Pathways through Crisis: Urban Risk and Public Culture

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 organizat...