Download or read book Taming the City Wilderness written by Meesh Lauren Zucker and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The City Wilderness (1898), a settlement study conducted in Boston’s South End neighborhood. The study was greatly influenced by European values of settler colonialism, and subsequently shaped traditional methods of early planning efforts. This process is now ingrained in the institutional knowledge of the field and built into the foundations of the former industrialized city center of the South End. By overlaying resident narratives on expert city plans, I reveal new spatial patterns of oppression to unearth the voices of those who the history of our profession once silenced and erased. In response to a statement recently released by the American Planning Association (APA) asking planners to address the structural disadvantages inflicted on the Black community by the profession and in support of our efforts to “raise the voice of the voiceless,” the APA claims to provide new tools. In response, I argue that instead of wasting time, money and resources to create new tools, practitioners and the APA should work to apply a historic lens to existing tools and planning efforts to ensure we understand where the roots of structural racism grew to divide our communities. To achieve this goal, I will focus on pivotal decades between 1880 and 1910 that provided the foundation and framework for contemporary planning practices and settlement efforts. I predict that in doing so, planners and practitioners will gain a clearer understanding of where traditional methods and studies may have built the racial divides felt deep in the hearts of our communities still to this day.
Download or read book Americans Against the City written by Steven Conn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-07 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a paradox of American life that we are a highly urbanized nation filled with people deeply ambivalent about urban life. An aversion to urban density and all that it contributes to urban life, and a perception that the city was the place where "big government" first took root in America fostered what historian Steven Conn terms the "anti-urban impulse." In response, anti-urbanists called for the decentralization of the city, and rejected the role of government in American life in favor of a return to the pioneer virtues of independence and self-sufficiency. In this provocative and sweeping book, Conn explores the anti-urban impulse across the 20th century, examining how the ideas born of it have shaped both the places in which Americans live and work, and the anti-government politics so strong today. Beginning in the booming industrial cities of the Progressive era at the turn of the 20th century, where debate surrounding these questions first arose, Conn examines the progression of anti-urban movements. : He describes the decentralist movement of the 1930s, the attempt to revive the American small town in the mid-century, the anti-urban basis of urban renewal in the 1950s and '60s, and the Nixon administration's program of building new towns as a response to the urban crisis, illustrating how, by the middle of the 20th century, anti-urbanism was at the center of the politics of the New Right. Concluding with an exploration of the New Urbanist experiments at the turn of the 21st century, Conn demonstrates the full breadth of the anti-urban impulse, from its inception to the present day. Engagingly written, thoroughly researched, and forcefully argued, Americans Against the City is important reading for anyone who cares not just about the history of our cities, but about their future as well.
Download or read book Here Be Dragons written by Stefan Ekman and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-19 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First in-depth study of the use of landscape in fantasy literature
Download or read book Story Line written by Ian Marshall and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Weaving together stories of his hiking adventures with reflective explorations of literary works set along the Appalachian Trail, Marshall traces a literary geography of the trail that ranges from Georgia to Maine and spans three centuries.
Download or read book The Plan of Chicago written by Carl Smith and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguably the most influential document in the history of urban planning, Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago, coauthored by Edward Bennett and produced in collaboration with the Commercial Club of Chicago, proposed many of the city’s most distinctive features, including its lakefront parks and roadways, the Magnificent Mile, and Navy Pier. Carl Smith’s fascinating history reveals the Plan’s central role in shaping the ways people envision the cityscape and urban life itself. Smith’s concise and accessible narrative begins with a survey of Chicago’s stunning rise from a tiny frontier settlement to the nation’s second-largest city. He then offers an illuminating exploration of the Plan’s creation and reveals how it embodies the renowned architect’s belief that cities can and must be remade for the better. The Plan defined the City Beautiful movement and was the first comprehensive attempt to reimagine a major American city. Smith points out the ways the Plan continues to influence debates, even a century after its publication, about how to create a vibrant and habitable urban environment. Richly illustrated and incisively written, his insightful book will be indispensable to our understanding of Chicago, Daniel Burnham, and the emergence of the modern city.
Download or read book Wild West China written by Christian Tyler and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Closed to the world for half a century, like a black hole in the Asian landmass, the wilderness of Xinjiang in northwest China is returning to the light. The picture it presents is both fascinating and disturbing. Despite a savage landscape and climate, Xinjiang has a rich past: sand-buried cities, painted cave shrines, rare creatures, and wonderfully preserved mummies of European appearance. Their descendants, the Uighurs, still farm the tranquil oases that ring the dreaded Taklamakan, the world's second largest sand desert, and the Kazakh and Kirghiz herdsmen still roam the mountains. The region's history, however, has been punctuated by violence, usually provoked by ambitious outsiders--nomad chieftains from the north, Muslim emirs from Central Asia, Russian generals, or warlords from inner China. The Chinese regard the far west as a barbarian land. Only in the 1760s did they subdue it, and even then their rule was repeatedly broken. Compared with the Russians' conquest of Siberia, or the Americans' trek west, China's colonization of Xinjiang has been late and difficult. The Communists have done most to develop it, as a penal colony, as a buffer against invasion, and as a supplier of raw materials and living space for an overpopulated country. But what China sees as its property, the Uighurs regard as theft by an alien occupier. Tension has led to violence and savage reprisals. This portrait of Xinjiang should be essential reading for travelers and for anyone interested in today's China and the fate of minority peoples.
Download or read book Wilderness written by Corry McDonald and published by Sunstone Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The growing awareness of the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s, along with the enactment of the Wilderness Act, precipitated local, regional, and national joint actions of the many outdoor recreation organizations. Wilderness enactments resulted from some of the more successful citizen attempts. The onrush of man's capability to "tame the wilderness" continues to accelerate with the population growth and the need for some restraints has become increasingly evident. This book shows what happened in a magical part of the American Southwest. "Wisconsin Bookwatch" reported: "...an informative history of the conflicting forces striving to determine the fate of New Mexico's wild lands-on one hand, the press of population growth and the desire to 'tame the wilderness'; and on the other, the efforts of environmental movements and outdoor recreation groups to preserve the wilderness and its heritage. Black-and-white photographs illustrate this thoughtful and moving account which is a welcome and much appreciated contribution to Environmental Studies reference collections and reading lists." * * * * * Corry McDonald was employed for over thirty years by Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was during this time that he developed an interest in the wilderness areas of that state. McDonald took copious notes on every back country trip he made. Those notes have become the basis for this book. In it he reluctantly tells about some of his secret places in the hope that it will reduce some of the overuse of the wildernesses that are so well known. He is also the author of "The Dilemma of Wilderness" from Sunstone Press.
Download or read book The Taming of the Wilderness written by Leon F. Hesser and published by Leon Hesser. This book was released on 2002 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Taming of the Wilderness describes the process of transforming the flora and fauna of nineteenth century Indiana from Hunting Grounds of Native Americans to commercial agriculture and its supporting industry. The book is in three parts: 1800-1825: Living with the Wilderness; subsistence living under primitive conditions; 1825-1850: Bridling the Wilderness; canals and steamboats facilitate trade; and 1850-1875: A Wilderness Vanquished; railroads dramatically change farming and the environment. A dominant theme portrays the fate of Native Americans who were pushed out of their sacred lands by coercion and brute force so the settlers could remake the landscape to their own liking. The author animates the story with personal experiences of genuine pioneer families. The book reads like a novel. It gives the reader a feeling of having been there and experienced the drudgery as well as the joys of taming the wilderness.
Download or read book Forest and Stream written by and published by . This book was released on 1903 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Wild Nights written by Anne Matthews and published by North Point Press. This book was released on 2002-05-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deer in Manhattan, coyotes in the Bronx, wild turkeys flying down Broadway -- in this first truly urban period in human history, confrontation and competition with the natural world is becoming an everyday occurrence. Anne Matthews explores these encounters, examining the implications of this unexpected and powerful resurgence of nature for the fate of a world of supercities and suburban hypersprawl.
Download or read book Manhood for Amateurs written by Michael Chabon and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-01-24 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pulitzer Prize winning author -- “an immensely gifted writer and a magical prose stylist” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) -- offers his first major work of nonfiction, an autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful, and powerful as critics and readers have come to expect. A shy manifesto, an impractical handbook, the true story of a fabulist, an entire life in parts and pieces: MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS is the first sustained work of personal writing from Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and humane writers presents his autobiography and his vision of life in the way so many of us experience our own: as a series of reflections, regrets and re-examinations, each sparked by an encounter, in the present, that holds some legacy of the past. What does it mean to be a man today? Chabon invokes and interprets and struggles to reinvent for us, with characteristic warmth and lyric wit, the personal and family history that haunts him even as -- simply because -- it goes on being written every day. As a devoted son, as a passionate husband, and above all as the father of four young Americans, Chabon’s memories of childhood, of his parents’ marriage and divorce, of moments of painful adolescent comedy and giddy encounters with the popular art and literature of his own youth, are like a theme played -- on different instruments, with a fresh tempo and in a new key -- by the mad quartet of which he now finds himself co-conductor. At once dazzling, hilarious, and moving, MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS is destined to become a classic.
Download or read book Pedaling Revolution written by Jeff Mapes and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From traffic-dodging-bike messengers to tattooed teenagers on battered bikes, from riders in spandex to well-dressed executives, ordinary citizens are becoming transportation revolutionaries. Jeff Mapes traces the growth of bicycle advocacy and explores the environmental, safety, and health aspects of bicycling. He rides with bicycle advocates who are taming the streets of New York City, joins the street circus that is Critical Mass in San Francisco, and gets inspired by the everyday folk pedaling in Amsterdam, the nirvana of American bike activists. Chapters focused on big cities, college towns, and America's most successful bike city, Portland, show how cyclists, with the encouragement of local officials, are claiming a share of the valuable streetscape."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book In the Shadow Of the Poorhouse written by Michael B. Katz and published by Perseus (for Hbg). This book was released on 1996-12-11 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With welfare reform a burning political issue, this special anniversary edition of the classic history of welfare in America has been revised and updated to include the latest bipartisan debates on how to "end welfare as we know it". With an informative new Introduction and a new concluding chapter, this timely edition makes for important reading. Index.
Download or read book The Dead City written by Paul Dobraszczyk and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Dead City unearths meanings from such depictions of ruination and decay, looking at representations of both thriving cities and ones which are struggling, abandoned or simply in transition. It reveals that ruination presents a complex opportunity to envision new futures for a city, whether that is by rewriting its past or throwing off old assumptions and proposing radical change. Seen in a certain light, for example, urban ruin and decay are a challenge to capitalist narratives of unbounded progress. They can equally imply that power structures thought to be deeply ingrained are temporary, contingent and even fragile. Examining ruins in Chernobyl, Detroit, London, Manchester and Varosha, this book demonstrates that how we discuss and depict urban decline is intimately connected to the histories, economic forces, power structures and communities of a given city, as well as to conflicting visions for its future.
Download or read book The Nature of Cities written by Michael Bennett and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities are often thought to be separate from nature, but recent trends in ecocriticism demand that we consider them as part of the total environment. This new collection of essays sharpens the focus on the nature of cities by exploring the facets of an urban ecocriticism, by reminding city dwellers of their place in ecosystems, and by emphasizing the importance of this connection in understanding urban life and culture. The editors—both raised in small towns but now living in major urban areas—are especially concerned with the sociopolitical construction of all environments, both natural and manmade. Following an opening interview with Andrew Ross exploring the general parameters of urban ecocriticism, they present essays that explore urban nature writing, city parks, urban "wilderness," ecofeminism and the city, and urban space. The volume includes contributions on topics as wide-ranging as the urban poetry of English writers from Donne to Gay, the manufactured wildness of a gambling casino, and the marketing of cosmetics to urban women by idealizing Third World "naturalness." These essays seek to reconceive nature and its cultural representations in ways that contribute to understanding the contemporary cityscape. They explore the theoretical issues that arise when one attempts to adopt and adapt an environmental perspective for analyzing urban life. The Nature of Cities offers the ecological component often missing from cultural analyses of the city and the urban perspective often lacking in environmental approaches to contemporary culture. By bridging the historical gap between environmentalism, cultural studies, and urban experience, the book makes a statement of lasting importance to the development of the ecocritical movement.
Download or read book Environmental City written by William Scott Jr. Swearingen and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Austin grew from a college and government town of the 1950s into the sprawling city of 2010, two ideas of Austin as a place came into conflict. Many who promoted the ideology of growth believed Austin would be defined by economic output, money, and wealth. But many others thought Austin was instead defined by its quality of life. Because the natural environment contributed so much to Austin's quality of life, a social movement that wanted to preserve the city's environment became the leading edge of a larger movement that wanted to retain a unique sense of place. The "environmental movement" in Austin became the political and symbolic arm of the more general movement for place. This is a history of the environmental movement in Austin—how it began; what it did; and how it promoted ideas about the relationships between people, cities, and the environment. It is also about a deeper movement to retain a sense of place that is Austin, and how that deeper movement continues to shape the way Austin is built today. The city it helped to create is now on the forefront of national efforts to rethink how we build our cities, reduce global warming, and find ways that humans and the environment can coexist in a big city.
Download or read book Popular Culture written by Iain Chambers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-06-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iain Chambers approaches the often overlooked details and textures of popular culture through a series of histories which show how it becomes continually remade as each of us defines our own urban space.
