Improbable Metropolis

Improbable Metropolis PDF Author: Barrie Scardino Bradley
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9781477320198
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Winner, Good Brick Award, Preservation Houston, 2020 Just over 180 years ago, the city of Houston was nothing more than an alligator-infested swamp along the Buffalo Bayou that spread onto a flat, endless plain. Today, it is a sprawling, architecturally and culturally diverse metropolis. How did one transform into the other in such a short period? Improbable Metropolis uses the built environment as a guide to explore the remarkable evolution that Houston has undergone from 1836 to the present. Houston’s architecture, an indicator of its culture and prosperity, has been inconsistent, often predictable, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally extraordinary. Industries from cotton, lumber, sugar, and rail and water transportation, to petroleum, healthcare, biomedical research, and aerospace have each in turn brought profit and attention to Houston. Each created an associated building boom, expanding the city’s architectural sophistication, its footprint, and its cultural breadth. Providing a template for architectural investigations of other American cities, Improbable Metropolis is an important addition to the literature on Texas history.

Improbable Metropolis

Improbable Metropolis PDF Author: Barrie Scardino Bradley
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9781477320198
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner, Good Brick Award, Preservation Houston, 2020 Just over 180 years ago, the city of Houston was nothing more than an alligator-infested swamp along the Buffalo Bayou that spread onto a flat, endless plain. Today, it is a sprawling, architecturally and culturally diverse metropolis. How did one transform into the other in such a short period? Improbable Metropolis uses the built environment as a guide to explore the remarkable evolution that Houston has undergone from 1836 to the present. Houston’s architecture, an indicator of its culture and prosperity, has been inconsistent, often predictable, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally extraordinary. Industries from cotton, lumber, sugar, and rail and water transportation, to petroleum, healthcare, biomedical research, and aerospace have each in turn brought profit and attention to Houston. Each created an associated building boom, expanding the city’s architectural sophistication, its footprint, and its cultural breadth. Providing a template for architectural investigations of other American cities, Improbable Metropolis is an important addition to the literature on Texas history.

A Paradise of Small Houses

A Paradise of Small Houses PDF Author: Max Podemski
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807007781
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
From the Haitian-style “shotgun” houses of the 19th century to the lavish high-rises of the 21st century, a walk through the streets of America’s neighborhoods that reveals the rich history—and future—of urban housing The Philadelphia row house. The New York tenement. The Boston triple-decker. Every American city has its own iconic housing style, structures that have been home to generations of families and are symbols of identity and pride. Max Podemski, an urban planner for the city of Los Angeles and lifelong architecture buff, has spent his career in and around these buildings. Deftly combining his years of experience with extensive research, Podemski walks the reader through the history of our dwelling spaces—and offers a blueprint for how time-tested urban planning models can help us build the homes the United States so desperately needs. In A Paradise of Small Houses, Podemski charts how these dwellings have evolved over the centuries according to the geography, climate, population, and culture of each city. He introduces the reader to styles like Chicago’s prefabricated workers cottages and LA’s car-friendly dingbats, illuminating the human stories behind each city’s iconic housing type. Through it all, Podemski interrogates the American values that have equated home ownership with success and led to the US housing crisis, asking, “How can we look to the past to build the homes, neighborhoods, and cities of the future that our communities deserve?”

Oil Spaces

Oil Spaces PDF Author: Carola Hein
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000449491
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Oil Spaces traces petroleum’s impact through a range of territories from across the world, showing how industrially drilled petroleum and its refined products have played a major role in transforming the built environment in ways that are often not visible or recognized. Over the past century and a half, industrially drilled petroleum has powered factories, built cities, and sustained nation-states. It has fueled ways of life and visions of progress, modernity, and disaster. In detailed international case studies, the contributors consider petroleum’s role in the built environment and the imagination. They study how petroleum and its infrastructure have served as a source of military conflict and political and economic power, inspiring efforts to create territories and reshape geographies and national boundaries. The authors trace ruptures and continuities between colonial and postcolonial frameworks, in locations as diverse as Sumatra, northeast China, Brazil, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Kuwait as well as heritage sites including former power stations in Italy and the port of Dunkirk, once a prime gateway through which petroleum entered Europe. By revealing petroleum’s role in organizing and imagining space globally, this book takes up a key task in imagining the possibilities of a post-oil future. It will be invaluable reading to scholars and students of architectural and urban history, planning, and geography of sustainable urban environments.

Futebol

Futebol PDF Author: Alex Bellos
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608196038
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 564

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Book Description
A new and updated edition of bestselling author Alex Bellos's classic book on soccer, unforgettably capturing the game at the heart of the Brazilian national identity. Since the 1950s, when Pelé first started playing, soccer has been how the world sees Brazil, but it is also how Brazilians see themselves. The essence of their game is one in which prodigious individual skills outshine team tactics, where dribbles and delicate flicks are preferred over physical challenges or long-distance passes, where technique has all the elements of dance and, indeed, is often described as such. At their best, Brazilian soccer players are both athletes and artists. As Alex Bellos brilliantly reveals in his classic book, their game can symbolize racial harmony, flamboyance, youth, innovation, and skill-in short, it's a microcosm of the country itself. Bellos, a veteran journalist and author whose star has continued to rise since Futebol was first published in 2002, revisits his search for what the great Brazilian striker Ronaldo has called the “true truth” of the Brazilian way of life. With an unerring eye for an illustrative story and a pitch-perfect ear for the voices of the people he meets, Bellos uncovers the nuanced role soccer has played in the history of Brazil and the lives of its people. Updated and with a new chapter covering recent events in Brazil.

Atlas of Improbable Places

Atlas of Improbable Places PDF Author: Travis Elborough
Publisher: Aurum Press
ISBN: 0711264015
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Atlas of Improbable Places shows the modern world from surprising new vantage points that will inspire urban explorers and armchair travellers alike to consider a new way of understanding the world we live in.

Dissonant Identities

Dissonant Identities PDF Author: Barry Shank
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819572675
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Music of the bars and clubs of Austin, Texas has long been recognized as defining one of a dozen or more musical "scenes" across the country. In Dissonant Identities, Barry Shank, himself a musician who played and lived in the Texas capital, studies the history of its popular music, its cultural and economic context, and also the broader ramifications of that music as a signifying practice capable of transforming identities. While his focus is primarily on progressive country and rock, Shank also writes about traditional country, blues, rock, disco, ethnic, and folk musics. Using empirical detail and an expansive theoretical framework, he shows how Austin became the site for "a productive contestation between two forces: the fierce desire to remake oneself through musical practice, and the equally powerful struggle to affirm the value of that practice in the complexly structured late-capitalist marketplace."

Leading the Inclusive City

Leading the Inclusive City PDF Author: Hambleton, Robin
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 144731185X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Cities are often seen as helpless victims in a global flow of events and many view growing inequality in cities as inevitable. This engaging book rejects this gloomy prognosis and argues that imaginative place-based leadership can enable citizens to shape the urban future in accordance with progressive values – advancing social justice, promoting care for the environment and bolstering community empowerment. This international and comparative book, written by an experienced author, shows how inspirational civic leaders are making a major difference in cities across the world. The analysis provides practical lessons for local leaders and a significant contribution to thinking on public service innovation for anyone who wants to change urban society for the better.

Breakpoint

Breakpoint PDF Author: Jeremy B. C. Jackson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300179391
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
An insightful look at the American environmental crisis and emerging solutions from the heartland to the coasts in the era of global climate change Eminent ecologist Jeremy B. C. Jackson and award-winning journalist Steve Chapple traveled the length of the Mississippi River interviewing farmers, fishermen, scientists, and policymakers to better understand the mounting environmental problems ravaging the United States. Along their journey, which quickly expands to California, Florida, and New York, the pair uncovered surprising and profound connections between ecological systems and environmental crises across the country. Artfully weaving together independent research and engaging storytelling, Jackson and Chapple examine the looming threats from recent hurricanes and fires, industrial agriculture, river mismanagement, extreme weather events, drought, and rising sea levels that are pushing the country toward the breaking point of ecological and economic collapse. Yet, despite these challenges, the authors provide optimistic and practical solutions for addressing these multidimensional issues to achieve greater environmental stability, human well-being, and future economic prosperity. With a passionate call to action, they look hopefully toward emerging and achievable solutions to preserve the country's future.

Journeys

Journeys PDF Author: Jan Morris
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195365178
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Superbly written articles about cities as different as Las Vegas and Stockholm, about journeys across Europe and China, and about "romantic re-visits" to such historic sites as the Acropolis and the Taj Mahal.

The Great Music City

The Great Music City PDF Author: Andrea Baker
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331996352X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
In the 1960s, as gentrification took hold of New York City, Jane Jacobs predicted that the city would become the true player in the global system. Indeed, in the 21st century more meaningful comparisons can be made between cities than between nations and states. Based on case studies of Melbourne, Austin and Berlin, this book is the first in-depth study to combine academic and industry analysis of the music cities phenomenon. Using four distinctly defined algorithms as benchmarks, it interrogates Richard Florida’s creative cities thesis and applies a much-needed synergy of urban sociology and musicology to the concept, mediated by a journalism lens. Building on seminal work by Robert Park, Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, it argues that journalists are the cultural branders and street theorists whose ethnographic approach offers critical insights into the urban sociability of music activity.