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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Raisin City (formerly, Raisin) is a census-designated place (CDP) in Fresno County, California, United States. The population was 165 at the 2000 census. Raisin City is located 13 miles (21 km) south-southwest of downtown Fresno, at an elevation of 236 feet (72 m).According to the United States Census Bureau, the CDP has a total area of 0.8 square miles (2.0 km²), all of it land. The first post office was established in 1907. As of the census of 2000, there were 165 people, 42 households, and 37 families residing in the CDP. The population density was 214.4 people per square mile (82.7/km²). ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Cathedral City is a city in Riverside County, California, United States. The population was 42,647 at the 2000 census. Sandwiched between Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage, it is one of the cities in the Coachella Valley (Palm Springs area) of southern California. The town's name derives from "Cathedral Canyon" to the south of the town, so named in 1850 by Colonel Henry Washington because its rock formations were reminiscent of a cathedral. The city itself started as a housing subdivision in 1925, but was not incorporated until 1981. The city grew 4-5 times in two decades, as the 2006 population estimate is 48,000. Locals gave it the nickname "Cat City", short for Cathedral. Others like historians claim that came from the reputation as a slinger gaming gulch in the late 1800s, and a safe haven for bars or saloons during prohibition of the 1920s. ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Yuba City is a Northern California city, founded in 1849. It is the county seat of Sutter County, California, United States. As of 2006, Yuba City had an estimated total population of 60,360. As of March 2010, Yuba City has an unemployment rate of 20.8%, the third highest among U.S. cities. Yuba City is the principal city of the Yuba City Metropolitan Statistical Area which encompasses all of Sutter County and Yuba County. The metro area's population is 164,138. It is the 21st largest metropolitan area in California ranked behind Redding and Chico. Its metropolitan statistical area is part of the Greater Sacramento CSA. The Maidu people were settled in the region when they were first encountered by Spanish and Mexican scouting expeditions in the early 1800s. One version of the origin of the name "Yuba" is that during one of these expeditions, wild grapes were seen growing by a river, and so it was named "Uba", a variant spelling of the Spanish word uva (grape). ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Truckee is an incorporated town in Nevada County, California, United States. The population was 13,864 at the 2000 census. Truckee was named after a Paiute chief. His assumed Paiute name was Tru-ki-zo. He was the father of Chief Winnemucca and grandfather of Sarah Winnemucca. The first people who came to cross the Sierra Nevada encountered his tribe. The friendly Chief rode toward them yelling "Tro-kay!", which is Paiute for "Everything is all right". The settlers assumed he was yelling his name. Chief Truckee later served as a guide for John C. Frémont. ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Palo Alto is a California charter city located in the northwest corner of Santa Clara County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, USA. It is named after a tree called El Palo Alto. The city includes portions of Stanford University and is headquarters to a number of Silicon Valley high-technology companies, including Hewlett-Packard, VMware and Facebook. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 58,598 residents. ... Read more

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This book will change the way we understand cities. It not only provides readers with an introduction to cities and urbanism in the postmodern world but also overturns many common assumptions about urban structure. Dear's analysis combines concepts of postmodernism, space, and the urban to trace the genesis of a postmodern urban condition. He provides an understanding of the intellectual, moral and political consequences of postmodernism and an evaluation of the role of space and place in contemporary social theory and philosophy. The book's introductory chapters lay out in a concise manner the principal themes in urban theory, postmodern thought, and spatial analysis. From this, Dear constructs the fabric of a postmodern urbanism, employing the precepts of Henri Lefebvre and Fredric Jameson, together with a careful reading of the landscapes of contemporary cities, including the prototypical postmodern metropolis of Los Angeles among others. In the book's final section, Dear examines some consequences of postmodern urbanism, and begins the task of defining an urban agenda for the twenty-first century. He shows how urban studies have been transformed by postmodernism, and builds a postmodern politics that encompasses the individual and the global. Drawing as much from fiction and film, politics and history, architecture and cultural studies, as from urbanism and geography, Dear presents his vision of a twenty-first century dominated by global megacities and uncovers new ways of understanding how cities are made. ... Read more

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United States Capital 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???


... Read more

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A megalopolis (sometimes called a megapolis or megaregion) is defined as an extensive metropolitan area or a long chain of roughly continuous metropolitan areas. The term was used by Lewis Mumford in his 1938 book, The Culture of Cities, which described it as the first stage in urban overdevelopment and social decline. Later, it was used by Jean Gottmann in 1957, to describe the huge metropolitan area along the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. extending from Boston, Massachusetts through New York City; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and ending in Washington, D.C. According to Gottmann, it resulted from changes in work and social habits. The concept was later extended to include the following regions: BosWash (Boston?Washington), ChiPitts (Chicago to Pittsburgh), Quebec City ? Windsor Corridor, SanSan, and Bajalta California. ... Read more

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GOOGLE PRODUCT DESCRIPTION...
A megalopolis (sometimes called a megapolis or megaregion) is defined as an extensive metropolitan area or a long chain of roughly continuous metropolitan areas. The term was used by Lewis Mumford in his 1938 book, The Culture of Cities, which described it as the first stage in urban overdevelopment and social decline. Later, it was used by Jean Gottmann in 1957, to describe the huge metropolitan area along the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. extending from Boston, Massachusetts through New York City; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and ending in Washington, D.C. According to Gottmann, it resulted from changes in work

GO TO WIKIPEDIA! ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Vacaville City Coach runs local fixed route bus service in the city of Vacaville, California. And also provides commuter service to BART in Pleasant Hill and Walnut Creek in addition to job centers there in a consortium including Fairfield/Suisun Transit. The agencies also cooperate to run service between Fairfield and Sacramento stopping in Davis and Dixon also. Vacaville, California is located in Solano County, California, United States, between Sacramento and San Francisco. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 88,625. According to the Community Development Department of the City of Vacaville, the total population as of 2005 was 96,735. ... Read more

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"The tourist Venice is Venice," Mary McCarthy once observed--a sentiment very much in line with what most of the fourteen million tourists who visit the city each year experience, but at the same time a painful reality for the 65,000 Venetians who actually live there. Venice is viewed from a new perspective in this engaging book, which offers a heady, one-city tour of tourism itself. Conducting readers from the beginnings of Venetian tourism in the late Middle Ages to its emergence as a form of mass entertainment in our time, the authors explore what happens when today's "industrial tourism" collides with an ancient and ever-more-fragile culture. Giving equal consideration to those who tour Venice and those who live there, their book affords rare insight into just what it is that the touring and the toured see, experience, and elicit from each other. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Superb contemporary history
This is an easy read, and a surprisingly thoughtful, careful, and broadly informative book. It dives deeply into the endless, diverse difficulties of modern life in Venice, but with excellent historical context. Its history of Carnival, and its revival, for example, is the best I've read. It's blemished by two or three uninteresting pages of symbolic/semiotic analysis, but these minor problems are vastly overwhelmed by impressive reporting, review and research on important issues of the day.

The Bermuda-Shorts Triangle
If the City of Venice (Italy) ever decides to build a model of Las Vegas, will the model include a little replica of Las Vegas' Venetian Hotel, itself a model of Venice?It's the kind of question I might address to the authors of Venice: The Tourist Maze, this entertaining and rewarding account of what may be the most touristed city in the history of the planet.

You might suppose there is nothing new in a critique of Venetian tourism.Venice first licensed tour guides in 1219 (and right there is a factoid I did not know until I read this book).Any number of others have left accounts of tourism in Venice, and quite a few have left accounts of accounts.

Davis and Marvin do a creditable job of trying not to replow old ground.There's almost no mention of Mary McCarthy, Jan Morris, Viscount Norwich, and other visitors who have done so much to inform and entertain.There's only a bit of Henry James; almost none of Proust and only a glancing reference to that most famous of all sex tourists, Thomas Mann's Gustav von Aschenbach. Instead, they give their primary attention to tourism as an activity, from the standpoint alike of the provider and the consumer.You might almost call it an account of "the enterprise of tourism," except this makes it sound,misleadingly, like yet one more business book.

There is a whiff of the lamp about the presentation, although it never gets overpowering: the chapter on the gondola is called "the floating signifier," which is, I guess, the kind of joke you are bound to get when academics try to have fun.They say they "take advantage" of a notion of one "Appadurai" (who?), although he never makes it to the bibliography.A more obvious progenitor is Dean MacCannell, whose "The Tourist" is one of those rare books to make fancy theory both interesting and plausible.A still better source, though surely unintended, would be the trdition o;f the mystery novel, where the hard-boiled detective sees the great city from the underside (indeed I am a little surprised that they don't say a word about Donna Leon, the Arthur Conan Doyle of the Venetian murder mystery).

But forget about the theory: some of their best stuff is the nuts-and-boats practical.There is an admirable sketch-history of the gondola and its monster offspring, the vaporetto.And I particularly liked their discussion of the economics of the "artisan."They explain that Murano glass "works" because the craft is showy and dramatic, but that Burano lace-making does not "work," because the craft is not showy, and because real Burano lace is prohibitively expensive. Papier-mache masks work especially well, because the price is right, and the technology is accessible to any schoolchild.By the way it appears that those fancy designer masks (confession: I have one on the living room wall) are no part of the tradition of Venice: masks at the /carnevale/ were for the most part mass-produced.

The climax comes, inevitably in a discussion of the other Venice, the Venetian Hotel at Las Vegas (but why can't I find it in the index?).They provide an entertaining account, appropriately fascinated and appalled, of theVenetian as the private obsession of Steve Adleson who has lavished on it (so they say) the sum of $1.5 billion.They seem not to have noticed that from a business standpoint, the Venetian seems to have been a rousing success.If tourists still flock to the real Venice, they seem to descend at a comparable rate on our little Venice in the desert.

Been There, Lived That, Right On!
As an inveterate traveler, I usually find that books about places I have visited leave me sorry I read them - travel guides are often so filled with tourist hype or stereotypical portrayals or out-dated analysis. But, this is not a travel guide: it is a thoughful and well-researched critique of Venice as both a tourist city and a (struggling to remain) actual city.

Over the years I have related to Venice in three ways:a member of the day-trip brigade (with two children in tow); a more serious tourist making a five day stay of it; a long-term (six month) resident in one of its working class neighborhoods.From all of those perspectives, this book speaks to my experiences.

But, more than a souvenir of my times there (see the excellent discussion of the role of souvenirs in a tourist city), this work has opened my mind to other ways to see my beloved city.I now see the city and its people with new eyes, for the authors' critical eyes and ideas challenged me to experience Venice once again anew.

If, as I would claim, I love Venezia, then I would also want to engage my heart and soul in the challenge they pose for the future of the city: not the worries about "sinking into the sea" but the worries about becoming "lost in the tourists."

And did you know that tourists have been coming here for over 500 years (yes, fellow Americans, that is before any tourists invaded North America), and that tacky souvenirs have been available for at least 300 years?Lots more to know as well as ponder in this work.

Venice, the Tourist Maze
A must for the regular visitor of Venice. Davis and Marvin show clearly how the historical center and the outskirts (!) are sacrifized to the needs of mass-tourism. They describehow the the city is transformed sytematically into a historical theme-park in which the remaining locals have only a stage-role. And 'resistance is useless': the inhabitants are able to slow, not to stop the process.
The book predicts an ominous future of this cultural heritage site. Food for thought. ... Read more

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This marvelously evocative book by Stephen Johnson, Gerald Haslam, and Robert Dawson--all natives of the Great Central Valley of California--is the first to explore in detail the rich natural and social history of the state's agricultural heartland.
Gerald Haslam's text celebrates the tenacious people of the Valley, where hard work and ingenuity are the means to both survival and success. This is land that gives little but yields, under pressure, to creative experiments with unusual crops. Stephen Johnson's and Robert Dawson's stunning photographs reveal the immense beauty of the region as well as the delicate relationship between the land and the people who work it.
The Central Valley is California's economic hub as well as its physical center. A plain some 430 miles long and up to 75 miles wide, surrounded by mountains and covering nearly fifteen million acres--about the size of England--this valley has become the richest farming region in the world. More than 25 percent of the table food produced in the U.S. is grown here. Its southernmost county, Kern, produces more oil than some OPEC countries.
The Valley is as rich in people as it is in resources. Tagalog, Hmong, Spanish, English, Cantonese, Russian, Italian--all are spoken here. The population of farm laborers, small family farms, powerful agribusinesses, and, increasingly, urban professionals make the region's economic disparities as palpable as its cultural diversity.
The Valley has also produced a wealth of writers--Maxine Hong Kingston from Stockton, Richard Rodriguez and Joan Didion from Sacramento, Gary Soto from Fresno, among others--as well as the award-winning El Teatro Campesino (The Farmworkers' Theater).
But the Valley is imperiled. The past 150 years of massive agricultural expansion and population growth have systematically destroyed much of the area's original wildlife, and the "plain of majestic oaks" seen by early travelers has vanished. The region is also plagued by a host of critical issues: chemical pollution, soil erosion, water politics, the treatment of minorities, economic inequities, farm foreclosures. Johnson's and Dawson's photographs--which are complemented by engravings by Thomas Moran, paintings by Albert Bierstadt and William Hahn, and photographs by Carleton Watkins, Dorothea Lange, and Russell Lee, among others--bring home to us, as only visual images can, that it is up to us to safeguard the future of this endangered valley, to conserve its extraordinary human and natural wealth, and to try to reclaim some of its lost grandeur. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Stunning
THE GREAT CENTRAL VALLEY is a fat, heavy, glossy-paged book of photographs taken throughout the heart of California. Valley native Gerald Haslam, who has written extensively about this region, provides the text. The Table of Contents is:

Prologue
An Overview
Historical Patterns
The Delta
The Sacramento Valley
The San Joaquin Plain
The Tulare Basin
Some Issues
The Cusp of the Future
Epilogue
Exhibit Inventory
Sources
Index

I know of no book that more forcibly exudes the spirit, the voice, of the Great Central Valley, present through a photographic cornucupia, historical information and anecdote, regional knowledge, ecological data, and expertly written texts, all deeply humane in their display of people and landscapes joined in an ever-transforming heartland four hundred miles long and sixty wide.

Historical, not contemporary, material
The book contains mostly historical material -- photos and text. I was looking for a book about contemporary Central Valley. A one-page graph shows dollar-value of products and the percentage of U.S. production. One photo, of the planting of asparagus in a dust-storm, shows mostly dust.

Gorgeous and informitive
I bought the book mainly to see the work of photographer Stephen Johnson, and his work truly delivered. These pictures are a must study for landscape photographers. His photographs capture a simple beauty and are a heartfeltdisplay of the region. Also, I was pleasantly surprised by the work ofphotographer Robert Dawson, and by the amount of information containedwithin the pages of "The Great Central Valley". If you enjoyphotography or are interested in California history, you will highly enjoythis book. ... Read more

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While most historians, journalists, and filmmakers have focused on Los Angeles as a bastion of corporate greed, business boosterism, political corruption, cheap labor, exploited immigrants, and unregulated sprawl, The Next Los Angeles tells a different story: that of the reformers and radicals who have struggled for alternative visions of social and economic justice. In a new preface, the authors reflect on the gathering momentum of L.A.'s progressive movement, including the 2005 landslide victory of Antonio Villaraigosa as mayor. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Sucks but cures insomnia
This book is poorly written and an absolute chore to read.On any given page, a tiny bit of useful information is buried under a pile of extravagant vocabulary, which is generally confusing and completely pointless but I'm sure serves some author's inflated ego quite well.

Detestable that somebody finds this appropriate as a textbook. ... Read more

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Urban Studies

"A remarkable and timely book. . . . Must reading." William Julius Wilson

Offering a new vision of community-based regionalism, this book arrives just as "smart growth" measures and other attempts to link cities and suburbs are beginning to make their mark on the political and analytical scene. The authors make a powerful case for emphasizing equity, arguing that metropolitan areas must reduce poverty in order to grow and that low-income individuals must make regional connections in order to escape poverty.

A hard-hitting analysis of Los Angeles demonstrates that the roots of the unrest of 1992 lay in regional economic deterioration and that the recovery was slowed by insufficient attention to the poor. Regions That Work then provides a history and critique of community-development corporations, a statistical analysis of the poverty-growth relationship in seventy-four metro areas, a detailed study of three regions that have produced superior equity outcomes, and a provocative call for new policies and new politics.

Manuel Pastor Jr. is professor of Latin American and Latino studies and director of the Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Peter Dreier is E. P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics at Occidental College and director of the Urban & Environmental PolicyProgram. J. Eugene Grigsby III is director of the Advanced Policy Institute and professor at UCLA's School of Public Policy and Social Research. Marta Lpez-Garza is an assistantprofessor and holds a joint position in the Women's Studies Department and the Chicano/Chicana Studies Department at California State University, Northridge.

Globalization and Community Series, volume 6Translation Inquiries: University of Minnesota Press ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Sutter Buttes are a small circular complex of eroded volcanic lava domes which rise above the flat plains of the Central Valley of California in the United States. The highest peak, South Butte, reaches about 2,130 feet (650 m) above sea level. The Buttes are located just outside of Yuba City, California in the Sacramento Valley, the northern part of the Central Valley. They are named for John Sutter, who received a large land grant from the Mexican government. The Sutter Buttes also hold the title of being the world's smallest mountain range. ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Uptown is a neighborhood in Downtown Oakland, California, located just north of the center of downtown. Its boundaries are ill-defined, but most definitions include the area bounded by Grand Avenue at the north, Castro Street or I-980 on the west, San Pablo Avenue on the southwest, City Center plaza on the south, and Broadway on the east.Uptown was Oakland's main shopping district in the early to mid 20th century. Many buildings from that era remain, including the Capwell's department store (now a Sears), and the Art Deco I. Magnin. The Paramount Theater is located here on Broadway, as is the Fox Oakland Theatre, on Telegraph. ... Read more