Bringing the Civic Back in

Larry Bennett is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at DePaul University. He is the coeditor of The Many Futures of Work: Rethinking Expectations and Breaking Molds (Temple University Press) and of the press’s Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy book series. In 2017 and 2018 Professor Bennett was interim Executive Director of North Branch Works, a neighborhood economic development organization in Chicago.John D. Fairfield is Professor of History at Xavier University and the author of The Public and its Possibilities: Triumphs and Tragedies in the American City (Temple), The Mysteries of the Great City: The Politics of Urban Design, 1877-1937, and Oakley: From Hamlet to the Center of Cincinnati.Patricia Mooney-Melvin is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. She is the coeditor of Making Sense of the City: Local Government, Civic Culture, and Community Life in Urban America; editor of American Community Organizations: A Historical Dictionary; coauthor of The Urbanization of Modern America: A Brief History, 2nd Edition; and author of The Organic City: Urban Definition and Neighborhood Organization 1880-1920.

"[This book] should be appreciated both for the soundness of the scholarship that went into the pieces and as an affectionate and thoughtful memorial to the man who inspired them. Whether cities today can help us rekindle the spirit of 'civic nationalism' that were instrumental in creating remains to be seen. But these authors clearly hope they will, an aspiration they inherited from their mentor and colleague."-Journal of Urban Affairs