The City & The City
The City & The City

Author: China Miéville

Publisher: Del Rey

Published: 2009-05-26

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0345515668

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NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE SEATTLE TIMES, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. To investigate, Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to its equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the vibrant city of Ul Qoma. But this is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a seeing of the unseen. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them more than their lives. What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities. BONUS: This edition contains a The City & The City discussion guide and excerpts from China Miéville's Kraken and Embassytown.

Legacy Cities
Legacy Cities

Author: J. Rosie Tighe

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2019-06-13

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0822986884

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Legacy cities, also commonly referred to as shrinking, or post-industrial cities, are places that have experienced sustained population loss and economic contraction. In the United States, legacy cities are those that are largely within the Rust Belt that thrived during the first half of the 20th century. In the second half of the century, these cities declined in economic power and population leaving a legacy of housing stock, warehouse districts, and infrastructure that is ripe for revitalization. This volume explores not only the commonalities across legacy cities in terms of industrial heritage and population decline, but also their differences. Legacy Cities poses the questions: What are the legacies of legacy cities? How do these legacies drive contemporary urban policy, planning and decision-making? And, what are the prospects for the future of these cities? Contributors primarily focus on Cleveland, Ohio, but all Rust Belt cities are discussed.

The Spirit of Cities
The Spirit of Cities

Author: Daniel A. Bell

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2013-10-27

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0691159696

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A lively and personal book that returns the city to political thought Cities shape the lives and outlooks of billions of people, yet they have been overshadowed in contemporary political thought by nation-states, identity groups, and concepts like justice and freedom. The Spirit of Cities revives the classical idea that a city expresses its own distinctive ethos or values. In the ancient world, Athens was synonymous with democracy and Sparta represented military discipline. In this original and engaging book, Daniel Bell and Avner de-Shalit explore how this classical idea can be applied to today's cities, and they explain why philosophy and the social sciences need to rediscover the spirit of cities. Bell and de-Shalit look at nine modern cities and the prevailing ethos that distinguishes each one. The cities are Jerusalem (religion), Montreal (language), Singapore (nation building), Hong Kong (materialism), Beijing (political power), Oxford (learning), Berlin (tolerance and intolerance), Paris (romance), and New York (ambition). Bell and de-Shalit draw upon the richly varied histories of each city, as well as novels, poems, biographies, tourist guides, architectural landmarks, and the authors' own personal reflections and insights. They show how the ethos of each city is expressed in political, cultural, and economic life, and also how pride in a city's ethos can oppose the homogenizing tendencies of globalization and curb the excesses of nationalism. The Spirit of Cities is unreservedly impressionistic. Combining strolling and storytelling with cutting-edge theory, the book encourages debate and opens up new avenues of inquiry in philosophy and the social sciences. It is a must-read for lovers of cities everywhere. In a new preface, Bell and de-Shalit further develop their idea of "civicism," the pride city dwellers feel for their city and its ethos over that of others.

River Cities, City Rivers
River Cities, City Rivers

Author: Thaisa Way

Publisher: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection

Published: 2018-06-04

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 9780884024255

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Cities have been built alongside rivers throughout history--shaping the development of urban landscapes and altering ecologies. Yet we have rarely given these urban landscapes their due. River Cities, City Rivers explores how such histories have shaped the present and how they might inform our visions of the future.

Cities for People
Cities for People

Author: Jan Gehl

Publisher: Island Press

Published: 2013-03-05

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1597269840

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For more than forty years Jan Gehl has helped to transform urban environments around the world based on his research into the ways people actually use—or could use—the spaces where they live and work. In this revolutionary book, Gehl presents his latest work creating (or recreating) cityscapes on a human scale. He clearly explains the methods and tools he uses to reconfigure unworkable cityscapes into the landscapes he believes they should be: cities for people. Taking into account changing demographics and changing lifestyles, Gehl emphasizes four human issues that he sees as essential to successful city planning. He explains how to develop cities that are Lively, Safe, Sustainable, and Healthy. Focusing on these issues leads Gehl to think of even the largest city on a very small scale. For Gehl, the urban landscape must be considered through the five human senses and experienced at the speed of walking rather than at the speed of riding in a car or bus or train. This small-scale view, he argues, is too frequently neglected in contemporary projects. In a final chapter, Gehl makes a plea for city planning on a human scale in the fast- growing cities of developing countries. A “Toolbox,” presenting key principles, overviews of methods, and keyword lists, concludes the book. The book is extensively illustrated with over 700 photos and drawings of examples from Gehl’s work around the globe.

Cities in Layers
Cities in Layers

Author: Philip Steele

Publisher: Big Picture Press

Published: 2020-08-11

Total Pages: 64

ISBN-13: 1536203106

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The world's most famous cities through the ages! Walk around any famous city and layers of history start to emerge. In London, Roman walls are dwarfed by office blocks. In Rome, ancient treasures like the Colosseum stand shoulder to shoulder with buildings from the Renaissance. In New York, skyscrapers from the 1920s and 1930s predate enormous glass towers. In Cities in Layers: Six Famous Cities Through Time, six major world cities are shown at different stages throughout history. A clever die-cut element allows readers to really peel back layers of time.

Just Urban Design
Just Urban Design

Author: Kian Goh

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2022-11-22

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 026254427X

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Contributions by urban planners, sociologists, anthropologists, architects, and landscape architects on the role and scope of urban design in creating more just and inclusive cities. Scholars who write about justice and the city rarely consider the practices and processes of urban design, while discourses on urban design often neglect concerns about justice. The editors of Just Urban Design take the position that urban design interventions have direct and important implications for justice in the city. The contributions in this volume contextualize the state of knowledge about urban design for justice, stress inclusivity as the key to justice in the city, affirm community participation and organizing as cornerstones of greater equity, and assert that a just urban design must center and privilege our most marginalized individuals and communities. Approaching spatial and social justice in the city through the lens of urban design, the contributors explore the possibility of envisioning and delivering social, spatial, and environmental justice in cities through urban design and the material reality of built environment interventions. The editors’ combined expertise includes urban politics and climate change, public space, mobility justice, community development, housing, and informality, and the contributors include researchers and practitioners from urban planning, sociology, anthropology, architecture, and landscape architecture. Contributors: Rachel Berney, Rebecca Choi, Teddy Cruz, Diane E. Davis, Fonna Forman, Christopher Giamarino, Kian Goh, Alison B. Hirsch, Jeffrey Hou, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Setha Low, Matthew Jordan Miller, Vinit Mukhija, Chelina Odbert, Francesca Piazzoni, and Michael Rios.

City Of Cities
City Of Cities

Author: Stephen Inwood

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Published: 2011-07-06

Total Pages: 783

ISBN-13: 033054067X

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By 1880, London, capital of the largest empire ever known, was the richest, most populous city in the world. And yet it remained an overcrowded, undergoverned city with huge slums gripped by poverty and disease. Over the next three decades, London began its transformation into a new kind of city - one of unprecedented size, dynamism and technological advance. In this highly evocative account, Stephen Iinwood defines an era of unique character and importance by delving into the lives and textures of the booming city. He takes us - by hansom cab, bicycle, electric tram or motor bus - from the glittering new department stores of Oxford Street to the synagogues and sweat shops of the East End, from bohemian bars and gaudy mushc halls to the well-kept gardens of Edwardian surburbia. 'Essential reading for the scholar, the historian and the lover of London. ..He is equally at home with the grand sweep and the human detail, always supported by immaculate research...Inwood can throw off with elegant ease a concise explanation of technicalities that the reader was vaguely aware of not understanding and perhaps meant to look up sometime.' Liza Picard Financial Times Magazine

Cities in Time
Cities in Time

Author: Ali Madanipour

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-02-23

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1474220738

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From street-markets and pop-up shops to art installations and Olympic parks, the temporary use of urban space is a growing international trend in architecture and urban design. Partly a response to economic and ecological crisis, it also claims to offer a critique of the status quo and an innovative way forward for the urban future. Cities in Time aims to explore and understand the phenomenon, offering a first critical and theoretical evaluation of temporary urbanism and its implications for the present and future of our cities. The book argues that temporary urbanism needs to be understood within the broader context of how different concepts of time are embedded in the city. In any urban place, multiple, discordant and diverse timeframes are at play – and the chapters here explore these different conceptions of temporality, their causes and their effects. Themes explored include how institutionalised time regulates everyday urban life, how technological and economic changes have accelerated the city's rhythms, our existential and personal senses of time, concepts of memory and identity, virtual spaces, ephemerality and permanence.

Cities in the Urban Age
Cities in the Urban Age

Author: Robert A. Beauregard

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-03-19

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 022653541X

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We live in a self-proclaimed Urban Age, where we celebrate the city as the source of economic prosperity, a nurturer of social and cultural diversity, and a place primed for democracy. We proclaim the city as the fertile ground from which progress will arise. Without cities, we tell ourselves, human civilization would falter and decay. In Cities in the Urban Age, Robert A. Beauregard argues that this line of thinking is not only hyperbolic—it is too celebratory by half. For Beauregard, the city is a cauldron for four haunting contradictions. First, cities are equally defined by both their wealth and their poverty. Second, cities are simultaneously environmentally destructive and yet promise sustainability. Third, cities encourage rule by political machines and oligarchies, even as they are essentially democratic and at least nominally open to all. And fourth, city life promotes tolerance among disparate groups, even as the friction among them often erupts into violence. Beauregard offers no simple solutions or proposed remedies for these contradictions; indeed, he doesn’t necessarily hold that they need to be resolved, since they are generative of city life. Without these four tensions, cities wouldn’t be cities. Rather, Beauregard argues that only by recognizing these ambiguities and contradictions can we even begin to understand our moral obligations, as well as the clearest paths toward equality, justice, and peace in urban settings.