Main Street - by Mindy Thompson Fullilove (Paperback)

About the Book

"How do Main Streets contribute to our mental health? This question took social psychiatrist Mindy Thompson Fullilove on an 11-year search through 178 cities in 14 countries. From informal observations, Fullilove discerns the larger architecture of Main Streets. She describes the myriad ways that Main Streets are shaped for social interactions and how they are a marker for the integrity of civilization. Her illustrated book shows how urban centers are essential for gathering people to share information and to tend civic and commercial tasks that benefit all. She addresses ways cities can cure, not only ills of an inequitable, post-industrial culture, but malaise of a post-pandemic culture seeking reconnection"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Always defying categories, psychiatrist and urban activist Mindy Fullilove takes us on a geographical and historical journey to Main Streets around the world. . . . This is as much a guide for the perplexed (or depressed) as it is an astonishing study of the built environment and its effects on our health, communities, politics--and our future."--Mara Spiegel, Co-Director, The Division of Narrative Medicine, Columbia University

"As urbanists think about the future of cities, communities, and connections in this new world, Main Street is the place to start this analysis. . . . Organizers, researchers, doctors, architects, and politicians, by reading this book, will learn how to build the city in which everyone prospers."--Nupur Chaudhury, MUP, MPH, Host, NupurSpectives

"Synthesizing her observation of over 100 cities and conversations with leading thinkers, Mindy Fullilove's Main Street provides a novel perspective that guides us to see the social geometry of what makes a community vibrant. It should be required reading for students in urban sociology, architecture, urban planning, and community health."--David Vlahov, PhD, RN, Editor, Journal of Urban Health

"The doctor is in . . . examining community life. With the eye of a natural scientist, with the warm wit of a country practitioner on house calls, psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove prescribes the renaissance of Main Streets for the ills of industrial decline. You will not see your neighborhood, nor your neighbors, the same way after reading this book."--Helena Hansen, Associate Professor, NYU Anthropology and Psychiatry Departments

"Main Street builds on Mindy Fullilove's previous works and treats us to one of the most important books about our contemporary towns and cities since Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities. Mindy's perspective on the psychology of place helps us understand a different story, a story of serial forced displacements that have had devastating effects on inner-city communities, and, by extension, to all peoples and all places. This book's story is not isolated to memory and issues of race, class, and poverty; rather, it builds a strong connection to climate justice and to a more promising future."--Ron Shiffman, Professor, Pratt Institute Graduate School of Architecture "Pratt Institute Graduate School of Architecture "

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).