Dark Age Ahead

Author : Jane Jacobs
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307425452
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dark Age Ahead written by Jane Jacobs and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this indispensable book, urban visionary Jane Jacobs argues that as agrarianism gives way to a technology-based future, we’re at risk of cultural collapse. Jacobs—renowned author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities and The Economy of Cities—pinpoints five pillars of our culture that are in serious decay: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science; taxation, and government; and the self-regulation of the learned professions. The corrosion of these pillars, Jacobs argues, is linked to societal ills such as environmental crisis, racism, and the growing gulf between rich and poor. But this is a hopeful book as well as a warning. Drawing on a vast frame of reference—from fifteenth-century Chinese shipbuilding to Ireland’s cultural rebirth—Jacobs suggests how the cycles of decay can be arrested and our way of life renewed. Invigorating and accessible, Dark Age Ahead is not only the crowning achievement of Jane Jacobs’ career, but one of the most important works of our time.

Author : John Michael Greer
Publisher : New Society Publisher
ISBN 13 : 1550926284
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dark Age America written by John Michael Greer and published by New Society Publisher. This book was released on 2016-08-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After decades of missed opportunities, the door to a sustainable future has closed, and the future we face now is one in which today’s industrial civilization unravels in the face of uncontrolled climate change and resource depletion. The questions we need to ask now focus on what comes next. This book provides a hard but hopeful look at the answer

Author : Charles Fensham
Publisher : Clements Publishing Group
ISBN 13 : 1926798058
Total Pages : 229 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Emerging from the Dark Age Ahead written by Charles Fensham and published by Clements Publishing Group. This book was released on 2011 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating presentation of faith, Charles Fensham argues cogently and passionately for a church that embraces hope in spite of the dark and destructive pressures all around it. Although a metaphoric dark time awaits Christianity, Fensham assures his readers that this darkness merely conceals the light for the future. "Emerging from the Dark Age Ahead " offers a prophetic and challenging call for contemporary Christians to ask where we have come from, where we are, and where we are going. "Professor Fensham borrows from Jane Jacobs the metaphor of 'the Dark Age ahead, ' bringing social and cultural analysis to bear upon a fresh theology of church and mission for our time and place. Drawing from deep roots in the trinitarian tradition, and borrowing insight from historic monasticism, he calls for a pilgrim, steward church that will speak and act constructively in the coming time of troubles. This is a creative, original work that will stimulate theological students and lay folk as well."-Harold Wells, Professor Emeritus, Emmanuel College, University of Toronto "Insightful, provocative, instructive-words that describe how this book helps the church navigate the deep cultural challenge it now faces of massive technique organized through digitalization. Grounding the church's life in a missional hermeneutic of reading Scripture and the church's identity in the social Trinity, Fensham boldly, yet carefully, charts a course for engaging the dark age ahead."- Craig Van Gelder, Ph.D., Professor of Congregational Mission, Luther Seminary Charles Fensham has a unique perspective on the emergent church. Born in apartheid South Africa and raised within the apartheid-tainted Reformed church, he is an immigrant to Canada with experiences of the church in France, Switzerland, the South Pacific and Africa. He teaches at Knox College at the University of Toronto.

Author : Jane Jacobs
Publisher : Random House (NY)
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dark Age Ahead written by Jane Jacobs and published by Random House (NY). This book was released on 2004 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dark age is a culture's dead end. In North America, for example, we live in a virtual graveyard of lost and destroyed aboriginal cultures. In this powerful and provocative book, renowned author Jane Jacobs argues convincingly that we face the coming of our own dark age. Throughout history, there have been many more dark ages than the one that occurred between the fall of the Roman Empire and the dawn of the Renaissance. Ten thousand years ago, our ancestors went from hunter-gatherers to farmers and, along the way, lost almost all memory of what existed before. Now we stand at another monumental crossroads, as agrarianism gives way to a technology-based future. How do we make this shift without losing the culture we hold dear--and without falling behind other nations that successfully master the transition? First we must concede that things are awry. Jacobs identifies five central pillars of our society that show serious signs of decay: community and family; higher education; science and technology; governmental representation; and self-regulation of the learned professions. These are the elements we depend on to stand firm--but Jacobs maintains that they are in the process of becoming irrelevant. If that happens, we will no longer recognize ourselves. The good news is that the downward movement can be reversed. Japan avoided cultural defeat by retaining a strong hold on history and preservation during war, besiegement, and occupation. Ireland nearly lost all native language during the devastations of famine and colonialism, but managed to renew its culture through the steadfast determination of its citizens. Jacobs assures us that the same can happen here--if only werecognize the signs of decline in time. Dark Age Ahead is not only the crowning achievement of Jane Jacobs's career, but one of the most important works of our time. It is a warning that, if heeded, could save our very way of life.

Author : Peter L. Laurence
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812292464
Total Pages : 376 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Becoming Jane Jacobs written by Peter L. Laurence and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-01-29 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jane Jacobs is universally recognized as one of the key figures in American urbanism. The author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she uncovered the complex and intertwined physical and social fabric of the city and excoriated the urban renewal policies of the 1950s. As the legend goes, Jacobs, a housewife, single-handedly stood up to Robert Moses, New York City's powerful master builder, and other city planners who sought first to level her Greenwich Village neighborhood and then to drive a highway through it. Jacobs's most effective weapons in these David-versus-Goliath battles, and in writing her book, were her powers of observation and common sense. What is missing from such discussions and other myths about Jacobs, according to Peter L. Laurence, is a critical examination of how she arrived at her ideas about city life. Laurence shows that although Jacobs had only a high school diploma, she was nevertheless immersed in an elite intellectual community of architects and urbanists. Becoming Jane Jacobs is an intellectual biography that chronicles Jacobs's development, influences, and writing career, and provides a new foundation for understanding Death and Life and her subsequent books. Laurence explains how Jacobs's ideas developed over many decades and how she was influenced by members of the traditions she was critiquing, including Architectural Forum editor Douglas Haskell, shopping mall designer Victor Gruen, housing advocate Catherine Bauer, architect Louis Kahn, Philadelphia city planner Edmund Bacon, urban historian Lewis Mumford, and the British writers at The Architectural Review. Rather than discount the power of Jacobs's critique or contributions, Laurence asserts that Death and Life was not the spontaneous epiphany of an amateur activist but the product of a professional writer and experienced architectural critic with deep knowledge about the renewal and dynamics of American cities.

Author : Jane Jacobs
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0525432884
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Systems of Survival written by Jane Jacobs and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-08-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With intelligence and clarity of observation, the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities addresses the moral values that underpin working life. In Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs identifies two distinct moral syndromes—one governing commerce, the other, politics—and explores what happens when these two syndromes collide. She looks at business fraud and criminal enterprise, government’s overextended subsidies to agriculture, and transit police who abuse the system the are supposed to enforce, and asks us to consider instances in which snobbery is a virtue and industry a vice. In this work of profound insight and elegance, Jacobs gives us a new way of seeing all our public transactions and encourages us towards the best use of our natural inclinations.

Author : Jane Jacobs
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 0399589619
Total Pages : 544 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Vital Little Plans written by Jane Jacobs and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A career-spanning selection of previously uncollected writings and talks by the legendary author and activist No one did more to change how we look at cities than Jane Jacobs, the visionary urbanist and economic thinker whose 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities started a global conversation that remains profoundly relevant more than half a century later. Vital Little Plans is an essential companion to Death and Life and Jacobs’s other books on urbanism, economics, politics, and ethics. It offers readers a unique survey of her entire career in forty short pieces that have never been collected in a single volume, from charming and incisive urban vignettes from the 1930s to the raw materials of her two unfinished books of the 2000s, together with introductions and annotations by editors Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring. Readers will find classics here, including Jacobs’s breakout article “Downtown Is for People,” as well as lesser-known gems like her speech at the inaugural Earth Day and a host of other rare or previously unavailable essays, articles, speeches, interviews, and lectures. Some pieces shed light on the development of her most famous insights, while others explore topics rarely dissected in her major works, from globalization to feminism to universal health care. With this book, published in Jacobs’s centenary year, contemporary readers—whether well versed in her ideas or new to her writing—are finally able to appreciate the full scope of her remarkable voice and vision. At a time when urban life is booming and people all over the world are moving to cities, the words of Jane Jacobs have never been more significant. Vital Little Plans weaves a lifetime of ideas from the most prominent urbanist of the twentieth century into a book that’s indispensable to life in the twenty-first. Praise for Vital Little Plans “Jacobs’s work . . . was a singularly accurate prediction of the future we live in.”—The New Republic “In Vital Little Plans, a new collection of the short writings and speeches of Jane Jacobs, one of the most influential thinkers on the built environment, editors Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring have done readers a great service.”—The Huffington Post “A wonderful new anthology that captures [Jacobs’s] confident prose and her empathetic, patient eye for the way humans live and work together.”—The Globe and Mail “[A timely reminder] of the clarity and originality of [Jane Jacobs’s] thought.”—Toronto Star “[Vital Little Plans] comes to the foreground for [Jane Jacobs’s] centennial, and in a time when more of Jacobs’s prescient wisdom is needed.”—Metropolis “[Jacobs] changed the debate on urban planning. . . . As [Vital Little Plans] shows, she never stopped refining her observations about how cities thrived.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune “[Jane Jacobs] was one of three people I have met in a lifetime of meeting people who had an aura of sainthood about them. . . . The ability to radiate certainty without condescension, to be both very sure and very simple, is a potent one, and witnessing it in life explains a lot in history that might otherwise be inexplicable.”—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker “A rich, provocative, and insightful collection.”—Reason

Author : Jane Jacobs
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Death and Life of Great American Cities written by Jane Jacobs and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Jane Jacobs
Publisher : Vintage Canada
ISBN 13 : 0307369633
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dark Age Ahead written by Jane Jacobs and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-06-25 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visionary thinker Jane Jacobs uses her authoritative work on urban life and economies to show us how we can protect and strengthen our culture and communities. In Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs identifies five pillars of our culture that we depend on but which are in serious decline: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science; taxation and government; and self-policing by learned professions. The decay of these pillars, Jacobs contends, is behind such ills as environmental crisis, racism and the growing gulf between rich and poor; their continued degradation could lead us into a new Dark Age, a period of cultural collapse in which all that keeps a society alive and vibrant is forgotten. But this is a hopeful book as well as a warning. Jacobs draws on her vast frame of reference -- from fifteenth-century Chinese shipbuilding to zoning regulations in Brampton, Ontario -- and in highly readable, invigorating prose offers proposals that could arrest the cycles of decay and turn them into beneficent ones. Wise, worldly, full of real-life examples and accessible concepts, this book is an essential read for perilous times.

Author : Stephen A. Goldsmith
Publisher : New Village Press
ISBN 13 : 098155931X
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book What We See written by Stephen A. Goldsmith and published by New Village Press. This book was released on 2010-05-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading thinkers offer fresh insight into the workings of vibrant, ecological, equitable communities and their economies.