The Natural City
The Natural City

Author: Stephen B. Scharper

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0802091601

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Urban and natural environments are often viewed as entirely separate entities — human settlements as the domain of architects and planners, and natural areas as untouched wilderness. This dichotomy continues to drive decision-making in subtle ways, but with the mounting pressures of global climate change and declining biodiversity, it is no longer viable. New technologies are promising to provide renewable energy sources and greener designs, but real change will require a deeper shift in values, attitudes, and perceptions. A timely and important collection, The Natural City explores how to integrate the natural environment into healthy urban centres from philosophical, religious, socio-political, and planning perspectives. Recognizing the need to better link the humanities with public policy, The Natural City offers unique insights for the development of an alternative vision of urban life.

Nature Obscura
Nature Obscura

Author: Kelly Brenner

Publisher: Mountaineers Books

Published: 2020-02-26

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1680512080

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With wonder and a sense of humor, Nature Obscura author Kelly Brenner aims to help us rediscover our connection to the natural world that is just outside our front door--we just need to know where to look. Through explorations of a rich and varied urban landscape, Brenner reveals the complex micro-habitats and surprising nature found in the middle of a city. In her hometown of Seattle, which has plowed down hills, cut through the land to connect fresh- and saltwater, and paved over much of the rest, she exposes a diverse range of strange and unknown creatures. From shore to wetland, forest to neighborhood park, and graveyard to backyard, Brenner uncovers how our land alterations have impacted nature, for good and bad, through the wildlife and plants that live alongside us, often unseen. These stories meld together, in the same way our ecosystems, species, and human history are interconnected across the urban environment.

Mannahatta
Mannahatta

Author: Eric W. Sanderson

Publisher: Abrams

Published: 2013-11-27

Total Pages: 663

ISBN-13: 1613125739

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What did New York look like four centuries ago? An extraordinary reconstruction of a wild island from the forests of Times Square to the wetlands downtown. Named a Best Book of the Year by Library Journal, New York Magazine, and San Francisco Chronicle On September 12, 1609, Henry Hudson first set foot on the land that would become Manhattan. Today, it’s difficult to imagine what he saw, but for more than a decade, landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson has been working to do just that. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City is the astounding result of those efforts, reconstructing in words and images the wild island that millions now call home. By geographically matching an eighteenth-century map with one of the modern city, examining volumes of historic documents, and collecting and analyzing scientific data, Sanderson re-creates topography, flora, and fauna from a time when actual wolves prowled far beyond Wall Street and the degree of biological diversity rivaled that of our most famous national parks. His lively text guides you through this abundant landscape—while breathtaking illustrations transport you back in time. Mannahatta is a groundbreaking work that provides not only a window into the past, but also inspiration for the future. “[A] wise and beautiful book, sure to enthrall anyone interested in NYC history.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A cartographical detective tale . . . The fact-intense charts, maps and tables offered in abundance here are fascinating.” —The New York Times “[An] exuberantly written and beautifully illustrated exploration of pre-European Gotham.” —San Francisco Chronicle “You don’t have to be a New Yorker to be enthralled.” —Library Journal

Natural Born Angel
Natural Born Angel

Author: Scott Speer

Publisher: Scholastic UK

Published: 2013-04-01

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1407135244

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In a world where guardian angels are celebrities who save people for money, Maddy's life was transformed when she became the girlfriend of the hottest Angel around. But she never imagined that she'd become even more famous than Jackson. Unfortunately for Maddy, she's an irresistible PR opportunity - and soon her popularity soars higher than any Angel. Her relationship is cracking under the pressure. And as tension starts to mount between Angels and humans, she finds herself an ambassador for humankind. With Jackson at the helm of the Immortals, the two ex-lovers must become sworn enemies. It's Angels in one corner, humans on the other - until an evil force, greater than anything on Earth, forces them to stand united if they want to survive.

Understanding Emergent Urbanism
Understanding Emergent Urbanism

Author: Sotir Dhamo

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-08-31

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 3030827313

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The ideas presented in this book are a conceptual leverage to correct the rigidity of top-down practices and bring the real city, or the city of everyday life, closer to the city of conventional planning. Considering self-organization as the starting point at the base of complex systems, this book tries to understand how specific qualities emerge and evolve from this behavior. For this, the book discusses new ways of looking at and understanding cities by applying holistic methods and approaches based on the conceptual grounds of quantum, fractal, and complexity theories. The book highlights the fact that the information on how to transform and build a city is contained within the city itself. In this regard, some methodological steps to unpack complexities and translate the essential qualities of space into potential generators for city design and planning are provided. The book urges courageous experimentation and proposes a methodology where the computational nature of urban phenomena goes along with historic anthropological ideas, thus emphasizing the characteristics of a specific reality in a model. They do not exclude each other; in fact, they are part of the unbroken web of wholeness. Importantly, the proposed methodology supports gradual and natural coevolution process in the city through combining planned and unplanned actions and the involving multiplicity of actors, impacting on Urban Planning and Design Practice.

Louis Vuitton City Bags: A Natural History
Louis Vuitton City Bags: A Natural History

Author: Jean-Claude Kaufmann

Publisher: Rizzoli Publications

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 0847840875

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This volume is an unprecedented history of Louis Vuitton’s women’s bags, the most coveted line of accessories in women’s fashion. At the heart of Louis Vuitton are its City Bags, a range of women’s bags that dates back to the turn of the twentieth century. Featuring the trademark monograms of the house, the City Bag story began with the Steamer, a resort bag designed in 1901 to be packed inside a much larger steamer trunk. These bags have in a hundred years formally diversified into a dizzying array of handbags for every conceivable function demanded by the modern woman. Profoundly influential, City Bags are now known to millions by their descriptive names (Keepall, Bucket, Papillon, Alma, Locket, Noe, Speedy) and are still evolving into more fantastical forms. Lavishly illustrated with new and archival photography, historical graphics, landmark editorials, and ad campaigns, the volume traces the history of these specific bag families, and examines the earliest specimens and today’s most sought-after collectibles, including Vuitton’s collaborations with Takashi Murakami, Stephen Sprouse, Richard Prince, Yayoi Kusama, and Rei Kawakubo and one-off projects by Zaha Hadid, Shigeru Ban, Vivienne Westwood, Helmut Lang, Andrée Putman, and of course, Marc Jacobs. Louis Vuitton: City Bags is an ambitious volume on the creation and cultivation of a cultural phenomenon.

The Bird-Friendly City
The Bird-Friendly City

Author: Timothy Beatley

Publisher: Island Press

Published: 2020-11-05

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 164283047X

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How does a bird experience a city? A backyard? A park? As the world has become more urban, noisier from increased traffic, and brighter from streetlights and office buildings, it has also become more dangerous for countless species of birds. Warblers become disoriented by nighttime lights and collide with buildings. Ground-feeding sparrows fall prey to feral cats. Hawks and other birds-of-prey are sickened by rat poison. These name just a few of the myriad hazards. How do our cities need to change in order to reduce the threats, often created unintentionally, that have resulted in nearly three billion birds lost in North America alone since the 1970s? In The Bird-Friendly City, Timothy Beatley, a longtime advocate for intertwining the built and natural environments, takes readers on a global tour of cities that are reinventing the status quo with birds in mind. Efforts span a fascinating breadth of approaches: public education, urban planning and design, habitat restoration, architecture, art, civil disobedience, and more. Beatley shares empowering examples, including: advocates for “catios,” enclosed outdoor spaces that allow cats to enjoy backyards without being able to catch birds; a public relations campaign for vultures; and innovations in building design that balance aesthetics with preventing bird strikes. Through these changes and the others Beatley describes, it is possible to make our urban environments more welcoming to many bird species. Readers will come away motivated to implement and advocate for bird-friendly changes, with inspiring examples to draw from. Whether birds are migrating and need a temporary shelter or are taking up permanent residence in a backyard, when the environment is safer for birds, humans are happier as well.

The Natural
The Natural

Author: Bernard Malamud

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2017-08-24

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1446419126

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This is a book about heroism - of sorts. Roy Hobbs has an immense natural gift for playing baseball. He could become one of the great ones of the game, a player unmatched in his time - a hero. But his first hard-won big chance ends violently, at the hands of a crazy girl, and then it is years before he gets another shot. At last, in a few short seasons, or never, he must achieve the towering reputation that he feels is his right.

Making Urban Nature
Making Urban Nature

Author: Jacques Vink

Publisher: Nai010 Publishers

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9789462083172

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Making Urban Nature' is an inspirational book of examples about nature-inclusive designing in European cities. It calls for the integration of the living conditions found in nature in the designs of buildings and urban outdoor spaces and includes practical examples and design suggestions. The city is a rich habitat of great biodiversity. Many animal and plant species are now more common in the city than in rural areas. However, urban nature is fragile and planners and policymakers still consider the city to be the exclusive habitat of people. The authors see nature as an integral part of the urban organism and as such as important to the quality of life in the city. Nature-inclusive design is a pioneer practice that has only recently become part of urban planning. From different angles: this publication addresses the theory of ecology and biodiversity, city-bound species, urban habitats and the maintenance of urban nature, on the basis of inspirational and practical examples. The authors are members of De Natuurlijke Stad, a collaboration of architects, biologists and urban ecologists with a lot of practical and theoretical experience in nature-inclusive designing in the city.