Collins’s representation of the environment reflects key Victorian cultural engagements with issues such as the growth of the urban suburb, while at the same time employing gothic landscapes to advance his sensation fiction tropes.

People tend to want to know the explicit details of crimes, including descriptions of violence and carnage. The author discusses her team’s research, and the research of others when possible, on the places where female serial killers (FSKs) commit their crimes, which typically includes a suburb, and the primary means FSKs use to commit murder, the most common of which is poison. The author presents information on the victims of FSKs, including the average number deceased, and victim age, vulnerability, familiarity, relatedness. Startlingly, more than half of FSKs killed children, more than three-quarters of FSKs killed someone vulnerable and in their care, more than 90% killed at least one person they knew, and more than 60% were related to at least one victim by blood or marriage. The cases of FSKs Tammy Corbett, Genene Jones, and Nanny Doss are presented to illustrate chapter concepts.

The Great Migration ended in 1970 as manufacturing was replaced with electronic goods. Wages stagnated, and income inequality increased rapidly. This led to a new Gilded Age. Nixon replaced Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty with his War on Drugs. Blacks were opposed to Nixon’s Vietnam War, and he penalized them by incarcerating them. This, helped by state laws and President Reagan, led to mass incarceration – which became known as the New Jim Crow. Public education was reserved for suburban whites, while urban Blacks were in prison or attended underfunded schools. The Flint, Michigan, water crisis demonstrates the difficulty of urban Blacks as jobs and urban facilities disappeared. President Obama was the first Black president, elected in the financial crisis of 2008. The Supreme Court nullified the 1965 Voting Act as it had done with amendments in the 1880s. Obamacare was the most enduring achievements of Obama’s presidency.

The suburbs, which now contain the majority of the US population, have also become increasingly diverse, with more immigrants and people in poverty living there than in cities. Against this backdrop, the privileged, all-white enclaves conjured by New Yorker writers such as Cheever and Updike are outdated. This chapter focuses instead on New Yorker suburban fiction written by women contributors to demonstrate the magazine’s ongoing role in shaping the class consciousness and political sensibilities of its white female readers, who by 1954 accounted for 55 percent of its subscribers. Postwar, it became a symbol of its women readers’ education and refinement. Further, the liberal ideals advanced in the magazine’s essays consistently offered means for enhancing readers’ standing in their communities by championing social causes that would conveniently not raise taxes, lower property values, or compromise their children’s education. The female-authored New Yorker fiction discussed here offers a composite portrait and subtle critique of the white suburban woman voter whose current clout at the polls could be redirected to serve a larger purpose than self-aggrandizement.

Over the past half century, the old lines between cities and suburbs have lost the significance they once had. Growing numbers of African Americans have moved to suburbs even as new cohorts of immigrants have transformed the populations of cities and suburbs. Moreover, the economic divisions of the past no longer define the geography of the metropolis: many cities have experienced economic booms and an influx of affluent residents, while poverty in the suburbs has risen. Intertwined with these spatial shifts is growing economic inequality that has richly rewarded those at the top of the income spectrum and left the middle class increasingly stressed. Place of residence presents a uniquely formidable risk in the United States. Legally sanctioned racial segregation created a template for a particularly vicious form of inequality that has endured long after formal residential segregation was outlawed.  Since the 1980s, spatial inequalities have been exacerbated by the federal government’s turn away from place-based assistance. Growing economic inequality has magnified spatial differences, turning place of residence into a coveted prize -- or deep disadvantage.  The profound effect of place means that understanding inequality and opportunity in America requires assessing the economic and political forces that exacerbate spatial inequalities and those that temper them. These forces and the role of the institutional structure of local government in shaping them are the subject of this chapter, focusing on segmented localism, attitudes to tax and redistribution, and the potential of a nascent progressive urbanism to reduce spatial inequality.

This chapter emphasizes actions at the regional scale, specifically the West Coast hip neighborhoods of the Bay Area during the 1960s. The runaway crisis of the late 1960s and the People’s Park standoff in 1969 are the focus of this chapter, which explores the role that “the West” and “nature” each played in the counterculture imagination and in the emergence of the popular ecology movement on the streets of Berkeley. This chapter stresses again the more intimate scale of the body and the influence that mobile, sometimes sick, and recalcitrant youth bodies played in the remaking of public space and ideas of autonomy as youth and their adult allies fought for “the right to the city.” The flood of rootless, placeless teens in public space, parks, and new “youth ghettos” forced local municipal renegotiations of young people’s legal status, contributing to broad national changes to the very meanings of youth, youth public health accommodation, and environmental activism during a decade marked by such contests.

Chapter 6 describes how some local governments have given rights of citizenship, including voting rights, to nonresident landowners; in some cases, municipalities have actually limited the franchise exclusively to landowners. Once again, this is indicative of the distinctive nature of local citizenship. Property ownership ceased being a prerequisite for voting in state and federal elections by the 1850s, as citizenship was coming to be seen primarily in ethno-nationalist terms as a matter of shared identity. Local governments, reflecting their history as commercial entities, have been more open to tying the franchise to landownership, and as a de facto matter, many cities today use zoning regulations to ensure that anyone who cannot afford to purchase a home cannot acquire residence, and therefore the right to vote. This de facto property qualification for local citizenship illustrates that local citizenship is constructed as purely private and liberal, predicated upon consumer choice, mobility, and self-interest rather than identity or civic activity.

In a conclusion, I argue that the reason these theories all fail is because attempting to excise liberalism from local citizenship is futile. Cities were built on commerce, and commerce is as much in the lifeblood of cities as politics is. But liberalism has never been only about commerce. It is also about equality. Because of its commitment to equality, liberalism has had a far better track record in advancing human freedom than any of its competitors. And as globalization has advanced, we may have gone too far down the path of liberalism to turn back. Embracing liberalism, while also committing to reforming it, will enable us to harness the best of local citizenship’s historical legacy for a future in which the fate of citizenship and the nation-state are still uncertain.

Chapter 4 discusses the evolution of the urban space of Jeddah in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century on the basis of maps, photographs, and documents. It shows the impact of the Ottoman modernisation efforts regarding the urban fabric. Thus, the economic lifelines of the city, such as the ports and markets, were regularly cleaned and expanded. New buildings also reflected the increase of the state functions of administration and health. The latter issue was given particular attention in the light of concerns over epidemics, most notably cholera. Another major and related concern was the provision of sufficient and clean drinking water. Urban growth is also seen in the evolution and growth of suburbs which were closely linked to the city.

Nicola Presley establishes the increasing predominance of television to the American culture out of which Plath’s work emerges. Drawing on advertisements for television in Plath’s beloved Ladies Home Journal as well as contemporary critical thinking on the subject, Presley accounts for Plath’s deliberate engagement with television in her poetry and prose, making a case for Plath’s horror of television’s low artistic values and pernicious effects on those who watch it, yet also arguing for the undeniable visual impact of television on Plath’s writing.