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The rise of arts and culture is transforming citizen politics. Though new to many social scientists, this is a commonplace for many policy makers. We seek to overcome this divide by joining culture and the arts with classic concepts of political analysis. We offer an analytical framework incorporating the politics of cultural policy alongside the typical political and economic concerns. Our framework synthesizes several research streams that combine in global factors driving the articulation of culture into political/economic processes. The contexts of Toronto and Chicago are explored as both enhanced the arts dramatically, but Toronto engaged artists qua citizens, while Chicago did not.

Climate and disaster resilience mapping has been discussed in detail in Chapter 3. The Climate Disaster Resilience Index (CDRI) as a comprehensive and well-structured methodology for measuring the resilience of cities is presented, as well as the differences between CDRI and various assessment tools. The resilience of cities, or their agglomerations or subzones, is being measured because cities are seen to be at a suitable level to efficiently initiate action, especially in developing countries where unplanned or haphazard urbanization is a major risk factor. But for climate and disaster resilience mapping to be of value, it should be followed by action planning. Having a vision for the future and charting a course to achieve it is what action planning is about. Studies have consistently shown that vision, planning, and goal setting can positively influence cities’ organizational performance. Action planning can compel future thinking, highlight new opportunities and threats, and refocus a city's mission. Productive action planning focuses on the most critical problems, choices, and opportunities. Action planning requires time and a process. If used effectively, it is a powerful tool for self-management and goal-based achievement. Action planning typically includes deciding who is going to do what and by when and in what order for the city to reach its long-term goals. The design and implementation of the action planning depend on the nature and needs of the city.

In recent years the Minneapolis (Minnesota) Public Schools have displaced over 1,800 teachers and professional staff. While there is an extensive job loss literature, there is no information available on the adjustments encountered by displaced teachers. Survey data were obtained from a random sample of teachers and licensed staff who were downsized from 2000–2001 through 2003–2004. The majority of downsized teachers reported difficulty in finding another teaching position, in large part because many of them were laid-off during the summer after other districts had completed their hiring. Continuing lay-offs have cut deeper into the seniority roster, exacerbating job insecurity tension for downsizing survivors.

Overtourism is an emerging concept and a perennial process every destination is going through. It is a cyclic phenomenon derived from the destination, retained in the destination and at last demised by the destination. It's a kind of ‘tourism illness’ spreading rapidly in every destination in the present scenario. The status of overtourism in every destination has been caused by the tourist, of the tourist and for the tourist. In the context of religious places in Odisha, overtourism is a ‘disorder’ that cannot be mitigated, as religiosity, faith and spiritualism have propelled and governed people's sentiment and emotion. Hence ambiguity arises out of making an intrigue situation between a myth or a spiritual sojourn bounded by faith and belief. This chapter significantly contributes by unfolding the existing literature by providing the origin and evolution of overtourism, various stated definitions by the different authors, causes and consequences, and overtourism in religious destinations by adopting an exploratory study, particularly in case of the Golden triangle of Odisha.

In this chapter the authors describe the development of an interdisciplinary graduate program focusing on sustainable urban development at Chicago’s DePaul University. Locating the curriculum both in the administrative institutional context and the historical geography of a racially and economically segregated urban area, the authors discuss the process of program formation and adjustment over its first five years of operation, 2013–2018. The chapter highlights some of the challenges encountered by program faculty, from internal curricular competition to external classification of the program under federal educational designation, and notes some of the interdisciplinary innovations, such as requiring courses in Geographic Information Systems to aid spatial data analysis and visualizations. In the second part of the chapter, to assess the impact of the graduate program on students, the authors review and draw from reflection essays written by students who, while completing their studies, pursued internships with nonprofit organizations in Chicago. The chapter concludes by discussing the employment status of recent alumni to suggest how these former students are pursuing jobs that may come to impact sustainability policy and practice. The authors maintain it is necessary to push the understanding of “sustainability” beyond solely environmental concerns to incorporate understandings of how economic development and community engagement must be included to deliver a sustainable city. The interdisciplinary curriculum described challenges students to become leaders in local efforts to make urban areas not only more environmentally sustainable, but also more economically and socially sustainable for all residents.

This chapter introduces “Isolated Building Studies,” a photographic series that interrogates Chicago's landscape of racial and economic segregation. In order to facilitate comparison, the series features uniform compositions of buildings that do not have neighboring structures. Through the repetition of these buildings and their uncanny settings, viewers are pushed to investigate relationships between these scenes and the social, political, and economic forces that created them.

This chapter discusses the “seigniorage argument” in favor of public money issuance, according to which public finances could be improved if the state more fully exercised the privilege of money creation, which is, today, largely shared with private banks. This point was made in the 1930s by several proponents of the “100% money” reform scheme, such as Henry Simons of the University of Chicago, Lauchlin Currie of Harvard and Irving Fisher of Yale, who called for a full-reserve requirement in lawful money behind checking deposits. One of their claims was that, by returning all seigniorage profit to the state, such reform would allow a significant reduction of the national debt. In academic debates, however, following a criticism first made by Albert G. Hart of the University of Chicago in 1935, this argument has generally been discarded as wholly illusory. Hart argued that, because the state, under a 100% system, would be likely to pay the banks a subsidy for managing checking accounts, no substantial debt reduction could possibly be expected to follow. The 100% money proponents never answered Hart’s criticism, whose conclusion has often been considered as definitive in the literature. However, a detailed study of the subject reveals that Hart’s analysis itself appears to be questionable on at least two grounds: the first pertains to the sources of the seigniorage benefit, the other to its distribution. This chapter concludes that the “seigniorage argument” of the 100% money authors may not have been entirely unfounded.

Iowa City is located on banks of the Iowa River in a gently rolling region in the eastern half of Iowa, about 250 miles west of Chicago. It was the state capital until 1858, when the government was moved to a more central location in Des Moines. In 1919, the year the Frank H. Knight family moved to Iowa City, it was a small university community of about 15,000. No doubt Knight and his wife Minerva found it a pleasant enough place to live and raise their young family. To Frank, the town and surrounding area must have seemed much like that of Bloomington, IL, near where he was born and raised. For the first few years in Iowa City the Knight family lived in an 1890s vintage house close to the campus, and just around the corner from a public elementary school.³