Bourgeois Utopias

Author : Robert Fishman
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 0786722843
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bourgeois Utopias written by Robert Fishman and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-08-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A noted urban historian traces the story of the suburb from its origins in nineteenth-century London to its twentieth-century demise in decentralized cities like Los Angeles.

Author : Robert Fishman
Publisher : Hachette UK
ISBN 13 : 0786722843
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bourgeois Utopias written by Robert Fishman and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2008-08-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A noted urban historian traces the story of the suburb from its origins in nineteenth-century London to its twentieth-century demise in decentralized cities like Los Angeles.

Author : Arnold R. Alanen
Publisher : Wisconsin Historical Society
ISBN 13 : 0870206958
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Main Street Ready-Made written by Arnold R. Alanen and published by Wisconsin Historical Society. This book was released on 2014-05-28 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dream of the suburb is an old one in America. For more than a century, city dwellers have sought to escape the crowding and pollution of industrial centers for the quiet streets and green spaces on their fringes. In the 1930s, that dream inspired the largest migration of Americans in the twentieth century and led to the creation of Greendale, Wisconsin, one of three planned communities initially begun to resettle the rural poor hit hard by the Great Depression. This idea, though, quickly developed into a plan to revitalize cities and stabilize farming communities around the nation. The result was three “greenbelt towns” built from scratch, expressly for working-class families and within easy commuting distance of urban employment. Greendale, completed in 1938, was consciously designed as a midwestern town in both its physical character and social organization, where ordinary citizens could live in a safe, attractive, economical community that was in harmony with the surrounding farmland. “Main Street Ready-Made” examines Greendale as an outgrowth of public policy, an experiment in social engineering, and an organic community that eventually evolved to embrace a huge shopping mall, condominiums, and expensive homes while still preserving much of the architecture and ambiance of the original village. A snapshot of 1930s idealism and ingenuity, “Main Street Ready-Made” makes a significant contribution to the history of cities, suburbs, and social planning in mid-century America.

Author : Robert M. Fogelson
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300126999
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bourgeois Nightmares written by Robert M. Fogelson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2005-10-10 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The quintessential American suburbs, with their gracious single-family homes, large green lawns, and leaf-shaded streets, reflected not only residents’ dreams but nightmares, not only hopes but fears: fear of others, of racial minorities and lowincome groups, fear of themselves, fear of the market, and, above all, fear of change. These fears, and the restrictive covenants that embodied them, are the subject of Robert M. Fogelson’s fascinating new book. As Fogelson reveals, suburban subdividers attempted to cope with the deep-seated fears of unwanted change, especially the encroachment of “undesirable” people and activities, by imposing a wide range of restrictions on the lots. These restrictions ranged from mandating minimum costs and architectural styles for the houses to forbidding the owners to sell or lease their property to any member of a host of racial, ethnic, and religious groups. These restrictions, many of which are still commonly employed, tell us as much about the complexities of American society today as about its complexities a century ago.

Author : Michael D. Gordin
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400834953
Total Pages : 302 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Utopia/Dystopia written by Michael D. Gordin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-23 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concepts of utopia and dystopia have received much historical attention. Utopias have traditionally signified the ideal future: large-scale social, political, ethical, and religious spaces that have yet to be realized. Utopia/Dystopia offers a fresh approach to these ideas. Rather than locate utopias in grandiose programs of future totality, the book treats these concepts as historically grounded categories and examines how individuals and groups throughout time have interpreted utopian visions in their daily present, with an eye toward the future. From colonial and postcolonial Africa to pre-Marxist and Stalinist Eastern Europe, from the social life of fossil fuels to dreams of nuclear power, and from everyday politics in contemporary India to imagined architectures of postwar Britain, this interdisciplinary collection provides new understandings of the utopian/dystopian experience. The essays look at such issues as imaginary utopian perspectives leading to the 1856-57 Xhosa Cattle Killing in South Africa, the functioning racist utopia behind the Rhodesian independence movement, the utopia of the peaceful atom and its global dissemination in the mid-1950s, the possibilities for an everyday utopia in modern cities, and how the Stalinist purges of the 1930s served as an extension of the utopian/dystopian relationship. The contributors are Dipesh Chakrabarty, Igal Halfin, Fredric Jameson, John Krige, Timothy Mitchell, Aditya Nigam, David Pinder, Marci Shore, Jennifer Wenzel, and Luise White.

Author : Emily Talen
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0197647774
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book What Cities Say written by Emily Talen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-23 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In What Cities Say, Emily Talen provides a wide-ranging yet concise synthesis of the fundamental drivers of built form, its social and cultural meaning, and how we should interpret it. Including thirty-five distinct city patterns and forms, Talen develops a language of interpretation to understand the motive and meaning behind the city and its elements. By exposing these meanings, Talen asserts that we will be in a stronger position to articulate, and argue for, the kinds of cities we want.

Author : Faith Hillis
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190066334
Total Pages : 361 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Utopia's Discontents written by Faith Hillis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia's Discontents provides the first synthetic treatment of the Russian revolutionary emigration before the Revolution. It argues that neighborhoods created by Russian exiles became sites of revolutionary experimentation that offered their residents a taste of their anticipated utopian future.

Author : Daniel J. Philippon
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 9780820327594
Total Pages : 402 pages
Book Rating : 4.9X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Conserving Words written by Daniel J. Philippon and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conserving Words looks at five authors of seminal works of nature writing who also founded or revitalized important environmental organizations: Theodore Roosevelt and the Boone and Crockett Club, Mabel Osgood Wright and the National Audubon Society, John Muir and the Sierra Club, Aldo Leopold and the Wilderness Society, and Edward Abbey and Earth First! These writers used powerfully evocative and galvanizing metaphors for nature, metaphors that Daniel J. Philippon calls “conserving” words: frontier (Roosevelt), garden (Wright), park (Muir), wilderness (Leopold), and utopia (Abbey). Integrating literature, history, biography, and philosophy, this ambitious study explores how “conserving” words enabled narratives to convey environmental values as they explained how human beings should interact with the nonhuman world.

Author : Gary Wilder
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
ISBN 13 : 0823299899
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Concrete Utopianism written by Gary Wilder and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist, 2022 Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction Never before has it been more important for Left thinking to champion expansive visions for societal transformation. Yet influential currents of critical theory have lost sight of this political imperative. Provincial notions of places, periods, and subjects obstruct our capacity to invent new alignments and envision a world we wish to see. Political imagination is misread as optimism. Utopianism is conflated with idealism. Revolutionary traditions of non-liberal universalism and non-bourgeois humanism are rendered illegible. Negative critique becomes an end in itself. Pessimism is mistaken for radicalism and political fatalism risks winning the day. In this book, Gary Wilder insists that we place solidarity and temporality at the center of our political thinking. He develops a critique of Left realism, Left culturalism, and Left pessimism from the standpoint of heterodox Marxism and Black radicalism. These traditions offer precious resources to relate cultural singularity and translocal solidarity, political autonomy and worldwide interdependence. They develop modes of immanent critique and forms of poetic knowledge to envision alternative futures that may already dwell within our world: traces of past ways of being, knowing, and relating that persist within an untimely present; or charged residues of unrealized possibilities that were the focus of an earlier generation’s dreams and struggles; or opportunities for dialectical reversals embedded in the contradictory tendencies of the given order. Concrete Utopianism makes a bold case for embracing what Wilder calls a politics of the possible-impossible. Attentive to the non-identical character of places, periods, and subjects, insisting that axes of political alignment and contestation are neither self-evident nor unchanging, reworking Lenin’s call to “transform the imperial war into a civil war,” he invites Left thinkers see beyond inherited distinctions between here and there, now and then, us and them. Guided by the spirit of Marx’s call for revolutionaries to draw their poetry from a future they cannot fathom yet must nevertheless invent, he calls for practices of anticipation that envision and enact, call for and call forth, seemingly impossible ways of being together. He elaborates a critical orientation that emphasizes the dialectical relations between aesthetics and politics, political imagination and transformative practice, concrete interventions and revolutionary restructuring, past dreams and possible worlds, means of struggle and its ultimate aims. This orientation requires nonrealist epistemologies that do not mistake immediate appearances with the really real. Such epistemologies would allow critics to recognize uncanny and untimely aspects of social life, whether oppressive or potentially emancipatory. They may help actors to render the world subversively uncanny and untimely. They may clear pathways for the kind of critical internationalism and concrete utopianism that Left politics cannot afford to ignore.

Author : Ellen Wayland-Smith
Publisher : Picador
ISBN 13 : 1250043107
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Oneida written by Ellen Wayland-Smith and published by Picador. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating and unusual chapter in American history about a religious community that held radical notions of equality, sex, and religion---only to transform itself, at the beginning of the twentieth century, into a successful silverware company and a model of buttoned-down corporate propriety. In the early nineteenth century, many Americans were looking for an alternative to the Puritanism that had been the foundation of the new country. Amid the fervor of the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening, John Humphrey Noyes, a spirited but socially awkward young man, attracted a group of devoted followers with his fiery sermons about creating Jesus’ millennial kingdom here on Earth. Noyes established a revolutionary community in rural New York centered around achieving a life free of sin through God’s grace, while also espousing equality of the sexes and “complex marriage,” a system of free love where sexual relations with multiple partners was encouraged. Noyes’s belief in the perfectibility of human nature eventually inspired him to institute a program of eugenics, known as stirpiculture, that resulted in a new generation of Oneidans who, when the Community disbanded in 1880, sought to exorcise the ghost of their fathers’ disreputable sexual theories. Converted into a joint-stock company, Oneida Community, Limited, would go on to become one of the nation’s leading manufacturers of silverware, and their brand a coveted mark of middle-class respectability in pre- and post-WWII America. Told by a descendant of one of the Community’s original families, Ellen Wayland-Smith's Oneida is a captivating story that straddles two centuries to reveal how a radical, free-love sect, turning its back on its own ideals, transformed into a purveyor of the white-picket-fence American dream.