From citrus trees to spring breakers, Transforming the Irvine Ranch tells the story of Orange County’s metamorphosis from 93,000 acres of farmland into an iconic Southern California landscape of beaches and modernist architecture. Drawing on decades of archival research and their own years at the famed Irvine Company, the authors bring a collection of colorful characters responsible for the transformation to life, including: Ray Watson, whose nearly century-long life took him from an Oakland boarding house to the Irvine and Walt Disney Company boardrooms Joan Irvine Smith, a much-married heiress who waged war against the US government and the Irvine Foundation's reactionary board and won William Pereira, the visionary architect whose work became synonymous with the LA cityscape. Spanning the history of modern California from its Gold Rush past to the late 1970s, Transforming the Irvine Ranch chronicles a storied family’s largely successful attempts to remake the vast Irvine Ranch in its own image.
The Irvine Ranch: A Time for People describes the excitement, the accomplishments and the conflicts during the first 50 years of development of the 90,000-acre Irvine Ranch in Orange County, California, into the largest master-planned new community in the United States. The book highlights The Irvine Company, the privately held corporation which developed the Ranch under three ownerships during the post World War II years, focusing on the firms seven presidents and current chairman. Here is the dramatic transformation of an agricultural dynasty into an urban empire told in eight engrossing chapters wrapped around the actions and personalities of Myford Irvine, Arthur McFadden, Charles Thomas, William Mason, Raymond Watson, Peter Kremer, Thomas Nielsen and Donald Bren. The book provides the reader with an intimate perspective of the workings of the sometimes mysterious and frequently misunderstood Irvine Company.
The story of Irvine goes back more than 200 years, to a time when it was a vast, sprawling ranch extending from the brush-covered foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains to the dramatic bluffs of the Pacific coast. Since that time, the Irvine Ranch has experienced a revolutionary change from pastoral wide-open spaces to one of the most successful planned communities in the nation. All along the way, there were people whose vision shaped the transformation of Irvine. Among them were the members of the Irvine family, who for nearly a century were stewards of a ranch that amounted to more than one-fifth of modern-day Orange County. The Irvine of today owes its success to the ideals from its past: the determination to develop the immense potential of the land while still preserving its natural beauty.
The "new community" movement of the 1960s and 1970s attempted a grand experiment in housing. It inspired the construction of innovative communities that were designed to counter suburbia's cultural conformity, social isolation, ugliness, and environmental problems. This richly documented book examines the results of those experiments in three of the most successful new communities: Irvine Ranch in Southern California, Columbia in Maryland, and The Woodlands in the suburbs of Houston, Texas. Based on new research and interviews with developers, designers, and residents, Ann Forsyth traces the evolution, the successes, and the shortcomings of these experiments in urban innovation. Where they succeeded, in areas such as community identity and open space preservation, they provide support for current "smart growth" proposals. Where they did not, in areas such as housing affordability and transportation choices, they offer important insights for today's planners, designers, developers, civic leaders, and others interested in incorporating new forms of development into their designs.
This book explores the life of Robert Lyall, surgeon, botanist, voyager, British Agent to the court of Madagascar. Born the year of the French Revolution, Lyall grew up in politically radical Paisley, Scotland, before studying medicine, in Edinburgh, Manchester, and subsequently St. Petersburg, Russia. His criticism of the Tsar and Russian aristocracy led to an abrupt departure for London where Lyall became the voice of liberalism and calls for political reform, before appointed British Resident Agent in Madagascar in 1827, representing the interests of the Tory establishment that he had hitherto so roundly castigated. However, Lyall discovered that the Malagasy crown had turned against the British alliance of 1820, his scientific pursuits alienated the local elite, and his efforts to re-establish British influence antagonized the queen, Ranavalona I, who accused Lyall of sorcery and forced him and his burgeoning family to leave for Mauritius where he died an untimely death, of malaria, in 1831.
Using rich and detailed data, this groundbreaking book explains why homelessness has become a crisis in America and reveals the structural conditions that underlie it. In Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern seek to explain the substantial regional variation in rates of homelessness in cities across the United States. In a departure from many analytical approaches, Colburn and Aldern shift their focus from the individual experiencing homelessness to the metropolitan area. Using accessible statistical analysis, they test a range of conventional beliefs about what drives the prevalence of homelessness in a given city—including mental illness, drug use, poverty, weather, generosity of public assistance, and low-income mobility—and find that none explain the regional variation observed across the country. Instead, housing market conditions, such as the cost and availability of rental housing, offer a far more convincing account. With rigor and clarity, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem explores U.S. cities' diverse experiences with housing precarity and offers policy solutions for unique regional contexts.
In Transforming California, Stephanie Pincetl argues that the transformation of nature in order to enhance economic development lies at the heart of much of the state's recent history. She sees late-twentieth-century California on a path of continued environmental degradation, gripped by cynicism about government. Transforming California describes the evolution of the state's institutions of government as they apply to land use and development, and it shows how land-use decisions affect people's quality of life and their daily interactions with each other and with their environment. Pincetl offers an alternative vision for the renewal of the democratic spirit and process in California and for a reconciliation with nature.
"At first encounter, Orange County can resemble the incoherent sprawl that geographer James Howard Kunstler named The Geography of Nowhere: a car-dependent, seemingly bland space designed most of all for efficient capitalist consumption. But it is somewhere, too, and learning its stories helps it become more than its boosters' slogans. Writers Lisa Alvarez and Andrew Tonkovich, residents of Orange County's remote Modjeska Canyon, describe this whole county as "a much-constructed and -contrived locale, a pestered and paved landscape built and borne upon stories of human development... of destruction as well as, happily, of enduring wild places." In a similar vein, essayist D. J. Waldie, chronicler of the bordering suburb of Lakewood, asserts that "becoming Californian ... means locating yourself" in "habitats of memory" that connect ordinary, local areas with broader themes. Moving beyond sentimentality, nostalgia, and so many sales pitches that omit far too much, Waldie echoes Michel de Certeau's call to "awaken the stories that sleep in the streets." That is the goal of this book. Inspired by Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough, and Wendy Cheng's A People's Guide to Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2012), as well as the People's Guides to Boston and San Francisco that have followed it, we offer this guidebook for locals, tourists, students, and everyone who wants to understand where they really are. This book is organized with regional chapters, sorted roughly north to south by community. Within each city, sites are listed alphabetically. After the group of entries for each city, we recommend nearby restaurants as well as other sites of interest for visitors. Readers may explore this book geographically or use the thematic tours in the appendix to consider environmental politics, Cold War legacies, the politics of housing, LGBTQ spaces, or Orange County's carceral state. The appendix also contains suggestions for teachers using this book, engaging students in cognitive mapping, close reading, popular-culture analysis, and creating additional entries of people's history. While many local histories tend to focus on a few white settlers, this book places attention on the people, especially the subaltern ones who are hierarchically under others, including workers, people of color, youth, and LGBTQ individuals. No single book can represent an entire county, so we have chosen to concentrate on the lesser-known power struggles that have happened here and influenced the landscape that we all share. We could not include everyone, of course. We are mindful that other groups are currently creating more people's history on this landscape that we hope our readers will continue to explore. In Orange County, excavating the diverse past can be frowned upon or actively repressed by those invested in selling Orange County in the style of its booster Anglo settlers from 150 years ago. This book tells the diverse political history beyond the bucolic imagery of orange-crate labels. We hope it will inspire readers to further explore Orange County and reflect on even more sites that could be included in the ordinary, extraordinary landscape here"--
The two most popular question that people ask: 1) what is my purpose and 2) why was I born ? In Purpose, Why were you called you can find the answer. This book will also help you figure out what is you assignment and how to allow God to prepare you so that you will be able to successfully carry out your assignment and glorify God. I used part of my life to assist you in your journey. My story is not meant to cause pity, but to give praise to God. Purpose, Why were you called will help you to understand why you were born or called into a life fill with so much pain resulting from so many hurts and abuse. You will understand that there are two spirits in the world-- God and the Devil and they control the people in our lives. Two groups of people are called to be vessels of honor and vessels of dishonor. The vessels of honor belong to God, and vessels of dishonor belong to the Devil. Each of these people was placed on earth with an assignment. Both will glorify God.
