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Cities, Citizens, and Technologies
Author: Paula Geyh
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-05-21
Total Pages: 461
ISBN-13: 1135852197
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book is about the contemporary city and those who live in it. It is thus also about the urban world of the era (extending roughly from the 1960s to the present) that we see as postmodern, and specifically about how the postmodern city is changing under the impact of globalization and new information and communication technologies. In particular, Geyh explores how the urban spaces of postmodernity (parks, plazas, streets, sidewalks) and postmodern urban subjectivities and communities respond to and create each other – how they become mutually constructing. While there is much in this book about what makes a city "postmodern," its primary focus is on how the postmodern city is experienced by its inhabitants, and in this respect the book is also a study of everyday life in the postmodern era. As such, it deals not only with the ways in which the postmodern city has developed out of economic, technological, political, and cultural structures that are different from those of the modern city, but also with how the postmodern city changes our ways of knowing and experiencing the world and ourselves as postmodern urban subjects, as citizens of postmodernity.
Urban Geography
Author: Michael Pacione
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 745
ISBN-13: 0415462010
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This is the most comprehensive and readable book on urban geography in the array of contemporary literature on the subject.
Los Angeles as Postmodern Space
Author: Markus Widmer
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Published: 2008-11
Total Pages: 29
ISBN-13: 3640202724
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Essay from the year 1998 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1 (A), University of Aberdeen (English Department), course: Read the City - Read the Text, 11 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Edward W. Soja called Los Angeles 'the quintessential postmodern metropolis'. This, however, shall not be the premise of my argument in this essay, because of the obvious danger of circularity. Yet I will use postmodern critics and compare my findings to postmodern models of culture, space and society. I will not discuss the term postmodernism itself, simply because the range of this essay does not allow my entering this ongoing debate. The term will be used as denoting both a period, beginning, for my purposes, in the 1960s, and a theory of cultural tendencies in contemporary life. For this essay, I will assume that postmodernism is a fact, a part of everyday reality, and that it differs substantially from modernism. The main body of this essay will consist of a discussion of the fundamental factors which define Los Angeles as postmodern space. I will focus on particularities that distinguish Los Angeles from other cities, most of all from those which have not yet crossed the threshold of postmodernity. Firstly, I will investigate the geographical instability of the city; the fact that it is threatened to be annihilated by natural forces such as earthquakes and the desert. Secondly, I will address the idea of the city as a desert, its horizontality, its vastness, its lack of centre. Thirdly, the structure on this flat surface will be addressed; the freeways as an arterial network, and the structure of segregating walls, both literal and metaphorical. Finally, I will conclude by investigating the parallels between the idea of instability that underlies all of the factors I discuss, and the notion of the unstable in postmodernism.
Postmodern Geographies
Author: Edward W. Soja
Publisher: Verso
Published: 1989
Total Pages: 276
ISBN-13: 9780860919360
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Written by one of America's foremost geographers, Postmodern Geographies contests the tendency, still dominant in most social science, to reduce human geography to a reflective mirror, or, as Marx called it, an "unnecessary complication." Beginning with a powerful critique of historicism and its constraining effects on the geographical imagination, Edward Soja builds on the work of Foucault, Berger, Giddens, Berman, Jameson and, above all, Henri Lefebvre, to argue for a historical and geographical materialism, a radical rethinking of the dialectics of space, time and social being. Soja charts the respatialization of social theory from the still unfolding encounter between Western Marxism and modern geography, through the current debates on the emergence of a postfordist regime of "flexible accumulation." The postmodern geography of Los Angeles, exposed in a provocative pair of essays, serves as a model in his account of the contemporary struggle for control over the social production of space.
Text, Theory, Space
Author: Kate Darian-Smith
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2005-08-04
Total Pages: 271
ISBN-13: 1134804555
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Text, Theory, Space is a landmark in post-colonial criticism and theory. Focusing on two white settler societies, South Africa and Australia, the contributors investigate the meaning of 'the South' as an aesthetic, political, geographical and cultural space. Drawing upon a wide range of disciplines which include literature, history, urban and cultural geography, politics and anthropology, the contributors examine crucial issues including: * defining what 'the South' encompasses * investigating ideas of space, history, land and landscape * claiming, naming and possessing land * national and personal boundaries * questions of race, gender and nationalism
Cities In Space
Author: Prof David Herbert
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-11-26
Total Pages: 385
ISBN-13: 1134089341
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This is the third major revision of a text first published in 1982 with the title Urban Geography: A First Approach and in 1990 as Cities in Space: City as Place. The study of urban geography remains an important part of the geographical curriculum both in schools and in higher education. This book analyses life in an urban society and in a world which is being transformed by the processes of urbanization: to study urban geography is to study environments and phenomena significant to our everyday lives. This is an introductory text which aims to present both more traditional and newer approaches to urban geography in an accessible and educational way.
Signs and Cities
Author: Madhu Dubey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2007-11-01
Total Pages: 295
ISBN-13: 0226167283
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Signs and Cities is the first book to consider what it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African-American literature. Dubey argues that for African-American studies, postmodernity best names a period, beginning in the early 1970s, marked by acute disenchantment with the promises of urban modernity and of print literacy. Dubey shows how black novelists from the last three decades have reconsidered the modern urban legacy and thus articulated a distinctly African-American strain of postmodernism. She argues that novelists such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, and John Edgar Wideman probe the disillusionment of urban modernity through repeated recourse to tropes of the book and scenes of reading and writing. Ultimately, she demonstrates that these writers view the book with profound ambivalence, construing it as an urban medium that cannot recapture the face-to-face communities assumed by oral and folk forms of expression.
The Spaces of the Modern City
Author: Gyan Prakash
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2008-02-24
Total Pages: 476
ISBN-13: 9780691133430
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →It historicizes the contemporary discussion of urbanism, highlighting the local and global breadth of the city landscape. This interdisciplinary collection examines how the city develops in the interactions of space and imagination. The essays focus on issues such as street design in Vienna, the motion picture industry in Los Angeles, architecture in Marseilles and Algiers, and the kaleidoscopic paradox of post-apartheid Johannesburg. They explore the nature of spatial politics, examining the disparate worlds of eighteenth-century Baghdad, nineteenth-century Morelia. They also show the meaning of everyday spaces to urban life, illuminating issues such as crime in metropolitan London, youth culture in Dakar, "memory projects" in Tokyo, and Bombay cinema.
Public and Private Spaces of the City
Author: Ali Madanipour
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2003-09-02
Total Pages: 276
ISBN-13: 1134519850
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The relationship between public and private spheres is one of the key concerns of the modern society. This book investigates this relationship, especially as manifested in the urban space with its social and psychological significance. Through theoretical and historical examination, it explores how and why the space of human socities is subdivided into public and private sections. It starts with the private, interior space of the mind and moves step by step, through the body, home, neighborhood and the city, outwards to the most public, impersonal spaces, exploring the nature of each realm and their complex, interdependent realtionships. A stimulating and thought provoking book for any architect, architectural historian, urban planner or designer.
