Reviews for The Urban Villagers

The average rating for The Urban Villagers based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-06-29 00:00:00 Lee Anonymous An immigrant neighborhood is slated for destruction and no one can stop it. Even though they failed, no one forgot, and 30 years later a newspaper dedicated to the neighborhood was still in circulation. Leonard Nimoy ("Spock") had also grown up in that neighborhood. The writer of Urban Villagers, Gans, was suddenly a full professor at Harvard, when that apparently still meant something. Harvard had (has?) a policy of only giving full professorships to full professors of exceptional merit from other universities. He arrived in Cambridge as a kind of economic immigrant himself. He describes the Italian-American neighborhood which existed not far from an as yet surviving Italian-American neighborhood which received such extreme praise in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In that book, Jacobs mainly praises a similar neighborhood for its visual compactness and street layouts optimized for scrutinizing neighbors. A certain amount of such sociological analysis can be ascribed to Italian-American outlooks. Otherwise it would seem laughable for itinerant professors to idealize Boston's tiny neighborhood fiefdoms. As in a lot of cases, this is a niche academic book which is still highly accessible, but not populist enough to garner ratings on Goodreads. Eye-opening, profound, it helps explain how differences in economic mobility and ways of analyzing the world, inside vs. outside a "village", make survival of an entire village impossible.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-07-12 00:00:00 Joe Bob Read this in college in Boston as part of an honors program and it has informed the way I look at some urban areas. Whenever I am in Government Center, I'm alway think about Scollay Square and what came before the neighborhood was demolished.