Tokyo Roji

Tokyo Roji PDF 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.

Tokyo Roji

Tokyo Roji PDF Author: Heide Imai
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317363647
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book Here

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.

Urban Spaces in Japan

Urban Spaces in Japan PDF 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.

Murakami Haruki and Our Years of Pilgrimage

Murakami Haruki and Our Years of Pilgrimage PDF Author: Gitte Marianne Hansen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429594917
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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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.

Future Living

Future Living PDF 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.

Cognition and the Built Environment

Cognition and the Built Environment PDF 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.

Everyday Life in Asia

Everyday Life in Asia PDF Author: Devorah Kalekin-Fishman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317138422
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Everyday Life in Asia offers a range of detailed case studies which present social perspectives on sensory experiences in Asia. Thematically organized around the notions of the experience of space and place, tradition and the senses, cross-border sensory experiences, and habitus and the senses - its rich empirical content reveals people's commitment to place, and the manner in which its sensory experience provides the key to penetrating the meanings abound in everyday life. Offering the first close analysis of various facets of sensory experience in places that share a geographical location or cultural orientation in Asia, this collection links the conception of place with understandings of 'how the senses work'. With contributions from an international team of experts, Everyday Life in Asia will be of interest to anthropologists, geographers and sociologists with interests in culture, everyday life, and their relation to the senses of place and space.

Moralising Space

Moralising Space PDF 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.

Participatory Design Theory

Participatory Design Theory PDF 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.

Future Asian Space

Future Asian Space PDF Author: Erwin Viray
Publisher: NUS Press
ISBN: 9971695960
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Rapid technological, economic, social and cultural changes are transforming the idea of "Asian space." With the shift to a global economy and an urban population explosion, Asian cities have become a mainstay of progress, national pride, identity, and positioning on the global stage. The extraordinary pace and intensity of the changes have created a situation unique in the history of urban development. Despite the immense diversity of Asian countries, "Asia-ness" is often treated as a distinctive quality that has emerged from unique recent circumstances affecting Asian urbanizations as a whole. In Future Asian Space, 15 authors explore broad concepts relating to the creation and re-creation of "Asian space" and contemporary Asian identity, and their examination of different sites and research approaches highlights the difficulty of pinpointing what Asia-ness is, or might become. Appropriate design and planning of cities is a critical element in building a sustainable future and coping with environmental, social and cultural problems. Future Asian Space is designed to stimulate interests and engagement in discussions of the Asian city, and its trajectories in architecture and urbanism, but the authors' conclusions will intrigue anyone interested in the future of cities and urban life in Asia.

Anthropology for Architects

Anthropology for Architects PDF Author: Ray Lucas
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474241514
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
What can architects learn from anthropologists? This is the central question examined in Anthropology for Architects – a survey and exploration of the ideas which underpin the correspondence between contemporary social anthropology and architecture. The focus is on architecture as a design practice. Rather than presenting architectural artefacts as objects of the anthropological gaze, the book foregrounds the activities and aims of architects themselves. It looks at the choices that designers have to make – whether engaging with a site context, drawing, modelling, constructing, or making a post-occupancy analysis – and explores how an anthropological view can help inform design decisions. Each chapter is arranged around a familiar building type (including the studio, the home, markets, museums, and sacred spaces), in each case showing how anthropology can help designers to think about the social life of buildings at an appropriate scale: that of the individual life-worlds which make up the everyday lives of a building's users. Showing how anthropology offers an invaluable framework for thinking about complex, messy, real-world situations, the book argues that, ultimately, a truly anthropological architecture offers the potential for a more socially informed, engaged and sensitive architecture which responds more directly to people's needs. Based on the author's experience teaching as well as his research into anthropology by way of creative practice, this book will be directly applicable to students and researchers in architecture, landscape, urban design, and design anthropology, as well as to architectural professionals.