Consuming Landscapes

Consuming Landscapes PDF Author: Thomas Zeller
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421444836
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Get Book Here

Book Description
What we see through our windshields reflects ideas about our national identity, consumerism, and infrastructure. For better or worse, windshields have become a major frame for viewing the nonhuman world. The view from the road is one of the main ways in which we experience our environments. These vistas are the result of deliberate historical forces, and humans have shaped them as they simultaneously sought to be transformed by them. In Consuming Landscapes, Thomas Zeller explores how what we see while driving reflects how we view our societies and ourselves, the role that consumerism plays in our infrastructure, and ideas about reshaping the environment in the twentieth century. Zeller breaks new ground by comparing the driving experience and the history of landscaped roads in the United States and Germany, two major automotive countries. He focuses specifically on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the United States and the German Alpine Road as case studies. When the automobile was still young, an early twentieth-century group of designers—landscape architects, civil engineers, and planners—sought to build scenic infrastructures, or roads that would immerse drivers in the landscapes that they were traversing. As more Americans and Europeans owned cars and drove them, however, they became less interested in enchanted views; safety became more important than beauty. Clashes between designers and drivers resulted in different visions of landscapes made for automobiles. As strange as it may seem to twenty-first-century readers, many professionals in the early twentieth century envisioned cars and roads, if properly managed, as saviors of the environment. Consuming Landscapes illustrates how the meaning of infrastructures changed as a result of use and consumption. Such changes indicate a deep ambivalence toward the automobile and roads, prompting the question: can cars and roads bring us closer to nature while deeply altering it at the same time?

Consuming Landscapes

Consuming Landscapes PDF Author: Thomas Zeller
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421444836
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Get Book Here

Book Description
What we see through our windshields reflects ideas about our national identity, consumerism, and infrastructure. For better or worse, windshields have become a major frame for viewing the nonhuman world. The view from the road is one of the main ways in which we experience our environments. These vistas are the result of deliberate historical forces, and humans have shaped them as they simultaneously sought to be transformed by them. In Consuming Landscapes, Thomas Zeller explores how what we see while driving reflects how we view our societies and ourselves, the role that consumerism plays in our infrastructure, and ideas about reshaping the environment in the twentieth century. Zeller breaks new ground by comparing the driving experience and the history of landscaped roads in the United States and Germany, two major automotive countries. He focuses specifically on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the United States and the German Alpine Road as case studies. When the automobile was still young, an early twentieth-century group of designers—landscape architects, civil engineers, and planners—sought to build scenic infrastructures, or roads that would immerse drivers in the landscapes that they were traversing. As more Americans and Europeans owned cars and drove them, however, they became less interested in enchanted views; safety became more important than beauty. Clashes between designers and drivers resulted in different visions of landscapes made for automobiles. As strange as it may seem to twenty-first-century readers, many professionals in the early twentieth century envisioned cars and roads, if properly managed, as saviors of the environment. Consuming Landscapes illustrates how the meaning of infrastructures changed as a result of use and consumption. Such changes indicate a deep ambivalence toward the automobile and roads, prompting the question: can cars and roads bring us closer to nature while deeply altering it at the same time?

Routes, Roads and Landscapes

Routes, Roads and Landscapes PDF Author: Brita Brenna
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351902385
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 487

Get Book Here

Book Description
Routes and roads make their way into and across the landscape, defining it as landscape and making it accessible for many kinds of uses and perceptions. Bringing together outstanding scholars from cultural history, geography, philosophy, and a host of other disciplines, this collection examines the complex entanglement between routes and landscapes. It traces the changing conceptions of the landscape from the Enlightenment to the present day, looking at how movement has been facilitated, imagined and represented and how such movement, in turn, has conditioned understandings of the landscape. A particular focus is on the modern transportation landscape as it came into being with the canal, the railway, and the automobile. These modes of transport have had a profound impact on the perception and conceptualization of the modern landscape, a relationship investigated in detail by authors such as Gernot Böhme, Sarah Bonnemaison, Tim Cresswell, Finola O'Kane, Charlotte Klonk, Peter Merriman, Christine Macy, David Nye, Vittoria Di Palma, Charles Withers, and Thomas Zeller.

Landscapes of Privilege

Landscapes of Privilege PDF Author: Nancy Duncan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135939284
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book Here

Book Description
James and Nancy Duncan look at how the aesthetics of physical landscapes are fully enmeshed in producing the American class system. Focusing on an archetypal upper class American suburb-Bedford in Westchester County, NY-they show how the physical presentation of a place carries with it a range of markers of inclusion and exclusion.

Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America

Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America PDF Author: Arnold R. Alanen
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801862649
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Get Book Here

Book Description
Foreword : In search of the American cultural landscape / Dolores Hayden -- Considering nature and culture in historic landscape preservation / Robert Z. Melnick -- Selling heritage landscapes / Richard Francaviglia -- The history and preservation of urban parks and cemeteries / David Schuyler and Patricia M. O'Donnell -- Appropriating place in Puerto Rican barrios : preserving contemporary urban landscapes / Luis Aponte-Parés -- Considering the ordinary : vernacular landscapes in small towns and rural areas / Arnold R. Alanen -- Asian American imprints on the Western landscape / Gail Lee Dubrow -- Ethnographic landscapes : transforming nature into culture / Donald L. Hardesty -- Integrity as a value in cultural landscape preservation / Catherine Howett.

Buyways

Buyways PDF Author: Catherine Gudis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135952434
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Get Book Here

Book Description
The highway has become the buyway. Along the millions of miles the public travels, advertisers spend billions on images of cola, cars, vodka, fast food, and swimming pools that blur past us, catching our fleeting attention and turning the landscape into a corridor of commerce. A smart, succinct, and visually compelling history of the billboard in America, Buyways traces how the outdoor advertising industry changed the face of American commercialism. Taking us from itinerant bill-stickers of circus posters in the 19th century to the blinking, beeping, 3-D eyesores of today, Gudis argues that roadside advertising has turned the landscape itself into a commodity to be bought and sold as advertising space. Buyways vividly chronicles the battles between environmentalists and businessmen as well as the response of artists, from New Deal photographers who satirized the billboard-infested landscape to commercial artists who embraced the kitsch of it all. It also shows how advertisers tapped into the American mythology of the open road, promoting mobile consumption as the American Dream on four wheels. Entertaining and brilliantly illustrated, Buyways is a vibrant road map of the new geography of consumption. Also includes an eight page color insert.

Landscapes, Identities, and Development

Landscapes, Identities, and Development PDF Author: Zoran Roca
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9781409405542
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 512

Get Book Here

Book Description
International in scope and with a broad interdisciplinary relevance, this is a cutting-edge survey of current conceptual and methodological research and planning issues in the area of the landscape-heritage-development interface. The contributors are scholars from a wide range of cultural and professional backgrounds, experienced in fundamental and applied research, planning and policy design.

Eating and Being Eaten

Eating and Being Eaten PDF Author: B. Nyamnjoh
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9956550736
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Get Book Here

Book Description
This innovative book is an open invitation to a rich and copious meal of imagination, senses and desires. It argues that cannibalism is practised by all and sundry. In love or in hate, fear or fascination, purposefulness or indifference, individuals, cultures and societies are actively cannibalising and being cannibalised. The underlying message of: Own up to your own cannibalism! is convincingly argued and richly substantiated. The book brilliantly and controversially puts cannibalism at the heart of the self-assured biomedicine, globalising consumerism and voyeuristic social media. It unveils a vast number of prejudices, blind spots and shameful othering. It calls on the reader to consider a morality and an ethics that are carefully negotiated with required sensibility and sensitivity to the fact that no one and no people have the monopoly of cannibalisation and of creative improvisation in the game of cannibalism. The productive, transformative and (re)inventive understanding of cannibalism argued in the book should bring to the fore one of the most vital aspects of what it means to be human in a dynamic world of myriad interconnections and enchantments. To nourish and cherish such a productive form of cannibalism requires not only a compassionate generosity to let in and accommodate the stranger knocking at the door, but also, and more importantly, a deliberate effort to reach in, identify, contemplate, understand, embrace and become intimate with the stranger within us, individuals and societies alike.

How Green Were the Nazis?

How Green Were the Nazis? PDF Author: Franz-Josef Brüggemeier
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821416472
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich is the first book to examine the Third Reich's environmental policies and to offer an in-depth exploration of the intersections between brown ideologies and green practices.

Castle Of Transhumanism On Crumbling Pillars Of Humanism

Castle Of Transhumanism On Crumbling Pillars Of Humanism PDF Author: Santosh Jha
Publisher: Santosh Jha
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Get Book Here

Book Description
From darkest abyss of contemporary Humanism, rises the Sun of Trans-Humanism, holding potential to kill the hypothesis that ‘Mortality is Ultimate Reality. But; does it truly rise over the premise that ‘Intelligent Races are Suicidal’? This eBook checks out on Consciousness-Cognition-Intelligence and transcends all ‘meanings-purposes’ to test every possible inquisition, all answers and beyond. The query, ‘why am I, what I am’ is dead. Trans-humanism has to reconstruct ‘observance’ and ‘I-Centrism’ to deconstruct Reality; its manifestations and causalities. This transcendence, journeys ‘beyondness’ of very ‘label’ of human ‘media’; enters portals of probabilities that redesign current epistemology-ontology architectures. This eBook invites you to voyage landscapes of all transcendences. Human potentials and its eligibilities to decode, alter and even create Reality are immense and marvelous. But; so are human pathological propensities to manufacture and install ghastliest of hypocrisy-depravity-criminality. This label or term ‘Human’ looks weirder than all cosmic realities put together. It seems the most entropic ‘media’ in the entirety of Cosmic Information and its ‘processing’. The history of human life-living and human tryst with Reality has been infested with brilliant and supreme creation-creativity on one hand and notoriously monstrous and horrendous actions-behaviors on the other. That is why; Trans-humanism sparks deeper fears of complete self-annihilation, as it shall ‘transcend’ not only contemporary potentials of modern humanism but also its worst of pathologies. It is so bizarre that humanism has to fear nothing else but its own collective consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition. That is why the hypothesis that Trans-humanism cannot and should not be a castle to be constructed on the crumbling pillars of contemporary humanism. Transcendence is a massively complex idea. The 21st century humanism and its collective consciousness-cognition-intelligence stand on a rather precarious and tumultuous ‘vantage point’ of contemporaneousness, to actualize the very idea of the term ‘Transcendence’. It is not only about collective human potentials to arrive at the ‘wherewithal’ and ‘agenda’ of transcendence. Far more critical thing is to actualize the ‘spectrum-reality’ of core connotations of ‘meaning and purpose’, embedded in the conceptualizations of ‘Information’, which a human ‘media’ has the need to rise above and go beyond. This truly brings the very idea-idealism of Transcendence in holistic perspective; deciphering all ‘Hard Problems’ of all Realities. Information is the cosmos and cosmos cannot be transcended. All meanings are within the cosmic spectrum of Information. Even transcendence is only a meaning, within Information spectrum. Beyond-ness therefore seems only about expanding the horizons of boundaries; not crossing the boundary. True righteousness of ‘Transcendence’ is for the ‘realities’ of human ‘media’ of consciousness-cognition-intelligence-disposition and critically crucial emergent element of ‘Sense of Agency’. Beyondness is not actualizable for ‘Information’; attainable only with human ‘Media’. Trans-humanism does not have to bother about unmanageable loads of hypocrisy-stupidity-depravity-criminality in modern human world, as the real challenge for trans-humanism is to transcend the entrenched ‘mediocrity’ of human ‘media’, vis-à-vis the ‘brilliance’ and complexity of ‘Information’. The seeds of ‘Hard Problems’ are in innate ‘mediocrity’ of culturally-insinuated ‘agency’ of human ‘media’; which collective humanity and its scammed cultures hail as ‘superiority’ and ‘successes’. This generic mediocrity of human media and its very specific scammed sense of fake-fudged-propagandist superiority have to be transcended. This eBook journeys all landscapes of all transcendences and many more. A humble invite to join in…

Local Societies in Bronze Age Northern Europe

Local Societies in Bronze Age Northern Europe PDF Author: Nils Anfinset
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317544110
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book aims to understand the process of the Bronze Age societies of Northern Europe which are often regarded as the periphery and a bleak contrast to the Central European Bronze Age. The Bronze Age is the first "globalised" period with new types of societies and new modes of exchange and trade. In this context there is considerable local variation and diversity within the Bronze Age societies of Northern Europe which is poorly understood, although there have been advances and changes in this research. Therefore this book challenges some of the mainstream opinions on the Bronze Age of Northern Europe, and focus on local and regional aspects. This is done by a series of articles from significant contributors that deal with these issues on theoretical and empirical levels, with regards to differences, cultural dualism, boundaries, regions and regionality in a period of increased "globalisation". The result is a movement away from local and regional aspects toward communications, travels and contacts between northern Europe and the greater world, not only towards Central Europe and the Near East but also towards the east. Northern/Arctic Europe is often left out in these discussions, and this book will contribute to this greater picture of the Bronze Age world.