Best of
Urban-Studies
1980
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
William H. Whyte - 1980
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.
Ephesus After Antiquity: A Late Antique, Byzantine and Turkish City
Clive Foss - 1980
Famous for its connections with Artemis, Heraclitus and St Paul, it is also one of the richest archaeological sites in the Mediterranean. Founded in the tenth century BC, it became, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the largest city and most important commercial centre in Asia Minor and continued in this role into Late Antiquity, where Professor Foss takes up its story. Professor Foss charts the fluctuations of Ephesus in all their aspects, religious, social, political and geographical, with extensive reference to many sources - historians, hagiographers, and travellers, as well as the rich archaeological evidence. The author's ability to visualise and convey what the city must have looked like at each stage, coupled with his strong narrative sense and varied choice of illustrations, will appeal to the general reader interested in Ephesus and to archaeologists, historians and those interested in church history.