In the Life of Cities
In the Life of Cities

Author: Mohsen Mostafavi

Publisher: Lars Muller Publishers

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783037783023

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This volume addresses the complex relations between urban artifacts and urban life. The contributions show how architects, planners, and urban designers describe and give shape to the city, while novelists, humanists, and other scholars examine its operations and performances. The essential question is: How does the physical character of an urban environment influence or enable the events that take place within a specific setting? Contributors from a wide range of fields address the role and life of cities as diverse as Baku, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Detroit, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Paris, Quito, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv, Tirana, and Toronto. Portfolios of contemporary photography present the layered realities of urban life today. With contributions by Arjun Appadurai, Eve Blau, Svetlana Boym, Lindsay Bremner, Jana Cephas, Felipe Correa, Rahul Mehrotra, Mohsen Mostafavi, Antoine Picon, Gyan Prakash, Nasser Rabbat, Rafi Segal, Jorge Silvetti, AbdouMaliq Simone, and Charles Waldheim. Mohsen Mostafavi, an architect and educator, is dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design. He is the editor of Ecological Urbanism (with Gareth Doherty).

Cities for Life
Cities for Life

Author: Jason Corburn

Publisher: Island Press

Published: 2021-11-16

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1642831727

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In cities around the world, planning and health experts are beginning to understand the role of social and environmental conditions that lead to trauma. By respecting the lived experience of those who were most impacted by harms, some cities have developed innovative solutions for urban trauma. In Cities for Life, public health expert Jason Corburn shares lessons from three of these cities: Richmond, California; Medellín, Colombia; and Nairobi, Kenya. Corburn draws from his work with citizens, activists, and decision-makers in these cities over a ten-year period, as individuals and communities worked to heal from trauma--including from gun violence, housing and food insecurity, poverty, and other harms. Cities for Life is about a new way forward with urban communities that rebuilds our social institutions, practices, and policies to be more focused on healing and health.

The Secret Life of Cities
The Secret Life of Cities

Author: Helen Jarvis

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-07-01

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1317904559

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Contemporary urbanisation has two faces: global flows of people, money and information, and that of localised social and economic disparities. Recent research has focused on the headlines of global cities as control centres of the world economy, and social and economic shock waves that have raged through cities and regions, but less attention has been paid to the secret life of cities, and the changing nature of everyday life in the wake of such changes.This book challenges current research and policy agendas recommending spatial concentration and relocation as a solution to the problems of environmental sustainability and social dislocation. Instead, this book highlights the key linkages between social and environmental problems, it argues that neither are likely to be resolved with a simple spatial fix. The book draws attention to local contexts of contemporary urbanisation emphasising consideration of policy making from the perspective of the household as a key unit of analysis in identifying links between labour and housing markets, transport and leisure.This book draws upon detailed household interviews about the daily experience of life in a global city. It illustrates the dilemmas and solutions that people routinely find in order to go on in their lives. It shows that these local fixes that are managed at the level of the household work in spite of, and sometimes against, existing policies aimed at sustainability. It concludes that policy making needs to be radically overhauled in order to address the integrated nature of people's everyday lives.

Death and Life of Nature in Asian Cities
Death and Life of Nature in Asian Cities

Author: Anne Rademacher

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press

Published: 2021-09-10

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 9888528688

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Death and Life of Nature in Asian Cities explores the encounter between two processes that are unfolding in diverse patterns across Asia—the rapid urbanization of Asia across big cities, smaller towns, and the newest urban concentrations; and the contentious debates and novel schemes by which nature is figured and emplaced in cities and their conurbations. Contemporary Asian cities displace nature by causing its death and withering, but also embrace it through acts of renewal and the pursuit of sustainability. Contributors in this volume gather case studies from across Asia to address projects of urban greening and reimagining nature in urban life. The book illustrates how the intersection of urban growth and urban nature is a place rich with fresh ideas about urban planning, governance, and social life. This book illuminates a continuing process of discovery and regeneration through which urban natures may well be moving from taken-for-granted infrastructures to more consciously experienced sites of interplay between non-human life and materials, and daily human life experiences. Debates and efforts to recover nature in the city provoke moral and ethical evaluations of the human ecology of city life, and direct ecologies of urbanism into new avenues like aesthetics, care, perception, and stewardship. “This fascinating collection of essays brings together a series of cutting-edge insights into Asian cities caught in the maelstrom of global environmental change. A particular strength of this book is its commitment to forms of interdisciplinary dialogue and conceptual engagement that unsettle existing geographies of knowledge.” —Matthew Gandy, University of Cambridge; author of Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space “This impressive collection on urban ecologies moves beyond the anthropocentric city to expand our understanding of cities as multispecies spaces of active collaboration, decay, and regeneration, offering new possibilities for the flourishing of urban life—both human and non-human—and the design of more just and sustainable cities for all.” —Christina Schwenkel, University of California, Riverside; author of Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam

The Life and Death of Ancient Cities
The Life and Death of Ancient Cities

Author: Greg Woolf

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-04-08

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 0190618566

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The dramatic story of the rise and collapse of Europe's first great urban experiment The growth of cities around the world in the last two centuries is the greatest episode in our urban history, but it is not the first. Three thousand years ago most of the Mediterranean basin was a world of villages; a world without money or writing, without temples for the gods or palaces for the mighty. Over the centuries that followed, however, cities appeared in many places around the Inland Sea, built by Greeks and Romans, and also by Etruscans and Phoenicians, Tartessians and Lycians, and many others. Most were tiny by modern standards, but they were the building blocks of all the states and empires of antiquity. The greatest--Athens and Corinth, Syracuse and Marseilles, Alexandria and Ephesus, Persepolis and Carthage, Rome and Byzantium--became the powerhouses of successive ancient societies, not just political centers but also the places where ancient art and literatures were created and accumulated. And then, half way through the first millennium, most withered away, leaving behind ruins that have fascinated so many who came after. Based on the most recent historical and archaeological evidence, The Life and Death of Ancient Cities provides a sweeping narrative of one of the world's first great urban experiments, from Bronze Age origins to the demise of cities in late antiquity. Greg Woolf chronicles the history of the ancient Mediterranean city, against the background of wider patterns of human evolution, and of the unforgiving environment in which they were built. Richly illustrated, the book vividly brings to life the abandoned remains of our ancient urban ancestors and serves as a stark reminder of the fragility of even the mightiest of cities.

LIFE
LIFE

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 1965-12-24

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13:

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LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.

Buildings Cities Life
Buildings Cities Life

Author: Eberhard Zeidler

Publisher: Dundurn

Published: 2013-08-26

Total Pages: 1232

ISBN-13: 1459704142

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Renowned architect Eberhard Zeidler tells his story in a two-volume book that explores his early life in Germany and his years in Canada after he moved there in 1951. Architect of Toronto's Eaton Centre and Trump International Hotel and Tower, Zeidler has left his stamp on the urban landscape of Canada, the United States, and the rest of the world.

Ordinary Cities
Ordinary Cities

Author: Jennifer Robinson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-07-04

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1134406959

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"With the urbanization of the world's population proceeding apace and the equally rapid urbanization of poverty, urban theory has an urgent challenge to meet if it is to remain relevant to the majority of cities and their populations most of which are outside the West. Ordinary Cities establishes a new framework for thinking about urban development across a longstanding divide in urban scholarship and also in the realm of urban policy, between Western and other kinds of cities, especially those labeled third world. The book will consider the two framing axes of urban modernity and urban development which have been important in dividing the field of urban studies between Western and other cities. Tracking paths across previously separate academic literatures and policy debates, the book attempts to trace the outlines of a cosmopolitan approach to cities. It draws on evidence from Rio, Johannesburg, Lusaka and Kuala Lumpur to ground the theoretical arguments and provide examples of policy approaches and urban development interventions. Ordinary Cities argues that if cities are to be imagined in equitable and creative ways, urban theory must overcome these axes of theorization with their Western bias. The resources for theorizing cities need to become at least as cosmopolitan as cities themselves, drawing inspiration from the diverse range of contexts and histories that shape cities everywhere."--Back cover

The Death and Life of Great American Cities
The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Author: Jane Jacobs

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 1992-12-01

Total Pages: 482

ISBN-13: 067974195X

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Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and keenly detailed, a monumental work that provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities. "The most refreshing, provacative, stimulating and exciting study of this [great problem] which I have seen. It fairly crackles with bright honesty and common sense." —The New York Times A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured. In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity.

Visible Cities, Global Comics
Visible Cities, Global Comics

Author: Benjamin Fraser

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2019-09-25

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1496825071

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CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2020 More and more people are noticing links between urban geography and the spaces within the layout of panels on the comics page. Benjamin Fraser explores the representation of the city in a range of comics from across the globe. Comics address the city as an idea, a historical fact, a social construction, a material-built environment, a shared space forged from the collective imagination, or as a social arena navigated according to personal desire. Accordingly, Fraser brings insights from urban theory to bear on specific comics. The works selected comprise a variety of international, alternative, and independent small-press comics artists, from engravings and early comics to single-panel work, graphic novels, manga, and trading cards, by artists such as Will Eisner, Tsutomu Nihei, Hariton Pushwagner, Julie Doucet, Frans Masereel, and Chris Ware. In the first monograph on this subject, Fraser touches on many themes of modern urban life: activism, alienation, consumerism, flânerie, gentrification, the mystery story, science fiction, sexual orientation, and working-class labor. He leads readers to images of such cities as Barcelona, Buenos Aires, London, Lyon, Madrid, Montevideo, Montreal, New York, Oslo, Paris, São Paolo, and Tokyo. Through close readings, each chapter introduces readers to specific comics artists and works and investigates a range of topics related to the medium’s spatial form, stylistic variation, and cultural prominence. Mainly, Fraser mixes interest in urbanism and architecture with the creative strategies that comics artists employ to bring their urban images to life.