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177 books about Cities and towns and 5
start with O
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177 books about Cities and towns and 5
177 books about Cities and towns
5 start with O start with O
5 start with O start with O
One Country, Two Societies
Rural-Urban Inequality in Contemporary China
Martin King Whyte
Harvard University Press, 2010
This timely and important collection of original essays analyzes China’s foremost social cleavage: the rural–urban gap. It is now clear that the Chinese communist revolution, though professing dedication to an egalitarian society, in practice created a rural order akin to serfdom, in which 80 percent of the population was effectively bound to the land. China is still struggling with that legacy. The reforms of 1978 changed basic aspects of economic and social life in China’s villages and cities and altered the nature of the rural-urban relationship. But some important institutions and practices have changed only marginally or not at all, and China is still sharply divided into rural and urban castes with different rights and opportunities in life, resulting in growing social tensions.
The contributors, many of whom conducted extensive fieldwork, examine the historical background of rural–urban relations; the size and trend in the income gap between rural and urban residents in recent years; aspects of inequality apart from income (access to education and medical care, the digital divide, housing quality and location); experiences of discrimination, particularly among urban migrants; and conceptual and policy debates in China regarding the status and treatment of rural residents and urban migrants.
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The Option of Urbanism
Investing in a New American Dream
Christopher B. Leinberger
Island Press, 2009
Americans are voting with their feet to abandon strip malls and suburban sprawl, embracing instead a new type of community where they can live, work, shop, and play within easy walking distance. In The Option of Urbanism visionary developer and strategist Christopher B. Leinberger explains why government policies have tilted the playing field toward one form of development over the last sixty years: the drivable suburb. Rooted in the driving forces of the economy—car manufacturing and the oil industry—this type of growth has fostered the decline of community, contributed to urban decay, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and contributed to the rise in obesity and asthma.
Highlighting both the challenges and the opportunities for this type of development, The Option of Urbanism shows how the American Dream is shifting to include cities as well as suburbs and how the financial and real estate communities need to respond to build communities that are more environmentally, socially, and financially sustainable.
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Order, Materiality, and Urban Space in the Early Modern Kingdom of Sweden
Riitta Laitinen
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Our corporeality and immersion in the material world make us inherently spatial beings, and the fact that we all share everyday experiences in the global physical environment means that community is also spatial by nature. This book explores the relationship between the seventeenth-century townspeople of Turku, Sweden, and their urban surroundings. Riitta Laitinen offers a novel account of civil and social order in this early modern town, highlighting the central importance of materiality and spatiality and breaking down the dichotomy of public versus private life that has dominated traditional studies of the time period.
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Organicity
Entropy or Evolution
David Dobereiner
Black Rose Books, 2019
Nature is endlessly reinventing itself in a constant flux of movement and diversity. Yet the advancement of modern civilization has engendered extreme inequality, social division, and an imbalance between society and nature. Our technological proficiency has given our species the illusion of omnipotence; in our efforts to build robots more like us, we have not noticed how robotic we ourselves have become. To deal with this profound crisis, we must understand this problem at its roots. Could the origins of social domination and ecological exploitation be related? Is it possible for us to transform these dynamics and design society in a way that is cognizant of, and harmonious with, the Earth?
In this visionary book, David Dobereiner lucidly delves into the present urban and ecological impasse and examines the prospects for our future. Laced with insights into social and political ecology and written with a lifetime’s experience of innovating in ecological design, Organicity shows that there is still hope to build a more humane, egalitarian, and sustainable system, but it requires a fundamental shift in the way we do civilization. At the crossroads of creation and destruction, will evolution or entropy triumph?
In this visionary book, David Dobereiner lucidly delves into the present urban and ecological impasse and examines the prospects for our future. Laced with insights into social and political ecology and written with a lifetime’s experience of innovating in ecological design, Organicity shows that there is still hope to build a more humane, egalitarian, and sustainable system, but it requires a fundamental shift in the way we do civilization. At the crossroads of creation and destruction, will evolution or entropy triumph?
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Other Cities, Other Worlds
Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age
Andreas Huyssen, ed.
Duke University Press, 2008
Other Cities, Other Worlds brings together leading scholars of cultural theory, urban studies, art, anthropology, literature, film, architecture, and history to look at non-Western global cities. The contributors focus on urban imaginaries, the ways that city dwellers perceive or imagine their own cities. Paying particular attention to the historical and cultural dimensions of urban life, they bring to their essays deep knowledge of the cities they are bound to in their lives and their work. Taken together, these essays allow us to compare metropolises from the so-called periphery and gauge processes of cultural globalization, illuminating the complexities at stake as we try to imagine other cities and other worlds under the spell of globalization.
The effects of global processes such as the growth of transnational corporations and investment, the weakening of state sovereignty, increasing poverty, and the privatization of previously public services are described and analyzed in essays by Teresa P. R. Caldeira (São Paulo), Beatriz Sarlo (Buenos Aires), Néstor García Canclini (Mexico City), Farha Ghannam (Cairo), Gyan Prakash (Mumbai), and Yingjin Zhang (Beijing). Considering Johannesburg, the architect Hilton Judin takes on themes addressed by other contributors as well: the relation between the country and the city, and between racial imaginaries and the fear of urban violence. Rahul Mehrotra writes of the transitory, improvisational nature of the Indian bazaar city, while AbdouMaliq Simone sees a new urbanism of fragmentation and risk emerging in Douala, Cameroon. In a broader comparative frame, Okwui Enwezor reflects on the proliferation of biennales of contemporary art in African, Asian, and Latin American cities, and Ackbar Abbas considers the rise of fake commodity production in China. The volume closes with the novelist Orhan Pamuk’s meditation on his native city of Istanbul.
Contributors: Ackbar Abbas, Teresa P. R. Caldeira, Néstor García Canclini, Okwui Enwezor, Farha Ghannam, Andreas Huyssen, Hilton Judin, Rahul Mehrotra, Orhan Pamuk, Gyan Prakash, Beatriz Sarlo, AbdouMaliq Simone, Yingjin Zhang
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