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Book The Big U

    Book Details:
  • Author : Neal Stephenson
  • Publisher : Harper Collins
  • Release : 2009-10-13
  • ISBN : 0061847380
  • Pages : 322 pages

Download or read book The Big U written by Neal Stephenson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times Book Review called Neal Stephenson's most recent novel "electrifying" and "hilarious". but if you want to know Stephenson was doing twenty years before he wrote the epic Cryptonomicon, it's back-to-school time. Back to The Big U, that is, a hilarious send-up of American college life starring after years our of print, The Big U is required reading for anyone interested in the early work of this singular writer.

Book Proposed Lower Manhattan Crosstown Expressway

Download or read book Proposed Lower Manhattan Crosstown Expressway written by New York. City Construction Co-ordinator and published by . This book was released on 1946 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The Lofts of SoHo

    Book Details:
  • Author : Aaron Shkuda
  • Publisher : University of Chicago Press
  • Release : 2024-06-19
  • ISBN : 0226833410
  • Pages : 304 pages

Download or read book The Lofts of SoHo written by Aaron Shkuda and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024-06-19 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking look at the transformation of SoHo. American cities entered a new phase when, beginning in the 1950s, artists and developers looked upon a decaying industrial zone in Lower Manhattan and saw, not blight, but opportunity: cheap rents, lax regulation, and wide open spaces. Thus, SoHo was born. From 1960 to 1980, residents transformed the industrial neighborhood into an artist district, creating the conditions under which it evolved into an upper-income, gentrified area. Introducing the idea—still potent in city planning today—that art could be harnessed to drive municipal prosperity, SoHo was the forerunner of gentrified districts in cities nationwide, spawning the notion of the creative class. In The Lofts of SoHo, Aaron Shkuda studies the transition of the district from industrial space to artists’ enclave to affluent residential area, focusing on the legacy of urban renewal in and around SoHo and the growth of artist-led redevelopment. Shkuda explores conflicts between residents and property owners and analyzes the city’s embrace of the once-illegal loft conversion as an urban development strategy. As Shkuda explains, artists eventually lost control of SoHo’s development, but over several decades they nonetheless forced scholars, policymakers, and the general public to take them seriously as critical actors in the twentieth-century American city.

Book Reclaiming the Highline

Download or read book Reclaiming the Highline written by and published by . This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Downtown

    Book Details:
  • Author : Robert M. Fogelson
  • Publisher : Yale University Press
  • Release : 2001-01-01
  • ISBN : 0300098278
  • Pages : 505 pages

Download or read book Downtown written by Robert M. Fogelson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation Downtown is the first history of what was once viewed as the heart of the American city. Urban historian Robert Fogelson gives a riveting account of how downtown--and the way Americans thought about it--changed between 1880 and 1950. Recreating battles over subways and skyscrapers, the introduction of elevated highways and parking bans, and other controversies, this book provides a new and often starling perspective on downtown's rise and fall.

Book New York

    Book Details:
  • Author : Michael N. Danielson
  • Publisher : Univ of California Press
  • Release : 1983-10-03
  • ISBN : 0520045513
  • Pages : 403 pages

Download or read book New York written by Michael N. Danielson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1983-10-03 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies the cultural, economic, political, and social forces influencing life in New York City.

Book The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

Download or read book The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard written by Abraham Akkerman and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-01-09 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ebenezer Howard, an Englishman, and Jane Jacobs, a naturalized Canadian, personify the twentieth century's opposing outlooks on cities. Howard had envisaged small towns, newly built from scratch, fashioned on single family homes with small gardens. Jacobs embraced existing inner-city neighbourhoods emphasizing the verve of the living street. From Howard's idea, the American Dream of garden suburbs had emerged, yet his conceptualization of a modern city received criticism for being uniform and alienated from the rest of the city. Similarly, at the turn of the new century, Jacobs' inner-city neighbourhoods came to be recognized as the result of commodification, vacillating between poverty and newly discovered hubs of urban authenticity. Presenting Howard and Jacobs within a psychocultural context, The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard addresses our urban crisis in the recognition that "city form" is a gendered, allegorical medium expressing femininity and masculinity within two founding features of the built environment: void and volume. Both founding contrasts bring tensions, but also the opportunities of fusion between pairs of urban polarities: human scale against superscale, gait against speed, and spontaneity against surveillance. Jacobs and Howard, in their respective attitudes, have come to embrace the two ancient archetypes, the Garden and the Citadel, leaving it to future generations to blend their two contrarian stances.

Book The City at Eye Level

Download or read book The City at Eye Level written by Meredith Glaser and published by Eburon Uitgeverij B.V.. This book was released on 2012 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although rarely explored in academic literature, most inhabitants and visitors interact with an urban landscape on a day-to-day basis is on the street level. Storefronts, first floor apartments, and sidewalks are the most immediate and common experience of a city. These "plinths" are the ground floors that negotiate between inside and outside, the public and private spheres. The City at Eye Level qualitatively evaluates plinths by exploring specific examples from all over the world. Over twenty-five experts investigate the design, land use, and road and foot traffic in rigorously researched essays, case studies, and interviews. These pieces are supplemented by over two hundred beautiful color images and engage not only with issues in design, but also the concerns of urban communities. The editors have put together a comprehensive guide for anyone concerned with improving or building plinths, including planners, building owners, property and shop managers, designers, and architects.

Book Cross Manhattan Arterials and Related Improvements

Download or read book Cross Manhattan Arterials and Related Improvements written by Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and published by . This book was released on 1959 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book City Bound

    Book Details:
  • Author : Gerald E. Frug
  • Publisher : Cornell University Press
  • Release : 2013-07-02
  • ISBN : 0801460085
  • Pages : 281 pages

Download or read book City Bound written by Gerald E. Frug and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many major American cities are defying the conventional wisdom that suburbs are the communities of the future. But as these urban centers prosper, they increasingly confront significant constraints. In City Bound, Gerald E. Frug and David J. Barron address these limits in a new way. Based on a study of the differing legal structures of Boston, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, and Seattle, City Bound explores how state law determines what cities can and cannot do to raise revenue, control land use, and improve city schools. Frug and Barron show that state law can make it much easier for cities to pursue a global-city or a tourist-city agenda than to respond to the needs of middle-class residents or to pursue regional alliances. But they also explain that state law is often so outdated, and so rooted in an unjustified distrust of local decision making, that the legal process makes it hard for successful cities to develop and implement any coherent vision of their future. Their book calls not for local autonomy but for a new structure of state-local relations that would enable cities to take the lead in charting the future course of urban development. It should be of interest to everyone who cares about the future of American cities, whether political scientists, planners, architects, lawyers, or simply citizens.

Book The Transportation Experience

Download or read book The Transportation Experience written by William L. Garrison and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-09 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Transportation Experience explores the historical evolution of transportation modes and technologies. The book traces how systems are innovated, planned and adapted, deployed and expanded, and reach maturity, where they may either be maintained in a polished obsolesce often propped up by subsidies, be displaced by competitors, or be reorganized and renewed. An array of examples supports the idea that modern policies are built from past experiences. William Garrison and David Levinson assert that the planning (and control) of nonlinear, unstable processes is today's central transportation problem, and that this is universal and true of all modes. Modes are similar, in that they all have a triad structure of network, vehicles, and operations; but this framework counters conventional wisdom. Most think of each mode as having a unique history and status, and each is regarded as the private playground of experts and agencies holding unique knowledge, operating in isolated silos. However, this book argues that while modes have an appearance of uniqueness, the same patterns repeat: systems policies, structures, and behaviors are a generic design on varying modal cloth. In the end, the illusion of uniqueness proves to be myopic. While it is true that knowledge has accumulated from past experiences, the heavy hand of these experiences places boundaries on current knowledge; especially on the ways professionals define problems and think about processes. The Transportation Experience provides perspective for the collections of models and techniques that are the essence of transportation science, and also expands the boundaries of current knowledge of the field.

Book Wrestling with Moses

    Book Details:
  • Author : Anthony Flint
  • Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
  • Release : 2011-02-08
  • ISBN : 0812981367
  • Pages : 274 pages

Download or read book Wrestling with Moses written by Anthony Flint and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2011-02-08 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rivalry of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, a struggle for the soul of a city, is one of the most dramatic and consequential in modern American history. To a young Jane Jacobs, Greenwich Village, with its winding cobblestone streets and diverse makeup, was everything a city neighborhood should be. But consummate power broker Robert Moses, the father of many of New York’s most monumental development projects, thought neighborhoods like Greenwich Village were badly in need of “urban renewal.” Standing up against government plans for the city, Jacobs marshaled popular support and political power against Moses, whether to block traffic through her beloved Washington Square Park or to prevent the construction of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, an elevated superhighway that would have destroyed centuries-old streetscapes and displaced thousands of families. By confronting Moses and his vision, Jacobs forever changed the way Americans understood the city. Her story reminds us of the power we have as individuals to confront and defy reckless authority.

Book The Unequal City

Download or read book The Unequal City written by John Rennie Short and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years there has been intense scholarly and public interest in the changing nature of cities. Cities around the world have seen an increase in population and capital investments in land and building, a shift in central city populations as the poor are forced out, and a radical restructuring of urban space. The Unequal City tells the story of urban change and acts as a comprehensive guide to the Urban Now. A number of trends are examined including: the role of liquid capital; the resurgence of population; the construction of megaprojects and hosting of global megaevents; the role of the new rich; and the emergence of a new middle class.

Book Urban Waterfront Promenades

Download or read book Urban Waterfront Promenades written by Elizabeth Macdonald and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some cities have long-treasured waterfront promenades, many cities have recently built ones, and others have plans to create them as opportunities arise. Beyond connecting people with urban water bodies, waterfront promenades offer many social and ecological benefits. They are places for social gathering, for physical activity, for relief from the stresses of urban life, and where the unique transition from water to land eco-systems can be nurtured and celebrated. The best are inclusive places, welcoming and accessible to diverse users. This book explores urban waterfront promenades worldwide. It presents 38 promenade case studies—as varied as Vancouver’s extensive network that has been built over the last century, the classic promenades in Rio de Janeiro, the promenades in Stockholm’s recently built Hammarby Sjöstad eco-district, and the Ma On Shan promenade in the Hong Kong New Territories—analyzing their physical form, social use, the circumstances under which they were built, the public policies that brought them into being, and the threats from sea level rise and the responses that have been made. Based on wide research, Urban Waterfront Promenades examines the possibilities for these public spaces and offers design and planning approaches useful for professionals, community decision-makers, and scholars. Extensive plans, cross sections, and photographs permit visual comparison.

Book Highways  Current Literature

Download or read book Highways Current Literature written by Public Roads Bureau and published by . This book was released on 1950 with total page 682 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: