Cityscopes: Buenos Aires

Cityscopes: Buenos Aires PDF Author: Jason Wilson
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780232667
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Whether for tango, football, or art, passions in Buenos Aires run high. The largest city in Argentina, it is chaotic and lively, dangerous and cosmopolitan, and presents seemingly unlimited attractions for tourists. This book provides a view into the city today, and into its past. Europeans colonized Buenos Aires in the 16th century, and from this modest start by the end of the nineteenth century it had boomed. Its history is one of excesses and swings between authoritarian and democratic governments. By examining Buenos Aires past, we can appreciate what remains as story, urban myth, or reality. "

Cityscopes: Buenos Aires

Cityscopes: Buenos Aires PDF Author: Jason Wilson
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780232667
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
Whether for tango, football, or art, passions in Buenos Aires run high. The largest city in Argentina, it is chaotic and lively, dangerous and cosmopolitan, and presents seemingly unlimited attractions for tourists. This book provides a view into the city today, and into its past. Europeans colonized Buenos Aires in the 16th century, and from this modest start by the end of the nineteenth century it had boomed. Its history is one of excesses and swings between authoritarian and democratic governments. By examining Buenos Aires past, we can appreciate what remains as story, urban myth, or reality. "

Beijing

Beijing PDF Author: Linda Jaivin
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780233000
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Reaktion’s new CityScopes series consists of concise, illustrated guides that provide a social and urban history from a city’s beginnings to the present day. Written by authors with unique and intimate knowledge of each city, these books offer fascinating vignettes on the quintessential and the quirky. In the first book of the series, Linda Jaivin explores a city at the heart of one of the world’s oldest civilizations and the capital of its newest superpower—Beijing. In China’s central city, Jaivin finds thousands of years of history dating back to our ancestors, a story that includes dynastic empires, sieges, massacres, rebellions, and political spectacle. Recounting the lively history of the city, Jaivin discovers the Peking Man and the capital’s many legendary incarnations, such as the Cambaluc that Marco Polo wrote about in awe. She reveals it to be full of charismatic personalities and dramatic events, a place that has produced some of China’s most iconic works of literature, theater, and music. She also offers thought-provoking essays on contemporary topics ranging from the elemental problems of air and water to the vibrant art scene and the architectural adventurism of the city’s “hyperbuildings.” Generously illustrated, this guide provides helpful maps and suggested itineraries as well as practical recommendations for hotels, restaurants, museums, and other sites. Taking readers to lakeshores, down into the subway, and around the bustling art districts, Beijing is the ultimate introduction to this extraordinary city for travelers and armchair explorers alike.

New York

New York PDF Author: Elizabeth L. Bradley
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780234066
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
From the Big Apple to the City that Never Sleeps, New York has many identities. It is a melting pot of peoples and cultures, a capital of finance and commerce, and a mecca of fashion, art, and entertainment. It is home to the United Nations Headquarters and Wall Street, and it is the destination for millions of tourists each year. But outside of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, where does one even start? In this concise and witty guide from a native New Yorker, Elizabeth L. Bradley mixes history with high and low culture to make sense of this city for visitors and armchair travelers alike. Tracing the development of New York City from a Dutch trading post to the cultural capital of the world, Bradley provides brief histories of each of the five boroughs and introduces the city’s most important—and colorful—personalities. In addition to a rich account of the city’s past, she offers a series of ruminations on themes germane to New York today, describing its natural landmarks, unnatural gin joints, immigrant enclaves, and even its many noises. All along she includes thoughtful, eclectic lists of where to eat, drink, and shop, as well as what to see and do. Exploring the features that make New York both inimitable and extraordinary, this generously illustrated guide is a lively and engaging look at this ever-shifting archipelago.

Berlin

Berlin PDF Author: Joseph Pearson
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780237669
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
As Joseph Pearson poetically puts it in this rich look at one of Europe’s most fascinating cities: Berlin is a party in a graveyard. Europe’s youth capital, Berlin is also beset by sustained guilt for the atrocities that were ordered by its Nazi officers during the Third Reich. Built and rebuilt on the ruins of multiple regimes, Berlin in the twenty-first-century houses an extraordinary diversity of refugees, immigrants, and expats. Offering a comprehensive but concise history, Pearson tells the story of Berlin’s past over nine centuries while also painting a portrait of the vibrant German capital today. Pearson describes the rise of Berlin from a small settlement surrounded by bog to one of the crucial economic and political centers of Europe. Berlin is a palimpsest of a cutting edge and dynamic modern culture over a troubled history, one that is visible in bombsites, museums, late-night clubs, and even a lake that allegedly hosts a man-eating monster. He ultimately shows how the city is imbued with an array of unnerving elements: emptiness, provincialism, ramshackle industrial eclecticism, lurid and lascivious counter-cultural expressions, and a tremendous history of violence—but also that these are precisely the sorts of things that give the city its unique charge. Posing one thought-provoking question after another, Pearson walks the city’s neighborhoods, peeling back layer upon layer of history in order to reveal a Berlin that few of us know.

Paris

Paris PDF Author: Adam Roberts
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780237928
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
It is one of the world’s most iconic cities, the center of romance, cuisine, and high culture, a place we are all implored to visit in spring and then forever hold in our hearts: Paris. But behind these familiar notions lies a bustling and deeply complex metropolis, one that offers visitors an unending array of surprises. This book takes readers and travelers to this other Paris, a city of love and danger alike, a city imbued with over 2,000 years of history, which Adam Roberts lovingly recounts alongside an expert tour of the city’s sights, sounds, and flavors. Roberts tells the story of how a provincial backwater rose up to become one of the richest, most powerful, and most visited cities in Europe, a world leader in fashion, the arts, and gastronomy. He takes us back two millennia to when roaming Celtic tribes first set up camp on the banks of the Seine, and from there moves through turbulent centuries full of the fates and fortunes of kings, marked by invasions, revolutions, and magnificent buildings constructed one after the other. He explores the city’s renowned gothic architecture, the urban planning that has been revised throughout history, the mammoth museums that have been erected to preserve its artistic legacy, and the vibrant street culture that hosts markets, performers, and Paris’s own flâneurs every single day. Along the way, he points out countless hidden gems travelers rarely make it to: from a vintage candy shop to a museum of romantic life, from a hidden garden inside a hospital to a converted hair salon that hosts—of all things—table tennis tournaments. And of course he shows readers where to eat, catch a show, and go for gorgeous sunset strolls. Offering a comprehensive but easily digestible overview, Paris is the perfect book for anyone planning a visit to the city or anyone who simply loves it from afar.

Chicago

Chicago PDF Author: Whet Moser
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789140323
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Chicago has been called the “most American of cities” and the “great American city.” Not the biggest or the most powerful, nor the richest, prettiest, or best, but the most American. How did it become that? And what does it even mean? At its heart, Chicago is America’s great hub. And in this book, Chicago magazine editor and longtime Chicagoan Whet Moser draws on Chicago’s social, urban, cultural, and often scandalous history to reveal how the city of stinky onions grew into the great American metropolis it is today. Chicago began as a trading post, which grew into a market for goods from the west, sprouting the still-largest rail hub in America. As people began to trade virtual representations of those goods—futures—the city became a hub of finance and law. And as academics studied the city’s growth and its economy, it became a hub of intellect, where the University of Chicago’s pioneering sociologists shaped how cities at home and abroad understood themselves. Looking inward, Moser explores how Chicago thinks of itself, too, tracing the development of and current changes in its neighborhoods. From Boystown to Chinatown, Edgewater to Englewood, the Ukrainian Village to Little Village, Chicago is famous for them—and infamous for the segregation between them. With insight sure to enlighten both residents and anyone lucky enough to visit the City of Big Shoulders, Moser offers an informed local’s perspective on everything from Chicago’s enduring paradoxes to tips on its most interesting sights and best eats. An affectionate, beautifully illustrated urban portrait, his book takes us from the very beginnings of Chicago as an idea—a vision in the minds of the region’s first explorers—to the global city it has become.

Urban Planning Against Poverty

Urban Planning Against Poverty PDF Author: Jean-Claude Bolay
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030284190
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
This open access book revisits the theoretical foundations of urban planning and the application of these concepts and methods in the context of Southern countries by examining several case studies from different regions of the world. For instance, the case of Koudougou, a medium-sized city in one of the poorest countries in the world, Burkina Faso, with a population of 115.000 inhabitants, allows us to understand concretely which and how these deficiencies are translated in an African urban context. In contrast, the case of Nueve de Julio, intermediate city of 50.000 dwellers in the pampa Argentina, addresses the new forms of spatial fragmentation and social exclusion linked with agro export and crisis of the international markets. Case studies are also included for cities in Asia and Latin America. Differences and similarities between cases allow us to foresee alternative models of urban planning better adapted to tackle poverty and find efficient ways for more inclusive cities in developing and emerging countries, interacting several dimensions linked with high rates of urbanization: territorial fragmentation; environmental contamination; social disparities and exclusion, informal economy and habitat, urban governance and democracy.

San Francisco

San Francisco PDF Author: Michael Johns
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780239610
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
A local rock star once said, “San Francisco is forty-nine square miles surrounded by reality.” No American city has such a broad sweep of staggering views—of the ocean, of a huge bay, of surrounding hills—or such a high opinion of its own worth. San Francisco has always been rich, too; the city’s great wealth has long underwritten the broadmindedness so vital to its charm. But there is much more to the City by the Bay than money and rarefied air, and, in San Francisco, Michael Johns intimately portrays the history and surprisingly complex sensibilities that give this small city its outsized personality. Johns explores how, despite its sophistication, San Francisco retains a frontier quality that has always attracted seekers—of fortune, power, pleasure, refuge, rebellion. Yet the city is more than irreverent, independent, and a bit outside the law: it’s also historically progressive, technologically innovative, and open to all kinds of people and ideas. As Johns shows us, San Francisco is an easy place to be different—a home to the Beats and the hippies, a vibrant LGBT community and left-wing politics, the rise of Burning Man, and the creation of technologies that make today’s San Francisco the City of Apps. From Haight-Ashbury to the Tenderloin, Chinatown to the Mission, Johns’s urban journey blends historical narrative, personal reflections on the city today, and a treasure trove of images for a true San Francisco treat.

London

London PDF Author: Phil Baker
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789142571
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
City of cities, the modern world’s first great metropolis, London has shaped everything from clothing to youth culture. It has a unique place in the world’s memory, even as its role has changed from the capital of the planet to its playground, and as its lived history has mutated into the heritage industry. In this book, Londoner Phil Baker explores the city’s history and the London of today, balancing well-known major events with more curious and eccentric details. He reveals a city of almost unmatched historical density and richness. For Baker, London turns out to be Gothic in all senses of the word and enjoyably haunted by its own often bloody past. And despite extensive redevelopment, as he shows in this engaging and insightful book, some of the magic remains.

Chicago

Chicago PDF Author: Whet Moser
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789140005
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Chicago has been called the “most American of cities” and the “great American city.” Not the biggest or the most powerful, nor the richest, prettiest, or best, but the most American. How did it become that? And what does it even mean? At its heart, Chicago is America’s great hub. And in this book, Chicago magazine editor and longtime Chicagoan Whet Moser draws on Chicago’s social, urban, cultural, and often scandalous history to reveal how the city of stinky onions grew into the great American metropolis it is today. Chicago began as a trading post, which grew into a market for goods from the west, sprouting the still-largest rail hub in America. As people began to trade virtual representations of those goods—futures—the city became a hub of finance and law. And as academics studied the city’s growth and its economy, it became a hub of intellect, where the University of Chicago’s pioneering sociologists shaped how cities at home and abroad understood themselves. Looking inward, Moser explores how Chicago thinks of itself, too, tracing the development of and current changes in its neighborhoods. From Boystown to Chinatown, Edgewater to Englewood, the Ukrainian Village to Little Village, Chicago is famous for them—and infamous for the segregation between them. With insight sure to enlighten both residents and anyone lucky enough to visit the City of Big Shoulders, Moser offers an informed local’s perspective on everything from Chicago’s enduring paradoxes to tips on its most interesting sights and best eats. An affectionate, beautifully illustrated urban portrait, his book takes us from the very beginnings of Chicago as an idea—a vision in the minds of the region’s first explorers—to the global city it has become.