Download or read book The Nocturnal City written by Robert Shaw and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-02 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Night is a foundational element of human and animal life on earth, but its interaction with the social world has undergone significant transformations during the era of globalization. As the economic activity of the ‘daytime’ city has advanced into the night, other uses of the night as a time for play, for sleep or for escaping oppression have come increasingly under threat. This book looks at the relationship between night and society in contemporary cities. It identifies that while theories of ‘planetary urbanization’ have traced the spatial spread of urban forms, the temporal expansion of urban capitalism has been less well mapped. It argues that, as a key part of planetary being, understanding what goes on at night in cities can add nuance to debates on planetary urbanization. A series of practices and spaces that we encounter in the night-time city are explored. These include: the maintenance and repair of infrastructure; the aesthetics of the urban night; nightlife and the night-time economy; the home at night; and the ecologies of the urban night. Taking these forward the book will ask whether the night can reveal some of the boundaries to what we call ‘the urban’ in a world of cities, and will call for a revitalized and enhanced ‘nightology’ to study these limits.

Download or read book In the Watches of the Night written by Peter C. Baldwin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-02 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before skyscrapers and streetlights, American cities fell into inky blackness with each setting of the sun. But over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, new technologies began to light up the city. This text depicts the changing experiences of the urban night over this period, visiting a host of actors in the nocturnal city.

Download or read book Dark Matters written by Nick Dunn and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-25 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dark Matters explores the city at night as a place and time within which escape from the confines of the daytime is possible. More specifically, it is a state of being. There is a long history of nightwalking, often integral to shady worlds of miscreants, shift workers and transgressors. Yet the night offers much to be enjoyed beyond vice. Night by definition contrasts day, summoning notions of darkness and fear. But another night exists out there. Liberation and exhilaration in the urban landscape is increasingly rare when so much of our attention and actions are controlled. Rather than consider darkness as negative, opposed to illumination and enlightenment, this book explores the rich potential of the dark for our senses. The question may no longer be about what spaces we wish to engage with but when we do?

Download or read book Nightwalking written by Matthew Beaumont and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A captivating literary portrait of London explored at night by some of the city’s most iconic writers throughout history “Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night,” wrote the poet Rupert Brooke. Before the age of electricity, the nighttime city was a very different place to the one we know today – home to the lost, the vagrant and the noctambulant. Matthew Beaumont recounts an alternative history of London by focusing on those of its denizens who surface on the streets when the sun’s down. If nightwalking is a matter of “going astray” in the streets of the metropolis after dark, then nightwalkers represent some of the most suggestive and revealing guides to the neglected and forgotten aspects of the city. In this brilliant work of literary investigation, Beaumont shines a light on the shadowy perambulations of poets, novelists and thinkers: Chaucer and Shakespeare; William Blake and his ecstatic peregrinations and the feverish ramblings of opium addict Thomas De Quincey; and, among the lamp-lit literary throng, the supreme nightwalker Charles Dickens. We discover how the nocturnal city has inspired some and served as a balm or narcotic to others. In each case, the city is revealed as a place divided between work and pleasure, the affluent and the indigent, where the entitled and the desperate jostle in the streets. With a foreword and afterword by Will Self, Nightwalking is a fascinating literary exploration of the writers who traverse the city at night and the people they meet.

Download or read book Shanghai Nightscapes written by James Farrer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-08-03 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pulsing beat of its nightlife has long drawn travelers to the streets of Shanghai, where the night scene is a crucial component of the city’s image as a global metropolis. In Shanghai Nightscapes, sociologist James Farrer and historian Andrew David Field examine the cosmopolitan nightlife culture that first arose in Shanghai in the 1920s and that has been experiencing a revival since the 1980s. Drawing on over twenty years of fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, the authors spotlight a largely hidden world of nighttime pleasures—the dancing, drinking, and socializing going on in dance clubs and bars that have flourished in Shanghai over the last century. The book begins by examining the history of the jazz-age dance scenes that arose in the ballrooms and nightclubs of Shanghai’s foreign settlements. During its heyday in the 1930s, Shanghai was known worldwide for its jazz cabarets that fused Chinese and Western cultures. The 1990s have seen the proliferation of a drinking, music, and sexual culture collectively constructed to create new contact zones between the local and tourist populations. Today’s Shanghai night scenes are simultaneously spaces of inequality and friction, where men and women from many different walks of life compete for status and attention, and spaces of sociability, in which intercultural communities are formed. Shanghai Nightscapes highlights the continuities in the city’s nightlife across a turbulent century, as well as the importance of the multicultural agents of nightlife in shaping cosmopolitan urban culture in China’s greatest global city. To listen to an audio diary of a night out in Shanghai with Farrer and Field, click here: http://n.pr/1VsIKAw.

Download or read book Transforming Urban Nightlife and the Development of Smart Public Spaces written by Abusaada, Hisham and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2021-05-14 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public places are places where all citizens, irrespective of their race, age, religion, or class level (social or economic), cannot be excluded. It serves to improve the lifestyle experience of its inhabitants, as well as promote social connections. All citizens are responsible for it and are interested in it, and the intervention for change must be the responsibility of all without exception. As such, bottom-up urban planning is essential for urban environments and for transforming nightlife in public places in order to create more meaningful experiences and instill a greater sense of identity and community. Transforming Urban Nightlife and the Development of Smart Public Spaces analyzes the patterns of transformations of nightlife in public life. The book investigates urban nightlife transformations and the challenge of enhancing the sense of belonging in sensitive areas such as local communities and historical sites. The chapters present new insights to control the chaotic intervention related to the elements of traditional or digital technology, whether from citizens themselves or local authorities. The objective also is to document urban nightlife transformations that enhance the sense of belonging in historical sites. Important topics covered include urban-gamification, digital urban art, urban socio-ecosystems, and reimagining space in the urban nightlife. This book is ideal for urban planners, developers, social scientists, technologists, civil engineers, architects, policymakers, government officials, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students who are interested in urban nightlife and nightscape and the smart technologies used for transformation.

Download or read book Somewhere in the Night written by Nicholas Christopher and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-05-11 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film noir is more than a cinematic genre. It is an essential aspect of American culture. Along with the cowboy of the Wild West, the denizen of the film noir city is at the very center of our mythological iconography. Described as the style of an anxious victor, film noir began during the post-war period, a strange time of hope and optimism mixed with fear and even paranoia. The shadow of this rich and powerful cinematic style can now be seen in virtually every artistic medium. The spectacular success of recent neo-film noirs is only the tip of an iceberg. In the dead-on, nocturnal jazz of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, the chilled urban landscapes of Edward Hopper, and postwar literary fiction from Nelson Algren and William S. Burroughs to pulp masters like Horace McCoy, we find an unsettling recognition of the dark hollowness beneath the surface of the American Dream. Acclaimed novelist and poet Nicholas Christopher explores the cultural identity of film noir in a seamless, elegant, and enchanting work of literary prose. Examining virtually the entire catalogue of film noir, Christopher identifies the central motif as the urban labyrinth, a place infested with psychosis, anxiety, and existential dread in which the noir hero embarks on a dangerously illuminating quest. With acute sensitivity, he shows how technical devices such as lighting, voice over, and editing tempo are deployed to create the film noir world. Somewhere in the Night guides us through the architecture of this imaginary world, be it shot in New York or Los Angeles, relating its elements to the ancient cultural archetypes that prefigure it. Finally, Christopher builds an explanation of why film noir not only lives on but is currently enjoying a renaissance. Somewhere in the Night can be appreciated as a lucid introduction to a fundamental style of American culture, and also as a guide to film noir's heyday. Ultimately, though, as the work of a bold talent adeptly manipulating poetic cadence and metaphor, it is itself a superb aesthetic artifact.

Download or read book Nights in the Big City written by Joachim Schlör and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This elegantly written book describes the evolving perception and experience of the night in three great European cities: Paris, Berlin, and London. As Joachim Schlör shows, the lighting up of the European city by gas and electricity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought about a new relationship with the night for both those who toiled at work and those who caroused in restaurants, pubs, and cafes. Nights in the Big City explores this change and offers a stirring portrait of the secrets and mysteries a city can hold when the sun goes down. Sifting through countless police and church archives alongside first-hand accounts, Schlör sets out on his own explorations with a head full of histories, exploring the boulevards and side-streets of these three great capitals. Illustrated with haunting and evocative photographs by, among others, Bill Brandt and André Kertész, and filled with contemporary literary references, Nights in the Big City is a milestone in the cultural history of the city.

Download or read book Night City written by Monica Wellington and published by . This book was released on 2021-05-17 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a child falls asleep, twelve mice and a cat travel through the city visiting the night workers busy at their jobs. Hour by hour, from dusk till dawn, musicians, truckers, and bakers are among the people who keep the city humming. At seven o'clock, ballet dancers warm up for a performance. At midnight, a guard makes his rounds at the art museum. Near daybreak, vendors display their fruits and vegetables at the produce market. Office cleaners sweep, fire engines blare, police officers patrol, newspaper presses roll-all at night. The urban nightscape bursts with brilliant color and surprising detail. Views of the city sweep from soaring skylines to quiet streetscapes to the interior of an all-night diner. For dreamers and night owls alike, this is a delightful chronicle of the many nighttime activities that help keep the city going all day.

Download or read book Night Haunts written by Sukhdev Sandhu and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2010-11-22 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional depictions of London at night have imagined a lawless orgy of depravity and pestilence. But is Britain’s capital after dark now as bland and unthreatening as an evening in any new provincial town? Sukhdev Sandhu journeys across the city to find out whether the London night really has been rendered insipid by street lighting and CCTV. Night Haunts seeks to reclaim the mystery and romance of the city—to revitalize the great myth of London for a new century.

Download or read book City of Night written by John Rechy and published by Serpent's Tail. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bold and inventive in style, City of Night is the groundbreaking 1960s novel about male prostitution. Rechy is unflinching in his portrayal of one hustling 'youngman' and his search for self-knowledge among the other denizens of his neon-lit world. As the narrator moves from Texas to Times Square and then on to the French Quarter of New Orleans, Rechy delivers a portrait of the edges of America that has lost none of its power. On his travels, the nameless narrator meets a collection of unforgettable characters, from vice cops to guilt-ridden married men eaten up by desire, to Lance O'Hara, once Hollywood's biggest star. Rechy describes this world with candour and understanding in a prose that is highly personal and vividly descriptive.

Download or read book Tourism and the Night written by Andrew Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over recent decades, municipal authorities have promoted their cities as places boasting desirable night-time activities. Light festivals, museum lates, nightclubbing, and night markets extend the typical tourist experience into the night and have become a key part of the way some cities are branded. This anthology draws together research addressing the relationship between tourism and the night, facilitating a better understanding of nocturnal city destinations. Tourism and the Night: Rethinking Nocturnal Destinations covers an array of different tourist activities taking place at night and a range of European cities. The challenges facing late-night workers, the relationship between tourists and residents, and the effects of local policies on the expansion of late-night entertainment are examined in the first part of the book. The latter part focuses on the significance of night-time events, addressing the rising popularity of light art festivals and established religious rituals. Ultimately, this ground-breaking collection of papers examines how the night has become an important setting for city tourism. This trend means there is a need to rethink the management of urban districts and destinations, but there are also important implications for our understanding and experiences of the urban night. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events.

Download or read book City of Dreadful Night written by Lee Siegel and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995-10-31 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel of horror and the macabre in India, featuring an American scholar. With the help of a vagrant storyteller he discovers reincarnation, magical transformation, flesh-eating demons and vampires. Lots of stories within stories. By the author of Net of Magic.

Download or read book Cities and Sexualities written by Phil Hubbard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the hotspots of commercial sex through to the suburbia of twitching curtains, urban life and sexualities appear inseparable. Cities are the source of our most familiar images of sexual practice, and are the spaces where new understandings of sexuality take shape. In an era of global business and tourism, cities are also the hubs around which a global sex trade is organised and where virtual sex content is obsessively produced and consumed. Detailing the relationships between sexed bodies, sexual subjectivities and forms of intimacy, Cities and Sexualities explores the role of the city in shaping our sexual lives. At the same time, it describes how the actions of urban governors, city planners, the police and judiciary combine to produce cities in which some sexual proclivities and tastes are normalised and others excluded. In so doing, it maps out the diverse sexual landscapes of the city - from spaces of courtship, coupling and cohabitation through to sites of adult entertainment, prostitution, and pornography. Considering both the normative geographies of heterosexuality and monogamy, as well as urban geographies of radical/queer sex, this book provides a unique perspective on the relationship between sex and the city. Cities and Sexualities offers a wide overview of the state-of-the-art in geographies and sociologies of sexuality, as well as an empirically-grounded account of the forms of desire that animate the erotic city. It describes the diverse sexual landscapes that characterise both the contemporary Western city as well as cities in the global South. The book features a wide range of boxed case studies as well as suggestions for further reading at the end each chapter. It will appeal to undergraduate students studying Geography, Urban Studies, Gender Studies and Sociology.

Download or read book Cities of Light written by Sandy Isenstadt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-17 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities of Light is the first global overview of modern urban illumination, a development that allows human wakefulness to colonize the night, doubling the hours available for purposeful and industrious activities. Urban lighting is undergoing a revolution due to recent developments in lighting technology, and increased focus on sustainability and human-scaled environments. Cities of Light is expansive in coverage, spanning two centuries and touching on developments on six continents, without diluting its central focus on architectural and urban lighting. Covering history, geography, theory, and speculation in urban lighting, readers will have numerous points of entry into the book, finding it easy to navigate for a quick reference and or a coherent narrative if read straight through. With chapters written by respected scholars and highly-regarded contemporary practitioners, this book will delight students and practitioners of architectural and urban history, area and cultural studies, and lighting design professionals and the institutional and municipal authorities they serve. At a moment when the entire world is being reshaped by new lighting technologies and new design attitudes, the longer history of urban lighting remains fragmentary. Cities of Light aims to provide a global framework for historical studies of urban lighting and to offer a new perspective on the fast-moving developments of lighting today.

Download or read book Nocturnal Landscapes written by Iker Gil and published by . This book was released on 2021-06 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nocturnal Landscapes: Urban Flows of Global Metropolises is a project that observes and analyzes cities at night from an interdisciplinary perspective. Curated by Iker Gil and organized by MAS Context, it is centered around the remarkable work of Barcelona-based 300.000 Km/s and Minneapolis-based David Schalliol, two MAS Context contributors whose work we first published a decade ago.Architects Mar Santamaria and Pablo Martínez of 300.000 Km/s use Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) methodologies and data about urban life to compare the rhythms and regions of global cities through cartographic representations.Photographer and sociologist David Schalliol captures nighttime in cities around the world with photographs selected from more than a decade of work. The photographs emphasize human interaction, highlight moments of celebration and mourning, protest and labor, memorialization and solitude.Together, the work of 300.000 Km/s and David Schalliol provides an expansive look at global metropolises at night, combining analysis and observation, questioning the correlation of human activity and light, and revealing hidden aspects of our cities.

Download or read book Bicycle in a Ransacked City written by Andrés Cerpa and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 67 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These quiet, descriptive poems blaze with an inferno of lamenting and loving muses as a son helplessly watches his father suffer from a debilitating illness. The inquisitive voice of the speaker gently paints an emotional landscape ranging from childhood to the present, while trying to find glimpses of happiness in the imminent sorrow.