This new book takes place in Lockdown Three. This time Key can make Government-sanctioned expeditions out onto the streets of London (remember?). And it is there that the inaction takes place. Phone calls to his mother, promenades with his loyal friend, bubble-negotiations, sitting his fat arse down on benches, drinking mocha. Another three months of mind-freezing inertia. This time on the move. Conversations interspersed with poetry.

    The inspiration to write a work of art arises from the unconscious, full of ideas that the very author may have been unaware of. “The Little Prince for Grown-ups” gets to the roots of some of Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince, using mythology and Jungian psychology concepts to expose some of its buried treasures. As in the book of Saint-Exupéry, the crash that leads the pilot to land in the Sahara desert becomes the beginning of a self-knowledge journey. Exupéry himself, or rather, Antoine, is the protagonist of this journey, and his companions are the blonde boy with the scarf around his neck and the Wise Old Man. In addition, there are many stories from the Bible as well as Gnostic texts, and Greek mythology.. Despite being based on Jungian ideas, no psychology knowledge is required to the read the book.

    38 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more – everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Tao Te Ching. This detailed literature summary also contains Topics for Discussion on Tao Te Ching by Stephen Mitchell.

    For Melody Warnick, it was move #6, from Austin, Texas, to Blacksburg, Virginia, that threatened to unhinge her. In the lonely aftermath of unpacking, she wondered: Aren’t we supposed to put down roots at some point? How does where we live become the place where we want to stay? This time, she had an epiphany. Rather than hold her breath and hope this new town would be her family’s perfect fit, she would figure out how to fall in love with it—no matter what. How we come to feel at home in our towns and cities is what Warnick sets out to discover in This Is Where You Belong. She dives into the body of research around place attachment—the deep sense of connection that binds some of us to our cities and increases our physical and emotional well-being—then travels to towns across America to see it in action. Inspired by a growing movement of placemaking, she examines what its practitioners are doing to create likeable locales. She also speaks with frequent movers and loyal stayers around the country to learn what draws highly mobile Americans to a new city, and what makes us stay. The best ideas she imports to her adopted hometown of Blacksburg for a series of Love Where You Live experiments designed to make her feel more locally connected. Dining with her neighbors. Shopping Small Business Saturday. Marching in the town Christmas parade. Can these efforts make a halfhearted resident happier? Will Blacksburg be the place where she finally stays? What Warnick learns will inspire you to embrace your own community—and perhaps discover that the place where you live right now is home.

    As a result, we face both a dire emergency and a tremendous opportunity. At their best, our modern cities are hubs of human connection, fountains of creativity, and exemplars of green living. Yet at the same time, they still suffer the symptoms of industrial urbanization: pollution, crowding, crime, social fragmentation, and dehumanization. Now is the time to envision what cities can be and to transform them. This book, produced in partnership with the Atlantic Cities, celebrates 12 promising, provocative responses to this challenge, in realms ranging from transportation to food to art. It asks and begins to answer: How can we transform cities to be sustainable, efficient, beautiful, and invigorating to the human soul? And practically speaking, how do we get from here to there?

    In Unruly Places, Alastair Bonnett goes to some of the most unexpected, offbeat places in the world to reinspire our geographical imagination.Bonnett’s remarkable tour includes moving villages, secret cities, no man’s lands, and floating islands. He explores places as disorienting as Sandy Island, an island included on maps until just two years ago despite the fact that it never existed. Or Sealand, an abandoned gun platform off the English coast that a British citizen claimed as his own sovereign nation, issuing passports and crowning his wife as a princess. Or Baarle, a patchwork of Dutch and Flemish enclaves where walking from the grocery store’s produce section to the meat counter can involve crossing national borders.An intrepid guide down the road much less traveled, Bonnett reveals that the most extraordinary places on earth might be hidden in plain sight, just around the corner from your apartment or underfoot on a wooded path. Perfect for urban explorers, wilderness ramblers, and armchair travelers struck by wanderlust, Unruly Places will change the way you see the places you inhabit.

    So how do we define the city as it evolves in the 21st century? Drawing examples from across the globe, Deyan Sudjic decodes the underlying forces that shape our cities, such as resources and land, to the ideas that shape conscious elements of design, whether of buildings or of space. Erudite and entertaining, he considers the differences between capital cities and the rest to understand why it is that we often feel more comfortable in our identities as Londoners, Muscovites, or Mumbaikars than in our national identities.

    Drawing on a wealth of original field, survey and historical data, Loic Wacquant shows that the involution of America's urban core after the 1960s is due not to the emergence of an 'underclass', but to the joint withdrawal of market and state fostered by public policies of racial separation and urban abandonment. In European cities, by contrast, the spread of districts of 'exclusion' does not herald the formation of ghettos. It stems from the decomposition of working-class territories under the press of mass unemployment, the casualization of work and the ethnic mixing of populations hitherto segregated, spawning urban formations akin to 'anti-ghettos'. Comparing the US 'Black Belt' with the French 'Red Belt' demonstrates that state structures and policies play a decisive role in the articulation of class, race and place on both sides of the Atlantic. It also reveals the crystallization of a new regime of marginality fuelled by the fragmentation of wage labour, the retrenchment of the social state and the concentration of dispossessed categories in stigmatized areas bereft of a collective idiom of identity and claims-making. These defamed districts are not just the residual 'sinkholes' of a bygone economic era, but also the incubators of the precarious proletariat emerging under neoliberal capitalism.Urban Outcasts sheds new light on the explosive mix of mounting misery, stupendous affluence and festering street violence resurging in the big cities of the First World. By specifying the different causal paths and experiential forms assumed by relegation in the American and the French metropolis, this book offers indispensable tools for rethinking urban marginality and for reinvigorating the public debate over social inequality and citizenship at century's dawn.

    It also contains the life of his guru, Maharshi Amara, who spent his entire life working for the welfare of this world with the Light Beings in the higher planes known as Rishis. The book clearly explains many Spiritual Truths and the real meaning of Guru, Ashrama, Sanyasa, Vairagya, Meditation, Astral Travel, Samadhi, Energies, the New Age, Pralaya and many unknown and intriguing facts never published before, making it one of the most relevant books of current times. A must read for every sincere seeker of spirituality.

    By the late 1960s, it had become a symbol of urban decay and blight, compared by journaliststo bombed-out Dresden and war-torn Beirut. Several decades and a dozen casinos later, Atlantic City is again one of America's most popular tourist spots, with thirty-five million visitors a year. Yet most stay for a mere six hours, and the highway has replaced the Boardwalk as the city's mostimportant thoroughfare. Today the city doesn't have a single movie theater and its one supermarket is a virtual fortress protected by metal detectors and security guards. In this wide-ranging book, Bryant Simon does far more than tell a nostalgic tale of Atlantic City's rise, near death, and reincarnation. He turns the depiction of middle-class vacationers into a revealing discussion of the boundaries of public space in urban America. In the past, he argues, thepublic was never really about democracy, but about exclusion. During Atlantic City's heyday, African Americans were kept off the Boardwalk and away from the beaches. The overly boisterous or improperly dressed were kept out of theaters and hotel lobbies by uniformed ushers and police. The creationof Atlantic City as the Nation's Playground was dependent on keeping undesirables out of view unless they were pushing tourists down the Boardwalk on rickshaw-like rolling chairs or shimmying in smoky nightclubs. Desegregation overturned this racial balance in the mid-1960s, making the city's public spaces more open and democratic, too open and democratic for many middle-class Americans, who fled to suburbs and suburban-style resorts like Disneyworld. With the opening of the first casino in 1978, the urbanbalance once again shifted, creating twelve separate, heavily guarded, glittering casinos worlds walled off from the dilapidated houses, boarded-up businesses, and lots razed for redevelopment that never came. Tourists are deliberately kept away from the city's grim reality and its predominantlypoor African American residents. Despite ten of thousands of buses and cars rolling into every day, gambling has not saved Atlantic City or returned it to its glory days. Simon's moving narrative of Atlantic City's past points to the troubling fate of urban America and the nation's cultural trajectory in the twentieth century, with broad implications for those interested in urban studies, sociology, planning, architecture, and history.

    Author John Gallagher, who has covered urban redevelopment for the Detroit Free Press for two decades, spent a year researching what is going on in Detroit precisely because of its open space and the dire economic times we face. Instead of presenting another account of the city's decline, Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City showcases the innovative community-building work happening in the city and focuses on what else can be done to make Detroit leaner, greener, and more economically self-sufficient. Gallagher conducted numerous interviews, visited community projects, and took many of the photographs that accompany the text to uncover some of the strategies that are being used, and could be used in the future, to make twenty-first century Detroit a more sustainable and desirable place to live. Some of the topics Gallagher discusses are urban agriculture, restoring vacant lots, reconfiguring Detroit's overbuilt road network, and reestablishing some of the city's original natural landscape. He also investigates new models for governing the city and fostering a more entrepreneurial economy to ensure a more stable political and economic future. Along the way, Gallagher introduces readers to innovative projects that are already under way in the city and proposes other models for possible solutions-from as far away as Dresden, Germany, and Seoul, South Korea, and as close to home as Philadelphia and Youngstown-to complement current efforts. Ultimately, Gallagher helps to promote progressive ideas and the community leaders advancing them and offers guidance for other places dealing with the shrinking cities phenomenon. Readers interested in urban studies and environmental issues will enjoy the fresh perspective of Reimagining Detroit.

    Named Soul City, the community secured funding from the Nixon administration, planning help from Harvard and the University of North Carolina, and endorsements from the New York Times and the Today show. Before long, the brand-new settlement – built on a former slave plantation – had roads, houses, a health care center, and an industrial plant. By the year 2000, projections said, Soul City would have fifty thousand residents.But the utopian vision was not to be. The race-baiting Jesse Helms, newly elected as senator from North Carolina, swore to stop government spending on the project. Meanwhile, the liberal Raleigh News & Observer mistakenly claimed fraud and corruption in the construction effort. Battered from the left and the right, Soul City was shut down after just a decade. Today, it is a ghost town – and its industrial plant, erected to promote Black economic freedom, has been converted into a prison.Was it an impossible dream from the beginning? Or a brilliant idea thwarted by prejudice and ignorance? And how might America be different today if Soul City had been allowed to succeed?

    A work of creative nonfiction, the book roams through space, time and possibility, mapping cities of sound, melancholia and the afterlife, where time runs backwards or which float among the clouds. In doing so, Imaginary Cities seeks to move beyond the clichés of psychogeography and hauntology, to not simply revisit the urban past, or our relationship with it, but to invade and reinvent it. Following in the lineage of Borges, Calvino, Chris Marker and Kenneth White, the book examines the city from global macrocosm to the microcosm of its inhabitants’ perspectives. It proceeds through opium dreams, sea voyages, the hallucinations of prisoners, nocturnal decadence, impossible Soviet skyscrapers, marauding golems, subterranean civilisations, apocalyptic prophecies and the work of architectural visionaries such as Antonio Sant’Elia, Archigram and Buckminster Fuller. It rethinks the ideas of utopias and dystopias, urban exploration, alienation and resistance. It claims that the Situationists lacked ambition when they suggested, “Beneath the paving stones, the beach.” Instead, beneath the paving stones, we may just be able to discern the entire universe. Imaginary Cities demonstrates that each city dreamt up by artists, writers, architects and lunatics has a real-life equivalent and that the great Marco Polo was no liar. Imaginary Cities need not simply exist in fiction or the mind. We already inhabit them.

    In one, a model addicted to the internet gets invited to an elite party by a stranger. In another, a high school student obsessed with death tries to quench an ever-growing thirst. In others, embarrassing sex is explored, survival of the fittest is exercised, and death is redeemed. Throughout these twelve short stories one thing is common: Olson isn’t afraid to leave any rock unturned while exploring the dark side of the human condition.

    How to Live in the City is a book for navigating and nurturing this important relationship.Hugo Macdonald believes you need to feel a city to understand it. He won't tell you how wide the perfect pavement should be but he will show you how to walk down a pavement with eyes wide open. This is a book to help you feel human in an inhuman environment.