Showpiece City

Showpiece City PDF Author: Todd Reisz
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503613860
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
Staggering skylines and boastful architecture make Dubai famous—this book traces them back to a twentieth-century plan for survival. In 1959, experts agreed that if Dubai was to become something more than an unruly port, a plan was needed. Specifically, a town plan was prescribed to fortify the city from obscurity and disorder. With the proverbial handshake, Dubai's ruler hired British architect John Harris to design Dubai's strategy for capturing the world's attention—and then its investments. Showpiece City recounts the story of how Harris and other hired professionals planned Dubai's spectacular transformation through the 1970s. Drawing on exclusive interviews, private archives, dog-eared photographs, and previously overlooked government documents, Todd Reisz reveals the braggadocio and persistence that sold Dubai as a profitable business plan. Architecture made that plan something to behold. Reisz highlights initial architectural achievements—including the city's first hospital, national bank, and skyscraper—designed as showpieces to proclaim Dubai's place on the world stage. Reisz explores the overlooked history of a skyline that did not simply rise from the sands. In the city's earliest modern architecture, he finds the foundations of an urban survival strategy of debt-wielding brinkmanship and constant pitch making. Dubai became a testing ground for the global city—and prefigured how urbanization now happens everywhere.

Showpiece City

Showpiece City PDF Author: Todd Reisz
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503613860
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
Staggering skylines and boastful architecture make Dubai famous—this book traces them back to a twentieth-century plan for survival. In 1959, experts agreed that if Dubai was to become something more than an unruly port, a plan was needed. Specifically, a town plan was prescribed to fortify the city from obscurity and disorder. With the proverbial handshake, Dubai's ruler hired British architect John Harris to design Dubai's strategy for capturing the world's attention—and then its investments. Showpiece City recounts the story of how Harris and other hired professionals planned Dubai's spectacular transformation through the 1970s. Drawing on exclusive interviews, private archives, dog-eared photographs, and previously overlooked government documents, Todd Reisz reveals the braggadocio and persistence that sold Dubai as a profitable business plan. Architecture made that plan something to behold. Reisz highlights initial architectural achievements—including the city's first hospital, national bank, and skyscraper—designed as showpieces to proclaim Dubai's place on the world stage. Reisz explores the overlooked history of a skyline that did not simply rise from the sands. In the city's earliest modern architecture, he finds the foundations of an urban survival strategy of debt-wielding brinkmanship and constant pitch making. Dubai became a testing ground for the global city—and prefigured how urbanization now happens everywhere.

Building Sharjah

Building Sharjah PDF Author: Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi
Publisher: Birkhäuser
ISBN: 3035622779
Category : Architecture
Languages : de
Pages : 440

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Book Description
Building Sharjah reveals how modern architecture unfurled across the United Arab Emirates’ third-largest city. An oil discovery in 1972 positioned Sharjah as one of the world’s final cities shaped by transformative fortune. In the footsteps of Kuwait, Riyadh, and Dubai, Sharjah faced a metamorphosis: either one that repeated the past’s mistakes or one that reimagined how wealth can build a city. Sharjah’s potential enticed an international cast of experts to create a bold, new city. As their projects begin to vanish, this book preserves them through unseen photographs and recovered documents. New writing chronicles how local and arriving residents arranged the designed, concrete environment into a home. Beyond just a local artifact, this book examines the confident promises made by global practices of urbanization.

Public Sydney

Public Sydney PDF Author: Philip Thalis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781876991425
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
For the first time, see the making of Sydney and all its public buildings and places in exquisite drawings in this new book. For anyone who cares about Sydney, or cities in general -- whether a passionate city dweller, architect, landscape designer, planner, engineer or historian -- it offers a deep appreciation of the city's evolution.

Sophie's World

Sophie's World PDF Author: Jostein Gaarder
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466804270
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 599

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Book Description
A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

The Schenley Experiment

The Schenley Experiment PDF Author: Jake Oresick
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271079754
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
The Schenley Experiment is the story of Pittsburgh’s first public high school, a social incubator in a largely segregated city that was highly—even improbably—successful throughout its 156-year existence. Established in 1855 as Central High School and reorganized in 1916, Schenley High School was a model of innovative public education and an ongoing experiment in diversity. Its graduates include Andy Warhol, actor Bill Nunn, and jazz virtuoso Earl Hines, and its prestigious academic program (and pensions) lured such teachers as future Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather. The subject of investment as well as destructive neglect, the school reflects the history of the city of Pittsburgh and provides a study in both the best and worst of urban public education practices there and across the Rust Belt. Integrated decades before Brown v. Board of Education, Schenley succumbed to default segregation during the “white flight” of the 1970s; it rose again to prominence in the late 1980s, when parents camped out in six-day-long lines to enroll their children in visionary superintendent Richard C. Wallace’s reinvigorated school. Although the historic triangular building was a cornerstone of its North Oakland neighborhood and a showpiece for the city of Pittsburgh, officials closed the school in 2008, citing over $50 million in necessary renovations—a controversial event that captured national attention. Schenley alumnus Jake Oresick tells this story through interviews, historical documents, and hundreds of first-person accounts drawn from a community indelibly tied to the school. A memorable, important work of local and educational history, his book is a case study of desegregation, magnet education, and the changing nature and legacies of America’s oldest public schools.

Hypocrisy and Human Rights

Hypocrisy and Human Rights PDF Author: Kate Cronin-Furman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501767151
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description
Hypocrisy and Human Rights examines what human rights pressure does when it does not work. Repressive states with absolutely no intention of complying with their human rights obligations often change course dramatically in response to international pressure. They create toothless commissions, permit but then obstruct international observers' visits, and pass showpiece legislation while simultaneously bolstering their repressive capacity. Covering debates over transitional justice in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Cambodia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and other countries, Kate Cronin-Furman investigates the diverse ways in which repressive states respond to calls for justice from human rights advocates, UN officials, and Western governments who add their voices to the victims of mass atrocities to demand accountability. She argues that although international pressure cannot elicit compliance in the absence of domestic motivations to comply, the complexity of the international system means that there are multiple audiences for both human rights behavior and advocacy and that pressure can produce valuable results through indirect paths.

Politics in Color and Concrete

Politics in Color and Concrete PDF Author: Krisztina Fehérváry
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253009960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
A historical anthropology of material transformations of homes in Hungary from the 1950s o the 1990s. Material culture in Eastern Europe under state socialism is remembered as uniformly gray, shabby, and monotonous—the worst of postwar modernist architecture and design. Politics in Color and Concrete revisits this history by exploring domestic space in Hungary from the 1950s through the 1990s and reconstructs the multi-textured and politicized aesthetics of daily life through the objects, spaces, and colors that made up this lived environment. Krisztina Féherváry shows that contemporary standards of living and ideas about normalcy have roots in late socialist consumer culture and are not merely products of postsocialist transitions or neoliberalism. This engaging study decenters conventional perspectives on consumer capitalism, home ownership, and citizenship in the new Europe. “A major reinterpretation of Soviet-style socialism and an innovative model for analyzing consumption.” —Katherine Verdery, The Graduate Center, City University of New York “Politics in Color and Concrete explains why the everyday is important, and shows why domestic aesthetics embody a crucially significant politics.” —Judith Farquhar, University of Chicago “The topic is extremely timely and relevant; the writing is lucid and thorough; the theory is complex and sophisticated without being overly dense, or daunting. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.” —Brad Weiss, College of William and Mary

City on Fire

City on Fire PDF Author: Garth Risk Hallberg
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385353782
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1109

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A mystery that reverberates through families, friendships, and the corridors of power in New York and "captures the city’s dangerous, magnetic allure" (The New York Times). • Streaming now on Apple TV+ “As close to a great American novel as this century has produced.” —Stephen King New York City, 1976. Meet Regan and William Hamilton-Sweeney, estranged heirs to one of the city’s great fortunes; Keith and Mercer, the men who, for better or worse, love them; Charlie and Samantha, two suburban teenagers seduced by downtown’s punk scene; an obsessive magazine reporter and his idealistic neighbor—and the detective trying to figure out what any of them have to do with a shooting in Central Park on New Year’s Eve. When the blackout of July 13, 1977, plunges this world into darkness, each of these lives will be changed forever. City on Fire is an unforgettable novel about love and betrayal and forgiveness, about art and truth and rock ’n’ roll: about what people need from each other in order to live—and about what makes the living worth doing in the first place.

The Making of Urban Japan

The Making of Urban Japan PDF Author: André Sorensen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134736576
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
During the twentieth century, Japan was transformed from a poor, primarily rural country into one of the world's largest industrial powers and most highly urbanised countries. Interestingly, while Japanese governments and planners borrowed carefully from the planning ideas and methods of many other countries, Japanese urban planning, urban governance and cities developed very differently from those of other developed countries. Japan's distinctive patterns of urbanisation are partly a product of the highly developed urban system, urban traditions and material culture of the pre-modern period, which remained influential until well after the Pacific War. A second key influence has been the dominance of central government in urban affairs, and its consistent prioritisation of economic growth over the public welfare or urban quality of life. André Sorensen examines Japan's urban trajectory from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, paying particular attention to the weak development of Japanese civil society, local governments, and land development and planning regulations.

The Making of Medieval Rome

The Making of Medieval Rome PDF Author: Hendrik Dey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108985696
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 956

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Book Description
Integrating the written sources with Rome's surviving remains and, most importantly, with the results of the past half-century's worth of medieval archaeology in the city, The Making of Medieval Rome is the first in-depth profile of Rome's transformation over a millennium to appear in any language in over forty years. Though the main focus rests on Rome's urban trajectory in topographical, architectural, and archaeological terms, Hendrik folds aspects of ecclesiastical, political, social, military, economic, and intellectual history into the narrative in order to illustrate how and why the cityscape evolved as it did during the thousand years between the end of the Roman Empire and the start of the Renaissance. A wide-ranging synthesis of decades' worth of specialized research and remarkable archaeological discoveries, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in how and why the ancient imperial capital transformed into the spiritual heart of Western Christendom.