Word: urban
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Summer in the city can be a scary thought to the uninitiated. Oppressive heat and humidity, poor air quality and the stench of city streets combine to create a desperate impulse to escape from the urban jungle to the beach...
...Harvard Square part of Cambridge is less urban than it might look to the neophyte emerging from the T stop. Far from being a concrete jungle (well, except for Holyoke Center) this region actually has trees. Many parts of the Square, including Harvard Yard, Radcliffe Yard, and the Cambridge Common, are delightfully leafy, shaded enclaves. In the winter, the city's open space turns to mud. But during the summer months, students can sprawl on Harvard lawns that were carefully made green for the Commencement crowds...
That assertion may well be voiced loudly during this year's presidential campaign after Wilson's new book, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, is published in September. Wilson says that it is "deliberately written to influence the widest possible audience" and that it takes dead aim at conservative Republican proposals for overhauling welfare, Medicare and other social programs. "I refuse to be intimated by the rhetoric of the Contract with America," says Wilson, who calls himself an unashamed liberal. "They have defined the terms of the debate, and I say their...
...most urban and suburban Americans, home treatment systems probably aren't worth the hassle or expense, say independent experts. "In general, the greater risks lie in small community developments like trailer parks that opt not to be part of the water supply of a larger municipality," says Daniel Okun, a retired professor of environmental engineering at the University of North Carolina. "The point is to find out what's going on in your local water supply...
...such respects Martin Dressler is an urban fable about civilization and its discontents, the repression of instincts in the service of progress. Yet this commercial hero also represents a period of social history when ambition and new wealth outstripped utility and taste. Dressler's Grand Cosmo, an architectural and cultural Tower of Babel, is part residence and part theme park. Within its 30 stories and two subterranean levels are a beach, a lake, a model New England village, a Moorish bazaar and a simulated asylum for the insane. Criticized as an example of "the worst excesses of late Victorian eclecticism...