Drawing on the contributions of economists and geographers, of cultural, technological, and social historians, Sir Peter Hall examines twenty-one cities at their greatest moments. Hall describes the achievements of these golden ages and outlines the precise combinations of forces -- both universal and local -- that led to each city's belle epoque.Hall identifies four distinct expressions of civic innovation: artistic growth, technological progress, the marriage of culture and technology, and solutions to evolving problems. Descriptions of Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Elizabethan London, and nineteenth-century Vienna bring to life those seedbeds of artistic and intellectual creativity. Explorations of Manchester during the Industrial Revolution, of Henry Ford's Detroit, and of Palo Alto at the dawn of the computer age highlight centers of technological advances. Tales of the creation of Los Angeles' movie industry and the birth of the blues and rock 'n' roll in Memphis depict the marriage of culture and technology. Finally, Hall celebrates cities that have been forced to solve problems created by their very size. With Imperial Rome came the apartment block and aqueduct; nineteenth-century London introduced policing, prisons, and sewers; twentieth-century New York developed the skyscraper; and Los Angeles became the first city without a center, a city ruled instead by the car. And in a fascinating conclusion, Hall speculates on urban creativity in the twenty-first century.This penetrating study reveals not only the lives of cities but also the lives of the people who built them and created the civilizations within them. A decade in the making, Cities in Civilization is the definitive account of the culture of cities.

    This concept was first proposed by Louis Sullivan in his 1891 article, “The High-Building Question” (inspired by William Le Baron Jenney’s recently completed Manhattan Building in Chicago.) Hugh Ferriss (1889-1962), American draftsman and architect, studied architecture at Washington University in St. Louis where the Beaux Arts school was favored. Early in his career he worked as a draftsman in the office of Cass Gilbert until he became a freelance delineator. In 1922, Ferris took part in a series of zoning envelope studies that sought to comply with the earlier city legislation. Such were the key ingredients that gave rise to the book at hand.In The Metropolis of Tomorrow, 49 stunning illustrations depict towering structures, personal space, wide avenues, and rooftop parks — features that now exist in many innovative, densely populated urban landscapes. Ferriss uses metaphors from nature that lend his text a poetic quality. It is no wonder that the work inspired critics of the time to remark: “As a creative entity, as a symbol of the American spirit, it is superb” (Survey), and as “magically stirring as a prophecy” (Albert Guerard in Books).With its eloquent commentary and powerful renderings, The Metropolis of Tomorrow is an indispensable resource for students, architects, and anyone else with an interest in American architecture.

    In this book, Thomas Hanchett traces the city's spatial evolution over the course of a century, exploring the interplay of national trends and local forces that shaped Charlotte, and, by extension, other New South urban centers.Hanchett argues that racial and economic segregation are not age-old givens, but products of a decades-long process. Well after the Civil War, Charlotte's whites and blacks, workers and business owners, all lived intermingled in a salt-and-pepper pattern. The rise of large manufacturing enterprises in the 1880s and 1890s brought social and political upheaval, however, and the city began to sort out into a checkerboard of distinct neighborhoods segregated by both race and class. When urban renewal and other federal funds became available in the mid- twentieth century, local leaders used the money to complete the sorting out process, creating a sector pattern in which wealthy whites increasingly lived on one side of town and blacks on the other.

    After his opening chapters on the political, social, and economic basis of town life, Mack Walker traces a painful process of decline that, while occasionally slowed or diverted, leads inexorably toward death and, in the twentieth century, transfiguration. Along the way, he addresses such topics as local government, corporate economies, and communal society. Equally important, he illuminates familiar aspects of German history in compelling ways, including the workings of the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic reforms, and the revolution of 1848.Finally, Walker examines German liberalism's underlying problem, which was to define a meaning of freedom that would make sense to both the movers and doers at the center and the citizens of the home towns. In the book's final chapter, Walker traces the historical extinction of the towns and their transformation into ideology. From the memory of the towns, he argues, comes Germans' ubiquitous yearning for organic wholeness, which was to have its most sinister expression in National Socialism's false promise of a racial community.A path-breaking work of scholarship when it was first published in 1971, German Home Towns remains an influential and engaging account of German history, filled with interesting ideas and striking insights--on cameralism, the baroque, Biedermeier culture, legal history and much more. In addition to the inner workings of community life, this book includes discussions of political theorists like Justi and Hegel, historians like Savigny and Eichhorn, philologists like Grimm. Walker is also alert to powerful long-term trends--the rise of bureaucratic states, the impact of population growth, the expansion of markets--and no less sensitive to the textures of everyday life.

    In this volume Marc Van de Mieroop examines the evolution of the very earliest cities which, for millennia, inspired the rest of the ancient world. The author argues that the city determined every aspect of Mesopotamian civilization, and the political and social structure, economy, literature, and arts of Mesopotamian culture cannot be understood without acknowledging their urban background.

    The majority of existing research emphasizes the impersonality of such erotic interaction and underscores the element of danger involved. While never denying the danger of anonymous public sex in the age of AIDS, the contributors to "Public Sex/Gay Space" go beyond narrow moralisms about the need to regulate unsafe sexual practices to discuss the significance of sex in public. William Leap has brought together contributions from such fields as anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, and history to reinvigorate the discussion on this issue, with twelve essays providing a more nuanced portrait of why public sexual activity is such an integral part of gay culture. The authors present rich ethnographic snapshots of male sex in public places--many drawn from interviews with participants or, in some instances, the authors' personal experiences.Contributors investigate a broad cultural spectrum of gay sexual space and activity: in a public park in contemporary Hanoi, at the beachfront community of New York's Fire Island, and in nineteenth-century Amsterdam, for example. They explore issues such as visibility and secrecy, as well as economic status and social class, and interrogate the historical trajectories through which certain locations come to be favored sites for sexual encounters. Together, they offer insight into the ways in which public sex calls into question the very line that divides "public" from "private."

    This particular form of social-psychological space comes into being whenever a piece of actual physical space is dominated by relationships between and among persons who are strangers to one another, as often occurs in urban bars, buses, plazas, parks, coffee houses, streets, and so forth. More specifically, the book is about the social life that occurs in such social-psychological spaces (the normative patterns and principles that shape it, the relationships that characterize it, the aesthetic and interactional pleasures that enliven it) and the forces (anti-urbanism, privatism, post-war planning and architecture) that threaten it. The data upon which the book's analysis is based are diverse: direct observation; interviews; contemporary photographs, historic etchings, prints and photographs, and historical maps; histories of specific urban public spaces or spatial types; and the relevant scholarly literature from sociology, environmental psychology, geography, history, anthropology, and architecture and urban planning and design. Its central argument is that while the existing body of accomplished work in the social sciences can be reinterpreted to make it relevant to an understanding of the public realm, this quintessential feature of city life deserves much more u it deserves to be the object of direct scholarly interest in its own right. Choice noted that: "The author's writing style is unusually accessible, and the often fascinating narrative is generously supported by well-chosen photos."

    They are without a doubt a significant contribution to modern art and humankind.Repetively writing ones name as we know it began in the early 70's and the objective of "the game" was "getting up". Its practitioners were New York's inner city youths, and eventually, for what ever reasons, their main forum became the underground transit system and its subway cars. From then on, well into the 80's, they created, built, and continued a cultural movement which evolved into an intensive and indigenous urban "art form", that has since spread extensively world wide.The broadness of its mass appeal bridges many racial, cultural, and class barriers within today's increasingly hostile and alienating world, just as it did in the past. Beyond its own ranks of youth of today and yesterday, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people who are interested in its existence, its history and its current trends. For and from art admirers, academics, cultural allies, hip hoppers, and the hippest urbanites, to anyone in or outside of the city, exposed or unexposed to writing and this culture's multi-faceted contents, this book which refelcts on its how and why and focuses on an extensive tradition that is known as "style", is genuinely, a must read.Though in the past decade there have been several books written on the subject matter, never has there been one that yields as solid an authority and possesses the stature of credibility as this one. It is the first book from start to finish to contain a history and analysis from those diehard devotees who have experienced it and assisted in making this movement what it is today. No myth or added drama, just truths sheer trauma.

    They are grouped in three overlapping sections, covering the economy and society of cities; peasants and the rural economy; and food supply and famine. The essays, all previously published, are presented together with bibliographical addenda by Walter Scheidel that summarize and assess scholarly reaction to the author's work. The range of subject matter and approach is wide and the treatment original and provocative.

    These essays counter the mainstream narrative of rational, scientific development with alternative histories that reveal hitherto invisible planning practices and agendas. While the official story of planning celebrates the state and its traditions of city building and regional development, these stories focus on previously unacknowledged actors and the noir side of planning.Through a variety of critical lenses—feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial—the essays examine a broad range of histories relevant to the preservation and planning professions. Some contributors uncover indigenous planning traditions that have been erased from the record: African American and Native American traditions, for example. Other contributors explore new themes: themes of gendered spaces and racist practices, of planning as an ordering tool, a kind of spatial police, of "bodies, cities, and social order" (influenced by Foucault, Lefebvre, and others), and of resistance.This scrutiny of the class, race, gender, ethnic, or ideological biases of ideas and practices inherent in the notion of planning as a modernist social technology clearly points to the inadequacy of modernist planning histories. Making the Invisible Visible redefines planning as the regulation of the physicality, sociality, and spatiality of the city. Its histories provide the foundation of a new, alternative planning paradigm for the multicultural cities of the future.

    Reilly, an overweight genius misfit. Though he has visions of grandeur, Ignatius winds up selling wienies for Paradise Vendors, Inc. (the fictional equivalent of Lucky Dogs), in New Orleans' famed French Quarter. Lest you think that the outlandish world of Ignatius was only a figment of Toole's vivid imagination, in Managing Ignatius Jerry E. Strahan relates his amusing - and bemusing - experiences working for more than two decades with the audacious characters who compose the actual stable of Lucky Dog vendors. Strahan weaves delectable vignettes of the Vieux Carre demimonde in whose midst he makes a living - a group blending panhandlers, prostitutes, pimps, con artists, schizophrenics, drifters, jazz musicians, strippers, bikers, and transvestites. Over the years they've all worked for Lucky Dogs, truly an equal opportunity employer. They often drink too much, party too long, and work too little. In managing these eccentrics, Strahan serves variously as peacemaker, negotiator, marriage counselor, detective, father figure, and banker. Sometimes all in the same day. He tells all their stories with a gently ironic realism, revealing his peculiar managerial challenges with keen appreciation for the human condition. Like Ignatius, he understands how fickle Fortuna can be.

    Part protest and part affirmation of devotion, the event was a reminder that marriage rights have become a major issue among lesbians and gay men, who cannot marry legally and can only claim domestic partner rights in a few locations in the United States. Yet despite official lack of recognition, same-sex wedding ceremonies have been increasing in frequency over the past decade.Ellen Lewin, who has consecrated her own lesbian relationship with a commitment ceremony, decided to explore the myriad ways in which lesbians and gay men create meaningful ceremonies for themselves. She offers the first comprehensive account of lesbian and gay weddings in modern America. A series of richly detailed profiles--the result of extensive interviews and participation in the planning and realization of many of these commitment rituals--is woven together to show how new traditions, and ultimately new families, are emerging within contemporary America.Just as the book is a moving portrait of same-sex couples today, it is also a significant political document on a new arena in the struggle for lesbian and gay rights. In a larger sense, Lewin's work is about the politics surrounding same-sex marriages and the ramifications for central dimensions of American culture such as kinship, community, morality, and love.Lewin explores the ceremonies themselves, which range from traditional church weddings to Wicca rituals in the countryside, with portraits of the planning, the joys, and the anxieties that led up to the weddings. She introduces Bob and Mark, a leather fetishist couple who sanctified their love by legally changing their last names and exchanging vows in tuxedos, leather bow ties, and knee-high police boots. In an equally absorbing profile, Lewin describes Khadija, from a working-class black family deeply suspicious of whites (and especially Jews) and Shulamith, raised in a Zionist household. She tells of how the two women struggled to reconcile their widely disparate upbringings and how they ultimately combined elements of African and Jewish traditions in their wedding. These, among many other stories, make Recognizing Ourselves a vivid tapestry of lesbian and gay life in post-Stonewall United States.

    It offers tips on managing the brownfields redevelopment process, including exclusion strategies and state voluntary clean-up programmes.