Skip to main content

Shopping Cart

You're getting the VIP treatment!

Item(s) unavailable for purchase
Please review your cart. You can remove the unavailable item(s) now or we'll automatically remove it at Checkout.
itemsitem
itemsitem

Recommended For You

Loading...

Urban eBooks

If you like Urban eBooks, then you'll love these top picks.
Showing 1 - 24 of 7720 Results
Skip side bar filters
  • In Defense of Housing

    The Politics of Crisis

    In every major city in the world there is a housing crisis. How did this happen and what can we do about it?Everyone needs and deserves housing. But today our homes are being transformed into commodities, making the inequalities of the city ever more acute. Profit has become more important than social need. The poor are forced to pay more for worse housing. Communities are faced with the violence ... Read more

    Was $9.99 USD Now $1.99 USD

  • The Devil in the White City

    A Saga of Magic and Murder at the Fair that Changed America

    by Erik Larson ...
    **#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile comes the true tale of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and the cunning serial killer who used the magic and majesty of the fair to lure his victims to their death.“As absorbing a piece of popular history as one will ever hope to find.” —San Francisco ChronicleA ... Read more

    Was $13.99 USD Now $6.99 USD

  • When Crack Was King

    A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

    LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • A “vivid and frank” (NPR) account of the crack cocaine era and a community’s ultimate resilience, told through a cast of characters whose lives illuminate the dramatic rise and fall of the epidemic“A master class in disrupting a stubborn narrative, a monumental feat for the fraught subject of addiction in Black communities.”—The Washington Post“A poignant ... Read more

    Was $5.99 USD Now $4.99 USD

  • America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators

    **Washington Post • 50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024A leading journalist and public intellectual explains the long, disturbing history behind the American Right’s embrace of foreign dictators, from Kaiser Wilhelm and Mussolini to Putin and Orban.**Why do Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and much of the far Right so explicitly admire the murderous and incompetent Russian dictator Vladimir Putin? Why ... Read more

    Was $12.99 USD Now $2.99 USD

  • Sixty Miles Upriver

    Gentrification and Race in a Small American City

    An unvarnished portrait of gentrification in an underprivileged, majority-minority small cityNewburgh is a small postindustrial city of some twenty-eight thousand people located sixty miles north of New York City in the Hudson River Valley. Like many other similarly sized cities across America, it has been beset with poverty and crime after decades of decline, with few opportunities for its ... Read more

    $21.99 USD

  • The Death and Life of Great American Cities

    by Jane Jacobs ...
    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 ... Read more

    $9.99 USD

  • Tightrope

    Americans Reaching for Hope

    NATIONAL BESTSELLER • With stark poignancy and political dispassion Tightrope addresses the crisis in working-class America while focusing on solutions to mend a half century of governmental failure. This must-read book from the authors of Half the Sky “shows how we can and must do better” (Katie Couric)."A deft and uniquely credible exploration of rural America, and of other left-behind pockets ... Read more

    Was $13.99 USD Now $6.99 USD

  • Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

    **Winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award in CriticismWinner of the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for NonfictionWinner of the 2020 Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian NonfictionFinalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/BiographyNamed one of the Best Books of the 21st Century by the New York Times Book Review"Exhilarating…A rich resurrection of a forgotten history." —Parul ... Read more

    $13.99 USD

  • There Is No Place for Us

    Working and Homeless in America

    NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • Through the “revelatory and gut-wrenching” (Associated Press) stories of five Atlanta families, this landmark work of journalism exposes a new and troubling trend—the dramatic rise of the working homeless in cities across America“An exceptional feat of reporting, full of an immediacy that calls to mind Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family and Matthew ... Read more

    $13.99 USD

  • Metropolis

    A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

    by Ben Wilson ...
    **In a captivating tour of cities famous and forgotten, acclaimed historian Ben Wilson tells the glorious, millennia-spanning story how urban living sparked humankind's greatest innovations.“A towering achievement.... Reading this book is like visiting an exhilarating city for the first time—dazzling.” —The Wall Street Journal**During the two hundred millennia of humanity’s existence, nothing has ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • Mission High

    One School, How Experts Tried to Fail It, and the Students and Teachers Who Made It Triumph

    "This book is a godsend a moving portrait for anyone wanting to go beyond the simplified labels and metrics and really understand an urban high school, and its highly individual, resilient, eager and brilliant students and educators." -- Dave Eggers, co-founder, 826 National and ScholarMatchDarrell is a reflective, brilliant young man, who never thought of himself as a good student. He always ... Read more

    $9.99 USD

  • Smack

    Heroin and the American City

    Series series Politics and Culture in Modern America
    Why do the vast majority of heroin users live in cities? In his provocative history of heroin in the United States, Eric C. Schneider explains what is distinctively urban about this undisputed king of underworld drugs.During the twentieth century, New York City was the nation's heroin capital—over half of all known addicts lived there, and underworld bosses like Vito Genovese, Nicky Barnes, and ... Read more

    $28.99 USD

  • Arbitrary Lines

    How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

    by M. Nolan Gray ...
    What if scrapping one flawed policy could bring US cities closer to addressing debilitating housing shortages, stunted growth and innovation, persistent racial and economic segregation, and car-dependent development?It’s time for America to move beyond zoning, argues city planner M. Nolan Gray in Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. With lively explanations and ... Read more

    $21.99 USD

  • The Killing Fields of East New York

    The First Subprime Mortgage Scandal, a White-Collar Crime Spree, and the Collapse of an American Neighborhood

    by Stacy Horn ...
    In this groundbreaking work of investigative journalism and true crime, Stacy Horn sheds light on how the subprime mortgage scandal of the 1970s and a long history of white-collar crime slowly devastated East New York, a Brooklyn neighborhood that would come to be known as the Killing Fields.On a warm summer evening in 1991, seventeen-year-old Julia Parker was murdered in the Brooklyn neighborhood ... Read more

    $11.99 USD

  • Glass House

    The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

    For readers of Hillbilly Elegy and Strangers in Their Own Land**WINNER OF THE OHIOANA BOOK AWARDS AND FINALIST FOR THE 87TH CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS |**NAMED A BEST/MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2017 BY: New York Post • Newsweek • The Week • Bustle • Books by the Bank... ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • Life After Cars

    Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile

    From the hosts of The War on Cars podcast, a searing indictment of how cars ruin everything—and what we can do to fight backWhen the very first cars rolled off production lines, they were a technological marvel, predicted to make life easier and better for all Americans; yet a hundred years later, that dream is running on empty.Instead of unbounded freedom, the never-ending proliferation of ... Read more

    $14.99 USD

    PRE-ORDER

  • Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies

    by Leslie Kern ...
    **Shortlisted for the Architectural Book of the YearHow gentrification is killing our cities, and what we can do about it**What does gentrification look like? Can we even agree that it is a process that replaces one community with another? It is a question of class? Or of economic opportunity? Who does it affect the most? Is there any way to combat it? Leslie Kern, author of the best selling ... Read more

    $9.99 USD

  • Neighborhood Defenders

    Participatory Politics and America's Housing Crisis

    Since the collapse of the housing market in 2008, demand for housing has consistently outpaced supply in many US communities. The failure to construct sufficient housing - especially affordable housing - in desirable communities and neighborhoods comes with significant social, economic, and environmental costs. This book examines how local participatory land use institutions amplify the power of ... Read more

    $34.99 USD

  • The World in a City

    Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York

    by Joseph Berger ...
    “The whole world can be found in this city. . . .”–from the PrefaceFifty years ago, New York City had only a handful of ethnic groups. Today, the whole world can be found within the city’s five boroughs–and celebrated New York Times reporter Joseph Berger sets out to discover it, bringing alive the sights, smells, tastes, and people of the globe while taking readers on an intimate tour of the ... Read more

    $3.99 USD

  • The Folklore of the Freeway

    Race and Revolt in the Modernist City

    by Eric Avila ...
    Series series A Quadrant Book
    When the interstate highway program connected America’s cities, it also divided them, cutting through and destroying countless communities. Affluent and predominantly white residents fought back in a much heralded “freeway revolt,” saving such historic neighborhoods as Greenwich Village and New Orleans’s French Quarter. This book tells of the other revolt, a movement of creative opposition, ... Read more

    $17.99 USD

  • Homicide

    A Year on the Killing Streets

    by David Simon ...
    From the creator of HBO's The Wire, the classic book about homicide investigation that became the basis for the hit television showThe scene is Baltimore. Twice every three days another citizen is shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned to death. At the center of this hurricane of crime is the city's homicide unit, a small brotherhood of hard men who fight for whatever justice is possible in a deadly world ... Read more

    $13.99 USD

  • Picking Up

    On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City

    by Robin Nagle ...
    A “gripping” behind-the-scenes look at New York’s sanitation workers by an anthropologist who joined the force (Robert Sullivan, author of Rats).America’s largest city generates garbage in torrents—11,000 tons from households each day on average. But New Yorkers don’t give it much attention. They leave their trash on the curb or drop it in a litter basket, and promptly forget about it. And why not ... Read more

    $14.99 USD

  • Disrupting D.C.

    The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City

    A panoramic account of the urban politics and deep social divisions that gave rise to UberThe first city to fight back against Uber, Washington, D.C., was also the first city where such resistance was defeated. It was here that the company created a playbook for how to deal with intransigent regulators and to win in the realm of local politics. The city already serves as the nation’s capital. Now, ... Read more

    $20.99 USD

  • Street Archives and City Life

    Popular Intellectuals in Postcolonial Tanzania

    by Emily Callaci ...
    Series series Radical Perspectives
    In Street Archives and City Life Emily Callaci maps a new terrain of political and cultural production in mid- to late twentieth-century Tanzanian urban landscapes. While the postcolonial Tanzanian ruling party (TANU) adopted a policy of rural socialism known as Ujamaa between 1967 and 1985, an influx of youth migrants to the city of Dar es Salaam generated innovative forms of urbanism through the ... Read more

    $25.99 USD