Whyte published the findings from his revolutionary Street Life Project in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Both the book and the accompanying film were instantly labeled classics, and launched a mini-revolution in the planning and study of public spaces. They have since become standard texts, and appear on syllabi and reading lists in urban planning, sociology, environmental design, and architecture departments around the world.Project for Public Spaces, which grew out of Holly's Street Life Project and continues his work around the world, has acquired the reprint rights to Social Life, with the intent of making it available to the widest possible audience and ensuring that the Whyte family receive their fair share of Holly's legacy.From the forward: For more than 30 years, Project for Public Spaces has been using observations, surveys, interviews and workshops to study and transform public spaces around the world into community places. Every week we give presentations about why some public spaces work and why others don't, using the techniques, ideas, and memorable phrases from William H. "Holly" Whyte's The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.Holly Whyte was both our mentor and our friend. Perhaps his most important gift was the ability to show us how to discover for ourselves why some public spaces work and others don't. With the publication of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces and its companion film in 1980, the world could see that through the basic tools of observation and interviews, we can learn an immense amount about how to make our cities more livable. In doing so, Holly Whyte laid the groundwork for a major movement to change the way public spaces are built and planned. It is our pleasure to offer this important book back to the world it is helping to transform.

    Originally published in 1986, this dark, democratic environment provided the setting for photographer Bruce Davidson's first extensive series in color. Subway riders are set against a gritty, graffiti-strewn background, displayed in tones Davidson described as "an iridescence like that I had seen in photographs of deep-sea fish." Never before has the subway been portrayed in such detail, revealing the interplay of its inner landscape and out vistas. The images include lovers, commuters, tourists, families, and the homeless. From weary straphangers to languorous ladies in summer dresses to stalking predators, Davidson's compassionate vision illuminates the stubborn survival of humanity. From the spring of 1980 to 1985, Davidson explored and shot six hundred miles of subway tracks. In his own words, "I wanted to transform this subway from its dark, degrading, and impersonal reality into images that open up our experience again to the color, sensuality, and vitality of the individual souls that ride it each day." Now nearly 25 years later, and on the eve of the subway's 100th anniversary, St. Ann's Press is publishing a new edition of Davidson's classic book. This edition adds forty unseen images to the original book, and includes a new introduction by Arthur Ollman of the Museum of Photographic Art in San Diego, and a foreword by Fred Braithwaite (aka Fab Five Freddy), the original graffiti artist. It also includes Bruce Davidson and Henry Geldzahler's original essays.

    Kirkpatrick Sale examines a nation in the grips of growthmania and presents the ways to shape a more efficient and livable society built to the human scale."--Cover.

    An eminently readable history of the city's physical development, Lost Boston also makes an cloquent appeal for its preservation. Jane Holtz Kay traces the evolution of Boston from the barren, swampy peninsula of colonial times to the booming metropolis of today. In the process she creates the city's family album, infused with the flavor and energy that make Boston unique. Portrayed alongside the grand landmarks are the little details of city life that are so telling: neon signs and storefronts that were common in their time but are even more meaningful in their absence.. "Kay also brings to life the people who literally created Boston - architects like Charles Bulfinch and H. H. Richardson, landscape designer and master park creator Frederick Law Olmsted, and even such colorful political figures as Mayors John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald and James Michael Curley.

    

    Using Norway’s relatively peaceful divorce from Sweden as an example, Jacobs contends that Canada and Canadians—Quebecois and Anglophones alike—can learn important lessons from similar sovereignty questions of the past.

    It was a city every bit as vicious as ancient Rome, as lofty as Athens, as uninhibited as Sodom and Gomorrah. Poets, soldiers, artists, popes, courtesans - all played their part in Florence's towering tragi-comedy.This drama was reflected and depicted by three men of genius: Dante, politician and poet; Giotto, artist, architect and wit; and Boccaccio, adventurer and writer. Dante held high office at the time when Florence's affairs - bitterly chronicled in his Divine Comedy - were at their bloodiest and most violent, and tried, unavailingly and tragically, to divert the city's disaster course. Giotto, whose concerns were paint and stone rather than politics, never suffered from Florentine savagery - his life and work reflect rather the city's liberality, magnificence, comedy; its lavish way of life and its passionate love of art. But it is left to Boccaccio, youngest of the trio, standing on the threshold of the Renaissance, to reveal in The Decameron Florence's rampant sensuality, from the elegant and luxurious to the outrageously bawdy.Drawing on contemporary anecdotes, and later Italian writers, Timothy Holme has written an absorbing account of the men and women of medieval Florence, and in particular of the three giants, Dante, Giotto and Boccaccio. Very different in temperament, their fortunes were closely entwined; Dante wrote of Giotto; Boccaccio hero-worshipped Dante; Giotto painted Dante; Boccaccio portrayed Giotto in his Decameron. And all three were involved in that extraordinary, turbulent city - the Florence of the Middle Ages.

    An introduction to the history of the development of London and of the social life of its people.