to reveal the resulting fragmentation of identity and community.

Through analyzing a variety of texts and images, Goodman illuminates the ways that modern forces such as militarization, environmental degradation, internal migration, and an increased border patrol presence have shattered the perception of a secure homeland in the Southwest. The deceptive natural beauty of the Southwest deserts shields a dark history of trauma and decimation that has remained as a shadow on the region's psyche. The first to really synthesize such wide-ranging material about the effects of the atomic age in the Southwest, Goodman realizes the value of combined visual and verbal art and uses it to put forth her own original ideas about reconstructing a new sense of homeland.

Lost Homelands reminds us of the adversity and dislocation suffered by people of the Southwest by looking at the ways that artists, photographers, filmmakers, and writers have grappled with these problems for decades. In assessing the ruination of the region, however, Goodman argues that those same artists and writers have begun to reassemble a new sense of homeland from these fragments. ... Read more