Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies written by George Lewis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: V. 1. Cognitions -- v. 2. Critical theories

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies Volume 2 written by George E. Lewis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-22 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Improvisation informs a vast array of human activity, from creative practices in art, dance, music, and literature to everyday conversation and the relationships to natural and built environments that surround and sustain us. The two volumes of the Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies gather scholarship on improvisation from an immense range of perspectives, with contributions from more than sixty scholars working in architecture, anthropology, art history, computer science, cognitive science, cultural studies, dance, economics, education, ethnomusicology, film, gender studies, history, linguistics, literary theory, musicology, neuroscience, new media, organizational science, performance studies, philosophy, popular music studies, psychology, science and technology studies, sociology, and sound art, among others.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies Volume 1 written by George E. Lewis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-22 with total page 617 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Improvisation informs a vast array of human activity, from creative practices in art, dance, music, and literature to everyday conversation and the relationships to natural and built environments that surround and sustain us. The two volumes of the Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies gather scholarship on improvisation from an immense range of perspectives, with contributions from more than sixty scholars working in architecture, anthropology, art history, computer science, cognitive science, cultural studies, dance, economics, education, ethnomusicology, film, gender studies, history, linguistics, literary theory, musicology, neuroscience, new media, organizational science, performance studies, philosophy, popular music studies, psychology, science and technology studies, sociology, and sound art, among others.

Download or read book Sounding Cities written by Sebastian Klotz and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2018 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Berlin, Chicago, Kolkata - three modern cities, whose soundscapes are as different as they are similar. Historically and musically, all three cities bear witness to changing worlds, above all the diversity and multiculturalism that led to the rapid growth of urban centers from the Enlightenment to the present. It is this sound world of musical difference, which modernity subjected to auditory transformation, that is the subject of Sounding Cities. The chapters in this book draw the reader to the life of the city itself, to its streets and stages, transforming how we listen to the modern world. Philip V. Bohlman is Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor in Jewish History in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago, and Honorary Professor at the University of Music, Drama and Media in Hanover. Sebastian Klotz is Professor of Transcultural Musicology and Historical Anthropology of Music at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Lars-Christian Koch is Head of the Department of Ethnomusicology and the Berlin Phonogram Archive at the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin, Professor for Ethnomusicology at the University of Cologne, and HonoraryProfessor for Ethnomusicology at the University of the Arts in Berlin.

Download or read book Improvised Cities written by Helen Gyger and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in the 1950s, an explosion in rural-urban migration dramatically increased the population of cities throughout Peru, leading to an acute housing shortage and the proliferation of self-built shelters clustered in barriadas, or squatter settlements. Improvised Cities examines the history of aided self-help housing, or technical assistance to self-builders, which took on a variety of forms in Peru from 1954 to 1986. While the postwar period saw a number of trial projects in aided self-help housing throughout the developing world, Peru was the site of significant experiments in this field and pioneering in its efforts to enact a large-scale policy of land tenure regularization in improvised, unauthorized cities. Gyger focuses on three interrelated themes: the circumstances that made Peru a fertile site for innovation in low-cost housing under a succession of very different political regimes; the influences on, and movements within, architectural culture that prompted architects to consider self-help housing as an alternative mode of practice; and the context in which international development agencies came to embrace these projects as part of their larger goals during the Cold War and beyond.

Download or read book A Great Improvisation written by Stacy Schiff and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-01-10 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soon to be a streaming series ● In this dazzling work of history, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author follows Benjamin Franklin to France for the crowning achievement of his career "In December of 1776 a small boat delivered an old man to France." So begins an enthralling narrative account of how Benjamin Franklin--seventy years old, without any diplomatic training, and possessed of the most rudimentary French--convinced France, an absolute monarchy, to underwrite America's experiment in democracy. When Franklin stepped onto French soil, he well understood he was embarking on the greatest gamble of his career. By virtue of fame, charisma, and ingenuity, Franklin outmaneuvered British spies, French informers, and hostile colleagues; engineered the Franco-American alliance of 1778; and helped to negotiate the peace of 1783. The eight-year French mission stands not only as Franklin's most vital service to his country but as the most revealing of the man. In A Great Improvisation, Stacy Schiff draws from new and little-known sources to illuminate the least-explored part of Franklin's life. Here is an unfamiliar, unforgettable chapter of the Revolution, a rousing tale of American infighting, and the treacherous backroom dealings at Versailles that would propel George Washington from near decimation at Valley Forge to victory at Yorktown. From these pages emerges a particularly human and yet fiercely determined Founding Father, as well as a profound sense of how fragile, improvisational, and international was our country's bid for independence.

Download or read book Improvised Lives written by AbdouMaliq Simone and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-12-05 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poor and working people in cities of the South find themselves in urban spaces that are conventionally construed as places to reside or inhabit. But what if we thought of popular districts in more expansive ways that capture what really goes on within them? In such cities, popular districts are the settings of more uncertain operations that take place under the cover of darkness, generating uncanny alliances among disparate bodies, materials and things and expanding the urban sensorium and its capacities for liveliness. In this important new book AbdouMaliq Simone explores the nature of these alliances, portraying urban districts as sites of enduring transformations through rhythms that mediate between the needs of residents not to draw too much attention to themselves and their aspirations to become a small niche of exception. Here we discover an urban South that exists as dense rhythms of endurance that turn out to be vital for survival, connectivity, and becoming.

Download or read book Urbanity and Journalism written by Michael Wolff and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Grand Improvisation written by Derek Leebaert and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new understanding of the post World War II era, showing what occurred when the British Empire wouldn’t step aside for the rising American superpower—with global insights for today. An enduring myth of the twentieth century is that the United States rapidly became a superpower in the years after World War II, when the British Empire—the greatest in history—was too wounded to maintain a global presence. In fact, Derek Leebaert argues in Grand Improvisation, the idea that a traditionally insular United States suddenly transformed itself into the leader of the free world is illusory, as is the notion that the British colossus was compelled to retreat. The United States and the U.K. had a dozen abrasive years until Washington issued a “declaration of independence” from British influence. Only then did America explicitly assume leadership of the world order just taking shape. Leebaert’s character-driven narrative shows such figures as Churchill, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennan in an entirely new light, while unveiling players of at least equal weight on pivotal events. Little unfolded as historians believe: the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan; the Korean War; America’s descent into Vietnam. Instead, we see nonstop U.S. improvisation until America finally lost all caution and embraced obligations worldwide, a burden we bear today. Understanding all of this properly is vital to understanding the rise and fall of superpowers, why we’re now skeptical of commitments overseas, how the Middle East plunged into disorder, why Europe is fracturing, what China intends—and the ongoing perils to the U.S. world role.

Download or read book Ambient Urbanities as the Intersection Between the IoT and the IoP in Smart Cities written by McKenna, H. Patricia and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2019-03-01 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern day and technology-rich environments require a reconceptualization of how the nature of technology influences urban areas. Rethinking the way we apply these technologies will not only alter the way people communicate and interact, but it will also alter how individuals learn and explore the world around them. Ambient Urbanities as the Intersection Between the IoT and the IoP in Smart Cities offers insights about the ambient in 21st century smart cities, learning cities, responsive cities, and future cities, and highlights the importance of people as critical to the urban fabric of smart cities that are increasingly embedded with pervasive and often invisible technologies. The book, based on an urban research study, explores urbanity from multiple perspectives ranging from the cultural to the geographic. While highlighting topics including digital literacies, smarter governance, and information architectures, this book is ideally designed for students, educators, researchers, the business community, city government staff and officials, urban practitioners, and those concerned with contemporary and emerging complex urban challenges and opportunities.

Download or read book Urban Ecologies written by Christopher Schliephake and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-12-11 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term “urban ecology” has become a buzzword in various disciplines, including the social and natural sciences as well as urban planning and architecture. The environmental humanities have been slow to adapt to current theoretical debates, often excluding human-built environments from their respective frameworks. This book closes this gap both in theory and in practice, bringing together “urban ecology” with ecocritical and cultural ecological approaches by conceptualizing the city as an integral part of the environment and as a space in which ecological problems manifest concretely. Arguing that culture has to be seen as an active component and integral factor within urban ecologies, it makes use of a metaphorical use of the term, perceiving cities as spatial phenomena that do not only have manifold and complex material interrelations with their respective (natural) environments, but that are intrinsically connected to the ideas, imaginations, and interpretations that make up the cultural symbolic and discursive side of our urban lives and that are stored and constantly renegotiated in their cultural and artistic representations. The city is, within this framework, both seen as an ecosystemically organized space as well as a cultural artifact. Thus, the urban ecology outlined in this study takes its main impetus from an analysis of examples taken from contemporary culture that deal with urban life and the complex interrelations between urban communities and their (natural and built) environments.

Download or read book Improvised City written by Cole Roskam and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For nearly one hundred years, Shanghai was an international treaty port in which the extraterritorial rights of foreign governments shaped both architecture and infrastructure, and it merits examination as one of the most complex and influential urban environments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Improvised City illuminates the interplay between the city’s commercial nature and the architectural forms and practices designed to manage it in Shanghai’s three municipalities: the International Settlement, the French Concession, and the Chinese city. This book probes the relationship between architecture and extraterritoriality in ways that challenge standard narratives of Shanghai’s built environment, which are dominated by stylistic analyses of major landmarks. Instead, by considering a wider range of town halls, post offices, municipal offices, war memorials, water works, and consulates, Cole Roskam traces the cultural, economic, political, and spatial negotiations that shaped Shanghai’s growth. Improvised City repositions Shanghai within architectural and urban transformations that reshaped the world over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It responds to growing academic interest in the history of modern and contemporary Chinese architecture and urbanism; the ongoing, shifting relationship between sovereignty and space; and the variegated forms of urban exceptionality—such as special economic zones, tax-free trading spheres, and commercial enclaves—that continue to shape cities.

Download or read book Humanizing Cities Through Car Free City Development and Transformation written by Doheim, Rahma M. and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2020-06-05 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The heavy dependency on private cars has shaped the design of cities. While offering fast, comfortable, and convenient commutes, cars have become the most popular method of transportation, but are also a health crisis due to the toxic emissions they release into the atmosphere as well as the high death toll from traffic accidents. For these reasons, there is a need to minimize the use of cars within cities in favor of greener and humanized urban design that would improve the quality of life and reduce the global threat of climate change. Humanizing Cities Through Car-Free City Development and Transformation is an essential publication that explores the concepts of car-free cities and city humanization as possible solutions to reduce the deteriorating effect on the environment and the community. The publication discusses the urban initiative to implement pedestrianization and humanization of cities and public spaces to promote the concept of car-free living. Featuring coverage on a wide range of topics including city humanization, smart mobility, and urban policies, this book is ideally designed for urban planners, environmentalists, government officials, policymakers, architects, transportation authorities, researchers, academicians, and students.

Download or read book Sverre Fehn and the City Rethinking Architecture s Urban Premises written by Stephen M. Anderson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-15 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The urban attentions of Pritzker Laureate Sverre Fehn (1924–2009) are extensive, but as yet virtually unexplored. This book examines ten select projects to illuminate Fehn’s approach to the city, the embodiment of that thinking in his designs, and the broader lessons those efforts offer for better understanding the relationship between architecture and urban life, with unignorable implications for emergent urban architecture and its address of sociological and ecological crises. Wary of large-scale planning proposals or the erasure of existing urban patterns, Fehn offered an uncommon and profoundly vibrant approach to urbanism at the scale of the single architectural project. His writings, constructed buildings, competition entries, and lectures suggest opportunities for reinvigorating architecture’s engagement with the city, and provoke a rethinking of concepts foundational to its theorization. What is the nature of urbanity? What is the relationship of urbanity to the natural world? What is the role of architecture in the provision and sustenance of urban life? While exploring this territory will expand our knowledge of an architect central to key developments of late modernism, the range of the book and the arguments developed therein delineate far broader aims: a fuller understanding of architecture’s urban promise.

Download or read book Accented America written by Joshua L. Miller and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-26 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accented America is a sweeping study of U.S. literature between 1890-1950 that reveals a long history of English-Only nationalism: the political claim that U.S. citizens must speak a nationally distinctive form of English. This perspective presents U.S. literary works written between the 1890s and 1940s as playfully, painfully, and ambivalently engaged with language politics, thereby rewiring both narrative form and national identity. The United States has always been a densely polyglot nation, but efforts to prove the existence of a nationally specific form of English turn out to be a development of particular importance to interwar modernism. If the concept of a singular, coherent, and autonomous 'American language' seemed merely provocative or ironic in 1919 when H.L. Mencken emblazoned the phrase on his philological study, within a short period of time it would come to seem simultaneously obvious and impossible. Considering the continuing presence of fierce public debates over U.S. English and domestic multilingualisms demonstrates the symbolic and material implications of such debates in naturalization and citizenship law, presidential rhetoric, academic language studies, and the artistic renderings of novelists. Against the backdrop of the period's massive demographic changes, Accented America brings a broadly multi-ethnic set of writers into conversation, including Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Henry Roth, Nella Larsen, John Dos Passos, Lionel Trilling, Américo Paredes, and Carlos Bulosan. These authors shared an acute sense of linguistic standardization during the interwar era and contend with the defamiliarizing sway of radical experimentation with invented and improper literary vernaculars. Mixing languages, these authors spurn expectations for phonological exactitude to develop multilingual literary aesthetics. Rather than confirming the powerfully seductive subtext of monolingualism-that those who speak alike are ethically and politically likeminded-multilingual modernists composed interwar novels that were characteristically American because, not in spite, of their synthetic syntaxes and enduring strangeness.

Download or read book Post Industrial Urban Greenspace written by Jennifer Foster and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Post-industrial urban spaces typically include abandoned factories, disused rail lines, old pits and quarries, and de-commissioned landfills. In these places, different visions compete for dominance with respect to current and future land uses. Neighbours often view such urban greenspace as polluted, unkempt and weedy, harbouring undesirable biophysical features and people. These are spaces that often become the focus of some form of revitalization, reinvestment and restoration. From the perspective of civic authorities and urban planners, transforming post-industrial landscapes into disciplined and tended greenspace creates the urban conditions and signals of popular contemporary taste that attract investors, gentrifiers, and tourists. But post-industrial spaces are also places where unique and unpredictable human and ecological associations can emerge spontaneously. Such places may contain considerable ecological integrity and biodiversity and host human populations who find a home and respite in such ecologies. They also tell stories of an industrial and urban past that should be acknowledged, understood and (if suitable) celebrated. This volume explores the environmental justice and injustice dimensions of emerging urban post-industrial landscapes, including the ecological politics, cultural representations and aesthetics of these spaces. This bookw as published as a special issue of Local Environment.

Download or read book Improvisations on Urbanity written by Christopher Dell and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this publication trendy pragmatism coincides with the improvisation of jazz music. The result is a plan of action to constructively deal with disorder in urbanism. Improvisation acknowledges disorder and works with existing potentials. Improvisation means, therefore, to work with reality but at the same time, create reality. In a time where diverse life forms and rational principals coexist, urbanism becomes more and more inoperative. As the urban becomes even more complex, we have to begin to reflect upon how orders are created and negotiated.