Gardens, City Life and Culture

Gardens, City Life and Culture PDF Author: Michel Conan
Publisher: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Seeks to understand the roles played by gardens from Roman antiquity to approximately 1850, particularly as they relate to public life in large cities.

Gardens, City Life and Culture

Gardens, City Life and Culture PDF Author: Michel Conan
Publisher: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Seeks to understand the roles played by gardens from Roman antiquity to approximately 1850, particularly as they relate to public life in large cities.

Rhapsody in Green: A Writer, an Obsession, a Laughably Small Excuse for a Vegetable Garden

Rhapsody in Green: A Writer, an Obsession, a Laughably Small Excuse for a Vegetable Garden PDF Author: Charlotte Mendelson
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0857839934
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
'Excellent book.' Nigella Lawson 'Charming, inspiring, uplifting... pure lovely.' Marian Keyes 'Read Rhapsody in Green. A novelist's beautiful, useful essays about her tiny garden.' India Knight 'Glorious...for anyone who loves fruit, vegetables, herbs and language. It makes you see them with new eyes.' Diana Henry 'A witty account of 'extreme allotmenteering' for all obsessive gardeners' Mail on Sunday 'An extremely entertaining and inspiring story of one woman's passionate transformation of a small, irregular shaped urban garden into a bountiful source of food.' Woman & Home 'A gardening book like no other, this is the author's 'love letter' to her garden. She relays warm and witty stories about the trials and tribulations throughout her gardening year.' Garden News '...this inspirational, funny book, written by someone who hankers after a homesteader's lifestyle, will make you look at even your window box in a new, more productive light.' The Simple Things 'Gardening is not a hobby but a passion: a mess of excitement and compulsion and urgency and desire. Those who practise it are botanists, evangelists, freedom fighters, midwives and saboteurs; we kill; we bleed. No, I can't drop everything to come in for dinner; it's a matter of life and death out here.' Novelist Charlotte Mendelson has a secret life. Despite owning only six square metres of urban soil and a few pots, she is an extreme gardener; the creator of a tiny but bountiful edible jungle. And like all enthusiasts, she will not rest until you share her obsession. This is the story of an amateur gardener's journey to addiction: her attempts to buy lion dung from London Zoo and to build her own cold frame; her disinhibited composting and creative approach to design; her prejudices (roses, purple flowers, people with orchards); and her passions: quinces, salad-leaves, herbs, Japanese greens and ancient British apples. It is a story of where fantasy meets reality, of the slow onset of a consuming love and, most of all, of how gardening, however peculiar, can save your life.

City Life

City Life PDF Author: Adrian Franklin
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 0857026542
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
"A brave foray into the interdisciplinary and a serious attempt to cover city life in all its complexity... Franklin′s optimism about the city is refreshing. He revels in the growing human and cultural diversity and the ′re-emergence and spread of a more tolerant, carnivalesque, culture-driven city life′, and he celebrates the city′s ability to offer shelter to the unexpected and the fragile. For Franklin, the city is a product of nature, with all its vicissitudes." - Times Higher Education "Franklin writes with barely restrained optimism as he emphasizes the excitement, vitality and potential of cities. This advances the idea of city lives as assemblages of ‘human and non-human networks of texts, software, culture, behaviour, architecture, trees and gardens’... Franklin uses a wide range of sources in making his case. Historical accounts, search engine statistics and social and cultural theory are all smoothly integrated into the narrative." - Sociology Cities are more important as cultural entities than their mere function as dormitories and industrial sites. Yet, the understanding of what makes a city ′alive′ and appealing in cultural terms is still hotly contested - why are some cities so much more interesting, popular and successful than others? In this engaging discussion of ′city life′ Adrian Franklin takes the reader on a tour of contemporary western cities exploring their historical development and arguing that it is the transformative, ritual and performative qualities of successful cities that makes a difference. Here is a new urban culture characterized by ecological frames of reference; tracking the making of contemporary city life from traditional times, through early modern, machinic and modernised stages of development. Adopting dynamic narrative structures and stories to develop its critical position this book creates a vibrant synthesis of city life from its key components of leisure and tourism, recreation and play, arts and culture, nature and environment, and architecture and public space. Emphasising the importance of experience the book represents the fluid complexity of the city as a living space, an environment and a posthumanist space of transformation. It will be of interest to all those engaging with the difficulties of urban life in sociology, human geography, tourism and cultural studies.

Garden Culture of the Twentieth Century

Garden Culture of the Twentieth Century PDF Author: Leberecht Migge
Publisher: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection
ISBN: 9780884023883
Category : Gardens
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Innovative landscape architect Leberecht Migge espoused an idea of garden culture that reflected the progressive political currents of early twentieth-century Germany. Garden Culture of the Twentieth Century details his vision, including an emphasis on the socioeconomic benefits of urban agriculture that prefigured this now popular trend.

The Culture of Cities

The Culture of Cities PDF Author: Lewis Mumford
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504031342
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 572

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Book Description
A classic work advocating ecological urban planning—from a civic visionary and former architecture critic for the New Yorker. Considered among the greatest works of Lewis Mumford—a prolific historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and longtime architecture critic for the New Yorker—The Culture of Cities is a call for communal action to “rebuild the urban world on a sounder human foundation.” First published in 1938, this radical investigation into the human environment is based on firsthand surveys of North American and European locales, as well as extensive historical and technological research. Mumford takes readers from the compact, worker-friendly streets of medieval hamlets to the symmetrical neoclassical avenues of Renaissance cities. He studies the squalor of nineteenth-century factory towns and speculates on the fate of the booming twentieth-century Megalopolis—whose impossible scale, Mumford believes, can only lead to its collapse into a “Nekropolis,” a monstrosity of living death. A civic visionary, Mumford is credited with some of the earliest proposals for ecological urban planning and the appropriate use of technology to create balanced living environments. In the final chapters of The Culture of Cities, he outlines possible paths toward utopian future cities that could be free of the stressors of the Megalopolis, in sync with the rhythms of daily life, powered by clean energy, integrated with agricultural regions, and full of honest and comfortable housing for the working class. The principles set forth by these visions, once applied to Nazi-occupied Europe’s razed cities, are still relevant today as technological advances and overpopulation change the nature of urban life.

City Life

City Life PDF Author: Witold Rybczynski
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0684825295
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Tracing the development of American cities and city life from early colonial settlements to the familiar downtowns of today, a sweeping cultural history reveals how our urban spaces have been shaped by the land and the American lifestyle. Reprint. 25,000 first printing. NYT.

Their Paths Are Peace

Their Paths Are Peace PDF Author: Clara Lederer
Publisher: ATBOSH Media Ltd.
ISBN: 1626130442
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
Their Paths Are Peace tells the story of the creation of The Cleveland Cultural Gardens, a unique collection of landscaped, themed gardens each representing a different ethnic group/organization in Cleveland. First published in 1954 (and long out of print) this 65th anniversary edition presents the original content (with minor corrections) in a fresh layout.

Cities and Urban Cultures

Cities and Urban Cultures PDF Author: Deborah Stevenson
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education (UK)
ISBN: 0335227988
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
*What is distinctive about urban life? *What key trends have shaped the contemporary city? *How have the city and urban cultures been explained by sociology and cultural studies? This is the first book to explore cities and urban life from the perspectives of both sociology and cultural theory. Through an interdisciplinary approach and use of case material, the book demonstrates that the 'real' city of physicality and struggle and the 'imagined' city of representations are entwined in the construction of urban cultures. Starting with a comparison of the rural and the urban, the book considers ways of imagining the city and of conceptualising urban cultures. It goes on to investigate the implications of several pivotal urban and cultural trends, such as the use of the arts and local cultures in city re-imaging, and the ways in which modernism, postmodernism and globalisation have shaped the built environment and the orientation of academic enquiry. Also examined is the way in which representations of the urban landscape in film, literature, art, and popular texts, have informed dominant ideas about the way certain city spaces - including city centres, urban waterfronts, and so-called 'global cities' - should look, function and 'feel'. Designed as a text for undergraduate courses in cultural studies, sociology and wider social science, this book traces the development of urban environments from the nineteenth century to the present, and illuminates the nature of urban life.

The Struggle for Eden

The Struggle for Eden PDF Author: Malve von Hassell
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Writing at a time when the further destruction of community gardens had been legally forbidden, but the city council was voting to continue replacing them with development, Hassell (behavioral sciences, Suffolk County Community College, New York) presents one perspective on the history and current status of urban community gardens on the Lower East Side of New York City. He concentrates on the last two decades of the 20th century. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Fruitful Sites

Fruitful Sites PDF Author: Craig Clunas
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822317951
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Gardens are sites that can be at one and the same time admired works of art and valuable pieces of real estate. As the first account in English to be wholly based on contemporary Chinese sources, this innovative, beautifully illustrated book grounds the practices of garden-making in Ming dynasty China (1368-1644) firmly in the social and cultural history of the day. Who owned Ming gardens? Who visited them? How were they represented in words, in paintings, and in visual culture generally, and what meanings did these representations hold at different levels of Chinese society? How did the discourse of gardens intersect with other discourses such as those of aesthetics, agronomy, geomancy, and botany? By examining the gardens of the city of Suzhou from a number of different angles, Craig Clunas provides a rich picture of a complex cultural phenomenon--one that was of crucial importance to the self-fashioning of the Ming elite. Drawing on a wide range of recent work in cultural theory, the author provides for the first time a historical and materialist account of Chinese garden culture, and replaces broad generalizations and orientalist fantasy with a convincing picture of the garden's role in social life. Fruitful Sites will appeal to all students of China's cultural history, to students of garden history from any part of the world, to art historians, and to readers engaged in Asian and cultural studies.