Download or read book Endangered Cities written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Any war wreaks havoc on cities as well as the countryside. Endangered Cities explores specifically the urban experience in twentieth-century war-torn Europe. Volume contributors draw on the history of cities in seven European countries between 1914 and 1945 in which in almost every instance the boundaries between civilian and military powers collapse. Eleven original essays examine major phenomena during the urban war-time experience, including the effort to anticipate and defend against air attack, the burdens of siege and occupation, the rituals that developed around popular entertainment, black markets, the problems posed by death and destruction, and how cities devastated by war rose from the rubble to rebuild. Contributors include: Martin Baumeister, Roger Chickering, Davide Deriu, Marcus Funck, Andreas R. Hofmann, Benoît Majerus, Efi Markou, Karl D. Qualls, Eva-Maria Stolberg, Guy Thewes, Julia S. Torrie, and Malte Zierenberg.

Download or read book Endangered City written by Austin Zeiderman and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-19 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Security and risk have become central to how cities are planned, built, governed, and inhabited in the twenty-first century. In Endangered City, Austin Zeiderman focuses on this new political imperative to govern the present in anticipation of future harm. Through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Bogotá, Colombia, he examines how state actors work to protect the lives of poor and vulnerable citizens from a range of threats, including environmental hazards and urban violence. By following both the governmental agencies charged with this mandate and the subjects governed by it, Endangered City reveals what happens when logics of endangerment shape the terrain of political engagement between citizens and the state. The self-built settlements of Bogotá’s urban periphery prove a critical site from which to examine the rising effect of security and risk on contemporary cities and urban life.

Download or read book Cities Ranked Rated written by Bert Sperling and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2004-03-15 with total page 834 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities Ranked & Rated: Your Guide to the Best Places to Live in the U.S. & Canada provides timely facts and unbiased information on over 400 U.S. and 30 Canadian cities in an easy-to-access format. Whether you're mulling over the idea of relocating, trying to decide where to start out, or just curious about how your hometown stacks up, you’ll be intrigued by Cities Ranked & Rated. In addition to providing population statistics, each city is ranked on a number of essential factors, many of which are of vital interest in today's economy. Categories include: economy and jobs, cost of living, climate, education, health and health care, crime, transportation, leisure, and arts and culture. Easy-to-use tables help you put this wealth of information to work to find the city that best suits your special needs and interests.

Download or read book Extreme Cities written by Ashley Dawson and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cutting exploration of how cities drive climate change while being on the frontlines of the coming climate crisis How will climate change affect our lives? Where will its impacts be most deeply felt? Are we doing enough to protect ourselves from the coming chaos? In Extreme Cities, Ashley Dawson argues that cities are ground zero for climate change, contributing the lion’s share of carbon to the atmosphere, while also lying on the frontlines of rising sea levels. Today, the majority of the world’s megacities are located in coastal zones, yet few of them are adequately prepared for the floods that will increasingly menace their shores. Instead, most continue to develop luxury waterfront condos for the elite and industrial facilities for corporations. These not only intensify carbon emissions, but also place coastal residents at greater risk when water levels rise. In Extreme Cities, Dawson offers an alarming portrait of the future of our cities, describing the efforts of Staten Island, New York, and Shishmareff, Alaska residents to relocate; Holland’s models for defending against the seas; and the development of New York City before and after Hurricane Sandy. Our best hope lies not with fortified sea walls, he argues. Rather, it lies with urban movements already fighting to remake our cities in a more just and equitable way. As much a harrowing study as a call to arms Extreme Cities is a necessary read for anyone concerned with the threat of global warming, and of the cities of the world.

Download or read book Cities into Battlefields written by Stefan Goebel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities have always had a key role in warfare, as strategic centres which periodically suffered the horrors of siege and sack. With industrialisation, however, they were drawn ever closer to the front line and to direct and continuous experience of fighting and destruction. 'Cities into Battlefields: Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations of Total War' explores the cultural imprint of military conflict on metropolises world wide in the era of the First and Second World Wars. It brings together cultural and urban historians and scholars of related disciplines including anthropology, education, and geography. The volume examines how the emergence of 'total' warfare blurred the boundaries between home and front and transformed cities into battlefields. The logic of total mobilisation turned the social and cultural fabric of urban life upside down. Arranged so as to bring out the evolution of experience over time, the essays explore Eastern and Central Europe, Britain and Western Europe, and Japan and address several key themes. The first strand - scenarios - explores the apocalyptic imagination of intellectuals and experts in peacetime. Artists and writers anticipating doom presented the coming upheaval as an urban event - a commonplace of late-Victorian and post-1918 pessimism. On a different plane, civil servants and engineers materialised visions of urban chaos and devised countermeasures in case of emergencies. Both groups helped to furnish a repertoire of cultural forms which channelled and encoded the actual experience of war. The second strand deals with metropolitan experiences, notably mobilisation, deprivation, and destruction in wartime. Ruins and the repercussions of war is the central theme of the third strand - commemorations - which investigates post-war efforts to remember and forget. The quest for meaningful forms of commemoration was hard enough after the First World War; the Second World War, which saw whole cities disappear in flames, raised the possibility that the limits of representation had been reached. The central contention of this volume - that total war in the twentieth century has a significant but often overlooked metropolitan dimension - is fully addressed, thereby filling a conspicuous gap in the currently available literature.

Download or read book Endangered Species written by Edward P. Weber and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-03-21 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses primary documents as a lens through which to examine historical and present-day efforts to protect endangered species in the United States and around the world. In this thought-provoking work, author Edward P. Weber examines the values, policies, challenges, and approaches to endangered species conservation over the past 200 years. Using primary source documents and in-depth analysis of the issues, the reference tracks the evolution of species protection and conservation in the United States, and offers a brief look at global programs in the United States and other parts of the world. The book surveys how different countries are faring in protecting their plant and animal life, and considers which guidelines and programs hold the most promise for success in the future. Chapters compare and contrast past and present attitudes regarding endangered species and extinction and identify the influence of major organizations and individuals central to the debate over endangered species. Judiciously selected primary documents also explore the impact of species endangerment and loss on natural ecosystems—and ultimately, on humankind itself.

Download or read book Cities in the Wilderness written by Bruce Babbitt and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2007-08-03 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this brilliant, gracefully written, and important new book, former Secretary of the Interior and Governor of Arizona Bruce Babbitt brings fresh thought--and fresh air--to questions of how we can build a future we want to live in. We've all experienced America's changing natural landscape as the integrity of our forests, seacoasts, and river valleys succumbs to strip malls, new roads, and subdivisions. Too often, we assume that when land is developed it is forever lost to the natural world--or hope that a patchwork of local conservation strategies can somehow hold up against further large-scale development. In Cities in the Wilderness, Bruce Babbitt makes the case for why we need a national vision of land use. We may have a space program, he points out, but here at home we don't have an open-space policy that can balance the needs for human settlement and community with those for preservation of the natural world upon which life depends. Yet such a balance, the author demonstrates, is as remarkably achievable as it is necessary. This is no call for developing a new federal bureaucracy; Babbitt shows instead how much can be--and has been--done by making thoughtful and beneficial use of laws and institutions already in place. A hallmark of the book is the author's ability to match imaginative vision with practical understanding. Babbitt draws on his extensive experience to take us behind the scenes negotiating the Florida Everglades restoration project, the largest ever authorized by Congress. In California, we discover how the Endangered Species Act, still one of the most effective laws governing land use, has been employed to restore regional habitat. In the Midwest, we see how new World Trade Organization regulations might be used to help restore Iowa's farmlands and rivers. As a key architect of many environmental success stories, Babbitt reveals how broad restoration projects have thrived through federal- state partnership and how their principles can be extended to other parts of the country. Whether writing of land use as reflected in the Gettysburg battlefield, the movie Chinatown, or in presidential political strategy, Babbitt gives us fresh insight. In this inspiring and informative book, Babbitt sets his lens to panoramic--and offers a vision of land use as grand as the country's natural heritage.

Download or read book Communities Under Fire written by Alex Dowdall and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1914 and 1918, the Western Front passed through some of Europe's most populated and industrialised regions, such as the towns of Nancy, Reims, Arras, and Lens. This is the story of how war shaped the civilian identities of people who suffered intense artillery bombardment, military occupation, and forced displacement.

Download or read book The Ordeal of Peace Demobilization and the Urban Experience in Britain and Germany 1917 1921 written by Professor Adam R Seipp and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-06-28 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians know a great deal about how wars begin, but far less about how they end. Whilst much has been written about the forces, passions, and institutions that mobilized societies for war and worked to sustain that mobilization through years of struggle, much less is known about the equally complex processes that demobilized societies in the wake of armed conflict. As such, this new book will be welcomed by scholars wishing to understand the effects of the Great War in its fullest context, including the reactions, behaviors, and attitudes of 'ordinary' Europeans during the tumultuous events of the years of demobilization. Taking a transnational perspective on demobilization this study demonstrates that the experience of mass industrial war generated remarkably similar pressures within both the defeated and victorious countries. Using as examples the important provincial centres of Munich and Manchester, this book examines the experiences of European urban-dwellers from the last year of the war until the early 1920s. Utilizing a wide variety of sources from more than twenty archives in Germany, Britain, and the United States, this book recovers voices from the period that are often lost in conventional narratives, capturing the richness and diversity of the ideas, visions, and conflicts engendered by those difficult and tumultuous years. The result is a book that paints a vivid picture of the difficulties that peace could bring to economies and societies that had rapidly and fully adapted to the demands of industrial world war.

Download or read book Language City written by Ross Perlin and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2024-02-20 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a captivating portrait of contemporary New York City through six speakers of little-known and overlooked languages, diving into the incredible history of the most linguistically diverse place ever to have existed on the planet Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and—because many have never been recorded—when they’re gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the Manhattan-based non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City, Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, and follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. Perlin also dives deep into their languages, taking us on a fascinating tour of unusual grammars, rare sounds, and powerful cultural histories from all around the world. Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, a hundred of whom have lived in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N’ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem and the Bronx. After centuries of colonization and displacement, Lenape, the city’s original Indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan (“the place where we get bows”), has just one fluent native speaker, bolstered by a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, and the former lingua franca of the Lower East Side, Yiddish. A century after the anti-immigration Johnson-Reed Act closed America’s doors for decades and on the 400th anniversary of New York’s colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about growing political threats and the onslaught of “killer languages” like English and Spanish. Both remarkable social history and testament to the importance of linguistic diversity, Language City is a joyful and illuminating exploration of a city and the world that made it.

Download or read book Muslim Societies in Postnormal Times written by Ziauddin Sardar and published by International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where will Muslim societies be tomorrow? The world is increasingly and constantly changing, making it hard to keep up. This makes the state much more dire and troublesome for those already marginalised – particularly Muslim societies. Normal is no longer capable of upholding the promise of tomorrow’s certainty. These are postnormal times. In this storm of ignorance and uncertainty, Muslim societies stand to lose the most. But this is not destiny. In the cultivation of a new type of literacy – futures literacy – there resides a hope. Muslim Societies in Postnormal Times offers an alternative where we can ‘rescue’ and decolonise our futures. Sardar, Serra, and Jordan take an open and plural approach to the future revealing the true potentials that lie before us. Through detailed analysis of contemporary trends, the road to destruction is revealed. Through identifying and exploring emerging issues, agency through options can allow for positive change. And in the extrapolation of these ideas into scenarios, the authors pave the way for us to navigate our own preferred futures. Their study challenges the reader to think about the future in a new way, redefining the monolithic future as three tomorrows (Extended Present, Familiar Futures, and Unthought Futures), along the way ever watchful for Black Swans, Black Elephants, and the illustrious Black Jellyfish that could disrupt the path ahead. The authors pull no punches in critically evaluating the possibilities and nightmares that could potentially befall Muslim societies. Through a display of creativity and imagination, this book looks beyond the conventional to illuminate impacts in the context of the complex, interconnected world we find ourselves in. This informative and enlightening text will push readers to see beyond popular, yet native notions of present and future. In the exposition of the reader’s ignorance and uncertainty, they will begin to look for the unthought and take agency in recolonising and navigating their preferred tomorrow.

Download or read book Threatened and Endangered Species Due to the Urban Growth Within the Multiple Habitat Conservation Program Planning Area written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Humorless Ladies of Border Control written by Franz Nicolay and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2009, musician Franz Nicolay left his job in the Hold Steady, aka "the world's greatest bar band." Over the next five years, he crossed the world with a guitar in one hand, a banjo in the other, and an accordion on his back, playing the anarcho-leftist squats and DIY spaces of the punk rock diaspora. He meets Polish artists nostalgic for their revolutionary days, Mongolian neo-Nazis in full SS regalia, and a gay expat in Ulaanbaatar who needs an armed escort between his home and his job. The Russian punk scene is thrust onto the international stage with the furor surrounding the arrest of the group Pussy Riot, and Ukrainians find themselves in the midst of a revolution and then a full-blown war.> While engaging with the works of literary predecessors from Rebecca West to Chekhov and the nineteenth-century French aristocrat the Marquis de Custine, Nicolay explores the past and future of punk rock culture in the postcommunist world in the kind of book a punk rock Paul Theroux might have written, with a humor reminiscent of Gary Shteyngart. An audacious debut from a vivid new voice, The Humorless Ladies of Border Control is an unforgettable, funny, and sharply drawn depiction of surprisingly robust hidden spaces tucked within faraway lands.

Download or read book Urban Biodiversity and Equity written by Max Lambert and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This advanced textbook moves beyond a basic scientific comprehension of urban ecosystems to understand the essential details of how scientists, policy makers, and practitioners develop solutions to effectively manage urban biodiversity. Such efforts necessitate unravelling the complex components that bolster or constrain biodiversity including human-wildlife interactions, resource availability, climate fluctuations, novel species relationships, and landscape heterogeneity. However, key to an understanding of these processes is also recognizing the tremendous social variation inherent within and across urban areas. The diversity of urban human communities fundamentally shapes how society designs, builds, and manages urban landscapes. This means that urban environmental management unavoidably must account for human social variation. Unfortunately, urban systems have a history and continued legacy of social inequality (e.g., systemic racism and classism) that govern how cities are both built and managed. This novel text not only highlights these connections, but also illustrates the interdisciplinary approaches needed for advancing a new, justice-centred approach to nature conservation. Urban Biodiversity and Equity is suitable for graduate level students and professional researchers from both natural and social science disciplines studying the ecology, conservation, and management of urban environments and their biodiversity. It will also be of relevance and use to a broader audience of urban ecologists, urban planners, and urban wildlife practitioners.

Download or read book Urban Jungle written by Ben Wilson and published by Doubleday. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this exhilarating look at cities, past and future, Ben Wilson proposes that, in our world of rising seas and threatening weather, the natural world may prove the city's savior "Illuminating...Wilson leaves readers with hope about the future of efforts to preserve the ecosystems that surround us, as well as a new perspective that looks beyond the concrete and asphalt when walking along a city’s streets."—Associated Press Since the beginning of civilization, humans have built cities to wall nature out, then glorified it in beloved but quite artificial parks. In Urban Jungle Ben Wilson—the author of Metropolis, a seven-thousand-year history of cities that the Wall Street Journal called “a towering achievement”—looks to the fraught relationship between nature and the city for clues to how the planet can survive in an age of climate crisis. Whether it was the market farmers of Paris, Germans in medieval forest cities, or the Aztecs in the floating city of Tenochtitlan, pre-modern humans had an essential bond with nature. But when the day came that water was piped in and food flown from distant fields, that relationship was lost. Today, urban areas are the fastest-growing habitat on Earth and in Urban Jungle Ben Wilson finds that we are at last acknowledging that human engineering is not enough to protect us from extremes of weather. He takes us to places where efforts to rewild the city are under way: to Los Angeles, where the city’s concrete river will run blue again, to New York City, where a bleak landfill will be a vast grassland preserve. The pinnacle of this strategy will be Amsterdam: a city that is its own ecosystem, that makes no waste and produces its own energy. In many cities, Wilson finds, nature is already thriving. Koalas are settling in Brisbane, wild boar may raid your picnic in Berlin. Green canopies, wildflowers, wildlife: the things that will help cities survive, he notes, also make people happy. Urban Jungle offers the pleasures of history—how backyard gardens spread exotic species all over the world, how war produces biodiversity—alongside a fantastic vision of the lush green cities of our future. Climate change, Ben Wilson believes, is only the latest chapter in the dramatic human story of nature and the city.

Download or read book The City in the Muslim World written by Mohammad Gharipour and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting a critical, yet innovative, perspective on the cultural interactions between the "East" and the "West", this book questions the role of travel in the production of knowledge and in the construction of the idea of the "Islamic city". This volume brings together authors from various disciplines, questioning the role of Western travel writing in the production of knowledge about the East, particularly focusing on the cities of the Muslim world. Instead of concentrating on a specific era, chapters span the Medieval and Modern eras in order to present the transformation of both the idea of the "Islamic city" and also the act of traveling and travel writing. Missions to the East, whether initiated by military, religious, economic, scientific, diplomatic or touristic purposes, resulted in a continuous construction, de-construction and re-construction of the "self" and the "other". Including travel accounts, which depicted cities, extending from Europe to Asia and from Africa to Arabia, chapters epitomize the construction of the "Orient" via textual or visual representations. By examining various tools of representation such as drawings, paintings, cartography, and photography in depicting the urban landscape in constant flux, the book emphasizes the role of the mobile individual in defining city space and producing urban culture. Scrutinising the role of travellers in producing the image of the world we know today, this book is recommended for researchers, scholars and students of Middle Eastern Studies, Cultural Studies, Architecture and Urbanism.

Download or read book Ecology and Conservation of Birds in Urban Environments written by Enrique Murgui and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-02-10 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides syntheses of ecological theories and overarching patterns of urban bird ecology that have only recently become available. The numerous habitats represented in this book ranges from rows of trees in wooded alleys, to wastelands and remnants of natural habitats encapsulated in the urban matrix. Authored by leading scientists in this emergent field, the chapters explore how the characteristics of the habitat in urban environments influence bird communities and populations at multiple levels of ecological organization and at different spatial and temporal scales, and how this information should be incorporated in urban planning to achieve an effective conservation of bird fauna in urban environments. Birds are among the most conspicuous and fascinating residents of urban neighborhoods and provide urban citizens with everyday wildlife contact all over the world. However, present urbanization trends are rapidly depleting their habitats, and thus knowledge of urban bird ecology is urgently needed if birds are to thrive in cities. The book is unique in its inclusion of examples from all continents (except Antarctica) in an effort to arrive at a more holistic perspective. Among other issues, the individual chapters address the censusing of birds in urban green spaces; the relationship between bird communities and the structure of urban green spaces; the role of exotic plant species as food sources for urban bird fauna; the influence of artificial light and pollutants on bird fauna; trends in long-term urban bird research, and transdisciplinary studies on bird sounds and their effects on humans. Several chapters investigate how our current knowledge of the ecology of urban bird fauna should be applied in order to achieve better management of urban habitats so as to achieve conservation of species or even increase species diversity. The book also provides a forward-looking summary on potential research directions. As such, it provides a valuable resource for urban ecologists, urban ecology students, landscape architects, city planners, decision makers and anyone with an interest in urban ornithology and bird conservation. Moreover, it provides a comprehensive overview for researchers in the fields of ecology and conservation of urban bird fauna.