Author: Steve Pile
Publisher: SAGE Publications Limited
ISBN: 9780761970415
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
What is real about city life? Real Cities shows why it is necessary to take seriously the more imaginary, fantastic and emotional aspects of city life. Drawing inspiration from the work of Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud and Georg Simmel, Pile explores the dream-like and ghost-like experiences of the city. Such experiences are, he argues, best described as phantasmagorias. The phantasmagorias of city life, though commonplace, are far from self-evident and little understood. This book is a path-breaking exploration of urban phantasmagorias, grounded empirically in a series of unusual and exciting case studies. In this study, four substantial phantasmagorias are identified: dreams, magic, vampires and ghosts. The investigation of each phantasmagoria is developed using a wide variety of clear examples. Thus, voodoo in New York and New Orleans shows how ideas about magic are forged within cities. Meanwhile vampires reveal how specific fears about sex and death are expressed within, and circulate between, cities such as London and Singapore. Taken together, such examples build a unique picture of the diverse roles of the imaginary, fantastic and the emotional in modern city life. What is "real" about the city has radical consequences for how we think about improving city life, for all too often these are over-looked in utopian schemes for the city. Real Cities forcefully argues that an appreciation of urban phantasmagorias must be central to what is considered real about city life.
Author: Darran Anderson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022647030X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 573
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Book Description
How can we understand the infinite variety of cities? Darran Anderson seems to exhaust all possibilities in this work of creative nonfiction. Drawing inspiration from Marco Polo and Italo Calvino, Anderson shows that we have much to learn about ourselves by looking not only at the cities we have built, but also at the cities we have imagined. Anderson draws on literature (Gustav Meyrink, Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, and James Joyce), but he also looks at architectural writings and works by the likes of Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, Medieval travel memoirs from the Middle East, mid-twentieth-century comic books, Star Trek, mythical lands such as Cockaigne, and the works of Claude Debussy. Anderson sees the visionary architecture dreamed up by architects, artists, philosophers, writers, and citizens as wedded to the egalitarian sense that cities are for everyone. He proves that we must not be locked into the structures that exclude ordinary citizens--that cities evolve and that we can have input. As he says: "If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined as well.”
Author: Edoardo Chiesa
Publisher: Youcanprint
ISBN: 8866188077
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 126
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Book Description
The book " REAL CITIES- VIRTUAL CITIES - How to build the real world environmentally and financially sustainable based on the New Telematic City - NTC" shows how, using tools currently known and popular, you can set that world ecologically and financially sustainable, which many hope. Expression of this new mode is the NTC - New Telematic City, not just an acronym, but a business, technological, social opportunity to detail and to achieve. The book first discusses the so-called "pillars" upon which the NTC is based: 1. 1. The first one is the ICT, namely information and communication technologies. 2. 2. The second one is the set of rules and regulations of the European Union, to ensure security and development within Europe. 3. 3. The third one consists of the oriental arts like yoga and martial arts, secular heritage of the East, capable of ensuring the personal development of each individual. It is then shown how, using the pillars with the help of innovative concepts never before assumed, it is possible to redesign the organization of society in the manner proposed by the author.
Author: Alex Kotlowitz
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 1400097509
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 162
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Book Description
The acclaimed author of There Are No Children Here takes us into the heart of Chicago by introducing us to some of the city’s most interesting, if not always celebrated, people. Chicago is one of America’s most iconic, historic, and fascinating cities, as well as a major travel destination. For Alex Kotlowitz, an accidental Chicagoan, it is the perfect perch from which to peer into America’s heart. It’s a place, as one historian has said, of “messy vitalities,” a stew of contradictions: coarse yet gentle, idealistic yet restrained, grappling with its promise, alternately sure and unsure of itself. Chicago, like America, is a kind of refuge for outsiders. It’s probably why Alex Kotlowitz found comfort there. He’s drawn to people on the outside who are trying to clean up—or at least make sense of—the mess on the inside. Perspective doesn’t come easy if you’re standing in the center. As with There Are No Children Here, Never a City So Real is not so much a tour of a place as a chronicle of its soul, its lifeblood. It is a tour of the people of Chicago, who have been the author’s guides into this city’s—and in a broader sense, this country’s—heart. From the Hardcover edition.
Author: Konstantinos Dimopoulos
Publisher: Unbound Publishing
ISBN: 1783528508
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Virtual cities are places of often-fractured geographies, impossible physics, outrageous assumptions and almost untamed imaginations given digital structure. This book, the first atlas of its kind, aims to explore, map, study and celebrate them. To imagine what they would be like in reality. To paint a lasting picture of their domes, arches and walls. From metropolitan sci-fi open worlds and medieval fantasy towns to contemporary cities and glimpses of gothic horror, author and urban planner Konstantinos Dimopoulos and visual artist Maria Kallikaki have brought to life over forty game cities. Together, they document the deep and exhilarating history of iconic gaming landscapes through richly illustrated commentary and analysis. Virtual Cities transports us into these imaginary worlds, through cities that span over four decades of digital history across literary and gaming genres. Travel to fantasy cities like World of Warcraft’s Orgrimmar and Grim Fandango’s Rubacava; envision what could be in the familiar cities of Assassin’s Creed’s London and Gabriel Knight’s New Orleans; and steal a glimpse of cities of the future, in Final Fantasy VII’s Midgar and Half-Life 2’s City 17. Within, there are many more worlds to discover – each formed in the deepest corners of the imagination, their immense beauty and complexity astounding for artists, game designers, world builders and, above all, anyone who plays and cares about video games.
Author: Paul Chatterton
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
ISBN: 9780745337029
Category : City planning
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
A toolkit for realising a more sustainable and co-operative urban future.
Author: Hugh F. Kelly
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317618319
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Winner of the Gold Award in the Tenth Annual Robert Bruss Real Estate Book Competition 24 Hour Cities is the very first full length book about America’s cities that never sleep. Over the last fifty years, the nation’s top live-work-play cities have proven themselves more than just vibrant urban environments for the elite. They are attracting a cross-section of the population from across the U.S. and are preferred destinations for immigrants of all income strata. This is creating a virtuous circle wherein economic growth enhances property values, stronger real estate markets sustain more reliable tax bases, and solid municipal revenues pay for better services that further attract businesses and talented individuals. Yet, just a generation ago, cities like New York, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, and Miami were broke (financially and physically), scarred by violence, and prime examples of urban dysfunction. How did the turnaround happen? And why are other cities still stuck with the hollow downtowns and sprawling suburbs that make for a 9-to-5 urban configuration? Hugh Kelly’s cross-disciplinary research identifies the ingredients of success, and the recipe that puts them together.
Author: John Rennie Short
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351000330
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 136
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Book Description
Hosting the Olympic Games reveals the true costs involved for the cities that hold these large-scale sporting events. It uncovers the financing of the Games, reviewing existing studies to evaluate the costs and benefits, and draws on case study experiences of the Summer and Winter Games from the past forty years to assess the short- and long-term urban legacies for host cities. Written in an easily accessible style and format, it provides an in-depth critical analysis into the franchise model of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and offers an alternative vision for future Games. This book is an important contribution to understanding the consequences for the host cities of Olympic Games.
Author: Charles Montgomery
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429969539
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
A globe-trotting, eye-opening exploration of how cities can—and do—make us happier people Charles Montgomery's Happy City will revolutionize the way we think about urban life. After decades of unchecked sprawl, more people than ever are moving back to the city. Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or worse for our happiness? Are subways, sidewalks, and tower dwelling an improvement on the car-dependence of sprawl? The award-winning journalist Charles Montgomery finds answers to such questions at the intersection between urban design and the emerging science of happiness, and during an exhilarating journey through some of the world's most dynamic cities. He meets the visionary mayor who introduced a "sexy" lipstick-red bus to ease status anxiety in Bogotá; the architect who brought the lessons of medieval Tuscan hill towns to modern-day New York City; the activist who turned Paris's urban freeways into beaches; and an army of American suburbanites who have transformed their lives by hacking the design of their streets and neighborhoods. Full of rich historical detail and new insights from psychologists and Montgomery's own urban experiments, Happy City is an essential tool for understanding and improving our own communities. The message is as surprising as it is hopeful: by retrofitting our cities for happiness, we can tackle the urgent challenges of our age. The happy city, the green city, and the low-carbon city are the same place, and we can all help build it.
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 054413320X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 179
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Book Description
Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.
