Book picks similar to
Space, the City and Social Theory: Social Relations and Urban Forms by Fran Tonkiss


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Why Architecture Matters


Paul Goldberger - 2009
    The purpose of Why Architecture Matters is to "come to grips with how things feel to us when we stand before them, with how architecture affects us emotionally as well as intellectually" — with its impact on our lives. "Architecture begins to matter," writes Paul Goldberger, "when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads." He shows us how that works in examples ranging from a small Cape Cod cottage to the "vast, flowing" Prairie houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, from the Lincoln Memorial to the highly sculptural Guggenheim Bilbao and the Church of Sant'Ivo in Rome, where "simple geometries...create a work of architecture that embraces the deepest complexities of human imagination."Based on decades of looking at buildings and thinking about how we experience them, the distinguished critic raises our awareness of fundamental things like proportion, scale, space, texture, materials, shapes, light, and memory. Upon completing this remarkable architectural journey, readers will enjoy a wonderfully rewarding new way of seeing and experiencing every aspect of the built world.

The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project


Susan Buck-Morss - 1989
    In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form. Working with Benjamin's vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth. The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose materialist metaphysics he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century ur-form of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin's dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time--from air balloons to women's fashions, from Baudelaire's poetry to Grandville's cartoons--as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique. Buck-Morss plots Benjamin's intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south--Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples--and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of dialectics at a standstill. She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin's insights but then allows a set of afterimages to have the last word.

When Hitler Took Cocaine: Fascinating Footnotes from History


Giles Milton - 2014
    Covering everything from adventure, war, murder and slavery to espionage, including the stories of the real war horse, who killed Rasputin, Agatha Christie's greatest mystery and Hitler's English girlfriend, these tales deserve to be told.

Roadshow!: The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s


Matthew Kennedy - 2013
    Reserved seats went on sale at premium prices. Audience members dressed up and arrived early to peruse the program during the overture that preceded the curtain's rise. And when the show began, it was--a rather disappointing film musical.In Roadshow!, film historian Matthew Kennedy tells the fascinating story of the downfall of the big-screen musical in the late 1960s. It is a tale of revolutionary cultural change, business transformation, and artistic missteps, all of which led to the obsolescence of the roadshow, a marketing extravaganza designed to make a movie opening in a regional city seem like a Broadway premier. Ironically, the Hollywood musical suffered from unexpected success. Facing doom after its bygone heyday, it suddenly broke box-office records with three rapid-fire successes in 1964 and 1965: Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and The Sound of Music. Studios rushed to catch the wave, but everything went wrong. Kennedy takes readers inside the making of such movies as Hello, Dolly! and Man of La Mancha, showing how corporate management imposed financial pressures that led to poor artistic decisions-for example, the casting of established stars regardless of vocal or dancing talent (such as Clint Eastwood in Paint Your Wagon). And Kennedy explores the impact of profound social, political, and cultural change. The traditional-sounding Camelot and Doctor Dolittle were released in the same year as Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, representing a vast gulf in taste. The artifice of musicals seemed outdated to baby boomers who grew up with the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, race riots, and the Vietnam War.From Julie Andrews to Barbra Streisand, from Fred Astaire to Rock Hudson, Roadshow! offers a brilliant, gripping history of film musicals and their changing place in our culture.

Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York


James T. Murray - 2008
    But for how long?Are New York City's local merchants a dying breed or an enduring group of diehards hell bent on retaining the traditions of a glorious past? According to Jim and Karla Murray the influx of big box retailers and chain stores pose a serious threat to these humble institutions, and neighborhood modernization and the anonymity it brings are replacing the unique appearance and character of what were once incredibly colorful streets.Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York is a visual guide to New York City's timeworn storefronts, a collection of powerful images that capture the neighborhood spirit, familiarity, comfort and warmth that these shops once embodied.

Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan


Phillip Lopate - 2004
    In his brilliant exploration of this defining yet neglected shoreline, personal essayist Philip Lopate also recovers a part of the city's soul. A native New Yorker, Lopate has embraced Manhattan by walking every inch of its perimeter, telling stories on the way of pirates (Captain Kidd) and power brokers (Robert Moses), the lowly shipworm and Typhoid Mary, public housing in Harlem and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. He evokes the magic of the once bustling old port from Melville's and Whitman's day to the era of the longshoremen in On the Waterfront, while appraising today's developers and environmental activists, and probing new plans for parks and pleasure domes with river views. Whether escorting us into unfamiliar, hazardous crannies or along a Beaux Arts esplanade, Waterfront is a grand literary ramble and defense of urban life by one of our most perceptive observers.

Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States


Kenneth T. Jackson - 1985
    Integrating social history with economic and architectural analysis, and taking into account such factors as the availability of cheap land, inexpensive building methods, and rapid transportation, Kenneth Jackson chronicles the phenomenal growth of the American suburb from the middle of the 19th century to the present day. He treats communities in every section of the U.S. and compares American residential patterns with those of Japan and Europe. In conclusion, Jackson offers a controversial prediction: that the future of residential deconcentration will be very different from its past in both the U.S. and Europe.

Women Who Kill: True Crime Stories Of Killer Women, Serial Killers And Psychopathic Women Who Kill For Pleasure


Brody Clayton - 2015
    Read on your PC, Mac, smart phone, tablet or Kindle device. When male serial killers are on the loose they tend to make headlines, for example Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer. Men like these are infamous for the terror that they inflicted in the general population. Many of these men are diagnosed as psychopaths. The reasons for them going down the paths that they chose are analysed and studied and read about. There was a time however that all such crimes were always automatically linked to a man. A general perception was quite common; that there is no such thing as women serial killers and psychopaths. In fact, women killers can sometimes be more lethal, and the murders that they have committed can be just as cold and calculated as a man's. When women and men turn to murder and crime, they leave a wake of disappearances and blood in their path, a path that may be discovered after years have passed. Now, be it male or female, analysts have sat them down and assessed their mental progress. Things have changed over the decades. Their crimes are weighed in the same scales as their male counterparts, and now they can't hide themselves by claiming to be absolutely innocent. Here Is A Preview Of What You'll Learn... Women Who Kill – Delphine La Laurie and Her House of Horrors Women Who Kill – Elizabeth Bathory – The Blood Countess Women Who Kill – Nannie Doss – Nancy Hazel – The Husband Killer Women Who Kill – Nannie Doss – The Second Husband Women Who Kill – Nannie Doss – The Third Victim Women Who Kill – Nannie Doss – Four Husbands in a Row Women Who Kill – Nannie Doss – Last Man Standing Much, much more! Download your copy today! Take action today and download this book for a limited time discount of only $2.99! If you're intrigued by the women killers of our time then download this book now! Tags: women who kill, women killers, killer women, true crime, true murder stories, murder mysteries, cold cases true crime, murders solved, killer families, unsolved murders, crimes, true crime stories,

Any Last Words?


Les Macdonald - 2014
    Each story features a short synopsis of the crime and the journey through the justice system that brought them to the execution chamber.

American Public School Law


Kern Alexander - 1985
    It presents and discusses specific legal cases concerned with the multitude of issues facing the public school system-including teaching diverse student populations, teacher rights, and the role of the Federal government. There are over 1300 citations and excerpts of school law cases.

White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa


Sharon Rotbard - 2005
    Today, the Hebrew city of Tel Aviv glitters white, its Bauhaus-influenced modernist architecture betraying few traces of the city which once stood where it now stands: the Arab city of Jaffa. In this book, Sharon Rotbard blows apart this palimpsest in a clear, fluent and challenging style, which promises to force the reality of what so many have praised as 'progress' into the mainstream discourse. A book that works on many levels, White City, Black City is, all at once, an angry uncovering of a vanished history, a book mourning the loss of an architectural heritage, a careful study in urban design and a beautifully written narrative history. It is in all senses a political book, but one that expands beyond the typical. This book promises to become the central text on Tel Aviv - its publication in Hebrew was hailed as 'path-breaking' and a 'masterpiece'.

City: Urbanism and Its End


Douglas W. Rae - 2003
    Douglas Rae depicts the reasons for urban decline, explains why government spending has failed to restore urban vitality, and offers suggestions to enhance city life in the future.“A terrific read, moving seductively from the minutiae of neighborhood history to grand global forces.”—Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone“An extraordinarily detailed study of New Haven, tracing the city’s rise in the early part of the 20th century and its fall in the second half—an almost archetypal tale of the American city.”—Edward Rothstein, New York Times“For anyone with the slightest interest in cities, this book is that rare combination: a must-read volume that you can’t put down.”—Planning Magazine“[Rae] has provided the blueprint for the next generation of thinkers and city dwellers who debate the future of urban America. . . . A tour de force of research.”—Paul Bass, New Haven Advocate

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain


Owen Hatherley - 2010
    Darkly humorous architectural guide to the decrepit new Britain that neoliberalism built.

New York Underground: The Anatomy of a City


Julia Solis - 2002
    New York Underground takes readers through ingenious criminal escape routes, abandoned subway stations, and dark crypts beneath lower Manhattan to expose the city's basic anatomy. While the city is justly famous for what lies above ground, its underground passages are equally legendary and tell us just as much about how the city works.

The Lettered City


Ángel Rama - 1984
    Angel Rama’s groundbreaking study—presented here in its first English translation—provides an overview of the power of written discourse in the historical formation of Latin American societies, and highlights the central role of cities in deploying and reproducing that power. To impose order on a vast New World empire, the Iberian monarchs created carefully planned cities where institutional and legal powers were administered through a specialized cadre of elite men called letrados; it is the urban nexus of lettered culture and state power that Rama calls “the lettered city.” Starting with the colonial period, Rama undertakes a historical analysis of the hegemonic influences of the written word. He explores the place of writing and urbanization in the imperial designs of the Iberian colonialists and views the city both as a rational order of signs representative of Enlightenment progress and as the site where the Old World is transformed—according to detailed written instructions—in the New. His analysis continues by recounting the social and political challenges faced by the letrados as their roles in society widened to include those of journalist, fiction writer, essayist, and political leader, and how those roles changed through the independence movements of the nineteenth century. The coming of the twentieth century, and especially the gradual emergence of a mass reading public, brought further challenges. Through a discussion of the currents and countercurrents in turn-of-the-century literary life, Rama shows how the city of letters was finally “revolutionized.”Already crucial in setting the terms for debate concerning the complex relationships among intellectuals, national formations, and the state, this elegantly written and translated work will be read by Latin American scholars in a wide range of disciplines, and by students and scholars in the fields of anthropology, cultural geography, and postcolonial studies.