Author: Robin Visser
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392771
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375
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Book Description
Denounced as parasitical under Chairman Mao and devalued by the norms of traditional Chinese ethics, the city now functions as a site of individual and collective identity in China. Cities envelop the countryside, not only geographically and demographically but also in terms of cultural impact. Robin Visser illuminates the cultural dynamics of three decades of radical urban development in China. Interpreting fiction, cinema, visual art, architecture, and urban design, she analyzes how the aesthetics of the urban environment have shaped the emotions and behavior of people and cultures, and how individual and collective images of and practices in the city have produced urban aesthetics. By relating the built environment to culture, Visser situates postsocialist Chinese urban aesthetics within local and global economic and intellectual trends. In the 1980s, writers, filmmakers, and artists began to probe the contradictions in China’s urbanization policies and rhetoric. Powerful neorealist fiction, cinema, documentaries, paintings, photographs, performances, and installations contrasted forms of glittering urban renewal with the government’s inattention to a livable urban infrastructure. Narratives and images depicting the melancholy urban subject came to illustrate ethical quandaries raised by urban life. Visser relates her analysis of this art to major transformations in urban planning under global neoliberalism, to the development of cultural studies in the Chinese academy, and to ways that specific cities, particularly Beijing and Shanghai, figure in the cultural imagination. Despite the environmental and cultural destruction caused by China’s neoliberal policies, Visser argues for the emergence of a new urban self-awareness, one that offers creative resolutions for the dilemmas of urbanism through new forms of intellectual engagement in society and nascent forms of civic governance.
Author: C. R. Bryant
Publisher: Longman Publishing Group
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Author: Jeremy Brown
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107024048
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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Book Description
A powerful work of grassroots history, tracing China's rural-urban divide back to the policies of Mao Zedong, which pitted city dwellers against villagers.
Author: Alissa Hessler
Publisher: Page Street Publishing
ISBN: 1624144101
Category : House & Home
Languages : en
Pages : 593
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Book Description
The No-Nonsense Guide For Country Dreamers Though moving to the country takes determination, every ex-urbanite says it was the best decision they ever made. The same rings true for Alissa Hessler, who relocated from Seattle to rural Maine years ago and has never looked back. In this book she uses her wit, charm and experience to help you chart a path to successful country living. Ditch the City and Go Country covers the ins and outs of how to find a home, how to keep your current job remotely or where to look for a new one, how to own livestock and prepare for disasters, how to make a smooth transition and become a part of your new community and how to embrace the seasons. With this must-have guide, you’ll be able to stop daydreaming and finally live the life you’ve always wanted in the country. Alissa Hessler was inspired to launch her blog Urban Exodus after relocating to Maine in 2011. She has been featured in Modern Farmer, Popular Photography, Click Magazine and Maine Home.
Author: Karen Rosenkranz
Publisher: Frame Publishers
ISBN: 9492311313
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
City Quitters portrays creative pioneers pursuing alternative ways of living and working away from big cities. What does it mean to leave city life behind? Can the reality of living in the countryside fulfil our desire for a better, simpler, more creative life? This book is an attempt to shed light on what rural life can be like today, with all its joys and challenges, providing a fresh look at the people and scenes thriving outside urban spaces. From experimental co-habitation in a renaissance castle to oversized artworks on a farm, City Quitters offers a global perspective on creative post-urban life: 22 stories from 12 countries and five continents, all based in places with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. About the author Karen Rosenkranz is an independent trend forecaster and ethnographer based in London. She has travelled all over the world spotting shifts in behaviour, attitudes and aesthetics, and has helped creative agencies from Amsterdam to New York uncover important socio-cultural changes. Fascinated by things that haven’t found a place yet, and anything that might impact how we live in years to come, Rosenkranz continues to explore the origins of fresh and original ideas with City Quitters. Features • 22 interviews with creative professionals and entrepreneurs who left a big city and are now living and working in a rural or provincial environment • Offers fascinating insights into the personal and professional lives of creative individuals across the globe • Shows a fresh approach to rural living beyond rustic pastimes and nostalgia
Author: Ralph Rosen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047409183
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 397
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Book Description
The third in a series that explores cultural and ethical values in Classical antiquity, this volume examines the dichotomy between 'city' and 'country' in ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Fourteen papers address a variety of topics on this theme, and include a variety of methodological approaches—archaeological, iconographic, literary and philosophical. The book demonstrates that, despite a common rhetoric of polarity in antiquity that tended to construct city and countryside as very distinct, oppositional categories, there was far less consistency (and far more nuance) about the ideologies felt to inhere in each.
Author: Raymond Williams
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195198102
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
As a brilliant survey of English literature in terms of changing attitudes towards country and city, Williams' highly-acclaimed study reveals the shifting images and associations between these two traditional poles of life throughout the major developmental periods of English culture.
Author: Alexander R. Thomas
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793644330
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 491
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Book Description
City and Country: The Historical Evolution of Urban-Rural Systems begins with a simple assumption: every human requires, on average, two-thousand calories per day to stay alive. Tracing the ramifications of this insight leads to the caloric well: the caloric demand at one point in the environment. As population increases, the depth of the caloric well reflects this increased demand and requires a population to go further afield for resources, a condition called urban dependency. City and Country traces the structural ramifications of these dynamics as the population increased from the Paleolithic to today. We can understand urban dependency as the product of the caloric demands a population puts on a given environment, and when those demands outstrip the carry capacity of the environment, a caloric well develops that forces a community to look beyond its immediate area for resources. As the well deepens, the horizon from which resources are gathered is pushed further afield, often resulting in conflict with neighboring groups. Prior to settled villages, increases in population resulted in cultural (technological) innovations that allowed for greater use of existing resources: the broad-spectrum revolution circa 20 thousand years ago, the birth of agricultural villages 11 thousand years ago, and hierarchically organized systems of multiple settlements working together to produce enough food during the Ubaid period in Mesopotamia seven-thousand years ago—the first urban-rural systems. As cities developed, increasing population resulted in an ever-deepening morass of urban dependency that required expansion of urban-rural systems. These urban-rural dynamics today serve as an underlying logic upon which modern capitalism is built. The culmination of two decades of research into the nature of urban-rural dynamics, City and Country argues that at the heart of the logic of capitalism is an even deeper logic: urbanization is based on urban dependency.
Author: Rem Koolhaas
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783836584395
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
From animals to robotization, climate change to migration, Rem Koolhaas presents a new collaborative project exploring how countryside everywhere is transforming beyond recognition. The pocketbook gathers in-depth essays spanning from Fukushima to the Netherlands, Siberia to Uganda - an urgent dispatch from this long-neglected realm, revealing its radical potential for changing everything about how we live
Author: Carmelo Esterrich
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822983451
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Puerto Rico was swept by a wave of modernization, transforming the island from a predominantly rural society to an unquestionably urban one. A curious paradox ensued, however. While the island underwent rapid urbanization, and the rhetoric of economic development reigned over official discourses, the newly installed insular government, along with some academic circles and radio and television media, constructed, promoted, and sponsored a narrative of Puerto Rican culture based on rural subjects, practices, and spaces. By examining a wide range of cultural texts, but focusing on the film production of the Division of Community Education, the popular dance music of Cortijo y su combo, and the literary texts of Jose Luis Gonzalez and Rene Marques, Concrete and Countryside offers an in-depth analysis of how Puerto Ricans responded to this transformative period. It also shows how the arts used a battery of images of the urban and the rural to understand, negotiate, and critique the innumerable changes taking place on the island.
