Search results for ""Public Space""

Each year, 1.2 million people die from traffic fatalities, highlighting the need to design streets that offer safe and enticing travel choices for all people. Cities around the world are facing the same challenges as cities in the US, and many of these problems are rooted in outdated codes and standards. The Global Street Design Guide is a timely resource that sets a global baseline for designing streets and public spaces and redefines the role of streets in a rapidly urbanizing world. The guide will broaden how to measure the success of urban streets to include: access, safety, mobility for all users, environmental quality, economic benefit, public health, and overall quality of life. The first-ever worldwide standards for designing city streets and prioritising safety, pedestrians, public transport, and sustainable mobility are presented in the guide. Participating experts from global cities have helped to develop the principles that organise the guide. The Global Street Design Guide builds off the successful tools and tactics defined in NACTO's Urban Street Design Guide and Urban Bikeway Design Guide while addressing a variety of street typologies and design elements found in various contexts around the world. This innovative guide will inspire leaders, inform practitioners, and empower communities in realising the potential in their public space networks. It will help cities unlock the potential of streets as safe, accessible, and economically sustainable places.

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Anyone viewing what we call a “landscape” from a distance will recognise that it is an artefact, a habitat created by humans as part of our built environment. Designing this realm carefully is a discipline that is taking on increasing importance today. Günter Vogt, with his practice in VOGT Landscape Architects and as a professor at ETH Zürich, has developed a set of tools and a working method that incorporate all the different dimensions of the human-designed environment, from the large-scale landscape to the small-scale urban public space. 'Mutation and Morphosis' looks at all the many aspects involved in the collective process of designing and shaping landscapes, from planning to implementation. The model as a tool and the collection as a driving force are illustrated on the basis of an astonishing variety of topics. In theoretical discussions and the examination of detailed dossiers of facts on the ground, a trajectory is traced: from the emergence of new landscapes as a result of climate change to the migration of the wolf to Central Europe, from the impact of invasive plants to the study of geological formation processes. The panorama that unfolds gives us insights into the broad context that landscape architects must consider in their work, exemplified by the outstanding projects realized by VOGT.

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What makes a city smart? The Smart City in a Digital World takes on this question by describing, challenging, and offering democratic alternatives to the view that the answer begins and ends with technology. In the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown, corporations converged on cities around the world to sell technology, harvest valuable data, and deepen the private governance of urban life. They partnered with governments to promise what on the surface look like unalloyed benefits to city dwellers: safer streets, cleaner air, more efficient transportation, instant communication for all, and algorithms that take governance out of the hands of flawed human beings. Another story lies beneath that surface. Technology-driven smart cities deepen surveillance, shift urban governance to private companies, shrink democracy, create a hacker’s paradise, and hasten the coming of catastrophic climate change. The Smart City insists that people make cities smart, that human governance still matters, and that genuinely intelligent cities start with a vibrant democracy, a commitment to public space, and to citizen control over technology. To make this happen, we need to understand the technologies, the organizations, and the mythologies that power the global smart cities movement, as well as the growing resistance to the technology-driven city. Drawing on case studies from around the world that document the redevelopment of old cities and the creation of entirely new ones, The Smart City provides an essential guide to the future of urban life in a digital world.

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Space, the City and Social Theory offers a clear and critical account of key approaches to cities and urban space within social theory and analysis. It explores the relation of the social and the spatial in the context of critical urban themes: community and anonymity; social difference and spatial divisions; politics and public space; gentrification and urban renewal; gender and sexuality; subjectivity and space; experience and everyday practice in the city. The text adopts an international and interdisciplinary approach, drawing on a range of debates on cities and urban life. It brings together classic perspectives in urban sociology and social theory with the analysis of contemporary urban problems and issues. Rather than viewing the urban simply as a backdrop for more general social processes, the discussion looks at how social and spatial relations shape different versions of the city: as a place of social interaction and of solitude; as a site of difference and segregation; as a space of politics and power; as a landscape of economic and cultural distinction; as a realm of everyday experience and freedom. Similarly, it examines how core social categories - such as class, culture, gender, sexuality and community - are shaped and reproduced in urban contexts. Linking debates in urban studies to wider concerns within social theory and analysis, this accessible text will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students in urban sociology, social and cultural geography, urban and cultural studies.

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Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote that "the people reign over the American political world like God over the universe," unwittingly casting democracy as the political instantiation of the death of God. According to Jeffrey W. Robbins, Tocqueville's assessment remains an apt observation of modern democratic power, which does not rest with a sovereign authority but operates as a diffuse social force. By linking radical democratic theory to a contemporary fascination with political theology, Robbins envisions the modern experience of democracy as a social, cultural, and political force transforming the nature of sovereign power and political authority. Robbins joins his work with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's radical conception of "network power," as well as Sheldon Wolin's notion of "fugitive democracy," to fashion a political theology that captures modern democracy's social and cultural torment. This approach has profound implications not only for the nature of contemporary religious belief and practice but also for the reconceptualization of the proper relationship between religion and politics. Challenging the modern, liberal, and secular assumption of a neutral public space, Robbins conceives of a postsecular politics for contemporary society that inextricably links religion to the political. While effectively recasting the tradition of radical theology as a political theology, this book also develops a comprehensive critique of the political theology bequeathed by Carl Schmitt. It marks an original and visionary achievement by the scholar the Journal of the American Academy of Religion hailed "one of the best commentators on religion and postmodernism."

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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.

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Amid civil war, failing states, and terrorism, Arab liberals are growing in numbers and influence. Advocating a culture of equity, tolerance, good governance, and the rule of law, they work through some of the region’s largest media outlets to spread their ideals within the culture. Broadcasting Change analyzes this trend by portraying the intersection of media and politics in two Arab countries with seismic impact on the region and beyond. In Saudi Arabia, where hardline clerics silenced their opponents for generations, liberals now dominate the airwaves. Their success in weakening clerics’ grip over the public space would not only help develop the country; it would ensure that the birthplace of the prophet Muhammad exports a constructive understanding of Islam. In Egypt, home to a brutal government crackdown on Islamists and a bloodsport of attacks on Coptic Christians, local liberals are acting with courage on the ground and over the airwaves. Through TV talk shows, drama, and comedy, they play off the government’s anti-Islamist agenda to more thoughtfully advocate religious reform. Author Joseph Braude, himself a voice in Arabic-language broadcasts and publications, calls for international assistance to the region’s liberals, particularly in the realm of media. Local civic actors and some reform-minded autocrats welcome a new partnership with media experts and democratic governments in North America, Europe, and the Far East. Broadcasting Change argues that support for liberal reform through Arabic media should be construed as an international “public good” — on par with military peacekeeping and philanthropy.

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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 city's 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 Tokyo's 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 past - sometimes in unlikely forms - in 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.

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At the heart of Memphis lies Overton Park, a 342-acre public space that contains the world-class Memphis Zoo, an old-growth forest, the Memphis College of Art, an amphitheater, and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, among other beloved amenities. Founded in 1901, the park has been at the center of both celebration and controversy. Performers like Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash have dazzled audiences there, while local children have long enjoyed its playgrounds and runners its jogging trails. During the civil rights era, desegregating the park became a major goal of local activists, and the park’s Greensward was the scene of protests against the Vietnam War. Late in the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, when the proposed route of Interstate 40 threatened the park, concerned citizens banded together to fight the plan—a struggle that reached the Supreme Court and eventually saved the park for future generations.This delightfully informative book, filled with historic photos, offers a history of the park from the perspective of those who lived it. Brooks Lamb interviewed nearly a score of Memphians—from civil rights activist Johnnie Turner to U.S. Congressman Steve Cohen, from artist Martha Kelly to retired zookeepers Kathy Fay and Richard Meek—to learn what the park has meant to them and to discover the transformations they have witnessed. The stories they tell reveal a dynamic place that remains, despite changes and challenges, a people’s park and, in the words of one resident, “the heartbeat of Memphis.”

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Text in English & German. Johannes Peter Hölzinger studied architecture at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main from 1954 to 1957. After a residency fellowship at the Deutsche Akademie Villa Massimo in Rome he founded a "planning association for new forms of the environment" in 1965 together with Zero artist Hermann Goepfert, who has since died. One of the most successful results of his work with Goepfert was a new design for the Schloßpark in Karlsruhe on the occasion of the Bundesgartenschau in 1967, which won a major German architectural prize, the Hugo-Häring-Preis. From 1991 until his retirement in 2002 Hölzinger directed the art and public-space course at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Nuremberg. Individualistic and oppositional in comparison to other post-World War II architectural achievements, the design of Hölzinger's buildings is very distinctive. The playful elements of Postmodernism are as alien to his work as the functionalism of New Building. Because of his association with Hermann Goepfert, Hölzinger is much more closely connected with the art scene of his time. The integration of art and architecture is a unique feature of his buildings. If we try to assign a category to this "object architecture" (a term he coined himself), we will find less overlap with architecture than with fine art. From the very beginning Hölzinger saw architecture as an artistic discipline. Light kinetics offered him important new perspectives. Lighting design and the resulting colour changes of white walls play a vital role in his work.

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Winner, Warren Dean Memorial Prize, Conference on Latin American History (CLAH), 2018Street vending has supplied the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro with basic goods for several centuries. Once the province of African slaves and free blacks, street commerce became a site of expanded (mostly European) immigrant participation and shifting state regulations during the transition from enslaved to free labor and into the early post-abolition period. Street Occupations investigates how street vendors and state authorities negotiated this transition, during which vendors sought greater freedom to engage in commerce and authorities imposed new regulations in the name of modernity and progress.Examining ganhador (street worker) licenses, newspaper reports, and detention and court records, and considering the emergence of a protective association for vendors, Patricia Acerbi reveals that street sellers were not marginal urban dwellers in Rio but active participants in a debate over citizenship. In their struggles to sell freely throughout the Brazilian capital, vendors asserted their citizenship as urban participants with rights to the city and to the freedom of commerce. In tracing how vendors resisted efforts to police and repress their activities, Acerbi demonstrates the persistence of street commerce and vendors’ tireless activity in the city, which the law eventually accommodated through municipal street commerce regulation passed in 1924.A focused history of a crucial era of transition in Brazil, Street Occupations offers important new perspectives on patron-client relations, slavery and abolition, policing, the use of public space, the practice of free labor, the meaning of citizenship, and the formality and informality of work.

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2008 — Gold Award in Californiana – California Book Awards – Commonwealth Club of California 2010 — NACCS Book Award – National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies City plazas worldwide are centers of cultural expression and artistic display. They are settings for everyday urban life where daily interactions, economic exchanges, and informal conversations occur, thereby creating a socially meaningful place at the core of a city. At the heart of historic Los Angeles, the Plaza represents a quintessential public space where real and imagined narratives overlap and provide as many questions as answers about the development of the city and what it means to be an Angeleno. The author, a social and cultural historian who specializes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Los Angeles, is well suited to explore the complex history and modern-day relevance of the Los Angeles Plaza. From its indigenous and colonial origins to the present day, Estrada explores the subject from an interdisciplinary and multiethnic perspective, delving into the pages of local newspapers, diaries and letters, and the personal memories of former and present Plaza residents, in order to examine the spatial and social dimensions of the Plaza over an extended period of time. The author contributes to the growing historiography of Los Angeles by providing a groundbreaking analysis of the original core of the city that covers a long span of time, space, and social relations. He examines the impact of change on the lives of ordinary people in a specific place, and how this change reflects the larger story of the city.

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Amid civil war, failing states, and terrorism, Arab liberals are growing in numbers and influence. Advocating a culture of equity, tolerance, good governance, and the rule of law, they work through some of the region’s largest media outlets to spread their ideals within the culture. Broadcasting Change analyzes this trend by portraying the intersection of media and politics in two Arab countries with seismic impact on the region and beyond. In Saudi Arabia, where hardline clerics silenced their opponents for generations, liberals now dominate the airwaves. Their success in weakening clerics’ grip over the public space would not only help develop the country; it would ensure that the birthplace of the prophet Muhammad exports a constructive understanding of Islam. In Egypt, home to a brutal government crackdown on Islamists and a bloodsport of attacks on Coptic Christians, local liberals are acting with courage on the ground and over the airwaves. Through TV talk shows, drama, and comedy, they play off the government’s anti-Islamist agenda to more thoughtfully advocate religious reform. Author Joseph Braude, himself a voice in Arabic-language broadcasts and publications, calls for international assistance to the region’s liberals, particularly in the realm of media. Local civic actors and some reform-minded autocrats welcome a new partnership with media experts and democratic governments in North America, European, and the Far East. Broadcasting Change argues that support for liberal reform through Arabic media should be construed as an international “public good” — on par with military peacekeeping and philanthropy.

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Panem et circenses, “bread and circuses”. Juvenal’s expression denouncing the Roman plebs whose only ambitions were the distribution of free wheat and a passion for games gives a rather good idea of Roman society’s rather special character in the days of the first emperors. But you mustn’t be taken in: the picture of the Circus Maximus holding gladiator fights is sheer fiction. Except for chariot races and athletics competitions, the only fights held there involved men in arms equipped with helmets and swords (bestiarii) and hunters with spears (venatores) against ferocious beasts in the context of the venationes. The Forum was the circus during the Republic. This public space – reorganised for the occasion – was used as the showcase for the first gladiator fights well before the amphitheatre in Pompeii was created. Later, the amphitheatre was to become the inescapable symbol of town urbanism, like the Coliseum in Rome. This book offers the reader almost 800 years of history, from the “proto” ethnic gladiators (4th Century B.C.) to the imperial gladiator fights organised under Augustus, from hunting in the circus (mid 3rd Century B.C.) to the various arena shows, from the gladiator emperors to the Christian authors denouncing the amphitheatre’s sacrileges. Based on archaeological documentation (terra sigillata, baked earthen lamps, painted coatings, graffiti, glasswork, lapidary elements, etc.) and on solid literary sources, this study provides the most recent historical research on the subject so as to offer a more original study of this prodigious social phenomenon.

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Cutting-edge scholarly articles on diverse aspects of Goethe and his age, featuring in this volume a special section on the poetics of space in the Goethezeit. The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, encouraging North American Goethe scholarship by publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. Volume 24 features a special section titled "The Poetics of Space in the Goethezeit," co-edited by John Lyon and Elliott Schreiber, with contributions on blind spots in Goethe's Elective Affinities; on the topography and topoi of Goethe's autobiographical childhood; on disorientation and the subterranean in Novalis; on selfhood, sovereignty, and public space in Die italienische Reise and Dichtung und Wahrheit; on Goethe's theater of anamnesis in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre; and on spatial mobilization in Kleist's Berliner Abendblätter. There are also articles on the horror of coming home in Caroline de la Motte Fouqué's "Der Abtrünnige" and on Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's Eduard Allwills Papiere. Contributors: Colin Benert, Stephanie Galasso, Tove Holmes, Edgar Landgraf, Sara Luly, John B. Lyon, Anthony Mahler, Monika Nenon, Joseph O'Neil, Elliott Schreiber, Inge Stephan, Gabriel Trop, Christian P. Weber. Adrian Daub is Associate Professor of German at Stanford. Elisabeth Krimmer is Professor of German at the University of California Davis. Book review editor Birgit Tautz is Associate Professor of German at Bowdoin College.

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As capitalism triumphs on the ruins of utopias and faith in progress fades, revolts are breaking out everywhere. From London to Hong Kong and from Buenos Aires to Beirut, protests flare up, in some cases spreading like wildfire, in other cases petering out and reigniting elsewhere. Not even the pandemic has been able to stop them: as many were reflecting on the loss of public space, the fuse of a fresh explosion was lit in Minneapolis with the brutal murder of George Floyd. We are living in an age of revolt. But what is revolt? It would be a mistake to think of it as simply an explosion of anger, a spontaneous and irrational outburst, as it is often portrayed in the media. Exploding anger is not a bolt from the blue but a symptom of a social order in which the sovereignty of the state has imposed itself as the sole condition of order. Revolt challenges the sovereignty of the state, whether it is democratic or despotic, exposing the violence that underpins it. Revolt upsets the agenda of power, interrupts time, throws history into disarray. The time of revolt, discontinuous and intermittent, is also a revolt of time, an anarchic transition to a space of time that disengages itself from the architecture of politics. This brilliant reflection on the nature and significance of revolt will be of interest to students of politics and philosophy and to anyone concerned with the key questions of politics today.

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This penetrating work culls key concepts from grassroots activism to hold critical social theory accountable to the needs, ideas, and organizational practices of the global justice movement. The resulting critique of neoliberalism hinges on place-based struggles of groups marginalized by globalization and represents a brave rethinking of politics, economy, culture, and professionalism.Providing new practical and conceptual tools for responding to human and environmental crises in Appalachia and beyond, Recovering the Commons radically revises the framework of critical social thought regarding our stewardship of the civic and ecological commons. Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor ally social theory, field sciences, and local knowledge in search of healthy connections among body, place, and commons that form a basis for solidarity as well as a vital infrastructure for a reliable, durable world. Drawing particularly on the work of philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Dewey, and Hannah Arendt, the authors reconfigure social theory by ridding it of the aspects that reduce place and community to sets of interchangeable components. Instead, they reconcile complementary pairs such as mind/body and society/nature in the reclamation of public space. With its analysis embedded in philosophical and material contexts, this penetrating work culls key concepts from grassroots activism to hold critical social theory accountable to the needs, ideas, and organizational practices of the global justice movement. The resulting critique of neoliberalism hinges on place-based struggles of groups marginalized by globalization and represents a brave rethinking of politics, economy, culture, and professionalism.

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The first book to chart Scott Burton’s performance art and sculpture of the 1970s. Scott Burton (1939–89) created performance art and sculpture that drew on queer experience and the sexual cultures that flourished in New York City in the 1970s. David J. Getsy argues that Burton looked to body language and queer behavior in public space—most importantly, street cruising—as foundations for rethinking the audiences and possibilities of art. This first book on the artist examines Burton’s underacknowledged contributions to performance art and how he made queer life central in them. Extending his performances about cruising, sexual signaling, and power dynamics throughout the decade, Burton also came to create functional sculptures that covertly signaled queerness by hiding in plain sight as furniture waiting to be used. With research drawing from multiple archives and numerous interviews, Getsy charts Burton’s deep engagements with postminimalism, performance, feminism, behavioral psychology, design history, and queer culture. A restless and expansive artist, Burton transformed his commitment to gay liberation into a unique practice of performance, sculpture, and public art that aspired to be antielitist, embracing of differences, and open to all. Filled with stories of Burton’s life in New York’s art communities, Queer Behavior makes a case for Burton as one of the most significant out queer artists to emerge in the wake of the Stonewall uprising and offers rich accounts of queer art and performance art in the 1970s.

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Susan Buck-Morss asks: What does revolution look like today? How will the idea of revolution survive the inadequacy of the formula, “progress = modernization through industrialization,” to which it has owed its political life? Socialism plus computer technology, citizen resistance plus a global agenda of concerns, revolutionary commitment to practices that are socially experimental and inclusive of difference—these are new forces being mobilized to make another future possible. In a moving account that includes over 100 photos and images, many in color,, Revolution Today celebrates the new political subjects that are organizing thousands of grassroots movements to fight racial and gender violence, state-led terrorism, and capitalist exploitation of people and the planet worldwide. The twenty-first century has already witnessed unprecedented popular mobilizations. Unencumbered by old dogmas, mobilizations of opposition are not only happening, they are gaining support and developing a global consciousness in the process. They are themselves a chain of signifiers, creating solidarity across language, religion, ethnicity, gender, and every other difference. Trans-local solidarities exist. They came first. The right-wing authoritarianism and anti-immigrant upsurge that has followed is a reaction against the amazing visual power of millions of citizens occupying public space in defiance of state power. We cannot know how to act politically without seeing others act. This book provides photographic evidence of that fact, while making us aware of how much of the new revolutionary vernacular we already share.

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Protest movements shape public space not only through their messages, but in many cases also through their - mostly temporary - buildings. Frankfurt’s Deutsches Architekturmuseum DAM and Vienna’s MAK - Museum of Applied Arts are exploring this thesis in a joint exhibition project. The exhibition and the book coinciding with it explore the topic based on examples spanning from 1830 to 2022. Protest Architecture is the first-ever international survey of the architecture of protest and presents it in all its manifold forms and, in some cases, ambivalence. It is conceived as an encyclopedia with around 170 entries, supplemented by 14 more expansive case studies. A preceding chronology portrays some 80 protest movements and their architectural manifestations through concise texts and one image each, including examples from all over the world, such as the 1830 July Revolution in Paris, the 1848 March Revolution in Berlin, the 1911 Sugar Workers Strike in Queensland (Australia), the 1936-37 General Motors Sit-down Strike in Flint, MI (USA), the 1969-98 Troubles in Northern Ireland, Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen since 1971, the 1986 People Power Revolution in Manila, the 1999 WTO Protests in Seattle, WA (USA), the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions on Cairo’s Tahrir Square and Manama’s Pearl Roundabout, the 2013–14 Euromaidan uprisings in Kyiv, the 2015–16 #FeesMustFall student protests in Pretoria, the 2019 Acampamento Terra Livre in Brasilia, the 2020–21 Indian Farmers Protests, and the 2022 Freedom Convoy in Ottawa. Text in English and German.

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Vast interior spaces have become ubiquitous in the contemporary city. The soaring atriums and concourses of mega-hotels, shopping malls and transport interchanges define an increasingly normal experience of being ‘inside’ in a city. Yet such spaces are also subject to intense criticism and claims that they can destroy the quality of a city’s authentic life ‘on the outside’. Interior Urbanism explores the roots of this contemporary tension between inside and outside, identifying and analysing the concept of interior urbanism and tracing its history back to the works of John Portman and Associates in 1960s and 70s America. Portman – increasingly recognised as an influential yet understudied figure – was responsible for projects such as Peachtree Center in Atlanta and the Los Angeles Bonaventure Hotel, developments that employed vast internal atriums to define a world of possibilities not just for hotels and commercial spaces, but for the future of the American downtown amid the upheavals of the 1960s and 70s. The book analyses Portman’s architecture in order to reconsider major contexts of debate in architecture and urbanism in this period, including the massive expansion of a commercial imperative in architecture, shifts in the governance and development of cities amid social and economic instability, the rise of postmodernism and critical urban studies, and the defence of the street and public space amid the continual upheavals of urban development. In this way the book reconsiders the American city at a crucial time in its development, identifying lessons for how we consider the forces at work, and the spaces produced, in cities in the present.

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A radical reexamination of the textual and archaeological evidence about Augustus and the PalatineCaesar Augustus (63 BC–AD 14), who is usually thought of as the first Roman emperor, lived on the Palatine Hill, the place from which the word “palace” originates. A startling reassessment of textual and archaeological evidence, The House of Augustus demonstrates that Augustus was never an emperor in any meaningful sense of the word, that he never had a palace, and that the so-called "Casa di Augusto" excavated on the Palatine was a lavish aristocratic house destroyed by the young Caesar in order to build the temple of Apollo. Exploring the Palatine from its first occupation to the present, T. P. Wiseman proposes a reexamination of the "Augustan Age," including much of its literature.Wiseman shows how the political and ideological background of Augustus' rise to power offers a radically different interpretation of the ancient evidence about the Augustan Palatine. Taking a long historical perspective in order to better understand the topography, Wiseman considers the legendary stories of Rome’s origins—in particular Romulus' foundation and inauguration of the city on the summit of the Palatine. He examines the new temple of Apollo and the piazza it overlooked, as well as the portico around it with its library used as a hall for Senate meetings, and he illustrates how Commander Caesar, who became Caesar Augustus, was the champion of the Roman people against an oppressive oligarchy corrupting the Republic.A decisive intervention in a critical debate among ancient historians and archaeologists, The House of Augustus recalibrates our views of a crucially important period and a revered public space.

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A pathbreaking look at how progressive policy change for economic justice has swept U.S. cities In the 2010s cities and counties across the United States witnessed long-overdue change as they engaged more than ever before with questions of social, economic, and racial justice. After decades of urban economic restructuring that intensified class divides and institutional and systemic racism, dozens of local governments countered the conventional wisdom that cities couldn’t address inequality—enacting progressive labor market policies, from $15 minimum wages to paid sick leave.Justice at Work examines the mutually reinforcing roles of economic and racial justice organizing and policy entrepreneurship in building power and support for policy changes. Bridging urban social movement and urban politics studies, it demonstrates how economic and racial justice coalitions are collectively the critical institution underpinning progressive change. It also shows that urban policy change is driven by “urban policy entrepreneurs” who use public space and the intangible resources of the city to open “agenda windows” for progressive policy proposals incubated through national networks. Through case studies of organizing and policy change efforts in cities including Chicago, Seattle, and New Orleans around minimum wages, targeted hiring, paid time off, fair scheduling, and anti-austerity, Marc Doussard and Greg Schrock show that the contemporary wave of successful progressive organizing efforts is likely to endure. Yet they caution that success is dependent on skillful organizing that builds and sustains power at the grassroots—and skillful policy work inside City Hall. By promoting justice at—and increasingly beyond—work, these movements hold the potential to unlock a new model for inclusive economic development in cities.

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A pathbreaking look at how progressive policy change for economic justice has swept U.S. cities In the 2010s cities and counties across the United States witnessed long-overdue change as they engaged more than ever before with questions of social, economic, and racial justice. After decades of urban economic restructuring that intensified class divides and institutional and systemic racism, dozens of local governments countered the conventional wisdom that cities couldn’t address inequality—enacting progressive labor market policies, from $15 minimum wages to paid sick leave.Justice at Work examines the mutually reinforcing roles of economic and racial justice organizing and policy entrepreneurship in building power and support for policy changes. Bridging urban social movement and urban politics studies, it demonstrates how economic and racial justice coalitions are collectively the critical institution underpinning progressive change. It also shows that urban policy change is driven by “urban policy entrepreneurs” who use public space and the intangible resources of the city to open “agenda windows” for progressive policy proposals incubated through national networks. Through case studies of organizing and policy change efforts in cities including Chicago, Seattle, and New Orleans around minimum wages, targeted hiring, paid time off, fair scheduling, and anti-austerity, Marc Doussard and Greg Schrock show that the contemporary wave of successful progressive organizing efforts is likely to endure. Yet they caution that success is dependent on skillful organizing that builds and sustains power at the grassroots—and skillful policy work inside City Hall. By promoting justice at—and increasingly beyond—work, these movements hold the potential to unlock a new model for inclusive economic development in cities.

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U.S. suburbs are typically imagined to be predominantly white communities, but this is increasingly untrue in many parts of the country. Examining a multiracial suburb that is decidedly nonwhite, Wendy Cheng unpacks questions of how identity—especially racial identity—is shaped by place. She offers an in-depth portrait, enriched by nearly seventy interviews, of the San Gabriel Valley, not far from downtown Los Angeles, where approximately 60 percent of residents are Asian American and more than 30 percent are Latino. At first glance, the cities of the San Gabriel Valley look like stereotypical suburbs, but almost no one who lives there is white. The Changs Next Door to the Díazes reveals how a distinct culture is being fashioned in, and simultaneously reshaping, an environment of strip malls, multifamily housing, and faux Mediterranean tract homes. Informed by her interviews as well as extensive analysis of three episodic case studies, Cheng argues that people’s daily experiences—in neighborhoods, schools, civic organizations, and public space—deeply influence their racial consciousness. In the San Gabriel Valley, racial ideologies are being reformulated by these encounters. Cheng views everyday landscapes as crucial terrains through which racial hierarchies are learned, instantiated, and transformed. She terms the process “regional racial formation,” through which locally accepted racial orders and hierarchies complicate and often challenge prevailing notions of race.There is a place-specific state of mind here, Cheng finds. Understanding the processes of racial formation in the San Gabriel Valley in the contemporary moment is important in itself but also has larger value as a model for considering the spatial dimensions of racial formation and the significant demographic shifts taking place across the national landscape.

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"The Attempt is historical fiction at its best. Through its narrator's archival approach to his material, the book explores the intimate lives of a pair of fervent idealists, as well as a robber baron and his family. The result is a vivid, poignant narrative about political upheaval, both in the past and the present." --SIRI HUSTVEDT, author of The Blazing World When a Czech historian becomes convinced he's the illegitimate great-grandson of an infamous anarchist who attempted an assassination while living in the United States, he travels to New York to investigate. Arriving in Manhattan during the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement, his research takes him further back into the past--from the Pittsburgh home of a nineteenth-century US industrialist to 1920s Europe, where a celebrated anarchist couple is on the run from the law. Based on the lives of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, The Attempt is a novel about the legacy of radical politics and relationships--one that traverses centuries and continents to deliver a moving, powerful story of personal and political transformation. Magdalena Platzova is the author of six books, including two novels published in English: Aaron's Leap, a Lidove Noviny Book of the Year Award finalist, and The Attempt, a Czech Book Award finalist. Her fiction has also appeared in A Public Space and Words Without Borders. Platzova grew up in the Czech Republic, studied in Washington, DC, and England, received her MA in Philosophy at Charles University in Prague, and has taught at New York University's Gallatin School. She is now a freelance journalist based in Lyon, France.

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A riveting account of how a popularly elected leader has steered the world's largest democracy toward authoritarianism and intoleranceOver the past two decades, thanks to Narendra Modi, Hindu nationalism has been coupled with a form of national-populism that has ensured its success at the polls, first in Gujarat and then in India at large. Modi managed to seduce a substantial number of citizens by promising them development and polarizing the electorate along ethno-religious lines. Both facets of this national-populism found expression in a highly personalized political style as Modi related directly to the voters through all kinds of channels of communication in order to saturate the public space.Drawing on original interviews conducted across India, Christophe Jaffrelot shows how Modi's government has moved India toward a new form of democracy, an ethnic democracy that equates the majoritarian community with the nation and relegates Muslims and Christians to second-class citizens who are harassed by vigilante groups. He discusses how the promotion of Hindu nationalism has resulted in attacks against secularists, intellectuals, universities, and NGOs. Jaffrelot explains how the political system of India has acquired authoritarian features for other reasons, too. Eager to govern not only in New Delhi, but also in the states, the government has centralized power at the expense of federalism and undermined institutions that were part of the checks and balances, including India's Supreme Court.Modi's India is a sobering account of how a once-vibrant democracy can go wrong when a government backed by popular consent suppresses dissent while growing increasingly intolerant of ethnic and religious minorities.

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Modernism in architecture and urban design has failed the American city. This is the decisive conclusion that renowned public intellectual Nathan Glazer has drawn from two decades of writing and thinking about what this architectural movement will bequeath to future generations. In From a Cause to a Style, he proclaims his disappointment with modernism and its impact on the American city. Writing in the tradition of legendary American architectural critics Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, Glazer contends that modernism, this new urban form that signaled not just a radical revolution in style but a social ambition to enhance the conditions under which ordinary people lived, has fallen short on all counts. The articles and essays collected here--some never published before, all updated--reflect his ideas on subjects ranging from the livable city and public housing to building design, public memorials, and the uses of public space. Glazer, an undisputed giant among public intellectuals, is perhaps best known for his writings on ethnicity and social policy, where the unflinching honesty and independence of thought that he brought to bear on tough social questions has earned him respect from both the Left and the Right. Here, he challenges us to face some difficult truths about the public places that, for better or worse, define who we are as a society. From a Cause to a Style is an exhilarating and thought-provoking book that raises important questions about modernist architecture and the larger social aims it was supposed to have addressed-and those it has abandoned.

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Despite the ubiquity of automobility, the reality of automotive death is hidden from everyday view. There are accident blackspots all over the roads that we use and go past every day but the people that have died there or been injured are not marked, unless by homemade shrines and personal memorialization. Nowhere on the planet is this practice as densely actioned as in the United States.Road Scars is a highly visual scholarly monograph about how roadside car crash shrines place the collective trauma of living in a car culture in the everyday landscapes of automobility. Roadside shrines—or road trauma shrines—are vernacular memorial assemblages built by private individuals at sites where family and friends have died in automobile accidents, either while driving cars or motorcycles or being hit by cars as pedestrians, bicyclists, or motorcyclists. Prevalent for decades in Latin America and in the American Southwest, roadside car crash shrines are now present throughout the U.S. and around the world. Some are simply small white crosses, almost silent markers of places of traumatic death. Others are elaborate collections of objects, texts, and materials from all over the map culturally and physically, all significantly brought together not in the home or in a cemetery but on the roadside, in drivable public space—a space where private individuals perform private identities alongside each other in public, and where these private mobilities sometimes collide with one another in traumatic ways that are negotiated in roadside shrines. This book touches on something many of us have seen, but few have explored intellectually.

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In its considered response to the globalisation of culture, HCMA has consistently achieved an architecture that is expressive of time and place, and uniquely interprets Canadian values of openness and inclusivity. The firm's concentration on civic buildings denotes a deeply-rooted concern for community, and recognition that in contemporary pluralistic society's schools, libraries and community centres are both symbolically and literally, the meeting places for all sectors of our communities regardless of demography, faith or ethnicity. What distinguishes HCMA's design approach is its conceptual shift from the traditional departure points of form or function, to a more organic and humanist approach by which inhabitation of the building and its surroundings mediate the interface between these two opposing forces. While function implies an empirical definition of purpose, and form a pre-occupation with sculptural abstraction, inhabitation connotes an understanding that buildings should embrace the richness and diversity with which our lives unfold. Places: Public Architecture explores a selection of key projects by HCMA which offer insight into the firm's specific approach to community building through public architecture. Featured projects many of which have been challenged by contemporary advancements in technology, include schools, libraries, fire halls, childcare centres, and more. Through the practice of architecture HCMA asks what is the future of the library, of education, and of public space in an increasingly online age? The book features critical text by accomplished writer Jim Taggart, professional photography, lucid architectural drawings, and details, as well as a look at the firm's design process of iterative modelling/diagramming and research on contemporary topics.

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Despite the ubiquity of automobility, the reality of automotive death is hidden from everyday view. There are accident blackspots all over the roads that we use and go past every day but the people that have died there or been injured are not marked, unless by homemade shrines and personal memorialization. Nowhere on the planet is this practice as densely actioned as in the United States.Road Scars is a highly visual scholarly monograph about how roadside car crash shrines place the collective trauma of living in a car culture in the everyday landscapes of automobility. Roadside shrines—or road trauma shrines—are vernacular memorial assemblages built by private individuals at sites where family and friends have died in automobile accidents, either while driving cars or motorcycles or being hit by cars as pedestrians, bicyclists, or motorcyclists. Prevalent for decades in Latin America and in the American Southwest, roadside car crash shrines are now present throughout the U.S. and around the world. Some are simply small white crosses, almost silent markers of places of traumatic death. Others are elaborate collections of objects, texts, and materials from all over the map culturally and physically, all significantly brought together not in the home or in a cemetery but on the roadside, in drivable public space—a space where private individuals perform private identities alongside each other in public, and where these private mobilities sometimes collide with one another in traumatic ways that are negotiated in roadside shrines. This book touches on something many of us have seen, but few have explored intellectually.

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Living sustainably is not just about preserving the wilderness or keeping nature pristine. The transition to a green economy depends on cities. For the first time in human history, the majority of the people on the planet live in urban areas. If we are to avert climate catastrophe, we will need our cities to coexist with nature without destroying it. Many places are already investing in the infrastructure of the future-including renewable energy, energy efficiency, mass and personal transit, and advanced sewage and waste management-but the modern city still has a long way to go. In The Sustainable City, Steven Cohen provides a broad and engaging overview of the urban systems of the twenty-first century, surveying policies and projects already under way in cities around the world and pointing to more ways progress can be made. Cohen discusses the sustainable city from an organizational-management and public-policy perspective that emphasizes the local level, looking at case studies of existing legislation, programs, and public-private partnerships that strive to align modern urban life and sustainability. From waste management in Beijing to energy infrastructure in Africa to public space in Washington, D.C., there are concrete examples of what we can do right now. Cohen synthesizes the disparate strands of sustainable city planning in an approachable and applicable guide that highlights how these issues touch our lives on a daily basis, whether the transportation we take, where our energy comes from, or what becomes of our food waste. Providing recommendations and insights with immediacy and relevance, this book has invaluable lessons for anyone seeking to link public policy to promoting a sustainable lifestyle.

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We live in a world which no longer questions itself, which lives from one day to another managing successive crises and struggling to brace itself for new ones, without knowing where it is going and without trying to plan the itinerary. And everything important in our lives - livelihood, human bonds, partnerships, neighbourhood, goals worth pursuing and dangers to avoid - feels transient, precarious, vulnerable, insecure, uncertain, risky. Is there a connection between the shape of the world we inhabit and the way we live our lives? Exploring that connection, and finding out just how close it is, is the main concern of this book. What is at stake in this inquiry is the possibility of re-building the"'private/public" space, where private troubles and public issues meet and where citizens engage in dialogue in order to govern themselves. Individual liberty can only be a product of collective work, it can only be collectively secured and guaranteed. And yet today we are moving towards a privatization of the means to secure individual liberty. If seen as a therapy for the present ills, this is bound to produce effects of a most sinister kind. The act of translating private troubles into public issues is in danger of falling into disuse and being forgotten. The argument of this book is that making the translation possible again is an urgent and vital imperative for the renewal of politics today. This new book by Zygmunt Bauman - one of the most original and creative thinkers of our time - will be of particular interest to students of sociology, politics and social and political theory.

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Living sustainably is not just about preserving the wilderness or keeping nature pristine. The transition to a green economy depends on cities. For the first time in human history, the majority of the people on the planet live in urban areas. If we are to avert climate catastrophe, we will need our cities to coexist with nature without destroying it. Many places are already investing in the infrastructure of the future-including renewable energy, energy efficiency, mass and personal transit, and advanced sewage and waste management-but the modern city still has a long way to go. In The Sustainable City, Steven Cohen provides a broad and engaging overview of the urban systems of the twenty-first century, surveying policies and projects already under way in cities around the world and pointing to more ways progress can be made. Cohen discusses the sustainable city from an organizational-management and public-policy perspective that emphasizes the local level, looking at case studies of existing legislation, programs, and public-private partnerships that strive to align modern urban life and sustainability. From waste management in Beijing to energy infrastructure in Africa to public space in Washington, D.C., there are concrete examples of what we can do right now. Cohen synthesizes the disparate strands of sustainable city planning in an approachable and applicable guide that highlights how these issues touch our lives on a daily basis, whether the transportation we take, where our energy comes from, or what becomes of our food waste. Providing recommendations and insights with immediacy and relevance, this book has invaluable lessons for anyone seeking to link public policy to promoting a sustainable lifestyle.

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Designing and constructing openings The first volume of the SCALE series – Open | Close – examines a simple but effective building element, the Opening, illuminating the path from idea to realization in its various facets. The concept of Open | Close includes not only elements such as windows, doors, gates, loggias and skylights, which communicate between exterior and interior space, but also the structure of the building itself. Because Openings define and determine the relationship of the building to public space, they also determine the character of the site. The analysis of conception, form and construction of opening elements is supplemented and illustrated by international examples of best applications. The SCALE series provides practical tools for architects and students of architecture. Each volume analyses the construction process from the first design idea to the call for bids, covering the fundamental design principles and concrete details. The series title, SCALE, signifies that the perfect detail is the result of a process through various levels of conception and design, from the abstract to the particular. Although the focus is on communicating hands-on constructional know-how, SCALE’s innovative presentation does not just simply show solutions, but demonstrates how to develop them. Each volume presents essential information for design and implementation, from the first sketches to details of connectors in a scale of 1:10. Consistency in the plans and drawings, clear hierarchies in the headings and structure, and a clear, easily readable layout with helpful captions simplify the search for specific information, and make SCALE volumes ideal for quick, targeted consultation. SCALE is conceived as a series of practical textbooks which can be used independently of each other, but also supplement and build on each other to constitute a reference work on construction design.

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When we read best-selling books, go to movies, visit art museums, go dancing, take in a game, we customarily ignore the political economy that hammers these features of culture into shape; normally, at such times, we’re not thinking about corporate board room votes, lobbyists, public funding for the arts, the end of the Cold War, stock swaps, intellectual property, or the class divisions of public space. This book aims to change that by offering readers a number of ways to link cultural experience to political economy-to become aware of the ways in which political and economic realities and decisions determine the outlines of spaces and activities in everyday life.Unsettling and provocative, Culture Works tears down the imaginary walls separating culture, economics, and politics. Writing across the established borders between anthropology, sociology, art history, economics, communication and media studies, political theory, and performance, the authors seek to show how particular economies and power relations work in familiar and central cultural experiences: art, beer, advertising, dance, sport, shopping, the Web, and media. Their essays provide a series of lucid, critical accounts of various aspects of the political economy of culture and its attendant issues of production, consumption, corporatization, and the struggle for meaning. A refreshing example of a politics of writing and critical thinking that cultural studies and political economic analysis can produce when working together, the result will change the ways in which readers experience, consider, and understand culture works.Contributors: David L. Andrews, U of Maryland; Michael Curtin, Indiana U; Susan G. Davis, U of Illinois; Danielle Fox; Chad Raphael, Santa Clara U; Anna Beatrice Scott, U of California, Riverside; Ben Scott; Inger L. Stole, U of Illinois; Thomas Streeter, U of Vermont.Cultural Politics Series, volume 18

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How do we accommodate a growing urban population in a way that is sustainable, equitable, and inviting? This question is becoming increasingly urgent as we face diminishing fossil-fuel resources and the effects of a changing climate while global cities continue to compete to be the most vibrant centres of culture, knowledge, and finance. Jan Gehl has been examining this question since the 1960s, when few urban designers or planners were thinking about designing cities for people. But given the unpredictable, complex and ephemeral nature of life in cities, how can we best design public infrastructure - vital to cities for getting for place to place, or staying in place - for human use? Studying city life and understanding the factors that encourage or discourage use is the key to designing inviting public space. In How to Study Public Life Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre draw from their combined experience of over 50 years to provide a history of public-life study as well as methods and tools necessary to recapture city life as an important planning dimension. This type of systematic study began in earnest in the 1960s, when several researchers and journalists on different continents criticized urban planning for having forgotten life in the city. City life studies provide knowledge about human behaviour in the built environment in an attempt to put it on an equal footing with knowledge about urban elements such as buildings and transport systems. Studies can be used as input in the decision-making process, as part of overall planning, or in designing individual projects such as streets, squares or parks. The original goal is still the goal today: to recapture city life as an important planning dimension. Anyone interested in improving city life will find inspiration, tools, and examples in this invaluable guide.

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From the voices of protesters to the encroachment of a new fascism, everywhere we look power is revealed. Spouse to spouse, soldier to citizen, looker to gazed upon, power is never static: it is either demonstrated or deployed. Its hoarding is itself a demonstration. This thought-provoking issue of the acclaimed literary annual Freeman's explores who gets to say what matters in a time of social upheaval.Many of the writers are women. Margaret Atwood posits it is time to update the gender of werewolf narratives. Aminatta Forna shatters the silences which supposedly ensured her safety as a woman of colour walking in public space. Power must often be seized. The narrator of Lan Samantha Chang's short story finally wrenches control of the family's finances from her husband only to make a fatal mistake. Meanwhile the hero of Tahmima Anam's story achieves freedom by selling bull semen. Australian novelist Josephine Rowe recalls a gallery attendee trying to take what was not offered when she worked as a life-drawing model. Violence often results from power imbalances - Booker Prize winner Ben Okri watches power stripped from the residents of Grenfell Tower by ferocious neglect. But not all power must wreak damage. Barry Lopez remembers fourteen glimpses of power, from the moment he hitched a ride on a cargo plan in Korea to the glare he received from a bear traveling with her cubs in the woods, asking - do you plan me harm?Featuring work from brand new writers Nicole Im, Jaime Cortez and Nimmi Gowrinathan, as well as from some of the world's best storytellers, including US poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, Franco-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani, and Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, Freeman's: Power escapes from the headlines of today and burrows into the heart of the issue.

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The Olympics have developed into the world's premier sporting event. They are simultaneously a competitive exhibition and a grand display of cooperation that bring together global cultures on ski slopes, shooting ranges, swimming pools, and track ovals. Given their scale in the modern era, the Games are a useful window for better comprehending larger cultural, social, and historical processes, argues Jules Boykoff, an academic social scientist who played for the US Olympic soccer team. In Activism and the Olympics, Boykoff provides a critical overview of the Olympic industry and its political opponents in the modern era. After presenting a brief history of Olympic activism, he turns his attention to on-the-ground activism through the lens of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics and the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Here we see how anti-Olympic activists deploy a range of approaches to challenge the Olympic machine, from direct action and the seizure of public space to humor-based and online tactics. Drawing on primary evidence from myriad personal interviews with activists, journalists, civil libertarians, and Olympics organizers, Boykoff angles in on the Games from numerous vantages and viewpoints. Although modern Olympic authorities have strived—even through the Cold War era—to appear apolitical, Boykoff notes, the Games have always been the site of hotly contested political actions and competing interests. During the last thirty years, as the Olympics became an economic juggernaut, they also generated numerous reactions from groups that have sought to challenge the event’s triumphalism and pageantry. The 21st century has seen an increased level of activism across the world, from the Occupy Movement in the United States to the Arab Spring in the Middle East. What does this spike in dissent mean for Olympic activists as they prepare for future Games?

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This book explores the interface between geography, ethics and morality. It considers questions that have haunted the past, are subjects of controversy in the present, and which affect the future. Does distance diminish responsibility? Should we interfere with the lives of those we do not know? Is there a distinction between private and public space? Which values and morals, if any, are absolute, and which cultural, communal or personal? And are universal rights consistent with respect for difference? David Smith shows how these questions play themselves out in politics, planning, development, social and personal relations, the exploitation of resources, and competition for territory. After introducing the essential elements of moral philosophy from Plato to postmodernism, he examines the moral significance of concepts of landscape, location and place, proximity, distance and community, space and territory, justice, and nature. He is concerned above all with the morality people practice, to see how this varies according to geographical context, and to assess the inevitability of its outcomes. His argument is seamlessly interwoven with everyday observation and vividly described case studies: the latter include genocide and rescue during the Holocaust, the conflicts over space between Israeland Palestine and within Israel itself, and the social tensions and aspirations in post-apartheid South Africa. The meaning, possibility and limits of social justice lie at the heart of the book. That geographical context is vital to the understanding of moral practice and ethical theory is its central proposition. The book is clearly and engagingly written. The author has a student readership in mind, but his book will appeal widely to geographers and others involved in planning, development, politics, social theory, and the analysis of the contemporary world.

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This book traces the rise of the modern state—a mode of organizing political power within a closed territory—in post-Enlightenment Europe and its spread to the remainder of the world, especially colonial and postcolonial societies. The result of a long process of evolution dating back to the Roman Empire, this new form of state was characterized by the coincidence of public power and public space and the legalization of political and social relations. Intimately linked to the transformation of Western European cultures at a time when their economic might allowed them to conquer many regions of the world, the modern state provided a model that was adopted in most countries. The book analyzes the different conditions in which the modern state was grafted onto different cultural realities: a metropolitan model adopted by settlers or imposed as an instrument of colonial domination, or a representation of modernity selected by non-Western leaders out of fascination for its alleged efficiency and rationality. The author shows that, from the beginning, various logics of importation led non-Western cultures to invent their own practices of the state, thereby transforming the original model. In many countries, notably in postcolonial societies, discrepancies appeared between political actions and political representations and principles on which the state was supposed to rest. This has often led to political crises and breakdowns of legality and legitimacy, and to the formation of new types of social relations in spaces the state cannot control. At the international level, a similar phenomenon can be seen: international networks, based on trade links, religion, and culture, are now able to bypass official interstate relations.

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A panorama of a whole civilization, a world on the verge of cataclysm, unfolds in this magisterial work by the foremost historian of eighteenth-century France. Since Tocqueville’s account of the Old Regime, historians have struggled to understand the social, cultural, and political intricacies of this efflorescence of French society before the Revolution. France in the Enlightenment is a brilliant addition to this historical interest.France in the Enlightenment brings the Old Regime to life by showing how its institutions operated and how they were understood by the people who worked within them. Daniel Roche begins with a map of space and time, depicting France as a mosaic of overlapping geographical units, with people and goods traversing it to the rhythms of everyday life. He fills this frame with the patterns of rural life, urban culture, and government institutions. Here as never before we see the eighteenth-century French “culture of appearances”: the organization of social life, the diffusion of ideas, the accoutrements of ordinary people in the folkways of ordinary living—their food and clothing, living quarters, reading material. Roche shows us the eighteenth-century France of the peasant, the merchant, the noble, the King, from Paris to the provinces, from the public space to the private home.By placing politics and material culture at the heart of historical change, Roche captures the complexity and depth of the Enlightenment. From the finest detail to the widest view, from the isolated event to the sweeping trend, his masterly book offers an unparalleled picture of a society in motion, flush with the transformation that will be its own demise.

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Experiencing Dominion contributes to ongoing debates on hegemony, power, and identity in contemporary historical and anthropological literature through an examination of the imperial encounter between the British and the Greeks of the Ionian Islands during the nineteenth century. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the imperial encounter, with topics including identity construction, the contestation over civil society, gender and the manipulation of public space, hegemony and accommodation, the role of law and of the institutions of criminal justice, and religion and imperial dominion. Thomas Gallant—widely recognized as one of the leading scholars in historical anthropology— argues that a great deal can be learned about colonialism in general through an analysis of the Ionian Islands, precisely because that colonial encounter was so atypical. For example, Gallant demonstrates that because the Ionian Greeks were racially white, Christian, and descendents of Europe’s classical forebears, the process of colonial identity formation was more ambiguous and complex than elsewhere in the Empire where physical and cultural distinctions were more obvious. Colonial officers finally decided the Ionian Greeks were “Mediterranean Irish” who should be treated like European savages. Experiencing Dominion pushes contemporary literature on historical anthropology in a new direction by moving the discussion away from an emphasis on a simple polarity between hegemony and resistance, and instead focusing on the shared interactions between colonizers and colonized, rulers and ruled, foreigners and locals. In this important study, Gallant emphasizes contingency and historical agency, examines intentionality, and explores the processes of accommodation and, when warranted, resistance. In so doing, he reconstructs the world Britons and Greeks made together on the Ionian Islands during the nineteenth century through their shared experience of dominion.

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Experiencing Dominion contributes to ongoing debates on hegemony, power, and identity in contemporary historical and anthropological literature through an examination of the imperial encounter between the British and the Greeks of the Ionian Islands during the nineteenth century. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the imperial encounter, with topics including identity construction, the contestation over civil society, gender and the manipulation of public space, hegemony and accommodation, the role of law and of the institutions of criminal justice, and religion and imperial dominion. Thomas Gallant—widely recognized as one of the leading scholars in historical anthropology— argues that a great deal can be learned about colonialism in general through an analysis of the Ionian Islands, precisely because that colonial encounter was so atypical. For example, Gallant demonstrates that because the Ionian Greeks were racially white, Christian, and descendents of Europe’s classical forebears, the process of colonial identity formation was more ambiguous and complex than elsewhere in the Empire where physical and cultural distinctions were more obvious. Colonial officers finally decided the Ionian Greeks were “Mediterranean Irish” who should be treated like European savages. Experiencing Dominion pushes contemporary literature on historical anthropology in a new direction by moving the discussion away from an emphasis on a simple polarity between hegemony and resistance, and instead focusing on the shared interactions between colonizers and colonized, rulers and ruled, foreigners and locals. In this important study, Gallant emphasizes contingency and historical agency, examines intentionality, and explores the processes of accommodation and, when warranted, resistance. In so doing, he reconstructs the world Britons and Greeks made together on the Ionian Islands during the nineteenth century through their shared experience of dominion.

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Winner, Design Edge Regional Design AwardIn October 2001, paint was spilled on the streets of Montreal. A stark, primitive bike symbol, looking suspiciously like the one the city used to designate a bike path; a giant zipper, pulled open down the centre line of the street on a busy commuter route; the footprint of a giant, stomping through the city while people slept. Inspired by a desire for adventure and galvanized by a loathing of car culture, Roadsworth got down with an idea that had been incubating. The time had come for him to articulate his artistic vision, to challenge the notion of "public" space and whose right it is to use it. By 2004, Roadsworth had pulled off close to 300 pieces of urban art on the streets of Montreal. In the fall, he was charged with 51 counts of public mischief. It seemed to signal the end of his career. Instead the citizens of Montreal and lovers of his work from around the world rallied their support. A year later he was let off with a slap on the wrist. Since then, Roadsworth has developed as an artist, continuing to intervene in public spaces and to travel the world, executing commissioned work for organizations such as Cirque de Soleil, The Lost O (cycled over in le tour de France), and for municipalities, exhibitions, and arts festivals. In this playful and sometimes subversive book, featuring more than 200 reproductions of his unmistakable work, Roadsworth takes the urban landscape and turns its constituent elements on their heads, both indicting our culture's excesses and celebrating what makes us human (lest we forget).

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A riveting account of how a popularly elected leader has steered the world's largest democracy toward authoritarianism and intoleranceOver the past two decades, thanks to Narendra Modi, Hindu nationalism has been coupled with a form of national-populism that has ensured its success at the polls, first in Gujarat and then in India at large. Modi managed to seduce a substantial number of citizens by promising them development and polarizing the electorate along ethno-religious lines. Both facets of this national-populism found expression in a highly personalized political style as Modi related directly to the voters through all kinds of channels of communication in order to saturate the public space.Drawing on original interviews conducted across India, Christophe Jaffrelot shows how Modi's government has moved India toward a new form of democracy, an ethnic democracy that equates the majoritarian community with the nation and relegates Muslims and Christians to second-class citizens who are harassed by vigilante groups. He discusses how the promotion of Hindu nationalism has resulted in attacks against secularists, intellectuals, universities, and NGOs. Jaffrelot explains how the political system of India has acquired authoritarian features for other reasons, too. Eager to govern not only in New Delhi, but also in the states, the government has centralized power at the expense of federalism and undermined institutions that were part of the checks and balances, including India's Supreme Court.Modi's India is a sobering account of how a once-vibrant democracy can go wrong when a government backed by popular consent suppresses dissent while growing increasingly intolerant of ethnic and religious minorities.

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Special 2018 EditionFrom the new Introduction by Michelle Fine, Graduate Center, CUNY :"Why now, you may ask, should I return to a book written in 1988? Because, in Maxine's words: 'When freedom is the question, it is always time to begin.'"In The Dialectic of Freedom, Maxine Greene argues that freedom must be achieved through continuing resistance to the forces that limit, condition, determine, and—too frequently—oppress.Examining the interrelationship between freedom, possibility, and imagination in American education, Greene taps the fields of philosophy, history, educational theory, and literature in order to discuss the many struggles that have characterized Americans’ quests for freedom in the midst of what is conceived to be a free society. Accounts of the lives of women, immigrants, and minority groups highlight the ways in which Americans have gone in search of openings in their lived situations, learned to look at things as if they could be otherwise, and taken action on what they found.Greene presents a unique overview of American concepts and images of freedom from Jefferson’s time to the present. She examines the ways in which the disenfranchised have historically understood and acted on their freedom—or lack of it—in dealing with perceived and real obstacles to expression and empowerment. Strong emphasis is placed on the focal role of the arts and art experience in releasing human imagination and enabling the young to reach toward their vision of the possible.The author concludes with suggestions for approaches to teaching and learning that can provoke both educators and students to take initiatives, to transcend limits, and to pursue freedom—not in solitude, but in reciprocity with others, not in privacy, but in a public space

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As the most successful and influential film society in American history, Cinema 16 was a crucial organization for the creation of a public space for the full range of cinema achievement in the years following World War II. A precursor of the New York Film Festival, Cinema 16 screenings became a gathering place for New Yorkers interested not only in cinema, but in the use of media in the development of a more complete, effective democracy. For seventeen years, many of the leading intellectuals and artists of the time came together as part of a membership society of thousands to experience the creative programming of Cinema 16 director, Amos Vogel. What audiences saw at Cinema 16 changed their lives and had an enduring impact not only on the New York City cultural scene, but nationwide. Vogel's distribution of landmark documentary and avant-garde films helped make a place for many films that could never have had commercial release, given the pressures of commercialism and censorship during the postwar era. Vogel's commitment to the broadest range of cinema practice led him to develop a programming strategy, inherited from the European cine-club movement, that involved confronting audiences with such a wide range of cinematic forms that viewers left the theater considering not only the often remarkable films Vogel showed, but the place of Cinema itself in modern life. Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society is the first book on Cinema 16. Scott MacDonald provides a sense of the life and work of the society, using the complete Cinema 16 program announcements, selected letters between Vogel and the filmmakers whose films he showed; selections from the program notes that accompanied Cinema 16 screenings, theoretical essays by Vogel on curating independent cinema; conversations between MacDonald and Cinema 16 members; photographs and stills; and a variety of other documents.

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