Pathways through Crisis

Urban Risk and Public Culture

By (author) Carl A. Maida

Publication date:

16 December 2008

Length of book:

280 pages

Publisher

AltaMira Press

ISBN-13: 9780759111325

When densely populated urban areas face severe crises—natural disasters, epidemics, sudden unemployment, massive immigration—they often find that established mechanisms cannot respond adequately to the problems. Carl Maida argues that solutions to these problems tend to be developed within the affected communities themselves. In Pathways through Crisis, he draws on his two decades of work in ethnography and with crisis centers in the Los Angeles area to study the kinds of informal organizations that arise at the grass-roots level in order to deal with severe crises. This ground-breaking examination of responses to urban disaster suggests how both informal and formal organizations can be developed to serve people under extreme duress.

Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Chapter 1. A World of Strangers
Chapter 3 Chapter 2. Global Economy and Local Dilemma
Chapter 4 Chapter 3. Campaign against Stigma
Chapter 5 Chapter 4. Facing Crises through Culture
Chapter 6 Chapter 5. Strangers in the City
Chapter 7 Chapter 6. Worlds Turned Upside Down
Chapter 8 Chapter 7. The City is the Frontier
Chapter 9 Chapter 8. Common Worlds

In Pathways through Crisis anthropologist Carl Maida has brought together historical, sociological, and contemporary case studies to demonstrate how members of poor minority groups cope with crises. He uses metropolitan Los Angeles, with its multiplicity of inner-city populations, as his 'social laboratory,' describing their varied responses to epidemics, to natural disasters, and to the arrival of new generations of immigrants the settled populations may, or may not, want to absorb. Maida's book should be welcome in urban communities everywhere.