The Culture of Cities

The Culture of Cities PDF Author: Lewis Mumford
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504031342
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 572

Get Book Here

Book Description
A classic work advocating ecological urban planning—from a civic visionary and former architecture critic for the New Yorker. Considered among the greatest works of Lewis Mumford—a prolific historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and longtime architecture critic for the New Yorker—The Culture of Cities is a call for communal action to “rebuild the urban world on a sounder human foundation.” First published in 1938, this radical investigation into the human environment is based on firsthand surveys of North American and European locales, as well as extensive historical and technological research. Mumford takes readers from the compact, worker-friendly streets of medieval hamlets to the symmetrical neoclassical avenues of Renaissance cities. He studies the squalor of nineteenth-century factory towns and speculates on the fate of the booming twentieth-century Megalopolis—whose impossible scale, Mumford believes, can only lead to its collapse into a “Nekropolis,” a monstrosity of living death. A civic visionary, Mumford is credited with some of the earliest proposals for ecological urban planning and the appropriate use of technology to create balanced living environments. In the final chapters of The Culture of Cities, he outlines possible paths toward utopian future cities that could be free of the stressors of the Megalopolis, in sync with the rhythms of daily life, powered by clean energy, integrated with agricultural regions, and full of honest and comfortable housing for the working class. The principles set forth by these visions, once applied to Nazi-occupied Europe’s razed cities, are still relevant today as technological advances and overpopulation change the nature of urban life.

The Cultures of Cities

The Cultures of Cities PDF Author: Sharon Zukin
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9781557864376
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
How do cities use culture today? Building on the experience of New York as a "culture capital" Sharon Zukin shows how three notions of culture - as ethnicity, aesthetic, and marketing tool - are reshaping urban places and conflicts over revitalization. She rejects the idea that cities have either a singular urban culture or many different subcultures to argue that cultures are constantly negotiated in the city's central spaces - the streets, parks, shops, museums, and restaurants - which are the great public spaces of modernity. While cultural gentrification may contribute to making our cities both safer and more civilised places to live, it has its darker side. Beneath the perceptions of "civility" and "security" nurtured by cultural strategies, Zukin shows an aggressive private-sector bid for control of public space, a relentless drive for expansion by art museums and other non-profit cultural institutions, and an increasing redesign of the built environment for the purposes of social control. Tying these developments to a new "symbolic economy" based on tourism, media and entertainment, Zukin traces the connections between real estate development and popular expression, and between elite visions of the arts and more democratic representations. Going beyond the immigrants, artists, street peddlers, and security guards who are the key figures in the symbolic economy, Zukin asks: Who really occupies the central spaces of cities? And whose culture is imposed as public culture? Combining cultural critique, interviews, autobiography and ethnography, The Culture of Cities is a compelling account of the public spaces of modernity as they are transformed into new, more troubling landscapes.

Cities and Cultures

Cities and Cultures PDF Author: Malcolm Miles
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134257708
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 460

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cities and Cultures is a critical account of the relations between contemporary cities and the cultures they produce and which in turn shape them. The book questions received ideas of what constitutes a city's culture through case studies in which different kinds of culture - the arts, cultural institutions and heritage, distinctive ways of life - are seen to be differently used in or affected by the development of particular cities. The book does not mask the complexity of this, but explains it in ways accessible for undergraduates. The book begins with introductory chapters on the concepts of a city and a culture (the latter in the anthropological sense as well as denoting the arts), citing cases from modern literature. The book then moves from a critical account of cultural production in a metropolitan setting to the idea that a city, too, is produced through the characteristic ways of life of its inhabitants. The cultural industries are scrutinised for their relation to such cultures as well as to city marketing, and attention is given to the European Cities of Culture initiative, and to the hybridity of contemporary urban cultures in a period of globalisation and migration. In its penultimate chapter the book looks at incidental cultural forms and cultural means to identify formation; and in its final chapter, examines the permeability of urban cultures and cultural forms. Sources are introduced, positions clarified and contrasted, and notes given for selective further reading. Playing on the two meanings of culture, Miles takes an unique approach by relating arguments around these meanings to specific cases of urban development today. The book includes both critical comment on a range of literatures - being a truly inter-disciplinary study - and the outcome of the author's field research into urban cultures.

Urban Culture

Urban Culture PDF Author: Alan C Turley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131734264X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Get Book Here

Book Description
This innovative text uses the lens of culture to examine the various theoretical perspectives and paradigms of urban analysis. It explores the city's impact on how we make and consume all types of culture—art, music, literature, architecture, film, and more—not only illustrating the effects the urban environment has on the production of culture, but, at times, how culture has influenced the city. Theoretically diverse, Urban Culture employs the major theoretical perspectives in sociology and the major paradigms in Urban Sociology and Urban Studies: Urban Ecology, Marxism, New Urbanism, Socio-Psychological Perspective, Structuralists/Econometrics, and Urban Elites/ Entrepreneurs. Urban Terrorism is also addressed to provide a timely examination of the cultural impact and sociological effects of terrorism in an urban setting.

The City Cultures Reader

The City Cultures Reader PDF Author: Malcolm Miles
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415302456
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 564

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cities are products of culture and sites where culture is made. By presenting the best of classic and contemporary writing on the culture of cities, this reader provides an overview of the diverse material on the interface between cities and culture.

The Culture of Cities

The Culture of Cities PDF Author: Lewis Mumford
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Culture of Cities

The Culture of Cities PDF Author: Lewis Mumford
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504031342
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 572

Get Book Here

Book Description
A classic work advocating ecological urban planning—from a civic visionary and former architecture critic for the New Yorker. Considered among the greatest works of Lewis Mumford—a prolific historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and longtime architecture critic for the New Yorker—The Culture of Cities is a call for communal action to “rebuild the urban world on a sounder human foundation.” First published in 1938, this radical investigation into the human environment is based on firsthand surveys of North American and European locales, as well as extensive historical and technological research. Mumford takes readers from the compact, worker-friendly streets of medieval hamlets to the symmetrical neoclassical avenues of Renaissance cities. He studies the squalor of nineteenth-century factory towns and speculates on the fate of the booming twentieth-century Megalopolis—whose impossible scale, Mumford believes, can only lead to its collapse into a “Nekropolis,” a monstrosity of living death. A civic visionary, Mumford is credited with some of the earliest proposals for ecological urban planning and the appropriate use of technology to create balanced living environments. In the final chapters of The Culture of Cities, he outlines possible paths toward utopian future cities that could be free of the stressors of the Megalopolis, in sync with the rhythms of daily life, powered by clean energy, integrated with agricultural regions, and full of honest and comfortable housing for the working class. The principles set forth by these visions, once applied to Nazi-occupied Europe’s razed cities, are still relevant today as technological advances and overpopulation change the nature of urban life.

Community Design and the Culture of Cities

Community Design and the Culture of Cities PDF Author: Eduardo E. Lozano
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521389792
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book Here

Book Description
Having perceived a widespread failure of most community-scale plans, Eduardo Lozano has created a large and humane vision for community design, geared toward urban planners and designers, as well as those concerned with the communities of the future. Lozano strives to unify theory and practice, seeing that design at community scale is a relatively new responsibility for professionals and seeing the need for an awareness of the systemic nature of urban design. He also highlights relevant lessons from historical examples in order to rediscover the community design metier forgotten after the industrial revolution. The author relies on interdisciplinary studies, drawing from biology, ecology, and political science, as well as from history for his fascinating study. Throughout the book there is an emphasis on the interrelationship of design and culture--society, technology, institutions, and values--and on the need for an agenda for political and cultural change.

Multicultures and Cities

Multicultures and Cities PDF Author: Gösta Arvastson
Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press
ISBN: 9788763503723
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the planning of city development, it is important that different groups should be able to live in peaceful coexistence. This is how the concept 'multicultural' came about. During the 1970s, multiculturalism was developed into a model of political democracy-a strategy for society's rapid change. The term multiculturalism suggests that contemporary urban cultures somehow co-exist in a condition of mutual respect and possible equality. The new multiculturalism seems very different from the migration that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The essays in this collection address the general themes of ethnicity and contemporary European urbanism in many different ways, examining a wide variety of cities and city pairings. The common bond in these writings is the impact that a contemporary merging of ethnicity and culture is having on the new urbanity that is now widely accepted as driving the new Europe. The effect is far greater than might be predicted from the relative social powerlessness of many of the bearers of these cultures. At the same time, existing urban processes continue to ensure the marginality of these groups.

The State of the World's Cities 2004/2005

The State of the World's Cities 2004/2005 PDF Author:
Publisher: UN-HABITAT
ISBN: 9211317053
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book Here

Book Description
As towns and cities expand at unprecedented rates, sustainable urban development is one of the most pressing challenges facing the international community in the 21st century. This publication examines the realities faced by urban populations around the world, focusing on the impact of globalisation and the way cities are governed and planned, on the make-up and density of their population, and on their cultures and economies. Issues considered include: the impact of globalisation on urban culture; urban renewal and cultural strategies; the concept of metropolitanization; socio-economic and cultural impacts of international migration; urban poverty and homelessness, social inequality and exclusion; urban governance, safety and crime trends; contemporary planning strategies and the role of civil society; progress towards attainment of the Millennium Development Goals targets for sanitation and housing. The report highlights the need for a new culture of planning to establish multicultural and inclusive cities, involving civil society as well as public authorities.

The Global Cities Reader

The Global Cities Reader PDF Author: Neil Brenner
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415323444
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book contains fifty selections from classic writings by authors such as John Friedmann, Michael Peter Smith, Saskia Sassen, Peter Taylor, Manuel Castells and Anthony King, as well as major contributions by other international scholars of global city formation.