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Cities and Cultures
Author: Malcolm Miles
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2007-04-26
Total Pages: 244
ISBN-13: 1134257708
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Cities and Cultures is a critical account of the relations between contemporary cities and the cultures they produce and which in turn shape them. The book questions received ideas of what constitutes a city's culture through case studies in which different kinds of culture - the arts, cultural institutions and heritage, distinctive ways of life - are seen to be differently used in or affected by the development of particular cities. The book does not mask the complexity of this, but explains it in ways accessible for undergraduates. The book begins with introductory chapters on the concepts of a city and a culture (the latter in the anthropological sense as well as denoting the arts), citing cases from modern literature. The book then moves from a critical account of cultural production in a metropolitan setting to the idea that a city, too, is produced through the characteristic ways of life of its inhabitants. The cultural industries are scrutinised for their relation to such cultures as well as to city marketing, and attention is given to the European Cities of Culture initiative, and to the hybridity of contemporary urban cultures in a period of globalisation and migration. In its penultimate chapter the book looks at incidental cultural forms and cultural means to identify formation; and in its final chapter, examines the permeability of urban cultures and cultural forms. Sources are introduced, positions clarified and contrasted, and notes given for selective further reading. Playing on the two meanings of culture, Miles takes an unique approach by relating arguments around these meanings to specific cases of urban development today. The book includes both critical comment on a range of literatures - being a truly inter-disciplinary study - and the outcome of the author's field research into urban cultures.
The Cultures of Cities
Author: Sharon Zukin
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Published: 1996-01-23
Total Pages: 338
ISBN-13: 9781557864376
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →How do cities use culture today? Building on the experience of New York as a "culture capital" Sharon Zukin shows how three notions of culture - as ethnicity, aesthetic, and marketing tool - are reshaping urban places and conflicts over revitalization. She rejects the idea that cities have either a singular urban culture or many different subcultures to argue that cultures are constantly negotiated in the city's central spaces - the streets, parks, shops, museums, and restaurants - which are the great public spaces of modernity. While cultural gentrification may contribute to making our cities both safer and more civilised places to live, it has its darker side. Beneath the perceptions of "civility" and "security" nurtured by cultural strategies, Zukin shows an aggressive private-sector bid for control of public space, a relentless drive for expansion by art museums and other non-profit cultural institutions, and an increasing redesign of the built environment for the purposes of social control. Tying these developments to a new "symbolic economy" based on tourism, media and entertainment, Zukin traces the connections between real estate development and popular expression, and between elite visions of the arts and more democratic representations. Going beyond the immigrants, artists, street peddlers, and security guards who are the key figures in the symbolic economy, Zukin asks: Who really occupies the central spaces of cities? And whose culture is imposed as public culture? Combining cultural critique, interviews, autobiography and ethnography, The Culture of Cities is a compelling account of the public spaces of modernity as they are transformed into new, more troubling landscapes.
The City in History
Author: Lewis Mumford
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 1961
Total Pages: 788
ISBN-13: 9780156180351
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The city's development from ancient times to the modern age. Winner of the National Book Award. "One of the major works of scholarship of the twentieth century" (Christian Science Monitor). Index; illustrations.
Why Cities Matter
Author: Stephen T. Um
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2013-03-31
Total Pages: 178
ISBN-13: 1433532921
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →We live in a unique moment in history. Right now, more people live in urban centers than ever before. This means that we have an unprecedented opportunity to influence the majority of the world through the church in the city. Helping us to make the most of this moment, urban pastors Justin Buzzard and Stephen Um lay out a compelling vision for cultural engagement and church planting in our world’s cities. If you’re looking for motivation to maintain a commitment to the city or for guidance as you consider going all in, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of urban life that informs, instructs, inspires, and answers questions including: Why cities are so important What the Bible says about cities How to overcome common issues and develop a plan for living missionally in the city Instead of retreating from or taking from our cities, here is a call to make the cities our home, to take good care of them, and to participate in God’s kingdom-building work in the urban centers of our world.
The Culture of Cities
Author: Lewis Mumford
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-03-08
Total Pages: 572
ISBN-13: 1504031342
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A classic work advocating ecological urban planning—from a civic visionary and former architecture critic for the New Yorker. Considered among the greatest works of Lewis Mumford—a prolific historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and longtime architecture critic for the New Yorker—The Culture of Cities is a call for communal action to “rebuild the urban world on a sounder human foundation.” First published in 1938, this radical investigation into the human environment is based on firsthand surveys of North American and European locales, as well as extensive historical and technological research. Mumford takes readers from the compact, worker-friendly streets of medieval hamlets to the symmetrical neoclassical avenues of Renaissance cities. He studies the squalor of nineteenth-century factory towns and speculates on the fate of the booming twentieth-century Megalopolis—whose impossible scale, Mumford believes, can only lead to its collapse into a “Nekropolis,” a monstrosity of living death. A civic visionary, Mumford is credited with some of the earliest proposals for ecological urban planning and the appropriate use of technology to create balanced living environments. In the final chapters of The Culture of Cities, he outlines possible paths toward utopian future cities that could be free of the stressors of the Megalopolis, in sync with the rhythms of daily life, powered by clean energy, integrated with agricultural regions, and full of honest and comfortable housing for the working class. The principles set forth by these visions, once applied to Nazi-occupied Europe’s razed cities, are still relevant today as technological advances and overpopulation change the nature of urban life.
The Culture of Cities
Community Design and the Culture of Cities
Author: Eduardo E. Lozano
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1990-11-30
Total Pages: 360
ISBN-13: 9780521389792
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Having perceived a widespread failure of most community-scale plans, Eduardo Lozano has created a large and humane vision for community design, geared toward urban planners and designers, as well as those concerned with the communities of the future. Lozano strives to unify theory and practice, seeing that design at community scale is a relatively new responsibility for professionals and seeing the need for an awareness of the systemic nature of urban design. He also highlights relevant lessons from historical examples in order to rediscover the community design metier forgotten after the industrial revolution. The author relies on interdisciplinary studies, drawing from biology, ecology, and political science, as well as from history for his fascinating study. Throughout the book there is an emphasis on the interrelationship of design and culture--society, technology, institutions, and values--and on the need for an agenda for political and cultural change.
Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities
Author: Richard Sennett
Publisher:
Published: 1969
Total Pages: 252
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"An introduction, by R. Sennett.--The nature of the city, by M. Weber.--The metropolis and mental life, by G. Simmel.--The soul of the city, by O. Spengler.--The city; suggestions for the investigation of human behavior in the urban environment. Human migration and the marginal man. By R. Park.--Urbanism as a way of life. Rural-urban differences. Human ecology. By L. Wirth.--The folk society, by R. Redfield.--The cultural role of cities, by R. Redfield and M. Singer."
The City Cultures Reader
Author: Malcolm Miles
Publisher: Psychology Press
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 564
ISBN-13: 9780415302456
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Cities are products of culture and sites where culture is made. By presenting the best of classic and contemporary writing on the culture of cities, this reader provides an overview of the diverse material on the interface between cities and culture.
