Reinventing an Urban Vernacular

Reinventing an Urban Vernacular PDF

Author: Terry Moor

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-03-16

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1134822596

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With increasing population and its associated demand on our limited resources, we need to rethink our current strategies for construction of multifamily buildings in urban areas. Reinventing an Urban Vernacular addresses these new demands for smaller and more efficient housing units adapted to local climate. In order to find solutions and to promote better urban communities with an overall environmentally responsible lifestyle, this book examines a wide variety of vernacular building precedents, as they relate to the unique characteristics and demands of six distinctly different regions of the United States. Terry Moor addresses the unique landscape, climate, physical, and social development by analyzing vernacular precedents, and proposing new suggestions for modern needs and expectations. Written for students and architects, planners, and urban designers, Reinventing an Urban Vernacular marries the urban vernacular with ongoing sustainability efforts to produce a unique solution to the housing needs of the changing urban environment.

Tokyo Vernacular

Tokyo Vernacular PDF

Author: Jordan Sand

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2013-07-19

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0520275667

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Preserved buildings and historic districts, museums and reconstructions have become an important part of the landscape of cities around the world. Beginning in the 1970s, Tokyo participated in this trend. However, repeated destruction and rapid redevelopment left the city with little building stock of recognized historical value. Late twentieth-century Tokyo thus presents an illuminating case of the emergence of a new sense of history in the cityÕs physical environment, since it required both a shift in perceptions of value and a search for history in the margins and interstices of a rapidly modernizing cityscape. Scholarship to date has tended to view historicism in the postindustrial context as either a genuine response to loss, or as a cynical commodification of the past. The historical process of TokyoÕs historicization suggests other interpretations. Moving from the politics of the public square to the invention of neighborhood community, to oddities found and appropriated in the streets, to the consecration of everyday scenes and artifacts as heritage in museums, Tokyo Vernacular traces the rediscovery of the pastÑsometimes in unlikely formsÑin a city with few traditional landmarks. Tokyo's rediscovered past was mobilized as part of a new politics of the everyday after the failure of mass politics in the 1960s. Rather than conceiving the city as national center and claiming public space as national citizens, the post-1960s generation came to value the local places and things that embodied the vernacular language of the city, and to seek what could be claimed as common property outside the spaces of corporate capitalism and the state.

Urban China Reframed

Urban China Reframed PDF

Author: Wing-Shing Tang

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-06-22

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 1000404382

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Given China’s rapid economic growth and massive urbanization, no one in the world can ignore what is happening in urban China. This book is a critical review of existing urban China research, which is found wanting due to the decontextualized use of theories and concepts developed in the West. Urban China Reframed: A Critical Appreciation consists of epistemological, theoretical and methodological contributions to remedy these limitations by focusing on a number of relevant topics. First, models are widely employed in any study, and China nowadays has invoked models like city system, zones and global city in socio-economic development. How to interpret them in terms of knowledge production in a strong party-state? Second, given the global prevalence of neoliberalism, it is an important debate whether neoliberalism is applicable to China. Third, what is urban ideology in China? How to contextualize it? Are debates about the differentiation between the city and urbanization relevant to China? Fourth, massive rural-urban migration in China has taken place within its mega rural-urban dual system, an institution that has persisted since the 1950s. How does it manifest nowadays? Fifth, has the town-country divide in China, like in the West, disappeared? If not, how can one interpret China’s town-country relations, within the politics and administration of the Chinese state? Sixth, how to decipher the territorial development in the Pearl River Delta, the "world’s factory," under the auspices of the state? The collection of essays in this volume contributes to the theoretical understanding of urban China. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Eurasian Geography and Economics.

Sustainable Conservation and Urban Regeneration

Sustainable Conservation and Urban Regeneration PDF

Author: Maria Grazia Folli

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-12-05

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 3319652745

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This book documents research activities and design experimentation carried out within the scope of a project addressing conservation, urban regeneration, responsible use of resources, and sustainable development in a truly exceptional place: the city of Luxor. The project is a collaborative venture between the Politecnico di Milano, the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt, and the Luxor Governorate and is one outcome of a program established by the Egyptian government in 2009 with the goal of discovering a buried treasure, the “Avenue of Sphinxes”, which connected the Karnak and Luxor temples in ancient times. Readers will find an account of the excavations themselves, discussion of issues in restoration and conservation, and, above all, archaeological contextualization. Information is provided on integrated solutions to the problems arising from the scale of the excavation, for example in relation to urban morphology, the environment, road systems, infrastructure, housing, tourism, and individual and collective use of spaces. The book will appeal to all with an interest in strategies for enhancement of historical heritage in conjunction with urban regeneration and sustainable development.

Reinventing Order in the Congo

Reinventing Order in the Congo PDF

Author: Theodore Trefon

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2013-04-04

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1848137672

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Kinshasa is sub-Saharan Africa‘s second largest city. The seven million Congolese who live there have a rich reputation for the courageous and innovative ways in which they survive in a harsh urban environment. They have created new social institutions, practices, networks and ways of living to deal with the collapse of public provision and a malfunctioning political system. This book describes how ordinary people, in the absence of formal sector jobs, hustle for a modest living; the famous ‘bargaining‘ system ordinary Kinois have developed; and how they access food, water supplies, health and education. The NGO-ization of service provision is analysed, as is the quite rare incidence of urban riots. The contributors also look at popular discourses, including street rumor, witchcraft, and attitudes to ‘big men‘ such as musicians and preachers. This is urban sociology at its best - richly empirical, unjargonized, descriptive of the lives of ordinary people, and weaving into its analysis how they see and experience life.

Managing Urban America

Managing Urban America PDF

Author: Robert E. England

Publisher: CQ Press

Published: 2016-05-06

Total Pages: 493

ISBN-13: 1506310508

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Managing Urban America guides students through the challenges, politics, and practice of urban management—including managing conflict through politics, adapting to demographic and social changes, balancing budgets, and delivering a myriad of goods and services to citizens in an efficient, equitable, and responsive manner. The Eighth Edition has been thoroughly updated to include a discussion of the difficulties cities confront as they deal with the lingering economic challenges of the 2008 recession, the concept of e-government and how it affects the theory and practice of management, and the implications of environmental issues for urban government management.