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Book The Conscience of the Eye  The Design and Social Life of Cities

Download or read book The Conscience of the Eye The Design and Social Life of Cities written by Richard Sennett and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1992-08-17 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sennett's brilliant study of the physical fabric of the city as a mirror of Western society and culture was originally published (cloth) in 1990 by Alfred A. Knopf. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Book The Urban Condition

Download or read book The Urban Condition written by Ghent Urban Studies Team and published by 010 Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does the Western city at the end of the twentieth century look like? How did the modern metropolis of congestion and density turn into a posturban or even postsuburban cityscape? What are edge cities and technoburbs? How has the social composition of cities changed in the postwar era? What do gated communities tell us about social fragmentation? Is public space in the contemporary city being privatized and militarized? How can the urban self still be defined? What role does consumer aestheticism have to play in this? These and many more questions are addressed by this uniquely conceived multidisciplinary study. The Urban Condition seeks to interfere in current debates over the future and interpretation of our urban landscapes by reuniting studies of the city as a physical and material phenomenon and as a cultural and mental (arte)fact. The Ghent Urban Studies Team responsible for the writing and editing of this volume is directed by Kristiaan Versluys and Dirk De Meyer at the University of Ghent, Belgium. It is an interdisciplinary research team of young academics that further consists of Kristiaan Borret, Bart Eeckhout, Steven Jacobs, and Bart Keunen. The collective expertise of GUST ranges from architectural theory, urban planning, and art history to philosophy, literary criticism and cultural theory.

Book Encyclopedia of Community

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Community written by DAVID LEVINSON and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2003-06-30 with total page 2045 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Community is a major four volume reference work that seeks to define one of the most widely researched topics in the behavioural and social sciences. Community itself is a concept, an experience, and a central part of being human. This pioneering major reference work seeks to provide the necessary definitions of community far beyond the traditional views.

Book Living the City in Africa

Download or read book Living the City in Africa written by Brigit Obrist and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2013 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research on cities worldwide still takes its cue from cities in Europe and the US, which are seen as the standard model. However, cities in the global South are undergoing a much more rapid transformation, including multiple interlinked transitions, with Africa featuring the highest urbanization rates world-wide. Scholars therefore call for a new approach to urban studies which examines cities from a more global comparative perspective. This book discusses the new approach, which pays added attention to the role that societal creativity plays in processes of urbanization, instead of concentrating exclusively on expert-driven planning and intervention. Especially in fast-growing cities with weaker institutional capacity for interventions, the interplay between intervention and invention, between expert and societal agency, becomes more tangible and all the more significant. (Series: Swiss African Studies / Schweizerische Afrikastudien / Etudes africaines suisses - Vol. 10)

Book Capital Spaces

    Book Details:
  • Author : Matthew Carmona
  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Release : 2013-05-02
  • ISBN : 1136311955
  • Pages : 630 pages

Download or read book Capital Spaces written by Matthew Carmona and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years it has become common-place to hear claims that public space in cities across the globe has become the exclusive preserve of the wealthy and privileged, at the expense of the needs of wider society. Whether it is the privatization of public space through commerical developments like shopping malls and business parks, the gentrification of existing spaces by campaigns against perceived anti-social behaviour or the increasing domination of public areas by private transport in the form of the car, the urban public space is seen as under threat. But are things really that bad? Has the market really become the sole factor that influences the treatment of public space? Have the financial and personal interests of the few really come to dominate those of the many? To answer these questions Matthew Carmona and Filipa Wunderlich have carried out a detailed investigation of the modern public spaces of London, that most global of cities. They have developed a new typology of public spaces applicable to all cities, a typology that demonstrates that to properly assess contemporary urban places means challenging the over-simplification of current critiques. Global cities are made up of many overlapping public spaces, good and bad; this book shows how to analyze this complexity, and to understand it.

Book Civility

    Book Details:
  • Author : Philip Sheldrake
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2024-08-19
  • ISBN : 019267644X
  • Pages : 177 pages

Download or read book Civility written by Philip Sheldrake and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-19 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civility offers a thoughtful response to one of the most significant social challenges and public problems that we face in contemporary society, particularly in the Western world. The book identifies and discusses the critical public-social values and virtues that we need to focus upon and actively to promote to counter these problems and, overall, to develop a healthy human society. To achieve an effective, inclusive, and just society we must, first, reframe how we understand 'politics.' What does 'politics' mean and how should it be practiced? 'Politics' in its true sense does not mean something ideological but rather it involves the service of the 'polis'--that is, the human community. We also need to recover a robust sense of public virtues. The book describes some of the critical virtues and suggests how they may be cultivated. The overall argument is that in a healthy society it is vitally important to concentrate more effectively on public virtues and values rather than simply to focus on encouraging material success or on creating efficient social and political systems as the main goals that we seek to develop in our societies. The volume focuses particularly on the public virtues of civility, having a sense of 'place', building community, solidarity and responsibility, respect and compassion, and cultivating discernment (that is, the art of how to choose well). The book concludes by offering reflections on the particular role of education, especially school education, and of public leadership as two central elements in reshaping a healthy society based on clear societal values.

Book The New Wealth of Cities

Download or read book The New Wealth of Cities written by John Montgomery and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past two decades, city economies have restructured in response to the decline of older industries. This has involved new forms of planning and urban economic development, a return to traditional concerns of city building and a focus on urban design. During this period, there has also been a marked rise in our understanding of cultural development and its role in the design, economy and life of cities. In this book, John Montgomery argues that this amounts to a shift in urban development. He provides a long overdue look at the dynamics of the city, that is, how cities work in relation to the long cycles of economic development and suggests that a new wave of prosperity, built on new technologies and new industries, is just getting underway in the Western world. The New Wealth of Cities focuses on what effect this will have on cities and city regions and how they should react. Original and wide-ranging, this book will be a definitive resource on city economies and urban planning, explaining why it is that cities develop over time in periods of propulsive growth and bouts of decline.

Book A Future of Polycentric Cities

Download or read book A Future of Polycentric Cities written by Cole Hendrigan and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Dr Cole Hendrigan examines the options for sustainable transport and land-use planning based on building heights, mixes of land-use, transportation mode capacity and others to build the next generation of parks, housing, commercial and retail spaces along high-capacity rail corridors. Following the paradigm of ‘Transit Oriented Development’, Dr Hendrigan provides unique knowledge and insights on how to best make the transition towards more sustainable and livable cities, offering a practical method to better integrate transport and urban development to this end.

Book Knowledge Economy and the City

Download or read book Knowledge Economy and the City written by Ali Madanipour and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the relationship between space and economy, the spatial expressions of the knowledge economy. The capitalist industrial economy produced its own space, which differed radically from its predecessor agrarian and mercantile economies. If a new knowledge-based economy is emerging, it is similarly expected to produce its own space to suit the new circumstances of production and consumption. If these spatial expressions do exist, even if in incomplete and partial forms, they are likely to be the model for the future of cities.

Book Popular Culture in Africa

Download or read book Popular Culture in Africa written by Stephanie Newell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume marks the 25th anniversary of Karin Barber’s ground-breaking article, "Popular Arts in Africa", which stimulated new debates about African popular culture and its defining categories. Focusing on performances, audiences, social contexts and texts, contributors ask how African popular cultures contribute to the formation of an episteme. With chapters on theater, Nollywood films, blogging, and music and sports discourses, as well as on popular art forms, urban and youth cultures, and gender and sexuality, the book highlights the dynamism and complexity of contemporary popular cultures in sub-Saharan Africa. Focusing on the streets of Africa, especially city streets where different cultures and cultural personalities meet, the book asks how the category of "the people" is identified and interpreted by African culture-producers, politicians, religious leaders, and by "the people" themselves. The book offers a nuanced, strongly historicized perspective in which African popular cultures are regarded as vehicles through which we can document ordinary people’s vitality and responsiveness to political and social transformations.

Book Negotiating the Mediated City

Download or read book Negotiating the Mediated City written by Zlatan Krajina and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an interdisciplinary empirical investigation of how people interact with public screens in their daily lives. In more and more surprising locations, screens of various kinds appear within the sightlines of passers-by in contemporary cities. Outdoor advertisers target audiences which are increasingly mobile, public art uses screens to interrogate urban change, while postmodern architecture finds electronic imagery a suitable tool of expression. Traditionally, urban sociology research has assumed that people seek to filter urban stimuli, but recent accounts of public screens suggest producers design and position display interfaces site-specifically, so as to engage with those moving past. This study offers insight both into the dynamics of actual encounters and into the long-term process of how people learn to live with repeated invitations to consume media in public spaces. The book includes four cases: street advertising, underground transport advertising, and installation art in London (UK) and media façade architecture in Zadar (Croatia). Krajina shows that maintaining familiarity with everyday surroundings in media cities that change beyond citizens' control is a temporary achievement--and a recursive struggle. Finalist for the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Foundation book award, 2014

Book Public Space

    Book Details:
  • Author : Matthew Carmona
  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Release : 2008-06-03
  • ISBN : 1134166648
  • Pages : 241 pages

Download or read book Public Space written by Matthew Carmona and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-06-03 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book draws on three empirical projects to examine the questions of public space management on an international stage. They are set within a context of theoretical debates about public space, its history, and new management approaches.

Book Re Shaping Learning  A Critical Reader

Download or read book Re Shaping Learning A Critical Reader written by Anne Boddington and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learning Spaces is an emerging field, fuelled by a growing interest in the relationships between learning and spaces in which it takes place, whether conceptual, personal, social, physical and/or virtual. It is concerned with making learning spaces that can better meet the needs of 21st century learners, academics and other related publics. In post-compulsory education this has opened up many interesting and important issues. There remains a lack of any theoretical understanding as to how such spaces should be conceived or designed; and hardly any critical discussion about effective frameworks for either the development of contemporary learning spaces or for assessing their impact on learning, teaching and research. At the same time, there is much debate about what the purposes of post-compulsory education should be, as well as concerns about where and by whom it should be provided. We therefore need to urgently improve our understanding of the interactions between learning and space. It is essential that we not only share perspectives, theories and methodologies but also critically reflect on our own different assumptions, and work together to build better models for post-compulsory education in the future. To help in this process this book is designed as a ‘critical reader’ that can enable researchers, academics, students and managers involved in Learning Spaces to share and engage with some key ideas, issues and texts. A central aim is to bring together some of the best research from across the many different disciplines concerned with learning spaces, including education, architecture, anthropology, human-computer interaction, estate planning and museum studies. Reshaping Learning is thus intended for anyone interested in, and wanting to think more about, learning spaces whether as users, clients or managers; or who are want to better understand interactions between the social and the spatial.

Book Urban Maps

    Book Details:
  • Author : Richard Brook
  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Release : 2016-12-05
  • ISBN : 135187649X
  • Pages : 270 pages

Download or read book Urban Maps written by Richard Brook and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book concerns the city and the 'devices' that define the urban environment by their presence, representation or interpretation. The texts offer an interdisciplinary discourse and critique of the complex systems, artifacts, interventions and evidences that can inform our understanding of urban territories; on surfaces, in the margins or within voids. The diverse media of arts practices as well as commercial branding are used to explore narratives that reveal latent characteristics of urban situations that conventional architectural inquiry is unable to do. The subjects covered are presented within a wider framework of urban theory into which are embedded case study examples that outline the practices, processes and interpretations of each theme. The chapters provide a contemporary reading of urban socio-cultural conditions using 'mapping' as a lens to explore and communicate the social phenomena and lived experiences of the dynamic and temporal city. Mapping is developed as a form of critical instrumentality to expose, record and contribute to the understanding of the singular essences of space, place and networks by thematic, cognitive and experiential modes of investigation.

Book Learning Cities

    Book Details:
  • Author : Sue Nichols
  • Publisher : Springer
  • Release : 2018-03-29
  • ISBN : 981108100X
  • Pages : 248 pages

Download or read book Learning Cities written by Sue Nichols and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-03-29 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an interdisciplinary text exploring the learning and educative potentials of cities and their spaces, including urban and suburban contexts, at all stages of life. Drawing on the insights of researchers from diverse fields, such as education, architecture, history, visual sociology, applied linguistics and sensory studies, this collection of papers develops and demonstrates the connection between experience, in all its dimensions, and informal learning in the city. The chapters discuss various sensory domains of experience, considering visual, embodied, and even sexual dimensions in relation to what and how learning operates, and the contributors reflect on their learning and inquiring experiences in the city, with special reference to topics such as narrativity, ‘race’ and ethnicity, equity, urban literacy, re-generation, participation, representation and oral histories.

Book Public Religion and the Urban Environment

Download or read book Public Religion and the Urban Environment written by Richard Bohannon and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Nature' and the 'city' have most often functioned as opposites within Western culture, a dichotomy that has been reinforced (and sometimes challenged) by religious images. Bohannon argues here that cities and natural environments, however, are both connected and continually affected by one another. He shows how such connections become overt during natural disasters, which disrupt the narratives people use to make sense of the world,including especially religious narratives, and make them more visible. This book offers both a theoretical exploration of the intersection of the city, nature, and religion, as well as a sociological analysis of the 1997 flood in Grand Forks, ND, USA. This case study shows how religious factors have influenced how the relationship between nature and the city is perceived, and in particular have helped to justify the urban control of nature. The narratives found in Grand Forks also reveal a broader understanding of the nature of Western cities, highlighting the potent and ethically-rich intersections between religion, cities and nature.

Book Transcultural Cities

Download or read book Transcultural Cities written by Jeffrey Hou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-02-11 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transcultural Cities uses a framework of transcultural placemaking, cross-disciplinary inquiry and transnational focus to examine a collection of case studies around the world, presented by a multidisciplinary group of scholars and activists in architecture, urban planning, urban studies, art, environmental psychology, geography, political science, and social work. The book addresses the intercultural exchanges as well as the cultural trans-formation that takes place in urban spaces. In doing so, it views cultures not in isolation from each other in today’s diverse urban environments, but as mutually influenced, constituted and transformed. In cities and regions around the globe, migrations of people have continued to shape the makeup and making of neighborhoods, districts, and communities. For instance, in North America, new immigrants have revitalized many of the decaying urban landscapes, creating renewed cultural ambiance and economic networks that transcend borders. In Richmond, BC Canada, an Asian night market has become a major cultural event that draws visitors throughout the region and across the US and Canadian border. Across the Pacific, foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong transform the deserted office district in Central on weekends into a carnivalesque site. While contributing to the multicultural vibes in cities, migration and movements have also resulted in tensions, competition, and clashes of cultures between different ethnic communities, old-timers, newcomers, employees and employers, individuals and institutions. In Transcultural Cities Jeffrey Hou and a cross-disciplinary team of authors argue for a more critical and open approach that sees today’s cities, urban places, and placemaking as vehicles for cross-cultural understanding.