Download or read book Robert Moses and the Modern City written by Hilary Ballon and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2008-08-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh look at the greatest builder in the history of New York City and one of its most controversial figures. “We are rebuilding New York, not dispersing and abandoning it”: Robert Moses saw himself on a rescue mission to save the city from obsolescence, decentralization, and decline. His vast building program aimed to modernize urban infrastructure, expand the public realm with extensive recreational facilities, remove blight, and make the city more livable for the middle class. This book offers a fresh look at the physical transformation of New York during Moses’s nearly forty-year reign over city building from 1934 to 1968.It is hard to imagine that anyone will ever have the same impact on New York as did Robert Moses. In his various roles in city and state government, he reshaped the fabric of the city, and his legacy continues to touch the lives of all New Yorkers. Revered for most of his life, he is now one of the most controversial figures in the city’s history. Robert Moses and the Modern City is the first major publication devoted to him since Robert Caro’s damning 1974 biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.In these pages eight short essays by leading scholars of urban history provide a revised perspective; stunning new photographs offer the first visual record of Moses’s far-reaching building program as it stands today; and a comprehensive catalog of his works is illustrated with a wealth of archival records: photographs of buildings, neighborhoods, and landscapes, of parks, pools, and playgrounds, of demolished neighborhoods and replacement housing and urban renewal projects, of bridges and highways; renderings of rejected designs and controversial projects that were defeated; and views of spectacular models that have not been seen since Moses made them for promotional purposes.Robert Moses and the Modern City captures research undertaken in the last three decades and will stimulate a new round of debate.
Download or read book Designing the Modern City written by Eric Paul Mumford and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive new survey tracing the global history of urbanism and urban design from the industrial revolution to the present. Written with an international perspective that encourages cross-cultural comparisons, leading architectural and urban historian Eric Mumford presents a comprehensive survey of urbanism and urban design since the industrial revolution. Beginning in the second half of the 19th century, technical, social, and economic developments set cities and the world's population on a course of massive expansion. Mumford recounts how key figures in design responded to these changing circumstances with both practicable proposals and theoretical frameworks, ultimately creating what are now mainstream ideas about how urban environments should be designed, as well as creating the field called "urbanism." He then traces the complex outcomes of approaches that emerged in European, American, and Asian cities. This erudite and insightful book addresses the modernization of the traditional city, including mass transit and sanitary sewer systems, building legislation, and model tenement and regional planning approaches. It also examines the urban design concepts of groups such as CIAM (International Congresses of Modern Architecture) and Team 10, and their adherents and critics, including those of the Congress for the New Urbanism, as well as efforts toward ecological urbanism. Highlighting built as well as unbuilt projects, Mumford offers a sweeping guide to the history of designers' efforts to shape cities.
Download or read book The Spaces of the Modern City written by Gyan Prakash and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2008-02-24 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It historicizes the contemporary discussion of urbanism, highlighting the local and global breadth of the city landscape. This interdisciplinary collection examines how the city develops in the interactions of space and imagination. The essays focus on issues such as street design in Vienna, the motion picture industry in Los Angeles, architecture in Marseilles and Algiers, and the kaleidoscopic paradox of post-apartheid Johannesburg. They explore the nature of spatial politics, examining the disparate worlds of eighteenth-century Baghdad, nineteenth-century Morelia. They also show the meaning of everyday spaces to urban life, illuminating issues such as crime in metropolitan London, youth culture in Dakar, "memory projects" in Tokyo, and Bombay cinema.
Download or read book Intimate Metropolis written by Vittoria Di Palma and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intimate Metropolis explores connections between the modern city, its architecture, and its citizens, by questioning traditional conceptualizations of public and private. Rather than focusing purely on public spaces—such as streets, cafés, gardens, or department stores—or on the domestic sphere, the book investigates those spaces and practices that engage both the urban and the domestic, the public and the private. The legal, political and administrative frameworks of urban life are seen as constituting private individuals’ sense of self, in a wide range of European and world cities from Amsterdam and Barcelona to London and Chicago. Providing authoritative new perspectives on individual citizenship as it relates to both public and private space, in-depth case studies of major European, American and other world cities and written by an international set of contributors, this volume is key reading for all students of architecture.
Download or read book Paradise Planned written by Robert A.M. Stern and published by The Monacelli Press, LLC. This book was released on 2013-12-03 with total page 1073 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paradise Planned is the definitive history of the development of the garden suburb, a phenomenon that originated in England in the late eighteenth century, was quickly adopted in the United State and northern Europe, and gradually proliferated throughout the world. These bucolic settings offered an ideal lifestyle typically outside the city but accessible by streetcar, train, and automobile. Today, the principles of the garden city movement are once again in play, as retrofitting the suburbs has become a central issue in planning. Strategies are emerging that reflect the goals of garden suburbs in creating metropolitan communities that embrace both the intensity of the city and the tranquility of nature. Paradise Planned is the comprehensive, encyclopedic record of this movement, a vital contribution to architectural and planning history and an essential recourse for guiding the repair of the American townscape.
Download or read book Otis written by Jason Goodwin and published by Ivan R. Dee Publisher. This book was released on 2001 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elisha Graves Otis invented the safe elevator almost by accident. In doing so he made possible the construction of the skyscraper and laid the technical foundation for dynamic urban centers around the world.
Download or read book The Early Modern City 1450 1750 written by Christopher R. Friedrichs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-06 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering text which covers the urban society of early modern Europe as a whole. Challenges the usual emphasis on regional diversity by stressing the extent to which cities across Europe shared a common urban civilization whose major features remained remarkably constant throughout the period. After outlining the physical, political, religious, economic and demographic parameters of urban life, the author vividly depicts the everyday routines of city life and shows how pitifully vulnerable city-dwellers were to disasters, epidemics, warfare and internal strife.
Download or read book The Walker written by Matthew Beaumont and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Charles Dickens’ London to today’s megacities, a fascinating exploration of what urban walking tells us about modern life—for fans of Rebecca Solnit, Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, and literary history. “A labyrinthine journey into the literature of walking and thinking,” as seen in the lives and works of Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Ray Bradbury, and other literary greats (Guardian). There is no such thing as a false step. Every time we walk we are going somewhere. Especially if we are going nowhere. Moving around the modern city is not a way of getting from A to B, but of understanding who and where we are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont retraces episodes in the history of the walker since the mid-19th century. From Dickens’s insomniac night rambles to restless excursions through the faceless monuments of today’s neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of self-discovery and self-escape, of disappearances and secret subversions. Pacing stride for stride alongside literary amblers and thinkers such as Edgar Allan Poe, André Breton, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life. Through these writings, Beaumont asks: Can you get lost in a crowd? What are the consequences of using your smartphone in the street? What differentiates the nocturnal metropolis from the city of daylight? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? And can we save the city—or ourselves—by taking to the pavement?
Download or read book Imagining the Modern City written by James Donald and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paris, Berlin, London, Singapore, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles -- these define "the city" in the world's consciousness. James Donald takes us on a psychic journey to these places that have inspired artists, writers, architects, and filmmakers for centuries. Considering the cultural and political implications of the "urban imaginary, " Donald explores the pleasures and challenges of modern living, contending that the imagined city remains the best lens for a future of democratic community. How can we think of Chicago without recalling the grittiness of The Asphalt Jungle's back alleys, or of London without the dank, foggy atmosphere so often evoked by Dickens? When de Certeau explores what it means to walk through a city, or Foucault dissects the elements of the modern attitude, what are they telling us about modernity itself? Through a discussion of these and many other questions about urban thought, Donald demonstrates how artists and social critics have seen the city as the locus not just of vanity, squalor, and injustice, but also of civilized society's highest aspirations. Imagining the modern City also looks at how artists have shaped cities through their creation of public spaces, sculpture, and architecture -- art forms that help determine our ideas about our place in the urban environment. Planners and architects such as Otto Wagner, Le Corbusier, and Bernard Tschumi present us with real and possible cities, showing a way forward to alternative social futures, Donald asserts. The modern city provides both a culturally resonant imagined space and a physical place for the everyday life of its residents. Imagining the Modern City is a rich and dazzling exploration of theways cities stir and shape our consciousness.
Download or read book How Paris Became Paris written by Joan DeJean and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documents the century-long transformation of Paris from a medieval center to the modern city that is recognized today, revealing how the Parisian urban model was actually invented in the 1700s when period leaders tore down fortifications, created public parks and constructed streets and bridges. 25,000 first printing.
Download or read book Municipal Services and Employees in the Modern City written by Michèle Dagenais and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Municipal Services and Employees in the Modern City considers the roles played by local institutions and particular processes that shaped the urban fabric. It rediscovers from models and maps the constituent dynamics of cities since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and demonstrates how patterns evolved in the way services and locations were organized; how urban transformation was underpinned by structural development, and how the municipal workforce became an integral part of the agencies of change. Municipal Services and Employees in the Modern City suggests that municipal experiences are central to the development of urban studies. Its focus of analysis ranges across Europe and the Americas from high-ranking bureaucrats to firefighters, engineers to accountants, and town clerks to public servants. Each essay provides detailed information on how change was formulated or resisted within the administrative apparatus, offering insight into a sector of the 'white-collar' class and the degree of commitment to public values often at times of social and political upheaval. They explore the course of relationships between local and central government, and the shifting bounds of municipal interventionism over a broad period; whilst incorporating a social history approach to interpret the day-to-day responsibilities and routine of administration.
Download or read book Modern City Revisited written by Thomas Deckker and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2005-08-12 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The supposed rationality of the urban planning of the Modern Movement encompassed a variety of attitudes towards history, technology and culture, from the vision of Berlin as an American metropolis, through the dispute between the urbanists and disurbanists in the Soviet Union to the technocratic and austere vision of Le Corbusier. After the Second World War, architects attempted to reconcile these utopian visions to the practical problems of constructing - or reconstructing - urban environments, from Piero Bottoni at the Quartiere Trienale 8 in Milan in 1951 to Lucio Costa at Bras'lia in 1957. In the 1970s, the collapse of Modernism brought about universial condemnation of Modern urbanism; urban planning,and rationality itself, were thrown into doubt. However, such a wholesale condemnation hides the complex realities underlying these Modern cities. The contributors define some of the theoretical foundations of Modern urban planning, and reassess the successes and the failures of the built results. The book ends with contrasting views of the inheritance of Modern urbanism in the United States and the Netherlands.
Download or read book Perfect City written by Joe Berridge and published by Sutherland House Books. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Cities, more than ever, are the engines of our economies and the ecosystems in which our lives play out. This means that questions about the perfectibility and sustainability of urban life are all the more urgent. Joe Berridge, one of the world's leading urban planners, takes us on an insider's tour of the world's largest and most diverse cities, from New York to London, Shanghai to Singapore, Toronto to Sydney, to examine what is working and not working, what is promising, and what needs to be fixed in the contemporary megalopolis. We meet the people, politicians, and thinkers at the cutting edge of global city making, and share their struggles and successes as they balance the competing priorities of growing their economies, upgrading the urban machinery that keeps a city humming, and protecting, serving, and delighting their citizens. We visit a succession of great urban innovations, stop by many of Joe's favorite restaurants, and leave with a startling view of the magical urban future that awaits us all. "--
Download or read book Writing the Modern City written by Sarah Edwards and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-12 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary texts and buildings have always represented space, narrated cultural and political values, and functioned as sites of personal and collective identity. In the twentieth century, new forms of narrative have represented cultural modernity, political idealism and architectural innovation. Writing the Modern City explores the diverse and fascinating relationships between literature, architecture and modernity and considers how they have shaped the world today. This collection of thirteen original essays examines the ways in which literature and architecture have shaped a range of recognisably ‘modern’ identities. It focuses on the cultural connections between prose narratives – the novel, short stories, autobiography, crime and science fiction – and a range of urban environments, from the city apartment and river to the colonial house and the utopian city. It explores how the themes of memory, nation and identity have been represented in both literary and architectural works in the aftermath of early twentieth-century conflict; how the cultural movements of modernism and postmodernism have affected notions of canonicity and genre in the creation of books and buildings; and how and why literary and architectural narratives are influenced by each other’s formal properties and styles. The book breaks new ground in its exclusive focus on modern narrative and urban space. The essays examine texts and spaces that have both unsettled traditional definitions of literature and architecture and reflected and shaped modern identities: sexual, domestic, professional and national. It is essential reading for students and researchers of literature, cultural studies, cultural geography, art history and architectural history.
Download or read book The Emergence of a Modern City written by Henriette Steiner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an exploration of how urban life in Copenhagen, in the period known as the Golden Age (c. 1800 to 1850), was experienced and structured socially, institutionally, and architecturally. It draws on a broad historical source material - spanning urban anecdotes, biography, philosophy, literature, and visual culture - to do so. The book argues that Copenhagen emerged as a modern city at this time, despite the fact that the Golden Age never witnessed the appearance of the main characteristics of the modernisation of cities associated with industrialisation, such as street lighting, sewer systems, and railroads. The book outlines the historical and topographical context of Copenhagen in the Golden Age with a special focus on the works of the most prominent architect of the period, C.F. Hansen. The characterisation of the city is complemented by investigations into writings of three citizens: the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, the novelist Thomasine Gyllembourg, and the criminal Ole Kollerod, who all take an interest in the city's institutional and urban structures as well as their own place in it. From these different sources, a picture is painted of urban life and thought at a time when the city began to take on characteristics of ambiguity and alienation in European thinking, while at the same time the city itself retained some pre-modern motifs of a symbolic order. This transformation is set in a larger process of cultural re-orientation, from traditional Baroque culture to what might be termed Romantic culture. The book reconsiders the significance of this transformation for the emergent order of the modern European city in the nineteenth century and thus of the very foundation on which our own urban culture rests.
Download or read book Towards a Competitive Sustainable Modern City written by Peter K. Kresl and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-27 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This original book examines the experiences cities and urban areas have had with two principal concerns that confront them today: sustainability and competitiveness. Featuring a wide-ranging set of contributions from top researchers, this book discusses and analyzes the issues that different cities face, such as social cohesion, tolerance and cultural diversity, and how this will determine their developmental trajectories through the coming decade. Towards a Competitive, Sustainable Modern City will be an invaluable read for scholars and professors in urban economics and urban studies more broadly, particularly those who are focusing on the importance of sustainability in both areas
Download or read book Urban Culture and the Modern City written by Ágnes Györke and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When consulting key works on urban studies, the absence of Central and Eastern European towns is striking. Cities such as Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and Trieste, where such notable figures as Freud, Ferenczi, Kafka, and Joyce lived and worked, are rarely studied in a translocal framework, as if Central and Eastern Europe were still a blind spot of European modernity. This volume expands the scope of literary urban studies by focusing on Budapest and Hungarian small towns, offering in-depth analyses of the intriguing link between literature, the arts, and material culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. The case studies situate Hungarian urban culture within the global flow of ideas as they explore the period of modernism, the mid-century, and the post-1989 era in a context that moves well beyond the borders of the country.
