Uses observations of pedestrians to describe and analyze the city, and assesses the influence of architecture and urban planning.

    Arriving in 1934, he found a city imbued with the atmosphere of the recent imperial past and haunted by the powerful spirit of the late Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi. He entered a world of magnificent palaces and temples of the Forbidden City, of lotus-covered lakes and lush pleasure-gardens, of bustling bazaars and peaceful bathhouses, and of "flower houses" with their beautiful young courtesans versed in the arts of pleasing men. With a novelists' command of detail and dialogue, Blofeld vividly re-creates the magic of these years and conveys to the reader his appreciation and nostalgia for a way of life long vanished.

    The authors,take the reader from a better understanding of the many types of wayfinding difficulties that people have,and why they have them,through an explanation of what wayfinding is and how the process works,to detailed examinations of the architectural,graphic,audible and tactile components involved in wayfinding design. A prescription,in effect,for a much-needed,brand-new design discipline.

    It follows the lives of three black sisters as they come of age during this era - their careers, their romances and their successes and failures.

    It features Haraldr Sigurdarson, a Viking prince, who gradually learns the ways of the cosmopolitan court, and rises to heights he never dreamed of.

    In the first volume, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1889 (1984), the author emphasized the dynamism of late imperial commerce, the relation of the metropolis to its hinterland, and the corporate institutions of the city, notably its guilds, which assumed a number of functions we normally attribute to a municipal government. In this volume, the focus is on the people of Hankow, in all their ethnic diversity, occupational variety, and constant mobility, and on the social bonds that enabled this mass of people to live and work in a crowded city with much less disruptive social conflict than occurred in Hankow's counterparts in early modern Europe.Built into the argument of the book is a running comparison nineteenth-century Hankow with such cities as London and Paris in the somewhat earlier period when they, too, were experiencing the growing pains of nascent preindustrial capitalism. How are we to account for the fact that the cities of early modern Europe were so much more prone to protest and social upheaval than Hankow was in a comparable stage of development? The author finds the answer in the cultural hegemony of an activist elite that fostered moral consensus, social harmony, and an aura of solicitude for the well-being of residents at every social level, exemplified in such service institutions as poor relief, firefighting, and public security.Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, the social bonds that had held Hankow together were beginning to fragment, as social polarization and growing class-consciousness fostered an atmosphere of increasing unrest.