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Tracing the development of American cities and city life from early colonial settlements to the familiar downtowns of today, a sweeping cultural history reveals how our urban spaces have been shaped by the land and the American lifestyle. Reprint. 25,000 first printing. NYT.
This unique and insightful work examines the importance of ‘quality of life’ for the city which has become a key component of urban competitiveness over the past 30 years. It argues that having a high or low ‘quality of life’ will have important consequences for the vitality and status of any city. The book’s six substantive chapters explore this issue by each examining a distinct element that comprises ‘quality of life’, including the approach of economists to quality of life, links to urban competitiveness, the economy, urban amenities and attributes.
Building a relationship with a city is a lot like building a relationship with another person - just as cities can be intoxicating, generous and inspiring, so they can also be dangerous, fickle and impenetrable. How to Live in the City is a book for navigating and nurturing this important relationship. Hugo Macdonald believes you need to feel a city to understand it. He won't tell you how wide the perfect pavement should be but he will show you how to walk down a pavement with eyes wide open. This is a book to help you feel human in an inhuman environment.
Author : Carl Smith Publisher : University of Chicago Press Page : 340 pages File Size : 25,96 MB Release : 2013-04-17 Category : History ISBN : 022602251X
A city is more than a massing of citizens, a layout of buildings and streets, or an arrangement of political, economic, and social institutions. It is also an infrastructure of ideas that are a support for the beliefs, values, and aspirations of the people who created the city. In City Water, City Life, celebrated historian Carl Smith explores this concept through an insightful examination of the development of the first successful waterworks systems in Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago between the 1790s and the 1860s. By examining the place of water in the nineteenth-century consciousness, Smith illuminates how city dwellers perceived themselves during the great age of American urbanization. But City Water, City Life is more than a history of urbanization. It is also a refreshing meditation on water as a necessity, as a resource for commerce and industry, and as an essential—and central—part of how we define our civilization.
Could the vitality of embodied experience create a foundation for a new form of revolutionary authority? The Life of the City is a bold and innovative reassessment of the early urban avant-garde movements that sought to re-imagine and reinvent the experiential life of the city. Constructing a ground-breaking theoretical analysis of the relationships between biological life, urban culture, and modern forms of biopolitical ’experiential authority’, Julian Brigstocke traces the failed attempts of Parisian radicals to turn the ’crisis of authority’ in late nineteenth-century Paris into an opportunity to invent new forms of urban commons. The most comprehensive account to date of the spatial politics of the literary, artistic and anarchist groups that settled in the Montmartre area of Paris after the suppression of the 1871 Paris Commune, The Life of the City analyses the reasons why laughter emerged as the unlikely tool through which Parisian bohemians attempted to forge a new, non-representational biopolitics of sensation. Ranging from the carnivalesque performances of artistic cabarets such as the Chat Noir to the laughing violence of anarchist terrorism, The Life of the City is a timely analysis of the birth of a carnivalesque politics that remains highly influential in contemporary urban movements.
The city's development from ancient times to the modern age. Winner of the National Book Award. "One of the major works of scholarship of the twentieth century" (Christian Science Monitor). Index; illustrations.
If humankind can be said to have a single greatest creation, it would be those places that represent the most eloquent expression of our species’s ingenuity, beliefs, and ideals: the city. In this authoritative and engagingly written account, the acclaimed urbanist and bestselling author examines the evolution of urban life over the millennia and, in doing so, attempts to answer the age-old question: What makes a city great? Despite their infinite variety, all cities essentially serve three purposes: spiritual, political, and economic. Kotkin follows the progression of the city from the early religious centers of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China to the imperial centers of the Classical era, through the rise of the Islamic city and the European commercial capitals, ending with today’s post-industrial suburban metropolis. Despite widespread optimistic claims that cities are “back in style,” Kotkin warns that whatever their form, cities can thrive only if they remain sacred, safe, and busy–and this is true for both the increasingly urbanized developing world and the often self-possessed “global cities” of the West and East Asia. Looking at cities in the twenty-first century, Kotkin discusses the effects of developments such as shifting demographics and emerging technologies. He also considers the effects of terrorism–how the religious and cultural struggles of the present pose the greatest challenge to the urban future. Truly global in scope, The City is a timely narrative that will place Kotkin in the company of Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, and other preeminent urban scholars.
Author : Barbara E. Mundy Publisher : University of Texas Press Page : 257 pages File Size : 50,99 MB Release : 2018-03-22 Category : Art ISBN : 1477317139
Winner, Book Prize in Latin American Studies, Colonial Section of Latin American Studies Association (LASA), 2016 ALAA Book Award, Association for Latin American Art/Arvey Foundation, 2016 The capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan, was, in its era, one of the largest cities in the world. Built on an island in the middle of a shallow lake, its population numbered perhaps 150,000, with another 350,000 people in the urban network clustered around the lake shores. In 1521, at the height of Tenochtitlan's power, which extended over much of Central Mexico, Hernando Cortés and his followers conquered the city. Cortés boasted to King Charles V of Spain that Tenochtitlan was "destroyed and razed to the ground." But was it? Drawing on period representations of the city in sculptures, texts, and maps, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City builds a convincing case that this global capital remained, through the sixteenth century, very much an Amerindian city. Barbara E. Mundy foregrounds the role the city's indigenous peoples, the Nahua, played in shaping Mexico City through the construction of permanent architecture and engagement in ceremonial actions. She demonstrates that the Aztec ruling elites, who retained power even after the conquest, were instrumental in building and then rebuilding the city. Mundy shows how the Nahua entered into mutually advantageous alliances with the Franciscans to maintain the city's sacred nodes. She also focuses on the practical and symbolic role of the city's extraordinary waterworks—the product of a massive ecological manipulation begun in the fifteenth century—to reveal how the Nahua struggled to maintain control of water resources in early Mexico City.
Frank Hague served as the mayor of Jersey City for much of the early twentieth century. While some believed him a thief, others viewed him as a modern-day Robin Hood. He could put food on your table or triple your taxes, give you a job or end your career. It was with this same ease and power that he could make you a federal judge, a congressman or even a United States senator. He has been remembered including through a character on the popular TV drama "Boardwalk Empire" as one of the most corrupt politicians of the century. But in this biography, Leonard Vernon reexamines Hague's deeds, prompting a new understanding of his life and the memory of politicians of the era.