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Author: Jared Orsi
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520238508
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
An fascinating history of flood control efforts in Los Angeles from the 1870s to the present, showing how engineering has continually failed to contain nature. This book teaches us to think of cities as ecosystems.
Author: Jared Orsi
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520238508
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
An fascinating history of flood control efforts in Los Angeles from the 1870s to the present, showing how engineering has continually failed to contain nature. This book teaches us to think of cities as ecosystems.
Author: Martin Reuss
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813930537
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
The view of nature and technology inhabiting totally different, even opposite, spheres persists across time and cultures. Most people would consider an English countryside or a Louisiana bayou to be "natural," though each is to an extent the product of technology. Pollution, widely thought to be a purely man-made phenomenon, results partly from natural processes. All around us, things from the natural world are brought into the human world. At what point do we consider them part of culture rather than nature? And does such a distinction illuminate our world or obscure its workings? This compelling new book challenges the view that a clear and unwavering boundary exists between nature and technology. Rejecting this dichotomy, the contributors show how the history of each can be united in a constantly shifting panorama where definitions of "nature" and "technology" alter and overlap. In addition to recognizing the artificial divide between these two concepts, the essays in this book demonstrate how such thinking may affect societies’ ability to survive and prosper. The answers and ideas are as numerous as the landscapes they consider, for there is no single path toward a more harmonious vision of technology and nature. Technologies that work in one place may not in another. Nature that is preserved in one community might become the raw material of technological progress somewhere else. Add to this the fact that the natural world and technology are not passive players, but are profoundly involved in cultural construction. Understanding such dynamics not only reveals a new historical complexity; it prepares us for coping with many of the most difficult and pressing social issues facing us today. Contributors Peter Coates * Craig E. Colten * Stephen H. Cutcliffe * Hugh S. Gorman * Betsy Mendelsohn * Joy Parr * Peter C. Perdue * Sara B. Pritchard * Martin Reuss * William D. Rowley * Edmund Russell * Joel A. Tarr * Ann Vileisis * James C. Williams * Thomas Zeller
Author: Matthew Gandy
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262028255
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 363
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Book Description
A study of water at the intersection of landscape and infrastructure in Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and London. Water lies at the intersection of landscape and infrastructure, crossing between visible and invisible domains of urban space, in the tanks and buckets of the global South and the vast subterranean technological networks of the global North. In this book, Matthew Gandy considers the cultural and material significance of water through the experiences of six cities: Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and London. Tracing the evolving relationships among modernity, nature, and the urban imagination, from different vantage points and through different periods, Gandy uses water as a lens through which to observe both the ambiguities and the limits of nature as conventionally understood. Gandy begins with the Parisian sewers of the nineteenth century, captured in the photographs of Nadar, and the reconstruction of subterranean Paris. He moves on to Weimar-era Berlin and its protection of public access to lakes for swimming, the culmination of efforts to reconnect the city with nature. He considers the threat of malaria in Lagos, where changing geopolitical circumstances led to large-scale swamp drainage in the 1940s. He shows how the dysfunctional water infrastructure of Mumbai offers a vivid expression of persistent social inequality in a postcolonial city. He explores the incongruous concrete landscapes of the Los Angeles River. Finally, Gandy uses the fictional scenario of a partially submerged London as the starting point for an investigation of the actual hydrological threats facing that city.
Author: Metuge Ekane
Publisher: BoD - Books on Demand
ISBN: 9180571840
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 598
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Book Description
When it comes to the discourse of military intervention, the market is saturated with all sorts of books of war. Such books, for the most part, tend to be narrative accounts of heroic militarism which often do not address the aspect of [societal] rehabilitation. Scores of these books do not highlight the relevance of “interactive socialization” as regards politically embattled nations that harbour [sociologically] shattered societies. So, there is a gap in the market when it comes to the rehabilitation of battled-scarred societies with psychologically distressed masses. Garrison Metropolis explores the adaptive rehabilitation of this embattled universe through a regenerative doctrine of military intervention called “Pure militarism”.
Author: Peter Coates
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 178023144X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Many of the world’s major cities sprang up on the banks of rivers. Used for water, food, irrigation, transportation, and power, rivers sustain life and connect the world together, but most of us think of them simply as waterways that must be crossed on the way to another place. Using four European and two North American rivers as examples, A Story of Six Rivers considers the place of rivers in our world and emphasizes the inextricable links between history, culture, and ecology. Peter Coates explores six rivers, chosen as examples of the types of rivers found on the planet: the Danube, the second-longest river in Europe; the Spree, which flows through Berlin; the Po, which cuts eastward across northern Italy; the Mersey in northwest England; the Yukon, which runs through Canada and Alaska; and the Los Angeles in California. Creating a series of river biographies, Coates gives voice to each of these bodies of water, exploring how rivers nurture us, provide cultural and economic opportunities, and pose threats to our everyday lives. He challenges recent narratives that paint rivers as the victims of abuse, pollution, and damage at the hands of humans, focusing on change rather than devastation. Describing how humans and rivers form a symbiotic—and sometimes mutually destructive—relationship, Coates argues that rivers illustrate the limits of human authority and that their capacity to inspire us is as strong as our ability to pollute them. An intimate portrait of the way these bodies of water inform our lives, A Story of Six Rivers will make us reconsider the streams and tributaries we traverse each day.
Author: William Deverell
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405161833
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 539
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Book Description
This volume of original essays by leading scholars is an innovative, thorough introduction to the history and culture of California. Includes 30 essays by leading scholars in the field Essays range widely across perspectives, including political, social, economic, and environmental history Essays with similar approaches are paired and grouped to work as individual pieces and as companions to each other throughout the text Produced in association with the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West
Author: Gregory Simon
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520292790
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
Flame and Fortune in the American West creatively and meticulously investigates the ongoing politics, folly, and avarice shaping the production of increasingly widespread yet dangerous suburban and exurban landscapes. The 1991 Oakland Hills Tunnel Fire is used as a starting point to better understand these complex social-environmental processes. The Tunnel Fire is the most destructive fire—in terms of structures lost—in California history. More than 3,000 residential structures burned and 25 lives were lost. Although this fire occurred in Oakland and Berkeley, others like it sear through landscapes in California and the American West that have experienced urban growth and development within areas historically prone to fire. Simon skillfully blends techniques from environmental history, political ecology, and science studies to closely examine the Tunnel Fire within a broader historical and spatial context of regional economic development and natural-resource management, such as the widespread planting of eucalyptus trees as an exotic lure for homeowners and the creation of hillside neighborhoods for tax revenue—decisions that produced communities with increased vulnerability to fire. Simon demonstrates how in Oakland a drive for affluence led to a state of vulnerability for rich and poor alike that has only been exacerbated by the rebuilding of neighborhoods after the fire. Despite these troubling trends, Flame and Fortune in the American West illustrates how many popular and scientific debates on fire limit the scope and efficacy of policy responses. These risky yet profitable developments (what the author refers to as the Incendiary), as well as proposed strategies for challenging them, are discussed in the context of urbanizing areas around the American West and hold global applicability within hazard-prone areas.
Author: P. Brooker
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403907099
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
A study of urban identity and community looks at selected twentieth century literary and film texts in the context of theorizations of modernism, postmodernism, postcoloniality and globalization. Brooker draws on Beck and Giddens to propose a 'reflexive modernism' which rewrites and re-imagines the urban scene. The principal cities considered are London and New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Bangkok. Writers considered include Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Hanif Kureishi, Iain Sinclair, Paul Auster, Sarah Schulman and William Gibson. Filmmakers include Patrick Keiller and Wong Kar-Wai.
Author: Illinois. Military and Naval Dept
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Illinois
Languages : en
Pages : 850
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Book Description
Author: William Deverell
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822973111
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
Most people equate Los Angeles with smog, sprawl, forty suburbs in search of a city-the great "what-not-to-do" of twentieth-century city building. But there's much more to LA's story than this shallow stereotype. History shows that Los Angeles was intensely, ubiquitously planned. The consequences of that planning-the environmental history of urbanism—is one place to turn for the more complex lessons LA has to offer. Working forward from ancient times and ancient ecologies to the very recent past, Land of Sunshine is a fascinating exploration of the environmental history of greater Los Angeles. Rather than rehearsing a litany of errors or insults against nature, rather than decrying the lost opportunities of "roads not taken," these essays, by nineteen leading geologists, ecologists, and historians, instead consider the changing dynamics both of the city and of nature. In the nineteenth century, for example, "density" was considered an evil, and reformers struggled mightily to move the working poor out to areas where better sanitation and flowers and parks "made life seem worth the living." We now call that vision "sprawl," and we struggle just as much to bring middle-class people back into the core of American cities. There's nothing natural, or inevitable, about such turns of events. It's only by paying very close attention to the ways metropolitan nature has been constructed and construed that meaningful lessons can be drawn. History matters. So here are the plants and animals of the Los Angeles basin, its rivers and watersheds. Here are the landscapes of fact and fantasy, the historical actors, events, and circumstances that have proved transformative over and over again. The result is a nuanced and rich portrait of Los Angeles that will serve planners, communities, and environmentalists as they look to the past for clues, if not blueprints, for enhancing the quality and viability of cities.
