Download or read book The Urban Lifeworld written by Peter Madsen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-06-29 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of scholarly essays, the results of detailed research, contributes to our understanding of the cultural role of cities by offering a new approach to the analysis of urban experience.
Download or read book Untimely Ruins written by Nick Yablon and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American ruins have become increasingly prominent, whether in discussions of “urban blight” and home foreclosures, in commemorations of 9/11, or in postapocalyptic movies. In this highly original book, Nick Yablon argues that the association between American cities and ruins dates back to a much earlier period in the nation’s history. Recovering numerous scenes of urban desolation—from failed banks, abandoned towns, and dilapidated tenements to the crumbling skyscrapers and bridges envisioned in science fiction and cartoons—Untimely Ruins challenges the myth that ruins were absent or insignificant objects in nineteenth-century America. The first book to document an American cult of the ruin, Untimely Ruins traces its deviations as well as derivations from European conventions. Unlike classical and Gothic ruins, which decayed gracefully over centuries and inspired philosophical meditations about the fate of civilizations, America’s ruins were often “untimely,” appearing unpredictably and disappearing before they could accrue an aura of age. As modern ruins of steel and iron, they stimulated critical reflections about contemporary cities, and the unfamiliar kinds of experience they enabled. Unearthing evocative sources everywhere from the archives of amateur photographers to the contents of time-capsules, Untimely Ruins exposes crucial debates about the economic, technological, and cultural transformations known as urban modernity. The result is a fascinating cultural history that uncovers fresh perspectives on the American city.
Download or read book Urban Inequality written by Jesús Manuel González Pérez and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Urban Inequality" that was published in Urban Science
Download or read book Mexico City s Z calo written by Benjamin A. Bross and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a case study of one of Latin America’s most important and symbolic spaces, the Zócalo in Mexico City, weaving together historic events and corresponding morphological changes in the urban environment. It poses questions about how the identity of a place emerges, how it evolves and, why does it change? Mexico City’s Zócalo: A History of a Constructed Spatial Identity utilizes the history of a specific place, the Zócalo (Plaza de la Constitución), to explain the emergence and evolution of Mexican identities over time. Starting from the pre-Hispanic period to present day, the work illustrates how the Zócalo reveals spatial manifestations as part of the larger socio-cultural zeitgeist. By focusing on the history of changes in spatial production – what Henri Lefebvre calls society’s "secretions" – Bross traces how cultural, social, economic, and political forces shaped the Zócalo’s spatial identity and, in turn, how the Zócalo shaped and fostered new identities in return. It will be a fascinating read for architectural and urban historians investigating Latin America.
Download or read book Architecture and the Smart City written by Sergio M. Figueiredo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Increasingly the world around us is becoming ‘smart.’ From smart meters to smart production, from smart surfaces to smart grids, from smart phones to smart citizens. ‘Smart’ has become the catch-all term to indicate the advent of a charged technological shift that has been propelled by the promise of safer, more convenient and more efficient forms of living. Most architects, designers, planners and politicians seem to agree that the smart transition of cities and buildings is in full swing and inevitable. However, beyond comfort, safety and efficiency, how can ‘smart design and technologies’ assist to address current and future challenges of architecture and urbanism? Architecture and the Smart City provides an architectural perspective on the emergence of the smart city and offers a wide collection of resources for developing a better understanding of how smart architecture, smart cities and smart systems in the built environment are discussed, designed and materialized. It brings together a range of international thinkers and practitioners to discuss smart systems through four thematic sections: ‘Histories and Futures’, ‘Agency and Control’, ‘Materialities and Spaces’ and ‘Networks and Nodes’. Combined, these four thematic sections provide different perspectives into some of the most pressing issues with smart systems in the built environment. The book tackles questions related to the future of architecture and urbanism, lessons learned from global case studies and challenges related to interdisciplinary research, and critically examines what the future of buildings and cities will look like.
Download or read book Life Takes Place written by David Seamon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life Takes Place argues that, even in our mobile, hypermodern world, human life is impossible without place. Seamon asks the question: why does life take place? He draws on examples of specific places and place experiences to understand place more broadly. Advocating for a holistic way of understanding that he calls "synergistic relationality," Seamon defines places as spatial fields that gather, activate, sustain, identify, and interconnect things, human beings, experiences, meanings, and events. Throughout his phenomenological explication, Seamon recognizes that places are multivalent in their constitution and sophisticated in their dynamics. Drawing on British philosopher J. G. Bennett’s method of progressive approximation, he considers place and place experience in terms of their holistic, dialectical, and processual dimensions. Recognizing that places always change over time, Seamon examines their processual dimension by identifying six generative processes that he labels interaction, identity, release, realization, intensification, and creation. Drawing on practical examples from architecture, planning, and urban design, he argues that an understanding of these six place processes might contribute to a more rigorous place making that produces robust places and propels vibrant environmental experiences. This book is a significant contribution to the growing research literature in "place and place making studies."
Download or read book Rescaling Urban Poverty written by Mahito Hayashi and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2023-10-26 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: RESCALING URBAN POVERTY “In this path-breaking book, Mahito Hayashi explores the rescaled geographies of homelessness that have been produced in contemporary Japanese cities. Through an original synthesis of regulationist political economy and immersive place-based research, Hayashi situates urban homelessness in Japan in comparative-international contexts. The book offers new theoretical perspectives from which to decipher emergent forms of urban marginality and their contestation.” —Neil Brenner, Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology, University of Chicago “Mahito Hayashi traces the shifting spatial strategies of unhoused people as they create spaces of emancipation within Japanese cities. Attending to the complexities of contentious class politics and livelihoods barely sustained by the survival economies, Rescaling Urban Poverty is a unique and valuable contribution to the study of the geographies of urban social movements.” —Nik Theodore, Head of the Department of Urban Planning and Policy, University of Illinois Chicago Rescaling Urban Poverty discloses the hidden dynamics of state rescaling that ensnares homeless people at the fringes of mainstream society and its housing regimes/classes. Explains the oppressive effects of rescaling and its limits in the interplay of the state, domiciled society, public space, urban class relations, social movements, and capitalism Uses ethnography as a re-ontologising medium of critical theorisation in Lefebvrian, Gramscian, Harveyan, and other Marxian strands Develops rich context-based and field-based arguments about social movements, poverty and housing policy, and public space formation in Japan Uncovers the radical geographies of placemaking, commoning, and translation that can create prohomeless urban environments under rescaling Refines the method of abstraction to broaden the international scope of critical literatures and links different scholarly standpoints without obscuring disagreements By advancing a broad research program for homelessness and poverty, Rescaling Urban Poverty provides the essential understanding of how state rescaling ensnares homeless and impoverished people in the interplay of the state, domiciled society, public space, urban class relations, social movements, and capitalism. Its three angles – national states, public and private spaces, and urban social movements – uncover the hidden dynamics of rescaling that emerge, and are resisted, at the fringes of mainstream society and its housing regimes/classes. Evidence is drawn from Japanese cities where the author has conducted long-term fieldwork and develops robust urban narratives by mobilising spatial regulation theory, metabolism theory, state theory, and critical housing theory. The book cross-fertilises these Lefebvrian, Gramscian, Harveyan, and other Marxian strands through meticulous efforts to reinterpret both old and new texts. By building bridges between classical and contemporary interests, and between the theories and Japanese cities, this book attracts various audiences in geography, sociology, urban studies, and political economy.
Download or read book Urban Noir written by James J. Ward and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-09-06 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film noir has always been associated with urban landscapes, and no two cities have been represented more prominently in these films than New York and Los Angeles. In noir and neo-noir films since the 1940s, both cities are ominous locales where ruthless ambition, destructive impulses, and dashed hopes are played out against backdrops indifferent to human dramas. In Urban Noir: New York and Los Angeles in Shadow and Light, James J. Ward and Cynthia J. Miller have brought together essays by an international group of scholars that examine the dark appeal of these two cities. The essays in this volume explore aspects of the noir and neo-noir cityscape that have been relatively unexamined, including the role of sound and movement through space, the distinctive character of certain neighborhoods and locales, and the importance of individual moments in time. Among the films discussed in this book are classic noirs Double Indemnity (1944), He Walked by Night (1948), and Criss Cross (1949), as well as neo-noirs such as Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), Klute (1971), Taxi Driver (1976), Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), Cruising (1980), Alphabet City (1984), Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), Drive (2011), Rampart (2011), and Nightcrawler (2014). Uniting these essays is a thematic orientation toward darkness, whether interpreted in atmospheric and architectural terms, in social and psychological terms, or in terms of disruptive change, economic dislocation, and real or perceived existential threats. Offering multiple new perspectives on a wide range of films, Urban Noir will be of interest to scholars of film, media, politics, sociology, history, and popular culture.
Download or read book Urban Social Geography written by Paul Knox and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 731 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 6th edition of this highly respected text builds upon the successful structure, engaging writing style and clear presentation of previous editions. Examining urban social geography from a theoretical and historical perspective, it also explores how it has developed into the modern day. Taking account of recent critical work, whilst simultaneously presenting well established approaches to the subject, it ensures students are well-informed about all the issues. The result is a topical book that is clear and accessible for students
Download or read book Dealing with Urban and Rural Shrinkage written by Gert-Jan Hospers and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2018 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More and more places across the world are confronted with demographic shrinkage. This edited volume discusses how local communities in city and countryside have responded to the challenge of population decline. It is argued that formal strategies based on political and public sector decisions are only one way to deal with shrinkage. Informal adaptation strategies developed by civil society play an important role as well. To illustrate this, the book brings together a variety of theoretical perspectives, case studies and policy lessons from both urban and rural areas. Gert-Jan Hospers is researcher at the University of Twente and Radboud University, the Netherlands. Josefina Syssner is researcher at the Centre for Municipality Studies at Linkoeping University, Sweden.
Download or read book Cities Politics Power written by Simon Parker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-11-02 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditionally, the study of ‘power in the city’ was confined to the institutions of urban government and the actors involved in contesting and making political decisions in and for metropolitan societies. Increasingly, however, attention has turned to the function of the city not only as a centre of urban governance but as a major economic, social, cultural and strategic force in its own right. Cities, Politics and Power combines this traditional concern with how the cities in which we live are organized and run with a broader focus on cities and urban regions as multiple sites and agents of power. This book is divided into five sections, with a short introduction outlining the argument and organisation of the text. Part two charts the development of the urban polity and considers the ways in which coercion and force continue to be used to segregate, oppress and annihilate urban populations. Part three critically examines the key collective actors and processes that compete for and organise political power within cities, and how urban governance operates and interacts with lesser and greater scales of government and networks of power. Part four then explores the ways in which ‘the political’ is constituted by urban inhabitants, and how social identity, information and communication networks, and the natural and built environment all comprise intersecting fields of urban power. The conclusion calls for a broader theoretical and thematic approach to the study of urban politics. This book makes extensive use of comparative and historical case studies, providing broad coverage of politics and urban movements in both the Global North and the Global South, with a particular focus on the UK, USA, Canada, Latin America and China. It is written in an accessible and lucid style and provides suggestions for further reading at the end each chapter.
Download or read book The Governance of Urban Green Spaces in the EU written by Judith Schicklinski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-04-28 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across European cities the use of urban space is controversial and subject to diverging interests. On the one hand citizens are increasingly aware of the necessity for self-organising to reclaim green spaces. On the other hand local authorities have started to involve citizens in the governance of urban green spaces. While an increased level of citizen participation and conducive conditions for citizens’ self-organisation are a desirable development per se, the risk of functionalising civil society actors by the local authority for neoliberal city development must be kept in mind. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data collected in 29 European cities from all four European geographic regions, this book examines the governance of urban green spaces and urban food production, focusing on the contribution of citizen-driven activities. Over the course of the book, Schicklinski identifies best practice examples of successful collaboration between citizens and local government. The book concludes with policy recommendations with great practical value for local governance in European cities in times of the growth-turn. This book will be of great relevance to students, scholars, and policy-makers with an interest in environmental governance, urban geography, and sustainable development.
Download or read book Urban Imaginaries in Native Amazonia written by Fernando Santos-Granero and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2023-06-27 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring analysis from historical, ethnological, and philosophical perspectives, this volume dissects Indigenous Amazonians' beliefs about urban imaginaries and their ties to power, alterity, domination, and defiance. Contributors analyze how ambiguous urban imaginaries express a singular view of cosmopolitical relations, how they inform and shape forest-city interactions, and the history of how they came into existence, as well as their influence in present-day migration and urbanization.
Download or read book Reanimating Places written by Tom Mels and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time-space relationships are central to human geography. This book seeks to reanimate time-space, by considering the links between lived experience, various temporalities and particular places in terms of compounded and contested rhythms. Time-space rhythms emphasize the practical, symbolic, everyday and embodied qualities in the experience and making of our geographical environment. Bringing together a team of renowned geographers who have been exploring such ideas over the past decades, this book provides a unique and varied set of geographical approximations to the reanimation of place, nature and landscape, revealing a complex, disputed world of politics, sensory experiences and representations of space-time. Including case studies from Europe and North America, the book addresses some important issues, ranging from the symbolic orchestrations of landscape to deeply personal memories of particular natural rhythms.
Download or read book The New Conservatism written by Jürgen Habermas and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-10-07 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jürgen Habermas is well known for his scholarly writings on the theoretical foundations of the human sciences. The New Conservatism brings to light another side of Habermas's work, showing him to be an incisive commentator on a wide range of contemporary themes. The 1980s have been a crucial decade in the political life of Western democracies in general, and of the Federal Republic of Germany in particular. The transformations that accompanied a shift from 13 years of Social democratic rule in Germany to government by the conservative Christian Democrats are captured in this series of insightful, often passionate political and cultural commentaries. The central theme uniting the essays is the German problem of 'coming to terms within the past,' a problem that has important implications outside Germany as well. Of particular note are the essays on what has come to be known as the Historian's Debate: Habermas's attack on the revisionist German historians who have been trying to trivialize and "normalize" the history of the Nazi period, and his defence of the need for a realistic and discriminating approach to the Nazi period and its legacy. Habermas also takes up the recent debate concerning Martin Heidegger's involvement with Nazism and the rise of the neoconservative movement in Europe and America. In particular, the essay on The New Obscurity combines Habermas's analysis of the problems of the welfare state with his suggestions for avenues open to utopian impulses today.
Download or read book Human Ecology written by Markus Nauser and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-11-01 with total page 698 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We face an environmental catastrophe of global proportions. The ecological rationality of modern society, and of science in particular, is in question. Science still responds to crises at the level of technocratic expertise, and still treats society as an adaptive system. By bringing together a number of integrative approaches to the human-environment problem, Human Ecology shapes a more radical, fundamental agenda for change. The book creates a framework for a cohesive discourse, for a "new human ecology". From the notion that the individual person is an agent mediating between society and environment, the individual contributors recognize that the environmental crisis is really a crisis of society - manifesting itself in an increasing fragmentation of lives in general and knowledge in particular. Arguing for environmentally sustainable lifestyles, the book envisages a new kind of consciousness and a new environment.
Download or read book Cities of Entanglements written by Barbara Heer and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do people live together in cities shaped by inequality? This comparative ethnography of two African cities, Maputo and Johannesburg, presents a new narrative about social life in cities often described as sharply divided. Based on the ethnography of entangled lives unfolding in a township and in a suburb in Johannesburg, in a bairro and in an elite neighborhood in Maputo, the book includes case studies of relations between domestic workers and their employers, failed attempts by urban elites to close off their neighborhoods, and entanglements emerging in religious spaces and in shopping malls. Systematizing comparison as an experience-based method, the book makes an important contribution to urban anthropology, comparative urbanism and urban studies.
