Author: Craig Taylor
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393242331
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309
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Book Description
Winner of the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize A symphony of contemporary New York through the magnificent words of its people—from the best-selling author of Londoners. In the first twenty years of the twenty-first century, New York City has been convulsed by terrorist attack, blackout, hurricane, recession, social injustice, and pandemic. New Yorkers weaves the voices of some of the city’s best talkers into an indelible portrait of New York in our time—and a powerful hymn to the vitality and resilience of its people. Best-selling author Craig Taylor has been hailed as “a peerless journalist and a beautiful craftsman” (David Rakoff), acclaimed for the way he “fuses the mundane truth of conversation with the higher truth of art” (Michel Faber). In the wake of his celebrated book Londoners, Taylor moved to New York and spent years meeting regularly with hundreds of New Yorkers as diverse as the city itself. New Yorkers features 75 of the most remarkable of them, their fascinating true tales arranged in thematic sections that follow Taylor’s growing engagement with the city. Here are the uncelebrated people who propel New York each day—bodega cashier, hospital nurse, elevator repairman, emergency dispatcher. Here are those who wire the lights at the top of the Empire State Building, clean the windows of Rockefeller Center, and keep the subway running. Here are people whose experiences reflect the city’s fractured realities: the mother of a Latino teenager jailed at Rikers, a BLM activist in the wake of police shootings. And here are those who capture the ineffable feeling of New York, such as a balloon handler in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade or a security guard at the Statue of Liberty. Vibrant and bursting with life, New Yorkers explores the nonstop hustle to make it; the pressures on new immigrants, people of color, and the poor; the constant battle between loving the city and wanting to leave it; and the question of who gets to be considered a "New Yorker." It captures the strength of an irrepressible city that—no matter what it goes through—dares call itself the greatest in the world.
Author: Jan Gehl
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1597269840
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
For more than forty years Jan Gehl has helped to transform urban environments around the world based on his research into the ways people actually use—or could use—the spaces where they live and work. In this revolutionary book, Gehl presents his latest work creating (or recreating) cityscapes on a human scale. He clearly explains the methods and tools he uses to reconfigure unworkable cityscapes into the landscapes he believes they should be: cities for people. Taking into account changing demographics and changing lifestyles, Gehl emphasizes four human issues that he sees as essential to successful city planning. He explains how to develop cities that are Lively, Safe, Sustainable, and Healthy. Focusing on these issues leads Gehl to think of even the largest city on a very small scale. For Gehl, the urban landscape must be considered through the five human senses and experienced at the speed of walking rather than at the speed of riding in a car or bus or train. This small-scale view, he argues, is too frequently neglected in contemporary projects. In a final chapter, Gehl makes a plea for city planning on a human scale in the fast- growing cities of developing countries. A “Toolbox,” presenting key principles, overviews of methods, and keyword lists, concludes the book. The book is extensively illustrated with over 700 photos and drawings of examples from Gehl’s work around the globe.
Author: Eli Friedman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231555830
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 155
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Book Description
Amid a vast influx of rural migrants into urban areas, China has allowed cities wide latitude in providing education and other social services. While millions of people have been welcomed into the megacities as a source of cheap labor, local governments have used various tools to limit their access to full citizenship. The Urbanization of People reveals how cities in China have granted public goods to the privileged while condemning poor and working-class migrants to insecurity, constant mobility, and degraded educational opportunities. Using the school as a lens on urban life, Eli Friedman investigates how the state manages flows of people into the city. He demonstrates that urban governments are providing quality public education to those who need it least: school admissions for nonlocals heavily favor families with high levels of economic and cultural capital. Those deemed not useful are left to enroll their children in precarious resource-starved private schools that sometimes are subjected to forced demolition. Over time, these populations are shunted away to smaller locales with inferior public services. Based on extensive ethnographic research and hundreds of in-depth interviews, this interdisciplinary book details the policy framework that produces unequal outcomes as well as providing a fine-grained account of the life experiences of people drawn into the cities as workers but excluded as full citizens.
Author: N. K. Jemisin
Publisher: Tor Books
ISBN: 076539345X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 27
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Book Description
In this standalone short story by N. K. Jemisin, author of The Fifth Season, winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, New York City is about to go through a few changes. Like all great metropolises before it, when a city gets big enough, old enough, it must be born; but there are ancient enemies who cannot tolerate new life. Thus New York will live or die by the efforts of a reluctant midwife...and how well he can learn to sing the city's mighty song. The City Born Great is a Tor.com Original. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Author: Richard Florida
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307372138
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 418
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Book Description
International Bestseller All places are not created equal. In this groundbreaking book, Richard Florida shows that where we live is increasingly a crucial factor in our lives, one that fundamentally affects our professional and personal prospects. As well as explaining why place matters now more than ever, Who’s Your City? provides indispensable tools to help you choose the right place for you. It’s a cliché of the information age that globalization has made place irrelevant, that one can telecommute as effectively from New Zealand as New York. But it’s not true, Richard Florida argues, relying on twenty years of innovative research in urban studies, creativity, and demographic trends. In fact, as new units of economic growth called mega-regions become increasingly specialized, the world is becoming more and more “spiky” — divided between flourishing clusters of talent, education and competitiveness, and moribund “valleys.” All these places have personalities, Richard Florida explains in the second half of Who’s Your City?, and happiness depends on finding the city in which you can balance your personal and career goals to thrive. More people than ever before now have the opportunity to choose where to live, but at different points in our lives we need different kinds of places, he points out — what a couple of recent college graduates want from their city isn’t necessarily what a retiree is looking for. You have to find the place that suits you best: a boho-burb neighbourhood isn’t likely to be the best fit for patio man. So, for the first time, Who’s Your City? ranks cities by their fitness for various life stages, rating the best places for singles, young families, and empty nesters. It summarizes the key factors that make place matter to different kinds of people, from professional opportunities to the closeness of family to how well it matches their lifestyle, and provides an in-depth series of steps to help you choose the right place wisely. Sparkling with Richard Florida’s signature intellectual originality, Who’s Your City? moves from insights to studies to personal anecdotes, from a startling “Singles Map” of the United States to surprising data on the difference aesthetics makes to people’s sense of place. A perceptive and transformative book, it is both a brilliant exploration of the fundamental importance of place and an essential guide to making what may be the most important decision of your life.
Author: Michael Oluf Emerson
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479800260
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
Introduction: the claim -- How it happens -- Becoming market and people cities -- How government and leaders make cities work -- What residents think, believe, and act on -- Why it matters -- Getting there, being there: transportation and land use -- Environment/economy : and or versus? -- Life together and apart -- Across cities -- To be or not to be -- Acknowledgments -- Methodological appendix -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the authors
Author: Starhawk
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0307477657
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 496
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Book Description
An epic tale of freedom and slavery, love and war, and the potential futures of humankind tells of a twenty-first century California clan caught between two clashing worlds, one based on tolerance, the other on repression. Declaration of the Four Sacred Things The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth. Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them. To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves became the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. no one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy. All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity. To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible. To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices. To this we dedicate our lives. Praise for The Fifth Sacred Thing “This is wisdom wrapped in drama.”—Tom Hayden, California state senator “Starhawk makes the jump to fiction quite smoothly with this memorable first novel.”—Locus “Totally captivating . . . a vision of the paradigm shift that is essential for our very survival as a species on this planet.”—Elinor Gadon, author of The Once and Future Goddess “This strong debut fits well against feminist futuristic, utopic, and dystopic works by the likes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ursula LeGuin, and Margaret Atwood.”—Library Journal
Author: Alexander Garvin
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1610917588
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
One of Planetizen's Top Planning Books for 2017 - San Francisco Chronicle's 2016 Holiday Books Gift Guide Pick What makes a great city? City planner and architect Alexander Garvin set out to answer this question by observing cities, largely in North America and Europe, with special attention to Paris, London, New York, and Vienna. For Garvin, greatness is about what people who shape cities can do to make a city great. A great city is a dynamic, constantly changing place that residents and their leaders can reshape to satisfy their demands. Most importantly, it is about the interplay between people and public realm, and how they have interacted throughout history to create great cities. What Makes a Great City will help readers understand that any city can be changed for the better and inspire entrepreneurs, public officials, and city residents to do it themselves.
Author: Kevin Lynch
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262620017
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.
Author: Neil Brenner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136625046
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
The worldwide financial crisis has sent shock-waves of accelerated economic restructuring, regulatory reorganization and sociopolitical conflict through cities around the world. It has also given new impetus to the struggles of urban social movements emphasizing the injustice, destructiveness and unsustainability of capitalist forms of urbanization. This book contributes analyses intended to be useful for efforts to roll back contemporary profit-based forms of urbanization, and to promote alternative, radically democratic and sustainable forms of urbanism. The contributors provide cutting-edge analyses of contemporary urban restructuring, including the issues of neoliberalization, gentrification, colonization, "creative" cities, architecture and political power, sub-prime mortgage foreclosures and the ongoing struggles of "right to the city" movements. At the same time, the book explores the diverse interpretive frameworks – critical and otherwise – that are currently being used in academic discourse, in political struggles, and in everyday life to decipher contemporary urban transformations and contestations. The slogan, "cities for people, not for profit," sets into stark relief what the contributors view as a central political question involved in efforts, at once theoretical and practical, to address the global urban crises of our time. Drawing upon European and North American scholarship in sociology, politics, geography, urban planning and urban design, the book provides useful insights and perspectives for citizens, activists and intellectuals interested in exploring alternatives to contemporary forms of capitalist urbanization.
