EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book Visions of the Modern City

Download or read book Visions of the Modern City written by William Sharpe and published by . This book was released on 1987-09 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relentless pace of urbanization since the industrial revolution has inspired a continuing effort to view, read, and name the modern city. "We are now at a point of transition to a new kind of city", write William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, "and thus we are experiencing the same crisis of language felt by observers of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cities." Visions of the Modern City explores the ways in which artists and writers have struggled to define the city during the past two centuries and opens a new perspective on the urban vision of our time. In their introduction, the editors outline three phases in the evolution of the modern city—each having its own distinctive morphology and metaphor— and argue that a new vocabulary is needed to describe the sprawling "urban field" of today. Eric Lampard draws a detailed demographic and geographic picture of urbanization since the late eighteenth century, culminating with the "decentered" city of the 1980s. Other contributors examine the representation of cities from the London and Paris of 1850 to the New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo of the present. Deborah Nord and Philip Collins follow Henry Mayhew and Charles Dickens, respectively, through the urban underworld of Victorian London. Theodore Reff traces the double life of Paris expressed in the work of Manet, while Michele Hannoosh shows bow Baudelaire influenced the Impressionists by transferring the aesthetic implications of the term nature to urban experience. Thomas Bender and William Taylor focus on tensions between the horizontal and the vertical in the architectural development of New York City, and Paul Anderer investigates the private, domestic spaces that represent Tokyo in postwar Japanese fiction. Steven Marcus analyzes the breakdown of the city as signifying system in the novels of Saul Bellow and Thomas Pynchon, writers who question whether the indecipherable contemporary city has any meaning left at all.

Book Visions of the City

Download or read book Visions of the City written by David Pinder and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visions of the City is a dramatic history of utopian urbanism in the twentieth century. It explores radical demands for new spaces and ways of living, and considers their effects on planning, architecture and struggles to shape urban landscapes. The author critically examines influential utopian approaches to urbanism in western Europe associated with such figures as Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier, uncovering the political interests, desires and anxieties that lay behind their ideal cities. He also investigates avant-garde perspectives from the time that challenged these conceptions of cities, especially from within surrealism. At the heart of this richly illustrated book is an encounter with the explosive ideas of the situationists. Tracing the subversive practices of this avant-garde group and its associates from their explorations of Paris during the 1950s to their alternative visions based on nomadic life and play, David Pinder convincingly explains the significance of their revolutionary attempts to transform urban spaces and everyday life. He addresses in particular Constant's New Babylon, finding within his proposals a still powerful provocation to imagine cities otherwise. The book not only recovers vital moments from past hopes and dreams of modern urbanism. It also contests current claims about the 'end of utopia', arguing that reconsidering earlier projects can play a critical role in developing utopian perspectives today. Through the study of utopian visions, it aims to rekindle elements of utopianism itself. A superb critical exploration of the underside of utopian thought over the last hundred years and its continuing relevance in the here and now for thinking about possible urban worlds. The treatment of the Situationists and their milieu is a revelation. David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, City University of New York Graduate School

Book City Unseen

    Book Details:
  • Author : Karen Ching-Yee Seto
  • Publisher : Yale University Press
  • Release : 2018-01-01
  • ISBN : 030022169X
  • Pages : 267 pages

Download or read book City Unseen written by Karen Ching-Yee Seto and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stunning satellite images of one hundred cities show our urbanizing planet in a new light to reveal the fragile relationship between humanity and Earth Seeing cities around the globe in their larger environmental contexts, we begin to understand how the world shapes urban landscapes and how urban landscapes shape the world. Authors Karen Seto and Meredith Reba provide these revealing views to enhance readers' understanding of the shape, growth, and life of urban settlements of all sizes--from the remote town of Namche Bazaar in Nepal to the vast metropolitan prefecture of Tokyo, Japan. Using satellite data, the authors show urban landscapes in new perspectives. The book's beautiful and surprising images pull back the veil on familiar scenes to highlight the growth of cities over time, the symbiosis between urban form and natural landscapes, and the vulnerabilities of cities to the effects of climate change. We see the growth of Las Vegas and Lagos, the importance of rivers to both connecting and dividing cities like Seoul and London, and the vulnerability of Fukushima and San Juan to floods from tsunami or hurricanes. The result is a compelling book that shows cities' relationships with geography, food, and society.

Book Urban Visions

    Book Details:
  • Author : Carmen Díez Medina
  • Publisher : Springer
  • Release : 2018-06-23
  • ISBN : 3319590472
  • Pages : 354 pages

Download or read book Urban Visions written by Carmen Díez Medina and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-06-23 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a useful reference in the field of urbanism. It explains how the contemporary city and landscape have been shaped by certain twentieth century visions that have carried over into the twenty-first century. Aimed at both students and professionals, this collection of essays on diverse subjects and cases does not attempt to establish universal interpretations; it rather highlights some outstanding episodes that help us understand why the planning culture has given way to other forms of urbanism, from urban design to strategic urbanism or landscape urbanism. Compared with global interpretations of urbanism based on socioeconomic history or architectural historiography, Urban Visions. From Planning Culture to Landscape Urbanism, aims to present the discipline couched in international contemporary debate and adopt a historic and comparative perspective. The book’s contents pertain equally to other related disciplines, such as architecture, urban history, urban design, landscape architecture and geography. Foreword by Rafael Moneo.

Book City Visions

    Book Details:
  • Author : David Bell
  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Release : 2018-10-08
  • ISBN : 1317881567
  • Pages : 331 pages

Download or read book City Visions written by David Bell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of the latest work on the city, presenting contemporary theories, methods and perspectives in an accessible format for upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates in geography, cultural studies and sociology.

Book City of Virtues

    Book Details:
  • Author : Chuck Wooldridge
  • Publisher : University of Washington Press
  • Release : 2015-08-01
  • ISBN : 0295805986
  • Pages : 256 pages

Download or read book City of Virtues written by Chuck Wooldridge and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-08-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout Nanjing’s history, writers have claimed that its spectacular landscape of mountains and rivers imbued the city with “royal qi,” making it a place of great political significance. City of Virtues examines the ways a series of visionaries, drawing on past glories of the city, projected their ideologies onto Nanjing as they constructed buildings, performed rituals, and reworked the literary heritage of the city. More than an urban history of Nanjing from the late 18th century until 1911 — encompassing the Opium War, the Taiping occupation of the city, the rebuilding of the city by Zeng Guofan, and attempts to establish it as the capital of the Republic of China — this study shows how utopian visions of the cosmos shaped Nanjing’s path through the turbulent 19th century.

Book Writing the City

Download or read book Writing the City written by Desmond Harding and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-06 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines and challenges the traditional transatlantic axis, London-Paris-New York, that marks the intersection between western thinking about the City and the advent of literary modernism.

Book Plymouth

    Book Details:
  • Author : Jeremy Gould
  • Publisher : Historic England Press
  • Release : 2010
  • ISBN : 9781848020504
  • Pages : 0 pages

Download or read book Plymouth written by Jeremy Gould and published by Historic England Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Post-war reconstruction offered unparalleled opportunities to the developing profession of urban planners to cast off the constraints imposed by historic infrastructure and produce a new vision of urban living, expressed in rationally designed city centres linked to suburban precincts and with modern integrated transport systems. Plymouth is the foremost English example of post-war reconstruction on the grand scale, laid out to the designs of the most influential urban planner of the day, Sir Patrick Abercrombie. This book explains the circumstances which led to the development of Abercrombie's Plan for Plymouth (1943) and shows how the plan was implemented in the period 1945-62. Discussion of the overall scheme for the renewed city is complemented by description of the different zones which made up both the central area and the new suburbs, and attention is paid to the landscape forms and architectural styles employed in civic, commercial and residential areas. The significance of what was achieved in Plymouth will be assessed and international context is provided by comparison with British and European examples of contemporary planning. Urban regeneration programmes pose a threat to the legacy of the post-war reconstruction period, and the listing of post-war buildings is often contentious and contested. Finally, a discussion of the conservation issues raised by present-day plans for renewal in Plymouth will contribute to current debate about the formulation of policy relating to the buildings and landscapes of the post-war era.

Book Visions of the Emerald City

    Book Details:
  • Author : Mark Overmyer-Velazquez
  • Publisher : Duke University Press
  • Release : 2006-03-22
  • ISBN : 9780822337904
  • Pages : 254 pages

Download or read book Visions of the Emerald City written by Mark Overmyer-Velazquez and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-22 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVExplores how elites and commoners in Oaxaca constructed and experienced the process of modernity during President Porfirio Diaz's government./div

Book The Urbanism of Metabolism

Download or read book The Urbanism of Metabolism written by Raffaele Pernice and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-17 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited book explores and promotes reflection on how the lessons of Metabolism experience can inform current debate on city making and future practice in architectural design and urban planning. More than sixty years after the Metabolist manifesto was published, the author’s original contributions highlight the persistent links between present and past that can help to re-imagine new urban futures as well as the design of innovative intra-urban relationships and spaces. The essays are written by experienced scholars and renowned academics from Japan, Australia, Europe, South Korea and the United States and expose Metabolism’s special merits in promoting new urban models and evaluate the current legacy of its architectural projects and urban design lessons. They offer a critical, intellectual, and up-to-date account of the Metabolism projects and ideas with regard to the current evolution of architectural and urbanism discourse in a global context. The collection of cross-disciplinary contributions in this volume will be of great interest to architects, architectural and urban historians, as well as academics, scholars and students in built environment disciplines and Japanese cultural studies.

Book Great City Plans

    Book Details:
  • Author : Kevin J. Brown
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 2020-01-07
  • ISBN : 9788854415188
  • Pages : 0 pages

Download or read book Great City Plans written by Kevin J. Brown and published by . This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did our most renowned cities grow into the metropolises we know today? This unique cartography book looks at the city plan from the Renaissance until modern times. It surveys the city during the Enlightenment, Colonialism, and Industrial Revolution; explores Asian and frontier cities; looks at the administrative city plan; and presents the modern pictorial city map. Descriptions provide historical, political, social, and/or economic context, and biographies of the cartographers highlight their contributions.

Book Urban Futures

    Book Details:
  • Author : Timothy J. Dixon
  • Publisher : Policy Press
  • Release : 2021-05-19
  • ISBN : 1447330935
  • Pages : 300 pages

Download or read book Urban Futures written by Timothy J. Dixon and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2021-05-19 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2022 Urban Affairs Association Best Book Award. City visions represent shared, and often desirable, expectations about our urban futures. This book explores the history and evolution of city visions, placing them in the wider context of art, culture, science, foresight and urban theory. It highlights and critically reviews examples of city visions from around the world, contrasting their development and outlining the key benefits and challenges in planning such visions. The authors show how important it is to think about the future of cities in objective and strategic ways, engaging with a range of stakeholders – something more important than ever as we look to visions of a sustainable future beyond the COVID-19 crisis.

Book Inventing Autopia

    Book Details:
  • Author : Jeremiah B.C. Axelrod
  • Publisher : Univ of California Press
  • Release : 2009-06-02
  • ISBN : 0520252853
  • Pages : 416 pages

Download or read book Inventing Autopia written by Jeremiah B.C. Axelrod and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-06-02 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Flat-out one of the most interesting books I've read in years. To say that a book about California might rank with Kevin Starr's Americans and the California Dream or Mike Davis' City of Quartz is dangerously high praise, but I think Axelrod's book may someday be in that league."—John Ganim, University of California, Riverside "Inventing Autopia thoughtfully weaves together planning and policy history with cultural history to great effect. It is sure to change our understanding of the ways in which Los Angeles not only grew and developed but envisioned itself in the era."—William Deverell, author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past

Book The Image of the City

Download or read book The Image of the City written by Kevin Lynch and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1964-06-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.

Book Visions of Modernity

    Book Details:
  • Author : Scott McQuire
  • Publisher : SAGE Publications Limited
  • Release : 1998
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 296 pages

Download or read book Visions of Modernity written by Scott McQuire and published by SAGE Publications Limited. This book was released on 1998 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visions of Modernity offers an overview of modern visual culture, exploring the relationship between technology, society and identity which underpins contemporary media culture.

Book Consuming Visions

Download or read book Consuming Visions written by Maite Conde and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consuming Visions explores the relationship between cinema and writing in early twentieth-century Brazil, focusing on how the new and foreign medium of film was consumed by a literary society in the throes of modernization. Maite Conde places this relationship in the specific context of turn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro, which underwent a radical transformation to a modern global city, becoming a concrete symbol of the country's broader processes of change and modernization. Analyzing an array of literary texts, from journalistic essays and popular women's novels to anarchist treatises and vaudeville plays, the author shows how the writers' encounters with the cinema were consistent with the significant changes taking place in the city. The arrival and initial development of the cinema in Brazil were part of the new urban landscape in which early Brazilian movies not only articulated the processes of the city's modernization but also enabled new urban spectators--women, immigrants, a new working class, and a recently liberated slave population--to see, believe in, and participate in its future. In the process, these early movies challenged the power of the written word and of Brazilian writers, threatening the hegemonic function of writing that had traditionally forged the contours of the nation's cultural life. An emerging market of consumers of the new cultural phenomena--popular theater, the department store, the factory, illustrated magazines--reflected changes that not only modernized literary production but also altered the very life and everyday urban experiences of the population. Consuming Visions is an ambitious and engaging examination of the ways in which mass culture can become an agent of intellectual and aesthetic transformation.

Book New Towns for the Twenty First Century

Download or read book New Towns for the Twenty First Century written by Richard Peiser and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New towns—large, comprehensively planned developments on newly urbanized land—boast a mix of spaces that, in their ideal form, provide opportunities for all of the activities of daily life. From garden cities to science cities, new capitals to large military facilities, hundreds were built in the twentieth century and their approaches to planning and development were influential far beyond the new towns themselves. Although new towns are notoriously difficult to execute and their popularity has waxed and waned, major new town initiatives are increasing around the globe, notably in East Asia, South Asia, and Africa. New Towns for the Twenty-First Century considers the ideals behind new-town development, the practice of building them, and their outcomes. A roster of international and interdisciplinary contributors examines their design, planning, finances, management, governance, quality of life, and sustainability. Case studies provide histories of new towns in the United States, Asia, Africa, and Europe and impart lessons learned from practitioners. The volume identifies opportunities afforded by new towns for confronting future challenges related to climate change, urban population growth, affordable housing, economic development, and quality of life. Featuring inventories of classic new towns, twentieth-century new towns with populations over 30,000, and twenty-first-century new towns, the volume is a valuable resource for governments, policy makers, and real estate developers as well as planners, designers, and educators. Contributors: Sandy Apgar, Sai Balakrishnan, JaapJan Berg, Paul Buckhurst, Felipe Correa, Carl Duke, Reid Ewing, Ann Forsyth, Robert Freestone, Shikyo Fu, Pascaline Gaborit, Elie Gamburg, Alexander Garvin, David R. Godschalk, Tony Green, ChengHe Guan, Rachel Keeton, Steven Kellenberg, Kyung-Min Kim, Gene Kohn, Todd Mansfield, Robert W. Marans, Robert Nelson, Pike Oliver, Richard Peiser, Michelle Provoost, Peter G. Rowe, Jongpil Ryu, Andrew Stokols, Adam Tanaka, Jamie von Klemperer, Fulong Wu, Ying Xu, Anthony Gar-On Yeh, Chaobin Zhou.