City Quitters

City Quitters PDF

Author: Karen Rosenkranz

Publisher: Frame Publishers

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9492311313

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City Quitters portrays creative pioneers pursuing alternative ways of living and working away from big cities. What does it mean to leave city life behind? Can the reality of living in the countryside fulfil our desire for a better, simpler, more creative life? This book is an attempt to shed light on what rural life can be like today, with all its joys and challenges, providing a fresh look at the people and scenes thriving outside urban spaces. From experimental co-habitation in a renaissance castle to oversized artworks on a farm, City Quitters offers a global perspective on creative post-urban life: 22 stories from 12 countries and five continents, all based in places with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. About the author Karen Rosenkranz is an independent trend forecaster and ethnographer based in London. She has travelled all over the world spotting shifts in behaviour, attitudes and aesthetics, and has helped creative agencies from Amsterdam to New York uncover important socio-cultural changes. Fascinated by things that haven’t found a place yet, and anything that might impact how we live in years to come, Rosenkranz continues to explore the origins of fresh and original ideas with City Quitters. Features • 22 interviews with creative professionals and entrepreneurs who left a big city and are now living and working in a rural or provincial environment • Offers fascinating insights into the personal and professional lives of creative individuals across the globe • Shows a fresh approach to rural living beyond rustic pastimes and nostalgia

Cities Surround The Countryside

Cities Surround The Countryside PDF

Author: Robin Visser

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2010-04-12

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 0822392771

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Denounced as parasitical under Chairman Mao and devalued by the norms of traditional Chinese ethics, the city now functions as a site of individual and collective identity in China. Cities envelop the countryside, not only geographically and demographically but also in terms of cultural impact. Robin Visser illuminates the cultural dynamics of three decades of radical urban development in China. Interpreting fiction, cinema, visual art, architecture, and urban design, she analyzes how the aesthetics of the urban environment have shaped the emotions and behavior of people and cultures, and how individual and collective images of and practices in the city have produced urban aesthetics. By relating the built environment to culture, Visser situates postsocialist Chinese urban aesthetics within local and global economic and intellectual trends. In the 1980s, writers, filmmakers, and artists began to probe the contradictions in China’s urbanization policies and rhetoric. Powerful neorealist fiction, cinema, documentaries, paintings, photographs, performances, and installations contrasted forms of glittering urban renewal with the government’s inattention to a livable urban infrastructure. Narratives and images depicting the melancholy urban subject came to illustrate ethical quandaries raised by urban life. Visser relates her analysis of this art to major transformations in urban planning under global neoliberalism, to the development of cultural studies in the Chinese academy, and to ways that specific cities, particularly Beijing and Shanghai, figure in the cultural imagination. Despite the environmental and cultural destruction caused by China’s neoliberal policies, Visser argues for the emergence of a new urban self-awareness, one that offers creative resolutions for the dilemmas of urbanism through new forms of intellectual engagement in society and nascent forms of civic governance.

City Versus Countryside in Mao's China

City Versus Countryside in Mao's China PDF

Author: Jeremy Brown

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-06-18

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1107024048

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A powerful work of grassroots history, tracing China's rural-urban divide back to the policies of Mao Zedong, which pitted city dwellers against villagers.

Countryside

Countryside PDF

Author: Rem Koolhaas

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9783836584395

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From animals to robotization, climate change to migration, Rem Koolhaas presents a new collaborative project exploring how countryside everywhere is transforming beyond recognition. The pocketbook gathers in-depth essays spanning from Fukushima to the Netherlands, Siberia to Uganda - an urgent dispatch from this long-neglected realm, revealing its radical potential for changing everything about how we live

If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now

If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now PDF

Author: Christopher Ingraham

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2019-09-10

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 0062861492

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An NPR Best Book of the Year The hilarious, charming, and candid story of writer Christopher Ingraham’s decision to uproot his life and move his family to Red Lake Falls, Minnesota, population 1,400—the community he made famous as “the worst place to live in America” in a story he wrote for the Washington Post. Like so many young American couples, Chris Ingraham and his wife Briana were having a difficult time making ends meet as they tried to raise their twin boys in the East Coast suburbs. One day, Chris – in his role as a “data guy” reporter at the Washington Post – stumbled on a study that would change his life. It was a ranking of America’s 3,000+ counties from ugliest to most scenic. He quickly scrolled to the bottom of the list and gleefully wrote the words “The absolute worst place to live in America is (drumroll please) … Red Lake County, Minn.” The story went viral, to put it mildly. Among the reactions were many from residents of Red Lake County. While they were unflappably polite – it’s not called “Minnesota Nice” for nothing – they challenged him to look beyond the spreadsheet and actually visit their community. Ingraham, with slight trepidation, accepted. Impressed by the locals’ warmth, humor and hospitality – and ever more aware of his financial situation and torturous commute – Chris and Briana eventually decided to relocate to the town he’d just dragged through the dirt on the Internet. If You Lived Here You’d Be Home by Now is the story of making a decision that turns all your preconceptions – good and bad -- on their heads. In Red Lake County, Ingraham experiences the intensity and power of small-town gossip, struggles to find a decent cup of coffee, suffers through winters with temperatures dropping to forty below zero, and unearths some truths about small-town life that the coastal media usually miss. It’s a wry and charming tale – with data! -- of what happened to one family brave enough to move waaaay beyond its comfort zone

The Country and the City

The Country and the City PDF

Author: Raymond Williams

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1975

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780195198102

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As a brilliant survey of English literature in terms of changing attitudes towards country and city, Williams' highly-acclaimed study reveals the shifting images and associations between these two traditional poles of life throughout the major developmental periods of English culture.

The Down to the Countryside Campaign and Return to the City Movement

The Down to the Countryside Campaign and Return to the City Movement PDF

Author: Joshua Zhang

Publisher: Remembering Publishing, LLC

Published: 2023-09-19

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13:

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Using a social movement perspective, this monograph demonstrates the differences between the Return to the City Movement by the Chinese educated youths - the only successful social movement by the Chinese people since the establishment of the communist regime - and the Down to the Countryside Campaign by the Chinese Communist Party. Grounded in data collected via an unprecedented survey research effort involving respondents who lived through these historic events, the monograph explores the emotional impact upon the educated youths of being forced to the countryside, the directions and forms of their resettlement, work, income, mentality, marriage/love, and relationship with local peasants while in the countryside, timelines and methods involved in returning to the city, their final occupations, children’s fulfillment, current perceptions of urban life, evaluation of the campaign and their experiences in the countryside. The authors also summarize the lessons learned from the Return to the City Movement, providing references for Chinese social movements in the future.