Books in the Metropolitan Portraits series

Toronto describes the diverse and remarkable transformations that have occurred in the urban landscapes of Toronto, especially over the last fifty years as it has grown from a provincial industrial city into multicentered, multicultural, world-city region that is one of the largest metropolitan areas in North America.

A geographical examination of metropolitan San Diego and its regional environs.

Miami, so adept at stirring the imagination of strangers, has always lured visitors and migrants even if few ever ended up staying. Author Jan Nijman presents a careful and revealing dissection of one of the most intriguing cities of our age, one that offers a window into the global urban future.

Carl Abbott reports how Portland became a model of American urban planning.

Metropolitan Denver reveals the purposeful civic decisions made regarding tourism, downtown urban revitalization, and cultural-led economic development that make the city a destination.

Metropolitan Phoenix explores the efforts to build a sustainable desert city in the face of environmental uncertainty, rapid growth, and increasing social diversity.

Northern New Jersey is undergoing a gradual transformation to become symbolic of a new kind of suburban area, one that borrows culture, image, and economy from a metropolis but also maintains the day-to-day living patterns of heartland America in the face of rapid social change.

Conn examines the shifting meaning of the region's history, the utopian impulse behind its founding, the role of the region in creating the American middle class, the regional watershed, and the way art and cultural institutions have given shape to a resident identity.

Driving Detroit paints a portrait of metropolitan Detroit through an imaginative application of social science, song lyrics, poems, and oral history to explain why the city has fallen from industrial powerhouse into urban dysfunction.