A01=Marta Gutman
Author_Marta Gutman
buildings
california
Category=AMVD
Category=JBSF1
Category=JKSB1
Category=RPC
charity
child care
children
city
conservation
construction
daycare
discrimination
education
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnicity
families
history
immigration
interwar
kindergarten
metropolis
migration
nonfiction
oakland
orphanage
philanthropy
playgrounds
politics
poverty
prejudice
progressive era
race
recreation centers
remodeling
renewal
renovation
restoration
san francisco
settlement houses
sociology
urban
welfare
west coast
women
working class
Product details
- ISBN 9780226311289
- Weight: 765g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 19 Sep 2014
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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While the dynamic urban landscapes of New York, Boston, and Chicago have been widely studied, there is much to be gleaned from west coast cities, especially in California, where the migration boom at the end of the nineteenth century permanently changed the urban fabric of these newly diverse, plural metropolises. In A City for Children, Marta Gutman focuses on the use and adaptive reuse of everyday buildings in Oakland, California, to make the city a better place for children. She introduces us to the women who were determined to mitigate the burdens placed on working-class families by an indifferent industrial capitalist economy. Often without the financial means to build from scratch, women did not conceive of urban land as a blank slate to be wiped clean for development. Instead, Gutman shows how, over and over, women turned private houses in Oakland into orphanages, kindergartens, settlement houses, and day care centers, and in the process built the charitable landscape - a network of places that was critical for the betterment of children, families, and public life, often riddled with social inequalities and racial prejudices.
Spanning one hundred years of history, A City for Children provides a compelling model for building urban institutions and demonstrates that children, women, charity, and incremental construction, renovations, alterations, additions, and repurposed structures are central to the understanding of modern cities.
Marta Gutman is associate professor of architectural and urban history at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York and visiting professor of art history at the Graduate Center, City College of New York. She is a licensed architect.
