Autokind Vs. Mankind

Autokind Vs. Mankind PDF Author: Kenneth Schneider
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595193471
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
An automotive empire controls the forms of our cities and therefore dominates the lives of people. Automobility limits citizenship, depriving the poor, elderly, children, and handicapped of the most ordinary human rights. Using contemporary sources, Kenneth Schneider traces the rise of the automobile from "the toy of the rich" to "the necessity of the poor," and "the deprivation of all." He stresses the irony of how early automobile enthusiasm resulted in today's harsh auto-dominated realities: cities converted from human to automotive scale, the loss of urban open space to consumptive suburban sprawl, the billions of hours lost in traffic congestion annually, a greater human loss of life to accidents than from all America's wars, the promoted consumption of declining fuel and other resources. Human values and the content of civilization are rocked asunder by commandments to increase exclusive automobile travel. Whereas the basic value of city life derives from minimizing the need to travel, cities today are stretched to demand ever more travel in misshaped human environments that ironically promote a negative result of economic growth. But human beings are resilient and do learn. They can reverse course and build vibrant environments in the image of their own scale, visions, and values. Autokind Vs. Mankind aims at that potential.

Autokind Vs. Mankind

Autokind Vs. Mankind PDF Author: Kenneth Schneider
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595193471
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
An automotive empire controls the forms of our cities and therefore dominates the lives of people. Automobility limits citizenship, depriving the poor, elderly, children, and handicapped of the most ordinary human rights. Using contemporary sources, Kenneth Schneider traces the rise of the automobile from "the toy of the rich" to "the necessity of the poor," and "the deprivation of all." He stresses the irony of how early automobile enthusiasm resulted in today's harsh auto-dominated realities: cities converted from human to automotive scale, the loss of urban open space to consumptive suburban sprawl, the billions of hours lost in traffic congestion annually, a greater human loss of life to accidents than from all America's wars, the promoted consumption of declining fuel and other resources. Human values and the content of civilization are rocked asunder by commandments to increase exclusive automobile travel. Whereas the basic value of city life derives from minimizing the need to travel, cities today are stretched to demand ever more travel in misshaped human environments that ironically promote a negative result of economic growth. But human beings are resilient and do learn. They can reverse course and build vibrant environments in the image of their own scale, visions, and values. Autokind Vs. Mankind aims at that potential.

Autokind Vs. Mankind

Autokind Vs. Mankind PDF Author: Kenneth R. Schneider
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Automobiles
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description


Asphalt Nation

Asphalt Nation PDF Author: Jane Holtz Kay
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307819973
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 538

Get Book Here

Book Description
Asphalt Nation is a major work of urban studies that examines how the automobile has ravaged America’s cities and landscape, and how we can fight back. The automobile was once seen as a boon to American life, eradicating the pollution caused by horses and granting citizens new levels of personal freedom and mobility. But it was not long before the servant became the master—public spaces were designed to accommodate the automobile at the expense of the pedestrian, mass transportation was neglected, and the poor, unable to afford cars, saw their access to jobs and amenities worsen. Now even drivers themselves suffer, as cars choke the highways and pollution and congestion have replaced the fresh air of the open road. Today our world revolves around the car—as a nation, we spend eight billion hours a year stuck in traffic. In Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay effectively calls for a revolution to reverse our automobile-dependency. Citing successful efforts in places from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, Kay shows us that radical change is not impossible by any means. She demonstrates that there are economic, political, architectural, and personal solutions that can steer us out of the mess. Asphalt Nation is essential reading for everyone interested in the history of our relationship with the car, and in the prospect of returning to a world of human mobility.

Globalization and Urban Development

Globalization and Urban Development PDF Author: Harry W. Richardson
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 354028351X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
Most research on globalization has focused on macroeconomic and economy-wide consequences. This book explores an under-researched area, the impacts of globalization on cities and national urban hierarchies, especially but not solely in developing countries. Most of the globalization-urban research has concentrated on the "global cities" (e.g. New York, London, Paris, Tokyo) that influence what happens in the rest of the world. In contrast, this research looks at the cities at the receiving end of the forces of globalization. The general finding is that large cities, on balance, benefit from globalization, although in some cases at the expense of widening spatial inequities.

Gentrifier

Gentrifier PDF Author: John Joe Schlichtman
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442628413
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book Here

Book Description
Gentrifier opens up a new conversation about gentrification, one that goes beyond the statistics and the clichés, and examines different sides of a controversial, deeply personal issue. In this lively yet rigorous book, John Joe Schlichtman, Jason Patch, and Marc Lamont Hill take a close look at the socioeconomic factors and individual decisions behind gentrification and their implications for the displacement of low-income residents. Drawing on a variety of perspectives, the authors present interviews, case studies, and analysis in the context of recent scholarship in such areas as urban sociology, geography, planning, and public policy. As well, they share accounts of their first-hand experience as academics, parents, and spouses living in New York City, San Diego, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Providence. With unique insight and rare candour, Gentrifier challenges readers' current understandings of gentrification and their own roles within their neighborhoods. A foreword by Peter Marcuse opens the volume.

Forging a More Perfect Union

Forging a More Perfect Union PDF Author: Kenneth R Schneider
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595338178
Category : Cities and towns
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cities today are the weakest link of both democracy and modern affluence. Their explosive sprawl wastes land that promotes both urban social crises and environmental decay through mass auto movement on outrageously costly freeways--contradicting the inherent role of cities to minimize even the need to travel. The immense sprawl unnecessarily assures human isolation (with the consequent dependence upon television), undermines sustainable ecology, and abandons huge areas of the old inner city. Consequently cities are waste-generating environments that arbitrarily promote production and consumption for purposeless and endless economic growth that can never satisfy human "needs". As basic organizers of life in society, cities can become inspired environments of human development. But they must be built compactly to preserve large, accessible open spaces for recreation, parks, and natural areas. Then they can underwrite an unprecedented human efficiency comparable to productive efficiency. To build such cities, a major shift is required to control their structure and eliminate urban development as merely a promotional waste by real estate speculation. Urban development authorities are required to build cities through principles of land conservation, urban spaciousness, minimal need for transportation, human efficiency, and highly congenial human spaces.

Automobility

Automobility PDF Author: Corey T. Lesseig
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780815333432
Category : Automobiles
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book investigates the opportunities the automobile presented for early twentieth Mississippians to change their patterns of work and leisure.

Against Capitalism

Against Capitalism PDF Author: David Schweickart
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429982089
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 455

Get Book Here

Book Description
Capitalism is hegemonic today not because it is the best we fallible humans can do but because it supports, and is supported by, special interests of immense power. This book argues that Economic Democracy, a competitive economy of democratically run enterprises that replaces capitalist financial markets with more suitable institutions, will be more efficient than capitalism, more rational in its growth, more democratic, more egalitarian, and less alienating.Against Capitalism is an ambitious book, drawing on philosophical analysis, economic theory, and considerable empirical evidence to advance its controversial thesis. It examines both conservative and liberal forms of capitalism; it compares Economic Democracy to other models of socialism; and it considers the transition to Economic Democracy from advanced capitalist societies, from economies built on the Soviet model, and from conditions of underdevelopment. The book concludes with some unconventional reflections on historical materialism, ideal communism, and the future of Marxism.

An Introduction to Sustainable Transportation

An Introduction to Sustainable Transportation PDF Author: Preston L. Schiller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136541942
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Get Book Here

Book Description
Transportation plays a substantial role in the modern world; it provides tremendous benefits to society, but it also imposes significant economic, social and environmental costs. Sustainable transport planning requires integrating environmental, social, and economic factors in order to develop optimal solutions to our many pressing issues, especially carbon emissions and climate change. This essential multi-authored work reflects a new sustainable transportation planning paradigm. It explores the concepts of sustainable development and sustainable transportation, describes practical techniques for comprehensive evaluation, provides tools for multi-modal transport planning, and presents innovative mobility management solutions to transportation problems. Students of various disciplines, planners, policymakers and concerned citizens will find many of its provocative ideas and approaches of considerable value as they engage in the processes of understanding and changing transportation towards greater sustainability. This text reflects a fundamental change in transportation decision making. It focuses on accessibility rather than mobility, emphasizes the need to expand the range of options and impacts considered in analysis, and provides practical tools to allow planners, policy makers and the general public to determine the best solution to the transportation problems facing a community. The book starts by placing transportation within the broader sustainability discussion, emphasising a comprehensive approach to sustainability planning and introducing the notion of 'regenerative transportation'. In sections on policymaking and planning the book examines how decisions are currently, and how they should be, made - explaining the complex and often misunderstood area of public participation. The authors explain demand management as applied to transportation and present lessons from other public arenas and areas of application, especially in urban-suburban areas. The text takes readers through each and every mode of transport, beginning with human-powered modes and ending in motorized modes, including marine and air transport. The modes are analyzed separately and in comparison with others according to several criteria: Capacity/utility/functionality considerations; infrastructure demands; resource consumption; land use considerations; pollution; and costs. In ways that non-technically trained readers as well as planning students professionals can find useful the book includes guidance on how to optimize transportation systems; balancing economic, social and environmental objectives while creating just, robust, and diverse, rather than one-size-fits-all, solutions. The modes are grouped and compared within their respective contexts, and there is vital discussion and differentiation between passenger and freight-goods transport. The final section develops a comprehensive summary of the previous chapters and develops arguments for sustainable transportation policymaking and integrated planning, providing international examples and case studies and extracting from them general applications for integrated sustainable transportation. Featuring extensive international examples and case-studies, textboxes, graphics, recommended reading and end of chapter questions, the authors draw on considerable teaching and researching experience to present an essential, ground-breaking and authoritative text on sustainable transport.

Car Country

Car Country PDF Author: Christopher W. Wells
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295804475
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Get Book Here

Book Description
For most people in the United States, going almost anywhere begins with reaching for the car keys. This is true, Christopher Wells argues, because the United States is Car Country—a nation dominated by landscapes that are difficult, inconvenient, and often unsafe to navigate by those who are not sitting behind the wheel of a car. The prevalence of car-dependent landscapes seems perfectly natural to us today, but it is, in fact, a relatively new historical development. In Car Country, Wells rejects the idea that the nation's automotive status quo can be explained as a simple byproduct of an ardent love affair with the automobile. Instead, he takes readers on a tour of the evolving American landscape, charting the ways that transportation policies and land-use practices have combined to reshape nearly every element of the built environment around the easy movement of automobiles. Wells untangles the complicated relationships between automobiles and the environment, allowing readers to see the everyday world in a completely new way. The result is a history that is essential for understanding American transportation and land-use issues today. Watch the book trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48LTKOxxrXQ