The Age of Great Cities PDF Download

Author: Brett Josef Grubisic
Publisher: arsenal pulp press
ISBN: 1551522993
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
Equal parts bildungsroman and purported literary artifact, The Age of Cities is -really about the age of innocence. A manuscript is discovered inside a hollowed-out home economics textbook: it is the story of a young man from a small town who comes to the big city at the height of the Cold War. His accidental discovery of a gay -subculture—culminating in a feverish, dreamlike initiation—pushes him irrevocably toward crisis. The Age of Cities is about discovery, loss, and the contemporary “closet” where stories lie hidden from view.

Author: Robert A. Beauregard
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022653538X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
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.

Author: Annalee Newitz
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039365267X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and Science Friday A quest to explore some of the most spectacular ancient cities in human history—and figure out why people abandoned them. In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today. Newitz travels to all four sites and investigates the cutting-edge research in archaeology, revealing the mix of environmental changes and political turmoil that doomed these ancient settlements. Tracing the early development of urban planning, Newitz also introduces us to the often anonymous workers—slaves, women, immigrants, and manual laborers—who built these cities and created monuments that lasted millennia. Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate.

Author: Ricky Burdett
Publisher: Phaidon Press
ISBN: 9780714877280
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
An authoritative - and fascinating - investigation into the spatial and social dynamics of cities at a global scale Shaping Cities in an Urban Age is the third addition to Phaidon's hugely successful Urban Age series, published in collaboration with the London School of Economics (LSE) and the Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft (AHG). Generously illustrated with photographs, visual data, and statistics, and featuring a series of essays written by leading people in their fields, Shaping Cities in an Urban Age addresses our most urgent contemporary and future urban issues by examining a set of key forces that have combined to create the city as we know it today. From the publisher of The Endless City and Living in the Endless City.

Author: Juval Portugali
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642245447
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
Today, our cities are an embodiment of the complex, historical evolution of knowledge, desires and technology. Our planned and designed activities co-evolve with our aspirations, mediated by the existing technologies and social structures. The city represents the accretion and accumulation of successive layers of collective activity, structuring and being structured by other, increasingly distant cities, reaching now right around the globe. This historical and structural development cannot therefore be understood or captured by any set of fixed quantitative relations. Structural changes imply that the patterns of growth, and their underlying reasons change over time, and therefore that any attempt to control the morphology of cities and their patterns of flow by means of planning and design, must be dynamical, based on the mechanisms that drive the changes occurring at a given moment. This carefully edited post-proceedings volume gathers a snapshot view by leading researchers in field, of current complexity theories of cities. In it, the achievements, criticisms and potentials yet to be realized are reviewed and the implications to planning and urban design are assessed.

Author: Ashley Dawson
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784780367
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
A cutting exploration of how cities drive climate change while being on the frontlines of the coming climate crisis How will climate change affect our lives? Where will its impacts be most deeply felt? Are we doing enough to protect ourselves from the coming chaos? In Extreme Cities, Ashley Dawson argues that cities are ground zero for climate change, contributing the lion’s share of carbon to the atmosphere, while also lying on the frontlines of rising sea levels. Today, the majority of the world’s megacities are located in coastal zones, yet few of them are adequately prepared for the floods that will increasingly menace their shores. Instead, most continue to develop luxury waterfront condos for the elite and industrial facilities for corporations. These not only intensify carbon emissions, but also place coastal residents at greater risk when water levels rise. In Extreme Cities, Dawson offers an alarming portrait of the future of our cities, describing the efforts of Staten Island, New York, and Shishmareff, Alaska residents to relocate; Holland’s models for defending against the seas; and the development of New York City before and after Hurricane Sandy. Our best hope lies not with fortified sea walls, he argues. Rather, it lies with urban movements already fighting to remake our cities in a more just and equitable way. As much a harrowing study as a call to arms Extreme Cities is a necessary read for anyone concerned with the threat of global warming, and of the cities of the world.

Author: Daniel A. Bell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691159696
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
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.

Author: Robert Vaughan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cities and towns
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Author: Brett Grubisic
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458782573
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
'Winston closed his eyes with relief. He heard muffled pulses of party noise, but still felt damp and uncomfortable. His brain had turned haywire. At the mirror over the sink he was relieved to find his everyday face and no tell-tale outward sign - febrile flush, scarlet ears, Mr. Hyde eyes. He bent to the sink--both mirror and basin were too low, as though the bathroom had been built for children or with grief-shrunken Eastern European widows in mind - and splashed his face with cold water.''.... Equal parts Bildngsroman and purported literary artifact, The Age of Cities is really about the age of innocence. A manuscript is discovered inside a hollowed-out home economics textbook from the 1950s: the story of a male librarian from a small town who comes to the big city at the height of the Cold War in 1959. At first he is giddy with the discovery of an urban paradise, allowing him to reinvent himself at the same time as the city is. But his accidental discovery of a gay subculture - culminating in a feverish, dream-like initiation - pushes him irrevocably towards crisis. Written in the dialect of the time and framed by contemporary ''analysis,'' The Age of Cities is an imaginary artifact that is about the past and present all at once: a novel of ambiguous boundaries and invasive dichotomies. It is also about discovery, loss, and the ages-old ''closet'' where stories lie hidden from view.

Author: Juval Portugali
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1803923059
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Providing a succinct overview of historical, present and future perspectives of cities and urbanism, this discerning book examines how the 21st century, regarded as the age of cities, is associated with the current crisis of democracy.