Best of
Urban-Studies

2001

Made in Tokyo: Guide Book


Junzo Kuroda - 2001
    Born of a functional need rather than aesthetic ideal, golf range nets span spaghetti snack bars and a host of 70 other remarkable combinations are pictured and described in this quintessential glimpse of Tokyo's architectural grass roots.

Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic


Sibel Bozdoğan - 2001
    Fuat Koprulu Book Prize in Turkish Studies sponsored by the Turkish Studies AssociationWith the proclamation of the Turkish republic by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923, Turkey's political and intellectual elites attempted to forge from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire a thoroughly modern, secular, European nation-state. Among many other public expressions of this bold social experiment, they imported modern architecture as both a visible symbol and an effective instrument of their modernizing agenda. They abandoned the prevailing Ottoman revivalist style and transformed the entire profession of architecture in Turkey according to the aesthetic canons and rationalist doctrines of European modernism.In this book, the architectural historian Sibel Bozdogan offers a cultural history of modern Turkish architecture and its impact on European modernism from the Young Turk revolution of 1908 to the end of the Kemalist single-party regime in 1950.Drawing on official propaganda publications, professional architectural journals, and popular magazines of the day, Bozdogan looks at Turkish architectural culture in its broad political, historical, and ideological context. She shows how modern architecture came to be the primary visual expression of the so-called republican revolution--especially in the case of representative public buildings and in the idealized form of the modern house. She also illustrates Turkish architects' efforts to legitimize modern forms on rational, scientific grounds and to "nationalize" them by showing their compatibility with Turkish building traditions.After Ataturk's death in 1938, the initial revolutionary spirit in Turkish architectural culture gave way to nationalist trends in German and Italian architecture and to the inspiration of Central Asian and pre-Islamic Turkish monuments. The resulting departure from the distinct modernist aesthetic of the early 1930s toward a more classicized and monumental architecture representative of state power brought this heroic era of modern Turkish history to a close. Today, when Turkey's project of modernity is being critically reevaluated from many perspectives, this comprehensive survey of Kemalism's architectural legacy is timely and provocative.

Preserving the World's Great Cities: The Destruction and Renewal of the Historic Metropolis


Anthony Max Tung - 2001
    Never before have the complexities and dramas of urban preservation been as keenly documented as in Preserving the World’s Great Cities. In researching this important work, Anthony Tung traveled throughout the world to visit remarkable buildings and districts in China, Italy, Greece, the U.S., Japan, and elsewhere. Everywhere he found both the devastating legacy of war, economics, and indifference and the accomplishments of people who have worked and sometimes risked their lives to preserve and renew the most meaningful urban expressions of the human spirit.From Singapore’s blind rush to become the most modern city of the East to Warsaw’s poignant and heroic effort to resurrect itself from the Nazis’ systematic campaign of physical and cultural obliteration, from New York and Rome to Kyoto and Cairo, we see the city as an expression of the best and worst within us. This is essential reading for fans of Jane Jacobs and Witold Rybczynski and everyone who is concerned about urban preservation. From the Hardcover edition.

New City Spaces, Strategies and Projects


Jan Gehl - 2001
    The book presents an overview of the developments in the use and planning of public spaces, and offers a detailled description of architecturally interesting and inspiering public space stategies and projects from all parts of the World. In this context 9 cities with interesting public space strategies is presented: Barcelona, Lyon, Strasbourg, Freiburg and Copenhagen in Europe, Portland in North America, Curitiba and Cordoba in South America and Melbourne in Australia. Further 39 selected public space projects from all parts of the World are presented and discussed. City strategies as well as public space projects are extensively illustrated by drawings, plans and photographs.

The Boulevard Book: History, Evolution, Design of Multiway Boulevards


Allan B. Jacobs - 2001
    The American preoccupation with destination and speed has made multiway boulevards increasingly rare as artifacts of the urban landscape. This book reintroduces the boulevard, tree-lined and with separate realms for through traffic and for slow-paced vehicular-pedestrian movement, as an important and often crucial feature of both historic and contemporary cities. It presents more than fifty boulevards--as varied as Avenue Montaigne, in Paris; C. G. Road, in Ahmedabad, India; and The Esplanade, in Chico, California--celebrating their usefulness and beauty. It discusses their history and evolution, the misconceptions that led to their near-demise in the United States, and their potential as a modern street type.Based on wide research, The Boulevard Book examines the safety of these streets and offers design guidelines for professionals, scholars, and community decision makers. Extensive plans, cross sections, and perspective drawings permit visual comparisons. The book shows how multiway boulevards respond to many issues that are central to urban life, including livability, mobility, safety, interest, economic opportunity, mass transit, and open space.

Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape


Peter Reed - 2001
    In the last 20 years, many significant new public spaces have been created for sites that have been reclaimed from conflict, environmental degradation, and abandonment. The projects, found throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, were selected for their outstanding design, and for their variety of contexts, materials, scale, and types of spaces. This fully illustrated volume includes an essay by Peter Reed, Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, that demonstrates how these innovative projects expand the definition of the modernist landscape while responding to a variety of conditions such as program, social function, and the transformation and reclamation previously industrial areas. The essay is followed by a full-color plate section featuring the selected projects. Catalogue entries for each project provide a succinct description of the site, its transformation, and design concepts illustrated by photographs, drawings, and models. Includes work by George Hargreaves, Martha Schwartz, Peter Walker, James Corner, Peter Latz, Ken Smith, Tom Leader, and others. Essay by Peter Reed. Paperback, 9.5 x 11 in./176 pgs / 300 color and 30 b&w.

City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo


Teresa P.R. Caldeira - 2001
    Focusing on São Paulo, and using comparative data on Los Angeles, she identifies new patterns of segregation developing in these cities and suggests that these patterns are appearing in many metropolises.

Before Motown: A History of Jazz in Detroit, 1920-60


Lars Bjorn - 2001
    But what many people forget is that Detroit has a remarkable jazz history, which became a major influence in what came to be known as the Motown sound.Before Motown is the first book about the history of jazz in Detroit. It shows the significant impact Detroit has had on the development of jazz in America, with its own sound, distinct from that of the other jazz centers of Chicago, New Orleans, St. Louis, or Kansas City. Starting with the big bands in the 1920s,with groups like the McKinney's Cotton Pickers and Jean Goldkette's Orchestra, and continuing into the 1950s, Detroit experienced a golden age of modern jazz centered around clubs like the Blue Bird Inn. That jazz scene comes alive in interviews with musicians and club owners, combined with unique period photographs and advertisements. In addition, Detroit's vital jazz scene is placed in its social context, particularly within the changing relations between blacks and whites at the time.Long overdue, Before Motown tells the story of Detroit jazz as it really happened, told by the people who lived it. More importantly, it shows how life can mirror art in the most pragmatic of American cities, Detroit.Lars Bjorn is Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan, Dearborn, and the author of numerous articles and publications about jazz. Jim Gallert is Vice President of the Jazz Alliance of Michigan and a veteran jazz broadcaster. He has been involved with the Detroit jazz scene for over twenty-five years.

Mimesis and Intertextuality in Antiquity and Christianity


Dennis Ronald MacDonald - 2001
    While the study of intertextuality has influenced deeply the study of the Synoptic Gospels and other early Christian texts, few scholars of early Christian literature have enriched their observations with studies of mimesis. The apocryphal Acts of Andrew, for instance, contains extensive imitation of Homeric and Euripidean poetry, and both Luke-Acts and Mark contain extensive imitation of the Homeric epics. These essays examine the phenomenon of mimesis and intertextuality through an in-depth examination of particular texts, ranging from the apocryphal book of Tobit to Luke-Acts and the Synoptic Gospels. Contributors include: Francois Bovon (Harvard Divinity School); Thomas Louis Brodie (Dominican House of Study, Dublin, Ireland); Ellen Finkelpearl (Scripps College); Ronald F. Hock (University of Southern California); George W. E. Nickelsburg (University of Iowa); Judith Perkins (Saint Joseph College); and Gregory J. Riley (Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University). Dennis R. MacDonald teaches at the Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University and Director of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity. He is the author of Christianizing Homer: The "Odyssey," Plato, and the Acts of Andrew and Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark. For: Graduate students; general audience; professors; literary scholars>

The Patina Of Place: The Cultural Weathering Of A New England Industrial


Kingston Wm. Heath - 2001
    This rapid urbanization transformed the built environment of communities such as New Bedford, Massachusetts, as new housing styles emerged to accommodate the largely immigrant workforce of the mills. In particular, the wood-frame “three-decker” became the region’s multifamily housing design of choice in urban areas and is widely acknowledged as a unique architectural form that is characteristic of New England. In The Patina of Place, Kingston Heath offers the first book-length analysis of the three-decker and its cultural significance, revealing New Bedford’s evolving regional identity within New England.The Patina of Place offers a multidisciplinary analysis of workers’ housing as an index to social change and cultural identity in New Bedford from 1848 to 1925. Heath discusses both the city’s company-owned mill housing and the subsequent transition to a speculative building market that established the three-decker rental flat as the city’s most common housing form for industrial workers.Using the concept of “cultural weathering” to explore the cultural imprints left by inhabitants on their built environment, Heath considers whether the three-decker is a generic “type” that could be transferred elsewhere. He concludes that the ethnic, economic, and geographic conditions of a locale serve as filters that reshape the meaning, utility, and character of a building form, thereby making it an integral part of its particular community. Specifically, he shows how the three-decker was lived in, and used by, its original inhabitants and illustrates its transformation by later generations of residents following the collapse of the textile industry in the mid-1920s.The Patina of Place focuses on the three-decker in New Bedford, but its overarching theme concerns the cultural, economic, and social complexities of place-making and the creation of regional identity. Heath offers a broad investigation of the forces that drive the production and consumption of architecture, at the same time providing an economic and cultural context for the emergence of a particular architectural form.The Author: Kingston Heath is associate professor in the college of architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His articles have appeared in The Encyclopedia of Architecture and Old-Time New England, among other publications.

The Anti-Rent Era in New York Law and Politics, 1839-1865


Charles W. McCurdy - 2001
    history. From its beginning in the rural villages of eastern New York in 1839 until its collapse in 1865, the Anti-Rent movement impelled the state's governors, legislators, judges, and journalists, as well as delegates to New York's bellwether constitutional convention of 1846, to wrestle with two difficult problems of social policy. One was how to put down violent tenant resistance to the enforcement of landlord property and contract rights. The second was how to abolish the archaic form of land tenure at the root of the rent strike.Charles McCurdy considers the public debate on these questions from a fresh perspective. Instead of treating law and politics as dependent variables--as mirrors of social interests or accelerators of social change--he highlights the manifold ways in which law and politics shaped both the pattern of Anti-Rent violence and the drive for land reform. In the process, he provides a major reinterpretation of the ideas and institutions that diminished the promise of American democracy in the supposed "golden age" of American law and politics.

Global City Regions: Trends, Theory, Policy


Allen J. Scott - 2001
    As globalization intensifies, these city-regions come to pose many new questions and problems. This book presents a highly original and multifaceted review of these issues by some of the leading researchers in the field. It seeks at once to define the question of global city-regions and to describe the internal and external dynamics that shape them; it proposes a theorization of global city-regions based on their economic and political responses to intensifying levels of globalization; and it offers a number of policy insights into the severe social problems that confront global city-regions as they come face to face with an economically and politically neoliberal world.

Cityscapes: A History of New York in Images


Howard B. Rock - 2001
    In lithographs, paintings, drawings, and broadsides, New York is portrayed as rising from a small Dutch outpost to a republican seaport whose life was framed by the American Revolution. The visual evidence changes to etchings, photographs, and lithographs as "Cityscapes" depicts a mid-nineteenth-century city torn by dislocations caused by a multiethnic society amid the turmoil of the industrial revolution. Documenting the turn of the last century, a wealth of photographs shows the new five-borough metropolis taking in waves of immigrants and portrays the evolution of the immigrant metropolis into the cosmopolitan city of mid-century. In its final chapter, "Cityscapes" looks at the global village and takes stock of New York's role as the world economic and artistic capital of the late twentieth century.This lavish volume shows how New York produced contemporary understandings of what makes a city, from a distinctive skyline, to a democratic street grid, to diverse ethnic neighborhoods. From the depths of poverty to the heights of conspicuous consumption, images of New York illustrate how we comprehend the urban past, and imagine its future.

Creating Better Cities with Children and Youth: A Manual for Participation


David Driskell - 2001
    It is an important tool for urban planners, municipal officials, community development staff, non-governmental organizations, educators, youth-serving agencies, youth advocates, and others who are involved in the community development process. It offers inspiration to all who believe in the value of community education and empowerment as a fundamental building block of a vibrant and resilient civil society, and those who feel concern for young people and the quality of their lives. The manual's core ideas and methods have been field-tested in a wide range of urban settings in both developing and industrialized cities through the work of the UNESCO Growing Up in Cities project. Case studies from project sites help to demonstrate the methods in action and show how they can be customized to meet local needs. They provide lessons and insights to help ensure a successful project, and highlight the universal applicability and value of young people's participation.