From animals to robotization, climate change to migration, Rem Koolhaas presents a new collaborative project exploring how countryside everywhere is transforming beyond recognition. The pocketbook gathers in-depth essays spanning from Fukushima to the Netherlands, Siberia to Uganda - an urgent dispatch from this long-neglected realm, revealing its radical potential for changing everything about how we live
From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Puerto Rico was swept by a wave of modernization, transforming the island from a predominantly rural society to an unquestionably urban one. A curious paradox ensued, however. While the island underwent rapid urbanization, and the rhetoric of economic development reigned over official discourses, the newly installed insular government, along with some academic circles and radio and television media, constructed, promoted, and sponsored a narrative of Puerto Rican culture based on rural subjects, practices, and spaces. By examining a wide range of cultural texts, but focusing on the film production of the Division of Community Education, the popular dance music of Cortijo y su combo, and the literary texts of Jose Luis Gonzalez and Rene Marques, Concrete and Countryside offers an in-depth analysis of how Puerto Ricans responded to this transformative period. It also shows how the arts used a battery of images of the urban and the rural to understand, negotiate, and critique the innumerable changes taking place on the island.
Although most discussions of the Guatemalan "revolution" of 1944-54 focus on international and national politics, Revolution in the Countryside presents a more complex and integrated picture of this decade. Jim Handy examines the rural poor, both Maya and Ladino, as key players who had a decisive impact on the nature of change in Guatemala. He looks at the ways in which ethnic and class relations affected government policy and identifies the conflict generated in the countryside by new economic and social policies. Handy provides the most detailed discussion yet of the Guatemalan agrarian reform, and he shows how peasant organizations extended its impact by using it to lay claim to land, despite attempts by agrarian officials and the president to apply the law strictly. By focusing on changes in rural communities, and by detailing the coercive measures used to reverse the "revolution in the countryside" following the overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, Handy provides a framework for interpreting more recent events in Guatemala, especially the continuing struggle for land and democracy.
Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016 Rural queer experience is often hidden or ignored, and presumed to be alienating, lacking, and incomplete without connections to a gay culture that exists in an urban elsewhere. Queering the Countryside offers the first comprehensive look at queer desires found in rural America from a genuinely multi-disciplinary perspective. This collection of original essays confronts the assumption that queer desires depend upon urban life for meaning. By considering rural queer life, the contributors challenge readers to explore queer experiences in ways that give greater context and texture to modern practices of identity formation. The book’s focus on understudied rural spaces throws into relief the overemphasis of urban locations and structures in the current political and theoretical work on queer sexualities and genders. Queering the Countryside highlights the need to rethink notions of “the closet” and “coming out” and the characterizations of non-urban sexualities and genders as “isolated” and in need of “outreach.” Contributors focus on a range of topics—some obvious, some delightfully unexpected—from the legacy of Matthew Shepard, to how heterosexuality is reproduced at the 4-H Club, to a look at sexual encounters at a truck stop, to a queer reading of TheWizard of Oz. A journey into an unexplored slice of life in rural America, Queering the Countryside offers a unique perspective on queer experience in the modern United States and Canada.
The indispensable guide to everything we knew and loved before modern life got in the way. This gorgeous and beautifully illustrated countryside miscellany is the perfect purchase for anyone wanting to go back to their roots and rediscover a lost world... 'Beautiful book' -- ***** Reader review 'A delightful book with some lovely illustrations' -- ***** Reader review 'A heart-warming read, I love this book' -- ***** Reader review 'Magical' -- ***** Reader review 'Lovely book to just DELVE into' -- ***** Reader review 'A little gem!' -- ***** Reader review 'Sheer delight!' -- ***** Reader review **************************************************************************************************** Ever wondered how to predict the weather just by looking at the sky? Or wanted to attract butterflies to your garden? Is there a knack to building the perfect bonfire? And how exactly do you race a ferret? In this world of traffic tailbacks, supermarket shopping and 24-hour internet access, it's easy to feel disconnected from the beauty and rhythms of the natural world. If you have ever gazed in awe at stars in the night's sky, tried to catch a perfect snowflake or longed for the comfort of a roaring log fire, then this is the book for you. From spotting Britain's five kinds of owl to gardening by the phases of the moon, from curing a cold to brewing your own ale, and from navigating by the stars to making sloe gin, Red Sky at Night is packed with instructions and lists, ancient customs and old wives tales, making it an indispensable guide to countryside lore.
Draws together diverse images of landscape to explore the historical processes shaping our continuing attachment to the countryside - seen in artistic expression, attitudes to nature, country life and the development of rural and urban land.
This book celebrates country life by showcasing rural European homes from Sweden, Ireland, England, Holland, France, Greece, Tuscany, Majorca, and Greece, we present the most inspiring rural homes, each selected for their style, character and serenity.
First published in 1983. How had the situation developed in which agriculture had become such a creature of state protection, where public money supported prosperous landowners while poor farmers received practically nothing? Where the value of agricultural support exceeded net farm income, and vastly exceeded the level of support available to British Steel or British Rail? In answering these questions John Bowers and Paul Cheshire examined the real value of agricultural support in successive policy phases since the Second World War, and analysed the effects this support had on income distribution. Their thesis was that agricultural change, including the transfer of land from traditional farmers to institutions and corporations, was not the product of impersonal progress, but the direct result of agricultural support policies, resting on specious economic arguments. The authors’ analysis of this subject has inescapable relevance for the policymaker, for the taxpayer and consumer of foodstuffs, for the urban user of the British countryside and indeed for farmers and the farming lobby. Agriculture, the Countryside and Land Use will be an important book for all these groups and also for students of agriculture, geography and economics.
In 1880, ancient-growth forest still covered two-thirds of West Virginia, but by the 1920s lumbermen had denuded the entire region. Ronald Lewis explores the transformation in these mountain counties precipitated by deforestation. As the only state that lies entirely within the Appalachian region, West Virginia provides an ideal site for studying the broader social impact of deforestation in Appalachia, the South, and the eastern United States. Most of West Virginia was still dominated by a backcountry economy when the industrial transition began. In short order, however, railroads linked remote mountain settlements directly to national markets, hauling away forest products and returning with manufactured goods and modern ideas. Workers from the countryside and abroad swelled new mill towns, and merchants ventured into the mountains to fulfill the needs of the growing population. To protect their massive investments, capitalists increasingly extended control over the state's legal and political systems. Eventually, though, even ardent supporters of industrialization had reason to contemplate the consequences of unregulated exploitation. Once the timber was gone, the mills closed and the railroads pulled up their tracks, leaving behind an environmental disaster and a new class of marginalized rural poor to confront the worst depression in American history.
