Earth Sciences, Geography & Environment Books

Book SynopsisUrbanisation in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia, poses challenges to urban living conditions. Despite large scale housing programmes from the side of the government, construction and settling processes have largely remained incremental. Nadine Appelhans focuses on the relation between statutory planning and practices of everyday urbanisation. The findings from Bahir Dar suggest that some mundane regimes of building the city are patronised, while others are considered undesired by policy makers. Based on this insight, the author argues that urban development in Bahir Dar needs to be locally grounded, differentiated and inclusive to avoid further tendencies of segregation.

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Book SynopsisThese essays confirm the continued relevance of 'north' as a site of cultural practice and artistic endeavour. If northern regions are tangible realities, the place of varied topography, light, climate, and biogeography, the location of distinct peoples and culture, typically they have been depicted through the traditions of northern landscape representation and the cultural narratives of an era. These discussions - focusing on Scotland, Northern England, Northern Europe, Siberia, the Arctic and Nordic lands - by photographic practitioners as well as theorists, explore and question this tradition, considering landscape as experience, reinterpreting notions of wilderness, emptiness and the sublime.

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Book SynopsisCultures as well as individuals continually balance the demands of nostalgia and sustainability as they construct historical narratives of "futures worth preserving". The aim of this volume is to explore those narratives and the underlying assumptions which inform them. Drawing on a range of disciplines from the humanities and social sciences, the chapters investigate cultural assumptions about which aspects of the past deserve to be remembered and which aspects of the present should be sustained for the future. In the process, they reveal how contemporary definitions of sustainability are informed by a nostalgic yearning for the past, and how nostalgia is motivated by a reciprocal longing to sustain the past for the future.Trade Review"What remains to be explored, and for which this edited volume has laid an important foundation, is the desire called utopia (sensu Fredric Jameson), its entanglement with values, its cultural manifestations across the globe, and its influence on concepts of nostalgia and sustainability." Anna Tabouratzidis, Kult_online, 64 (2021)

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Book SynopsisIn the past years, the transiency of European city-making and dwelling has become increasingly hard to disregard. This urban flux calls for a methodological rethinking for those professionals, social and natural scientists, artists, and activists, with an interest in the processes of remaking and reclaiming urban space. With a practical and empirical emphasis, this anthology brings forth a variety of perspectives on urban appropriation strategies, their relation to public space-making, and their implications for future city development, exploring how ideas and practices of appropriation inform and relate to cultural narratives, politico-historical occasions as well as socio-ecological expressions.

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Book SynopsisWho wins and who loses in urban regeneration? What are the mechanisms at play?Francesca Weber-Newth looks at two neighbourhoods that are adjacent to large-scale regeneration schemes: the 2012 Olympic park in London and the Mediaspree waterside development in Berlin. By analysing how urban regeneration is experienced on the ground, her study counters the notion that Olympic-led regeneration is any different from other forms of neoliberal urban development. Adopting Pierre Bourdieu's view of the social world as made up of competitive "games", an analysis of the two neighbourhoods reveals how the concepts of "culture" and "community" are strategically employed in the "game" of urban regeneration - to the benefit of some and the detriment of others.Trade Review"A book worth reading, which shows the changes in regeneration practices over the last three decades in an exemplary manner and makes it clear that what is considered attractive in the city today has a long history." Felicitas Hillmann, Soziopolis, 23.09.2020, translated from German

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Book SynopsisThe challenge of housing is increasingly recognised in international policy discussions in connection to the processes of migration, climate change, and economic globalisation. This book addresses the challenges of housing and emerging solutions along the lines of three major dynamics: migration, climate change, and neo-liberalism. It explores the outcomes of neo-liberal "enabling" ideas, responses to extreme climate events with different housing approaches, and how the dynamics of migration reshape the urban housing provision in a changing world. The aim is to contextualise the theoretical discourses by reflecting on the case study context of the eleven papers published in this book. With forewords by Raquel Rolnik (University Sao Paulo) and Mohammed El Sioufi (UN-Habitat).

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Book SynopsisMalaria remains one of the main causes of mortality and morbidity in sub-Saharan Africa. Matian van Soest looks at the malaria epidemic in the peri-urban zones of Uganda's capital Kampala against the backdrop of recent socio-ecological transformations. Based on long-term ethnographic research, the book provides a holistic picture of the malaria epidemic in central Uganda, revealing the highly localized character of an epidemic that once spanned across almost the entire globe. Understanding, and ultimately tackling the disease, requires an appreciation of the social, political, as well as ecological circumstances that frame this epidemic.Table of ContentsIntroduction; Malaria: A brief overview; Ethnographic research in Uganda: Language and ethics in the field; Kampala's urban fringe: Socio-economic dynamics and transformations; Providing malaria treatment: Different forms of healthcare in Uganda; Coping with malaria: Facets of health seeking; Agriculture in the urban fringe: The ambivalent role of wetlands; Conclusion.

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Book SynopsisPost-foundationalism departs from the assumption that there is no ground, necessity, or objective rationale for human political existence or action. The edited volume puts contemporary debates arising from the "spatial turn" in cultural and social sciences in a dialogue with post-foundational theories of space and place to devise post-foundationalism as radical approach to urban studies. This approach enables us to think about space not only as socially produced, but also as crucially marked by conflict, radical negativity, and absence. The contributors undertake a (re-)reading of key spatial and/or post-foundational theorists to introduce their respective understandings of politics and space, and offer examples of post-foundational empirical analyses of urban protests, spatial occupation, and everyday life.

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Book SynopsisIn the light of social and environmental unsustainability and injustice, the continuing attachment to the idea that a growth-based economy is reconcilable with human prosperity and ecological limits seems increasingly implausible. Tracing and dissecting the complexities of social change, "Making Transformative Geographies" speaks about the development of visions, alternatives, and strategies for a radical transformation beyond accumulation and growth. Covering an empirical sample of 24 eco-social organizations, projects, and groupings in the city of Stuttgart (Germany), the book drills down into the social, spatial, and strategic dimensions of transformation. It advances a conceptually and empirically grounded assessment of the possibilities and limitations of community activism and civic engagement for shifting transformative geographies towards a degrowth trajectory.

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Book SynopsisSoutheast Asia is one of the most dynamic regions in the world. This volume offers a timely approach to Southeast Asian Studies, covering recent transitions in the realms of urbanism, rural development, politics, and media. While most of the contributions deal with the era of post-independence, some tackle the colonial period and the resulting developments. The volume also includes insights from Southern India. As a tribute to the interdisciplinary project of Southeast Asian Studies, this book brings together authors from disciplines as diverse as area studies, sociology, history, geography, and journalism.

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Book SynopsisHow can we map differing perceptions of the living environment? Mapping the Unmappable? explores the potential of cartography to communicate the relations of Africa's indigenous peoples with other human and non-human actors within their environments. These relations transcend Western dichotomies such as culture-nature, human-animal, natural-supernatural. The volume brings two strands of research - cartography and "relational" anthropology - into a closer dialogue. It provides case studies in Africa as well as lessons to be learned from other continents (e.g. North America, Asia and Australia). The contributors create a deepened understanding of indigenous ontologies for a further decolonization of maps, and thus advance current debates in the social sciences.

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Book SynopsisAdministrative asylum procedures are permeated by tensions between rationalities of legality, efficiency, and deterrence in asylum casework and their various effects on cases. Based on ethnographic research in the Swiss asylum administration, this book unveils the pragmatics and politics of rendering asylum cases resolvable by re-cording the lives of applicants in terms of asylum. With his reading of power and agency in administrations, Ephraim Pörtner offers a critical view of the intricate relationship between practices of asylum casework and the governmental need to resolve claims of people seeking protection.

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Book SynopsisSocial practice theories help to challenge the often hidden paradigms, worldviews, and values at the basis of many unsustainable practices. Discourses and their boundaries define what is seen as possible, as well as the range of issues and their solutions. By exploring the connections between practices and discourses, Minna Kanerva develops a conceptual approach enabling purposive change in unsustainable social practices. Radical transformation towards new meatways is arguably necessary, yet complex psychological, ideological, and power-related mechanisms currently inhibit change.

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Book SynopsisPeople experience disasters very differently. Conflicts about a "correct" interpretation of the risks might arise. The side-by-side of different truths lead to people seeing mismanagement and disinformation. The volcanic crisis of El Hierro shows how rivalling interpretations amongst affected islanders, the media, sciences, and disaster response institutions cause great social tensions and scepticism towards scientific information. Thus, to fully understand disaster risk, the focus must shift to the rifts between established convictions and the individuals' creativity to overcome them, taking into account their embeddedness in various fields of practice, each with their own rationales and ruptures.

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Book SynopsisWhether driven by developments in plant science, bio-philosophy, or broader societal dynamics, plants have to respond to a litany of environmental, social, and economic challenges. This collection explores the `work' that plants do in contemporary capitalism, examining how vegetal life is enrolled in processes of value creation, social reproduction, and capital accumulation. Bringing together insights from geography, anthropology, and the environmental humanities, the contributors contend that attention to the diverse capacities and agencies of plants can both enrich understandings of capitalist economies, and also catalyze new forms of resistance to their logics.

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Book SynopsisScientific practices of removing waste in mega-cities of the global South are embedded in socio-cultural belief systems which reproduce existing social hierarchies. Thus going beyond a techno-managerial approach in waste management, Sneha Sharma critically interrogates the politics around urban waste disposal in Mumbai, India. She undertakes an ethnographic journey to the city's most unwanted space, a dumping site, to reveal how spaces and people are made into waste through exclusionary formal and informal practices. Offering new insights on topics of urban marginality, informality, urban planning this book will attract scholars from sociology, urban studies, and human geography.

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Book SynopsisThe increasing platformisation of urban life needs critical perspectives to examine changing everyday practices and power shifts brought about by the expansion of digital platforms mediating care-services, housing, and mobility. This book addresses new modes of producing urban spaces and societies. It brings both platform researchers and activists from various fields related to critical urban studies and labour activism into dialogue. The contributors engage with the socio-spatial and normative implications of platform-mediated urban everyday life and urban futures, going beyond a rigid techno-dystopian stance in order to include an understanding of platforms as sites of social creativity and exchange.

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Book SynopsisDepicting the world, territory, and geopolitical realities involves a high degree of interpretation and imagination. It is never neutral. Cartography originated in ancient times to represent the world and to enable circulation, communication, and economic exchange. Today, IT companies are a driving force in this field and change our view of the world; how we communicate, navigate, and consume globally. Questions of privacy, authorship, and economic interests are highly relevant to cartography's practices. So how to deal with such powers and what is the critical role of cartography in it? How might a bottom-up perspective (and actions) in map-making change the conception of a geopolitical space?Table of ContentsPreface; Research Interest; On the Symposium and Exhibition; Acknowledgments; Shifts in Mapping; Introduction to the essay section; Shifts in Mapping: Two Concepts which have Changed the World View; Atlas of Indexical Cities: A Personal Search Engine for the World; Reflections on the Cartographic Languages When collectively mapping possible worlds; Critical Map Visualizations; The Digital Memory of Palmyra: (How) can data images be critical?; Design through Graduation; Radical Cartography; Biographies; Introduction to the Exhibition: STRATEGIES OF NEOGEOGRAPHY IN RECENT MEDIA ART; Works/Artists in the Exhibition.

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Book SynopsisDuring the early republican period, architectural interventions in rural Turkey took the form of social engineering as part of the state's modernization and nationalization policies. Özge Sezer demonstrates how the state's particular programs had a powerful effect on rural life in the countryside. She examines the regime's goals and strategies for controlling the rural people through development projects and demographic shaping to create a strong Turkish identity and a loyal citizenry. The book outlines the implementation of new rural settlements, particularly following the 1934 Settlement Law, with a geographic focus on two cities - Izmir and Elazig - with varied socio-economic and ethnic standing in the state program.

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Book SynopsisTeheran-ro in Seoul and Mediaspree area in Berlin are pristine examples for public spaces with a history of rapid change in the context of broader political and economic transitions. Dahae Lee shows that in such a transitional context, the public sector alone is incapable to provide and manage public space. Hence, it engages private sector entities in the form of privately owned public space/s (POPS). By analysing the planning instruments used for POPS in both cases, their uniqueness as well as strengths and weaknesses are revealed. Based on the results this study offers a number of policy recommendations for cities that encounter similar problems.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements; Abstract; List of Figures and Tables; List of Abbreviations; Introduction; Public space in transition; Research design and methodology; Challenges of providing and managing public space in a transitional context; Planning instruments for POPS in Teheran-ro, Seoul; Planning instruments for POPS in Mediaspree area, Berlin; Outcomes of planning instruments for POPS; Conclusion; Glossary; Appendix; Bibliography.

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Book SynopsisThrough a series of intricate informal processes and human-centric institutional arrangements, beneficiaries of South African government-subsidized housing force formally registered properties into informality. Sandile Mbatha explores the concept of informality in relation to how such beneficiaries challenge predominant understandings of property relations. These practices are embedded in complex urban tenure dynamics that prevail in post-colonial societies; societies, in which the state's imposition of predominantly western forms of tenure and property rights ignore the anthropological nature of housing.

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Book SynopsisMetropolitan research requires interdisciplinary collaboration in order to do justice to the complexities of metropolitan regions. This volume provides a scholarly and accessible overview of key methods and approaches in metropolitan research from a uniquely broad range of disciplines including architectural history, art history, heritage conservation, literary and cultural studies, spatial planning and planning theory, geoinformatics, urban sociology, economic geography, operations research, technology studies, transport planning, aquatic ecosystems research and urban epidemiology. It is this transdisciplinary perspective that allows metropolitain research to address recent social challenges of urban life, such as mobility, accessibility, or sustainability.

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Book SynopsisThe big societal challenges, such as climate change and public health, call for innovative approaches to address them. The contributors of this book present new ways to tackle these challenges by inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations in light weight engineering. They introduce a framework for transdisciplinary collaboration, explore the potential of light weight engineering in the areas of climate protection, resource efficiency, and sustainable mobility. To do so, they exemplify results and limitations of transdisciplinary collaboration based on three case studies: the optimization of rescue tools, the re-design of products to foster re-use and recycling processes in companies and society, and the additive manufacturing of individualized assistive tools and prostheses.

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Book SynopsisIn September 2021 a very special academic conference took place: T2051MCC - The 2051 Munich Climate Conference. Researchers from across the academic spectrum assembled to discuss climate change. What made it special was that everyone held their lecture as if it took place in an imagined year 2051. The theatre collective Büro Grandezza had released an open call for contributions to a conference in Munich. Almost 50 researchers wrote papers on climate narratives, geoengineering, coastal adaptation and other topics. This particular framework allowed them to break out of the constraints of the current discourse without neglecting methodology or thematic sharpness.

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Book SynopsisIn a neighbourhood facing massive redevelopment, racialized residents speak about stigma, social mixing, and what the island community means to them. Based on rich interviews, photographs, and archival research, Julie Chamberlain rejects the usual silence in German urban studies around racialization and examines how constructing some groups as "not belonging" has shaped Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg's past and present. For racialized long-time residents, it is Heimat, a space of belonging in the context of exclusion. As social mix policy threatens that belonging, residents explore their hopes and their fears for the future of an urban space where gentrification looms.

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Book SynopsisThe romance of extraction underlies and partly defines Western modernity and our cultural imaginaries. Combining affect studies and environmental humanities, this volume analyzes societies' devotion to extraction and fossil resources. This devotion is shaped by a nostalgic view on settler colonialism as well as by contemporary ?affective economies?. The contributors examine the links between forms of extractivism and gendered discourses of sentimentality and the ways in which cultural narratives and practices deploy the sentimental mode (in plots of attachment, sacrifice, and suffering) to promote or challenge extractivism.

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Book SynopsisSoundscapes profoundly connect listeners to the places they inhabit and thereby reveal the vibrant and resonant fabrics that lie beneath the delineated spaces of visual representation. Marvin Heine explores and celebrates the many-layered and ambiguously undulating sense- and soundscapes as they shape and are shaped by urban cultures and particular ways of listening. By examining historical documents, contemporary accounts, and original empirical material through a combination of actor-network-theory, ecology, and sound studies scholarship, he embraces, in a stylistically embodied and often poetic manner, the sonic urban world in all its fragile, ephemeral, yet deeply affective sonority.

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Book SynopsisIn Tarlabasi, an Istanbul neighbourhood facing massive redevelopment and displacement, marginalized residents speak about belonging, stigma, and what their community means to them. Based on a long-term ethnographic study that includes interviews, photographs, and archival research, Constanze Letsch examines how territorial stigmatization is weaponized by the state and how differently stigmatized groups try to fight against the vilification of their mahalle. The contested plans of urban renewal threaten not only their homes and workplaces but a rapidly vanishing Istanbul: socio-demographic interdependencies and networks that have developed over decades.

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Book SynopsisIncreasing irrigation efficiency has been high on the political agenda in Spain for many years. However, the overarching aim to reduce agricultural water consumption has not been met so far. Nora Schütze investigates processes of coordination between the water and agricultural sector in three Spanish river basins in the context of the EU Water Framework Directive implementation. From the perspective of polycentric governance, she identifies multiple mechanisms which illustrate how and why actors interact in certain ways, and thus shows why environmental aims of the Water Framework Directive remain unachieved.

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Book SynopsisSince 1991, post-Soviet political elites in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus have been engaged in nation -- as well as state-building. They have tried to strengthen territorial sovereignty and national security, re-shape collective identities and re-narrate national histories. Former Soviet republics have become new neighbours, partners and competitors searching for geopolitical identity in the new Eastern Europe," i.e. the countries left outside the enlarged EU. Old paradigms such as "Eurasia" or "East Slavic civilisation" have been re-invented and politically instrumentalised in the international relations and domestic politics of these countries. At the same time, these old concepts and myths have been contested and challenged by pro-Western elites. The main subject of this book is the construction of post-Soviet borders and their political, social and cultural implications. It focuses on the exemplary case of the Ukrainian-Russian border, approaching it as a social construct and a discursive phenomenon. The book shows how the symbolic meanings of and narratives on this border contribute to national identity formation and shape the images of the neighbouring countries as "the Other" thereby shedding new light on the role of border disputes between Ukraine and Russia in bilateral relations, in EU neighbourhood politics and in domestic political conflicts. The study also addresses "border making" on the regional level, focusing on the cross-border co-operation between Kharkiv and Belgorod and on the dilemmas of a Euro-region "in absence of Europe". Finally, it reflects the everyday experiences of the residents of near-border villages and shows how national and local identities are performed at, and transformed by, the new border.Trade Review[The] analytical structure and trajectory of Zhurzhenkos work travelling from broad historical time and geopolitical space to the here and now practically means one could read it from the last chapter to the first as easily as the other, conventional, way around. I enjoyed immensely reading in the closing chapters the Ukrainian and Russian villagers own testimonies, their preoccupations, details of their changing lives. I could well have taken all this in first before proceeding to the so called 'bigger questions' of state-to-state relations and the changing geopolitical architecture of Eastern Europe. Either way, it is a carefully constructed narrative about the advent of a border in peoples minds and across their land. -- Debatte, vol. 19, issue 1-2, 2011"I enjoyed immensely reading in the closing chapters the Ukrainian and Russian villagers' own testimonies, their preoccupations, details of their changing lives. It is a carefully constructed narrative about the advent of a border in people's minds and across their land. -- Marko Bojcun, Faculty of Governance and International Relations London Metropolitan University"Overall, this monograph is an excellent piece of scholarship, which is well written and extremely well researched. It will be of interest to researchers and students of East European Studies as well as Post-Soviet Studies and of specific interest for individuals interested in border studies as an emerging sub-field within the social sciences. -- Peter Rodgers, University of Sheffield[] many academic readers will find the fieldwork portion of Zhurzhenkos volume, as well as some of her theoretical analysis, informative and thought-provoking. [] Her detailed focus on the area and its problems is truly pioneering and is to be commended. -- Anthropology of East Europe Review 30 (1), Spring 2012Table of ContentsList of Abbreviations List of Images Foreword: Ukraine en route to where?, by Dieter Segert Acknowledgements Introduction Part I. Remapping the Post-Soviet Space 1. "Eurasia" and its Uses in the Ukrainian Geopolitical Imagination 2. Slavic Sisters into European Neighbours: Ukrainian-Belarusian relations after 1991 Part II. Bordering Nations, Transcending Boundaries 3. Under Construction: the Ukrainian-Russian Border from the Soviet Collapse to EU Enlargement 4. Boundary in Mind: Discourses and Narratives of the Ukrainian-Russian Border 5. "Slobozhanshchyna": Re-inventing a Region in the Ukrainian-Russian Borderlands Part III. Living (with the) Border 6. Making Sense of a New Border: Social Transformations and Shifting Identities in Five Near-Border Villages 7. Becoming Ukrainians in a "Russian" Village: Local Identity, Language and National Belonging

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Book SynopsisLex Fullarton takes a closer look at the three pillars of the sustainable development framework known as the Triple Bottom Line (TBL). The concept of the TBL is that for a project to be sustainable it must not simply be profitable in economic terms, but it must also benefit society and enhance the natural environment. In the 21st century, the greatest threat to Earths natural environment and the population of the planet is the rise of greenhouse gas emissions caused from burning fossil fuel as an energy source. The rise of GHG emissions has resulted in a rise in the ambient air temperature of the Earths atmosphere and is resulting in a significant change in climatic conditions on Earth. Fullarton scrutinizes the problem of getting industry and governments to understand the significance of creating harmony within the TBL. One of the main problems is that partisan politics tends to fragment the factors of the TBL rather than bring them together. Fullarton takes a strong stand in suggesting that taxation systems, which have traditionally been viewed primarily as a means of raising government finance, can be effectively applied to influence industrial and consumer attitudes towards transiting away from polluting fossil-fuel energy sources towards non-polluting renewable energy use.

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Book Synopsisfreytag & berndt maps are available for many countries and regions in the world. In addition to the precise cartography each map also includes a lot of additional information about the region covered.

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Book SynopsisText in German. The theme of this book is nutrition: the manufacture and availability of foodstuffs, and their preparation and presentation in the context of a societys social and cultural development. Nutrition and physical wellbeing are closely linked. Human beings and animals alike need to eat in order to survive. In our rich industrial nations, where the availability of food is taken for granted, attitudes towards food tend toward extremes: asceticism on the one hand, and overindulgence and excess on the other. Over the centuries, methods of food consumption and food preparation have become refined in tandem with the ever more differentiated organisation of human coexistence between these two poles. Regional and social differences in taste-related culture have arisen, each representative of the lifestyle of their time. Today, cooking and the arranging of food may have an almost artistic form, with high expectations for the quality of the product and its preparation. The fact is, however, that we live in a society in which almost all products are industrially produced. We have no power to influence the production process, and the lists of ingredients on the packaging that provide information on the composition of individual foods are puzzling, and make us doubt whether the product is really what it pretends to be. In a wide-ranging tour dhorizon, this book investigates the complex contemporary semantic fields of foods, their production and preparation, their presentation in a commercial context, and their marketing in the media. The author also takes a critical look at the new enthusiasm for DIY food production, baking, and even livestock slaughter, and examines the star system way cooking is presented in the media. The resulting book is a cultural history of food and of eating from a cultural history, sociology, psychology, economy, and media perspective, as they exist within the contemporary discourse on nutrition with its extremes of hype and hubris. Volker Fischer was deputy director of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt am Main for over ten years. From 1994 to 2012 he has built up a new design department at the Museum for Applied Arts in Frankfurt. At the same time, he taught on the history of architecture and design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach. Fischer is already represented in Edition Axel Menges by books on Stefan Heiliger, Richard Meier, Stefan Wewerka, the Commerzbank in Frankfurt am Main by Norman Foster, Hall 3 of Messe Frankfurt by Nicholas Grimshaw, on "beauty design" as well as on the design activities of Lufthansa and Apple.

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Book SynopsisSince 2011, the German government has been implementing a policy phasing out nuclear power. Over a period of seven years, Bernhard Ludewig photographed the country’s atomic landscape and history, keeping a visual record of the buildings and the work performed in them. The images, collected here, create a unique panorama of usually inaccessible spaces. On show are the plants’ operations – processes including the opening of the reactor and the loading of Castor containers for transport – and interiors, such as control rooms and cooling towers. The book follows the journey of uranium from enrichment through reprocessing to final storage, and shows research spanning from ­Otto Hahn’s discovery of fission to thorium and breeder reactor prototypes. In total 55 sites are represented, and im­ages of research reactors, training facilities, and ­Chernobyl’s sarcophagus provide a further look behind closed door. The Nuclear Dream offers an insight into a disappearing world whose rooms and technology ­often appear sacred. It is a fitting tribute to an era of boundless energy – one whose blue glow captured a generation and proclaimed the start of a new era.

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Book SynopsisThis book aims to explore Berlin's ability not to trivialise new ideas and thus remain a leader in innovation. Berlin is a city that continues to fascinate. It has a tormented history, is the capital of two reconciled Germanies, is an increasingly popular tourist destination, and has affordable living and workspaces for young people, artists, and other creative minds. The 3.7-million metropolis is also the scene for large-scale urban and architectural projects, bottom-up projects, and citizens' initiatives such as communal gardening, cooperative living and other urban innovations. Is the miracle of Berlin's success due to its genius of improvisation, that is to say its ability to adapt to a complex history, to invent specific courses of action, to negotiate? Since 2016, Berlin policy makers have developed an urban strategy to combat real estate price increases and gentrification. Another challenge for Berlin is to adapt to demographic change and the growing number of tourists. More participative, more equitable, and less favourable to automobiles, this city is looking to incorporate diverse methods: public/private partnership, citizen awareness initiatives, social and economic

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Book SynopsisIn an era of accelerating population growth, mass urbanization, and increasing pressure on the natural environment, the megacities of China's eastern seaboard have become a focal point of architectural and urban-design attention. The "reform and opening-up era" has touched China's major cities in different ways, affecting the existing fabric of dynastic capitals, trade hubs, and former European colonies and concessions; this in turn has provided the setting for a range of complex reactions by contemporary architects. The Architectural Guide China provides an invaluable window into this work, with city-by-city coverage including historic maps and background information on urban form. Building on the authors' years of experience leading architectural study tours, this book is the first comprehensive English-language survey of recent Chinese architecture to be organized as a travel guide.

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Book SynopsisPost-Civil War Spain used the countryside as locus and symbol for the reconstruction and modernisation of the state. The Modern Village in Franco’s Spain studies the reconstruction of the towns devastated between 1936 and 1939. It analyses the ideological, political, and urbanistic principles of Franco’s hydro-social programme of modernisation of the countryside through the creation of man-made landscapes (Kulturlandschaften) of dams, irrigation canals, electric power plants, and new settlements – a genuine experiment in water urbanism. The consequent strategy of interior colonisation entailed the construction of 300 new villages or pueblos, each designed as a ‘rural utopia’ centred on a plaza mayor, which embodied, between tradition and modernity, the political ideal of civil life under the national-catholic regime. In the 1950s – 1960s, a new generation of architects, including José Luis Fernández del Amo, Alejandro de la Sota, and Antonio Fernández Alba, reimagined the pueblos as platforms of urban and architectonic experimentation in their search for an abstracted rural vernacular and an organic urban form merging with the landscape.

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Book SynopsisThe City of Mariupol’s heroic defence and systematic destruction at the beginning of the Russian invasion have made it an international symbol of senseless brutality and Ukrainian defiance. The ruined city today still harbours the embers of that resistance. Join a multidisciplinary team of architects, planners, Mariupol residents, and outside experts as they envision the rebirth of their beloved city following its liberation. Inspired by the Ukrainian people’s faith and determination to rebuild, the authors join forces with displaced Mariupol residents to imagine a dynamic future for Mariupol that will begin the day the Ukrainian flag rises. Despite the unavailability of reliable information and the difficulty of communicating with the scattered population, the team illustrates the case for planning rebuilding while the city is still under occupation, both so as to exorcise the scars of war and colonialism and to establish a viable economy and human-centred city that draws strength from its tragic past. This title is part of the Histories of Ukrainian Architecture programme initiated by DOM publishers in response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty on 24 February 2022.

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Book SynopsisAncient Rome has always been considered a compendium of City and World. In the Renaissance, an era of epistemic fractures, when the clash between the new science (Copernicus, Galileo, Vesalius, Bacon, etcetera) and the authority of ancient texts produced the very notion of modernity, the extended and expanding geography of ancient Rome becomes, for Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, a privileged arena in which to question the nature of bodies and the place they hold in a changing order of the universe. Drawing on the rich scenario provided by Shakespeares Rome, and adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, the authors of this volume address the way in which the different bodies of the earthly and heavenly spheres are re-mapped in Shakespeares time and in early modern European culture. More precisely, they investigate the way bodies are fashioned to suit or deconstruct a culturally articulated system of analogies between earth and heaven, microcosm and macrocosm.As a whole, this collection brings to the fore a wide range of issues connected to the Renaissance re-mapping of the world and the human. It should interest not only Shakespeare scholars but all those working on the interaction between sciences and humanities.

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