Author: Heide Imai
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317363647
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
The Japanese urban alleyway, which was once part of people’s personal spatial sphere and everyday life has been transformed by diverse and competing interests. Marginalised through the emergence of new forms of housing and public spaces, re-appropriated by different fields, and re-invented by the contemporary urban design discourse, the social meaning attached to the roji is being re-interpreted by individuals, subcultures and new social movements. The book will introduce and discuss examples of urban practices which take place within the dynamic urban landscape of contemporary Tokyo to portray the life cycle of an urban form being rediscovered, commodified and lost as physical space.
Author: Christoph Brumann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415695457
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
Urban Spaces in Japan explores the workings of power, money and the public interest in the planning and design of Japanese space. Through a set of vivid case studies of well-known Japanese cities including Tokyo, Kobe, and Kyoto, this book examines the potential of civil society in contemporary planning debates. Further, it addresses the implications of Japan's biggest social problem - the demographic decline - for Japanese cities, and demonstrates the serious challenges and exciting possibilities that result from the impending end of Japan's urban growth. Presenting a synthetic approach that reflects both the physical aspects and the social significance of urban spaces, this book scrutinizes the precise patterns of urban expansion and shrinkage. In doing so, it also summarizes current theories of public space, urban space, and the body in space which are relevant to both Japan and the wider international debate. With detailed case studies and more general reflections from a broad range of disciplines, this collection of essays demonstrates the value of cross-disciplinary cooperation. As such, it is of interest to students and scholars of geography and urban planning as well as history, anthropology and cultural studies.
Author: Gitte Marianne Hansen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429594917
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 347
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Book Description
This book is a timely and expansive volume on Murakami Haruki, arguably Japan's most high-profile contemporary writer. With contributions from prominent Murakami scholars, this book approaches the works of Murakami Haruki through interdisciplinary perspectives, discussing their significance and value through the lenses of history; geography; politics; gender and sexuality; translation; and literary influence and circulation. Together the chapters provide a multifaceted assessment on Murakami’s literary oeuvre in the last four decades, vouching for its continuous importance in understanding the world and Japan in contemporary times. The book also features exclusive material that includes the cultural critic Katō Norihiro’s final work on Murakami – his chapter here is one of the few works ever translated into English – to interviews with Murakami and discussions from his translators and editors, shedding light not only on Murakami’s works as literature but as products of cross-cultural exchanges. Murakami Haruki and Our Years of Pilgrimage will prove a valuable resource for students and scholars of Japanese studies, comparative and world literature, cultural studies, and beyond.
Author: Claudia Hildner
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3038210226
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 160
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Book Description
Single-family houses are becoming increasingly outdated. They offer no response to demographic change or to the fact that there are fewer and fewer life-long relationships. They are often too inflexible for new family models or ways of cohabitation. This publication presents projects in recent years in Japan, which respond to the need for new forms of housing. The architects are developing solutions that allow residents to live together but still maintain enough distance and privacy. The presented apartment types and their layout allow for a variety of life models. Particularly interesting here is the use of spaces that provide a gradual transition from public to private space—an approach to building that, according to experts, could revolutionize western residential architecture. The publication portrays these new forms of building and living based on prominent Japanese examples that include Shigeru Ban, Sou Foujimoto, and Akihisa Hirata.
Author: Matthew Wilson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315449102
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 393
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Book Description
Amidst the soot, stink and splendour of Victorian London, a coterie of citizen-sociologists set out to break up the British Empire. They were the followers of the French philosopher Auguste Comte, a controversial figure who introduced the modern science of sociology and the republican Religion of Humanity. Moralising Space examines how from the 1850s Comte’s British followers practised this science and religion with the aim to create a global network of 500 utopian city-states. Curiously the British Positivists’ work has never been the focus of a full-length study on modern sociology and town planning. In this intellectual history, Matthew Wilson shows that through to the interwar period affiliates to the British Positivist Society – Richard Congreve, Frederic Harrison, Charles Booth, Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford – attempted to realise Comte’s vision. With scarcely used source material Wilson presents the Positivists as an organised resistance to imperialism, industrial exploitation, poverty and despondency. Much to the consternation of the church, state and landed aristocracy they organised urban interventions, led ad hoc sociological surveys and published programmes for realising idyllic city-communities. Effectively this book contributes to our understanding of how Positivism, as a utopian spatial design praxis, heavily influenced twentieth-century architecture and planning.
Author: Ole Möystad
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317282841
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
Cognition and the Built Environment argues that interacting with our built environment, as users and as architects, is a cognitive process. It claims that architecture, in its form and meaning, is a basic, embodied level of human cognition. The assumption is that we and our built environment together form an intelligent system, a cognitive feedback loop between us and the world of which we are part. With this as a vantage point, the book discusses the meaning and intelligence of concrete architectural environments as well as the agency of the architect, of his client and of the user. The inquiry oscillates between abstract thought, topological models and cognitive semiotics, between pragmatist philosophy and the professional practice of planning cities, developing projects and using objects. Architecture serves more complex purposes than our caves, paths and landmarks did. Written for students and academics of urban design, urban planning and architectural theory, Cognition and the Built Environment argues that human cognition feeds on the interaction between thought, agency and built environment, and that architecture is the spatial form of this interaction.
Author: Peter Rowe
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1861895364
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 371
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Book Description
An exciting explosion of urban expansion is occurring in East Asia: cities such as Singapore, Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing, and Shanghai are expanding at a prodigious rate and bringing widespread change to the region. Peter G. Rowe's East Asia Modern is a timely comparative analysis of urban growth in this rapidly evolving part of the globe. A renowned scholar on East Asian architecture and urbanism, Peter G. Rowe examines how the unique modernizing process of East Asian cities can be most usefully understood. Rowe offers a historical assessment of the region, chronicling the cities' development over the last century and setting into context their individual paths toward becoming modern. Rowe explains what the modernizing process has meant for the cultural diffusion of predominantly Western ideas, how East Asian urban regions have developed a distinct type of modernity, and what lessons can be gleaned from the contemporary East Asian experience. Refuting many common misconceptions about contemporary East Asian life, East Asia Modern offers a readable critical assessment of life in modern East Asia while also pointing to possibilities for the future.
Author: Oswald Devisch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351615742
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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Book Description
In recent years, many countries all over Europe have witnessed a demand for a more direct form of democracy, ranging from improved clarity of information to being directly involved in decision-making procedures. Increasingly, governments are putting citizen participation at the centre of their policy objectives, striving for more transparency, to engage and empower local individuals and communities to collaborate on public projects and to encourage self-organization. This book explores the role of participatory design in keeping these participatory processes public. It addresses four specific lines of enquiry: how can the use and/or development of technologies and social media help to diversify, to coproduce, to interrupt and to document democratic design experiments? Aimed at researchers and academics in the fields of urban planning and participatory design, this book includes contributions from a range of experts across Europe including the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Denmark, Austria, Spain, France, Romania, Hungary and Finland.
Author: Machiko Iwahashi Ishikawa
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501751956
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
How can the "voiceless" voice be represented? This primary question underpins lshikawa's analysis of selected work by Buraku writer, Nakagami Kenji (1946-1992). In spite of his Buraku background, Nakagami's privilege as a writer made it difficult for him to "hear" and "represent" those voices silenced by mainstream social structures in Japan. This "paradox of representing the silenced voice" is the key theme of the book. Gayatri Spivak theorizes the (im)possibility of representing the voice of "subalterns," those oppressed by imperialism, patriarchy and heteronomativity. Arguing for Burakumin as Japan's "subalterns," Ishikawa draws on Spivak to analyze Nakagami' s texts. The first half of the book revisits the theme of the transgressive Burakumin man. This section includes analysis of a seldom discussed narrative of a violent man and his silenced wife. The second half of the book focuses on the rarely heard voices of Burakumin women from the Akiyuki trilogy. Satoko, the prostitute, unknowingly commits incest with her half-brother, Akiyuki. The aged Yuki sacrifices her youth in a brothel to feed her fatherless family. The mute Moyo remains traumatized by rape. lshikawa' s close reading of Nakagami's representation of the silenced voices of these sexually stigmatized women is this book's unique contribution to Nakagami scholarship.
Author: Anne McKnight
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816672857
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
How Japan’s most canonical postwar writer brought that country’s largest social minority into the mainstream.
