Author: Helena Moncrieff
Publisher: ECW Press
ISBN: 1773051520
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
Examining the roots and fruits of the urban foodscape Our cities are places of food polarities — food deserts and farmers’ markets, hunger and food waste, fast food delivery and urban gardening. While locavores and preserving pros abound, many of us can’t identify the fruit trees in our yards or declare a berry safe to eat. Those plants — and the people who planted them — are often forgotten. In The Fruitful City, Helena Moncrieff examines our relationship with food through the fruit trees that dot city streets and yards. She tracks the origins of these living heirlooms and questions how they went from being subsistence staples to raccoon fodder. But in some cities, previously forgotten fruit is now in high demand, and Moncrieff investigates the surge of non-profit urban harvest organizations that try to prevent that food from rotting on concrete and meets the people putting rescued fruit to good use. As she travels across Canada, slipping into backyards, visiting community orchards, and taking in canning competitions, Moncrieff discovers that attitudinal changes are more important than agricultural ones. While the bounty of apples is great, reconnecting with nature and our community is the real prize.
Author: Susan S. Fainstein
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801462185
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
For much of the twentieth century improvement in the situation of disadvantaged communities was a focus for urban planning and policy. Yet over the past three decades the ideological triumph of neoliberalism has caused the allocation of spatial, political, economic, and financial resources to favor economic growth at the expense of wider social benefits. Susan Fainstein's concept of the "just city" encourages planners and policymakers to embrace a different approach to urban development. Her objective is to combine progressive city planners' earlier focus on equity and material well-being with considerations of diversity and participation so as to foster a better quality of urban life within the context of a global capitalist political economy. Fainstein applies theoretical concepts about justice developed by contemporary philosophers to the concrete problems faced by urban planners and policymakers and argues that, despite structural obstacles, meaningful reform can be achieved at the local level. In the first half of The Just City, Fainstein draws on the work of John Rawls, Martha Nussbaum, Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, and others to develop an approach to justice relevant to twenty-first-century cities, one that incorporates three central concepts: diversity, democracy, and equity. In the book's second half, Fainstein tests her ideas through case studies of New York, London, and Amsterdam by evaluating their postwar programs for housing and development in relation to the three norms. She concludes by identifying a set of specific criteria for urban planners and policymakers to consider when developing programs to assure greater justice in both the process of their formulation and their effects.
Author: Stephen T. Um
Publisher: Crossway
ISBN: 1433532921
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 178
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Book Description
We live in a unique moment in history. Right now, more people live in urban centers than ever before. This means that we have an unprecedented opportunity to influence the majority of the world through the church in the city. Helping us to make the most of this moment, urban pastors Justin Buzzard and Stephen Um lay out a compelling vision for cultural engagement and church planting in our world’s cities. If you’re looking for motivation to maintain a commitment to the city or for guidance as you consider going all in, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of urban life that informs, instructs, inspires, and answers questions including: Why cities are so important What the Bible says about cities How to overcome common issues and develop a plan for living missionally in the city Instead of retreating from or taking from our cities, here is a call to make the cities our home, to take good care of them, and to participate in God’s kingdom-building work in the urban centers of our world.
Author: Michele Acuto
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501759728
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 157
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Book Description
In How to Build a Global City, Michele Acuto considers the rise of a new generation of so-called global cities—Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai—and the power that this concept had in their ascent, in order to analyze the general relationship between global city theory and its urban public policy practice. The global city is often invoked in theory and practice as an ideal model of development and a logic of internationalization for cities the world over. But the global city also creates deep social polarization and challenges how much local planning can achieve in a world economy. Presenting a unique elite ethnography in Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai, Acuto discusses the global urban discourses, aspirations, and strategies vital to the planning and management of such metropolitan growth. The global city, he shows, is not one single idea, but a complex of ways to imagine a place to be global and aspirations to make it so, often deeply steeped in politics. His resulting book is a call to reconcile proponents and critics of the global city toward a more explicit engagement with the politics of this global urban imagination.
Author: Cecil C. Konijnendijk
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319750763
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
Amsterdamse Bos, Bois de Boulognes, Epping Forest, Hong Kong’s country parks, Stanley Park: throughout history cities across the world have developed close relationships with nearby woodland areas. In some cases, cities have even developed – and in some cases are promoting – a distinct ‘forest identity’. This book introduces the rich heritage of these city forests as cultural landscapes, and shows that cities and forests can be mutually beneficial. Essential reading for students and researchers interested in urban sustainability and urban forestry, this book also has much wider appeal. For with city forests playing an increasingly important role in local government sustainability programs, it provides an important reference for those involved in urban planning and decision making, public affairs and administration, and even public health. From providers of livelihoods to healthy recreational environments, and from places of inspiration and learning to a source of conflict, the book presents examples of city forests from around the world. These cases clearly illustrate how the social and cultural development of towns and forests has often gone hand in hand. They also reveal how better understanding of city forests as distinct cultural and social phenomena can help to strengthen synergies both between cities and forests, and between urban society and nature.
Author: Jason Diamond
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566895901
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
For decades the suburbs have been where art happens despite: despite the conformity, the emptiness, the sameness. Time and again, the story is one of gems formed under pressure and that resentment of the suburbs is the key ingredient for creative transcendence. But what if, contrary to that, the suburb has actually been an incubator for distinctly American art, as positively and as surely as in any other cultural hothouse? Mixing personal experience, cultural reportage, and history while rejecting clichés and pieties and these essays stretch across the country in an effort to show that this uniquely American milieu deserves another look.
Author: Elisabeth Paling Funk
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438435975
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
New Netherland's distinctive regional history as well as the colony's many relationships with Europe and the seventeenth-century Atlantic world are featured in the second collection of papers from the widely praised annual Rensselaerwijck Seminar. Leading scholars from both sides of the Atlantic critique and offer the latest research on a dynamic range of topics: the age of exploration, domestic life in New Netherland, the history and significance of the West India Company, the complex era of Jacob Leisler, the southern frontier lands of the colony, relations with New England, Dutch foodways in the Hudson Valley and their use of beer, the endurance of the Dutch legacy into 19th century New York, and contemporary genealogical research on colonial Dutch ancestors. Cogent and informative, these papers are an indispensable source for better understanding the lives and legacies of the long ago New Netherland colony.
Author: David Harvey
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820336041
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
Throughout his distinguished and influential career, David Harvey has defined and redefined the relationship between politics, capitalism, and the social aspects of geographical theory. Laying out Harvey's position that geography could not remain objective in the face of urban poverty and associated ills, Social Justice and the City is perhaps the most widely cited work in the field. Harvey analyzes core issues in city planning and policy--employment and housing location, zoning, transport costs, concentrations of poverty--asking in each case about the relationship between social justice and space. How, for example, do built-in assumptions about planning reinforce existing distributions of income? Rather than leading him to liberal, technocratic solutions, Harvey's line of inquiry pushes him in the direction of a "revolutionary geography," one that transcends the structural limitations of existing approaches to space. Harvey's emphasis on rigorous thought and theoretical innovation gives the volume an enduring appeal. This is a book that raises big questions, and for that reason geographers and other social scientists regularly return to it.
Author: Craig Clunas
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 178023158X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
Gardens are sites that can be at one and the same time admired works of art and valuable pieces of real estate. As the first account in English to be wholly based on contemporary Chinese sources, this beautifully illustrated book grounds the practices of garden-making in Ming Dynasty China (1369–1644) firmly in the social and cultural history of the day. Who owned gardens? Who visited them? How were they represented in words, in paintings and in visual culture generally, and what meanings did these representations hold at different levels of Chinese society? Drawing on a wide range of recent work in cultural theory, Craig Clunas provides for the first time a historical and materialist account of Chinese garden culture, and replaces broad generalizations and orientalist fantasy with a convincing picture of the garden's role in social life.
Author: Steven Collins
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 145168438X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Like many modern-day Christians, Dr. Collins struggled with what seemed to be a clash between his belief in the Bible and the research regarding ancient history--a crisis of faith that inspired him to embark on an expedition that has led to one of the most exciting finds in recent archaeology.
