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Author: Andrew Grant
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501764101
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
In The Concrete Plateau, Andrew Grant examines the ways that urbanization has extended into the Tibetan Plateau. Many people still think of Tibetans as not being urban, or that if they do live in cities, this means that they have lost something. Much of this is relates to the expectation that urbanization can only erode essential aspects of Tibetan culture. Grant pushes back against this notion through his in-depth exploration of Tibetans' experiences with urban life in the growing city of Xining, the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau. Grant shows how Tibetans' actions to sustain their community challenge China's civilizing machine: a product of state-led urbanization that seeks to marginalize ethnic and indigenous groups. In their homes, neighborhoods, and businesses, Tibetans' assertion of cultural identity and modification of the built environment has prevented their assimilation into China's national urban project. The Concrete Plateau presents insights into the politics of urban development not only in Tibet and China, but to contexts of urban diversity all around world. Its findings are important for studies of urban development in the Global South where in-migrating ethnic and indigenous groups are negotiating top-down urban projects. Grant's book offers a profound rethinking of urbanization, rurality, culture, and the politics of place.
Author: Andrew Grant
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501764101
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
In The Concrete Plateau, Andrew Grant examines the ways that urbanization has extended into the Tibetan Plateau. Many people still think of Tibetans as not being urban, or that if they do live in cities, this means that they have lost something. Much of this is relates to the expectation that urbanization can only erode essential aspects of Tibetan culture. Grant pushes back against this notion through his in-depth exploration of Tibetans' experiences with urban life in the growing city of Xining, the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau. Grant shows how Tibetans' actions to sustain their community challenge China's civilizing machine: a product of state-led urbanization that seeks to marginalize ethnic and indigenous groups. In their homes, neighborhoods, and businesses, Tibetans' assertion of cultural identity and modification of the built environment has prevented their assimilation into China's national urban project. The Concrete Plateau presents insights into the politics of urban development not only in Tibet and China, but to contexts of urban diversity all around world. Its findings are important for studies of urban development in the Global South where in-migrating ethnic and indigenous groups are negotiating top-down urban projects. Grant's book offers a profound rethinking of urbanization, rurality, culture, and the politics of place.
Author: Frederick Law Olmsted
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN: 9780262650120
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
A century ago Frederick Law Olmsted recognized the need for extensive planning if American cities were to become civilized environments for man. The selections in this book demonstrate his understanding of urban spaces and how, when politically unobstructed, he was able to manipulate them. While Sutton has concentrated on Olmsted's contributions to the theory and practice of city planning, her anthology reveals a broad and comprehensive cross section of his career.Writings in the first two chapters elucidate the views and values that Olmsted brought to his work--notably his attitudes on form and function (fitness and appropriateness)-- and his criticisms of existing urban patterns. At a time when men generally took a static approach to planning, Olmsted opposed the traditional grid system, lack of organic structure, and abuse of space which dominated schemes for American cities. Instead he proposed that large spaces be set aside for public parks, connected by roadways and public transportation to the rest of the city.The books remaining chapters contain documents written in support of specific plans for five North American cities with widely varying conditions: San Francisco, Buffalo, Montreal, Chicago, and Boston. The writings range in scope from Olmsted's observations on nineteenth century California life ti his most elaborate and ambitious design of a system of parks and boulevards for Boston. Two selections describing plans for the exurban Garden Cities of Berkeley, California, and Riverside, Illinois, complete anthology.At the end of his career, Olmsted could look on 17 large public parks as well as numerous smaller works and comment: "I know that in the minds of a large body of men of influence I have raised my calling from the rank of a trade, even of a handicraft, to that of a liberal profession, an art, an art of design."
Author: Peter Hall
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 9780394587325
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1236
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Book Description
Ranging over 2,500 years,Cities in Civilizationis a tribute to the city as the birthplace of Western civilization. Drawing on the contributions of economists and geographers, of cultural, technological, and social historians, Sir Peter Hall examines twenty-one cities at their greatest moments. Hall describes the achievements of these golden ages and outlines the precise combinations of forces -- both universal and local -- that led to each city's belle epoque. Hall identifies four distinct expressions of civic innovation: artistic growth, technological progress, the marriage of culture and technology, and solutions to evolving problems. Descriptions of Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Elizabethan London, and nineteenth-century Vienna bring to life those seedbeds of artistic and intellectual creativity. Explorations of Manchester during the Industrial Revolution, of Henry Ford's Detroit, and of Palo Alto at the dawn of the computer age highlight centers of technological advances. Tales of the creation of Los Angeles' movie industry and the birth of the blues and rock 'n' roll in Memphis depict the marriage of culture and technology. Finally, Hall celebrates cities that have been forced to solve problems created by their very size. With Imperial Rome came the apartment block and aqueduct; nineteenth-century London introduced policing, prisons, and sewers; twentieth-century New York developed the skyscraper; and Los Angeles became the first city without a center, a city ruled instead by the car. And in a fascinating conclusion, Hall speculates on urban creativity in the twenty-first century. This penetrating study reveals not only the lives of cities but also the lives of the people who built them and created the civilizations within them. A decade in the making,Cities in Civilizationis the definitive account of the culture of cities.
Author: Toby Lincoln
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108169295
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285
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Book Description
In this accessible new study, Toby Lincoln offers the first history of Chinese cities from their origins to the present. Despite being an agricultural society for thousands of years, China had an imperial urban civilization. Over the last century, this urban civilization has been transformed into the world's largest modern urban society. Throughout their long history, Chinese cities have been shaped by interactions with those around the world, and the story of urban China is a crucial part of the history of how the world has become an urban society. Exploring the global connections of Chinese cities, the urban system, urban governance, and daily life alongside introductions to major historical debates and extracts from primary sources, this is essential reading for all those interested in China and in urban history.
Author: Guillermo Algaze
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226013782
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
The alluvial lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southern Mesopotamia are widely known as the “cradle of civilization,” owing to the scale of the processes of urbanization that took place in the area by the second half of the fourth millennium BCE. In Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization, Guillermo Algaze draws on the work of modern economic geographers to explore how the unique river-based ecology and geography of the Tigris-Euphrates alluvium affected the development of urban civilization in southern Mesopotamia. He argues that these natural conditions granted southern polities significant competitive advantages over their landlocked rivals elsewhere in Southwest Asia, most importantly the ability to easily transport commodities. In due course, this resulted in increased trade and economic activity and higher population densities in the south than were possible elsewhere. As southern polities grew in scale and complexity throughout the fourth millennium, revolutionary new forms of labor organization and record keeping were created, and it is these socially created innovations, Algaze argues, that ultimately account for why fully developed city-states emerged earlier in southern Mesopotamia than elsewhere in Southwest Asia or the world.
Author: Bernhard Gissibl
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857455273
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
National parks are one of the most important and successful institutions in global environmentalism. Since their first designation in the United States in the 1860s and 1870s they have become a global phenomenon. The development of these ecological and political systems cannot be understood as a simple reaction to mounting environmental problems, nor can it be explained by the spread of environmental sensibilities. Shifting the focus from the usual emphasis on national parks in the United States, this volume adopts an historical and transnational perspective on the global geography of protected areas and its changes over time. It focuses especially on the actors, networks, mechanisms, arenas, and institutions responsible for the global spread of the national park and the associated utilization and mobilization of asymmetrical relationships of power and knowledge, contributing to scholarly discussions of globalization and the emergence of global environmental institutions and governance.
Author: Alex Krieger
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674987993
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
A sweeping history of American cities and towns, and the utopian aspirations that shaped them, by one of America’s leading urban planners and scholars. The first European settlers saw America as a paradise regained. The continent seemed to offer a God-given opportunity to start again and build the perfect community. Those messianic days are gone. But as Alex Krieger argues in City on a Hill, any attempt at deep understanding of how the country has developed must recognize the persistent and dramatic consequences of utopian dreaming. Even as ideals have changed, idealism itself has for better and worse shaped our world of bricks and mortar, macadam, parks, and farmland. As he traces this uniquely American story from the Pilgrims to the “smart city,” Krieger delivers a striking new history of our built environment. The Puritans were the first utopians, seeking a New Jerusalem in the New England villages that still stand as models of small-town life. In the Age of Revolution, Thomas Jefferson dreamed of citizen farmers tending plots laid out across the continent in a grid of enlightened rationality. As industrialization brought urbanization, reformers answered emerging slums with a zealous crusade of grand civic architecture and designed the vast urban parks vital to so many cities today. The twentieth century brought cycles of suburban dreaming and urban renewal—one generation’s utopia forming the next one’s nightmare—and experiments as diverse as Walt Disney’s EPCOT, hippie communes, and Las Vegas. Krieger’s compelling and richly illustrated narrative reminds us, as we formulate new ideals today, that we chase our visions surrounded by the glories and failures of dreams gone by.
Author: Chonglan Fu
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811382115
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
This book considers urban development in China, highlighting links between China’s history and civilization and the rapid evolution of its urban forms. It explores the early days of urban dwelling in China, progressing to an analysis of residential environments in the industrial age. It also examines China’s modern and postmodern architecture, considered as derivative or lacking spiritual meaning or personality, and showcases how China's traditional culture underpins the emergence of China’s modern cities. Focusing on the notion of “courtyard spirit” in China, it offers a study of the urban public squares central to Chinese society, and examines the disruption of the traditional Square model and the rise and growth of new architectural models.
Author: Teresa A. Meade
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271042114
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
"Conflicts during the Old Republic between Rio de Janeiro's lower orders and their employers, the transit companies, and the state about the effects of 'modernization' resulted in many losses, but also a few victories for the poor. Such popular protests have been marginalized by a historiography that tends to label them 'pre-modern' and to privilege workplace organization and protest over community protest"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.
Author: Robert A. Beauregard
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022653538X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
We live in a self-proclaimed Urban Age, where we celebrate the city as the source of economic prosperity, a nurturer of social and cultural diversity, and a place primed for democracy. We proclaim the city as the fertile ground from which progress will arise. Without cities, we tell ourselves, human civilization would falter and decay. In Cities in the Urban Age, Robert A. Beauregard argues that this line of thinking is not only hyperbolic—it is too celebratory by half. For Beauregard, the city is a cauldron for four haunting contradictions. First, cities are equally defined by both their wealth and their poverty. Second, cities are simultaneously environmentally destructive and yet promise sustainability. Third, cities encourage rule by political machines and oligarchies, even as they are essentially democratic and at least nominally open to all. And fourth, city life promotes tolerance among disparate groups, even as the friction among them often erupts into violence. Beauregard offers no simple solutions or proposed remedies for these contradictions; indeed, he doesn’t necessarily hold that they need to be resolved, since they are generative of city life. Without these four tensions, cities wouldn’t be cities. Rather, Beauregard argues that only by recognizing these ambiguities and contradictions can we even begin to understand our moral obligations, as well as the clearest paths toward equality, justice, and peace in urban settings.
