About the Book
Traverses the central thoroughfares of our cities to uncover the ways they bring together our communities
How do Main Streets contribute to our mental health? This intriguing question took social psychiatrist Mindy Thompson Fullilove on an 11-year search through 178 cities in 14 countries. As Andy Merrifield notes in the foreword, "Mindy has drifted through a lot of Main Streets, walked them, observed, talked to people, ordinary people as well as professional practitioners. While she got to pace many miles of New York's Broadway, eat French patisseries as a flâneuse in Gay Paree, sip çay in Istanbul, and chill in Kyoto's dazzling Zen temples, her real concern is Main Street, USA, the more modest main stems of provincial America." From these visits Fullilove has discerned the larger architecture of Main Streets. She observes the ways that Main Streets are shaped for a vast array of social gatherings and processes, how they are a marker for
the integrity of civilization-and the marks aren't always good. She also looks at Main Streets as "an allée, a way that is part drama and part quotidian. While passing through, we get to look at one another, to sing, to recognize what we are, have been, might be." Her conclusion, that Main Streets are essential for gathering people and sharing information, emphasizes that tending our oft-neglected civic and commercial centers is a task worthy of us all.
About the Author:
Mindy Thompson Fullilove (Author)
Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, is an American social psychiatrist who focuses on the ways environmental factors affect the mental health of communities. She is Professor of Urban Policy and Health, Urban Policy Analysis & Management Program, Milano School for International Affairs, Management & Urban Policy, The New School. She has numerous published articles and six books, including URBAN ALCHEMY: Restoring Joy in America's Sorted-Out Cities and ROOT SHOCK: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It.
Andy Merrifield (Foreword by) ANDY MERRIFIELD is an independent scholar and author of a dozen books, as well as numerous
articles, essays and reviews appearing in Monthly Review, The Nation, Harper's Magazine, New
Left Review, The Guardian, Literary Hub, Jacobin, and Dissent. He is a prolific writer about
urbanism, political theory and literature, with titles credited to him including Dialectical
Urbanism (Monthly Review Press), The New Urban Question, and Magical Marxism. He has also
published three intellectual biographies, of Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, and John Berger, a
popular existential travelogue, The Wisdom of Donkeys, a manifesto for liberated living, The
Amateur, together with a memoir about cities and love, inspired by Raymond Carver's short
stories, called What We Talk About When We Talk About Cities (and Love).
