Transformations Of Urban And Suburban Landscapes

Author : Gary Backhaus
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 9780739103364
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Transformations of Urban and Suburban Landscapes written by Gary Backhaus and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2002 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of landscape and place has become an increasingly fertile realm of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. In this new book of essays, selected from presentations at the first annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Geography, scholars investigate the experiences and meanings that inscribe urban and suburban landscapes. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi bring philosophy and geography into a dialogue with a host of other disciplines to explore a fundamental dialectic: while our collective and personal activity modifies the landscape, in turn, the landscape modifies human identities, and social and environmental relations. Whether proposing a peripatetic politics, conducting a sociological analysis of building security systems, or critically examining the formation of New York City's municipal parks, each essay sheds distinctive light on this fascinating and engaging aspect of contemporary environmental studies.

Author : Nicholas Dagen Bloom
Publisher : Ohio State University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780814208748
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Suburban Alchemy written by Nicholas Dagen Bloom and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Suburban Alchemy: 1960s New Towns and the Transformation of the American Dream, Nicholas Dagen Bloom examines the "new town" movement of the 1960s, which sought to transform the physical and social environments of American suburbs by showing that idealism could be profitable. Bloom offers case studies of three of the movement's more famous examples -- Reston, Virginia; Columbia, Maryland; and Irvine, California -- to flesh out his historical account. In each case, innovative planners mixed land uses and housing types; refined architectural, graphic, and landscape design; offered well-defined village and town centers; and pioneered institutional planning. As Bloom demonstrates, these efforts did not uniformly succeed, and attempts to reshape community life through design notably faltered. However, despite frequent disappointments and compromises, the residents have kept the new town ideals alive for over four decades and produced a vital form of suburban community that is far more complicated and interesting than the early vision promoted by the town planners. Lively chapters illustrate efforts in local politics, civic spirit, social and racial integration, feminist innovations, and cultural sponsorship. Suburban Alchemy should be of interest to scholars of U.S. urban history, planning history, and community development, as well as the general reader interested in the development of alternative communities in the United States.

Author : Paul H. Mattingly
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 0801876478
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Suburban Landscapes written by Paul H. Mattingly and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-04-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Certificate of Commendation from the American Association for State and Local History Most Americans today live in the suburbs. Yet suburban voices remain largely unheard in sociological and cultural studies of these same communities. In Suburban Landscapes: Culture and Politics in a New York Metropolitan Community, Paul Mattingly provides a new model for understanding suburban development through his narrative history of Leonia, New Jersey, an early commuter suburb of New York City. Although Leonia is a relatively small suburb, a study of this kind has national significance because most of America's suburbs began as rural communities, with histories that predated the arrival of commuters and real estate developers. Examining the dynamics of community cultural formation, Mattingly contests the prevailing urban and suburban dichotomy. In doing so, he offers a respite from journalistic cliches and scholarly bias about the American suburb, providing instead an insightful, nuanced look at the integrative history of a region. Mattingly examines Leonia's politics and culture through three eras of growth and change (1859-94, 1894-1920, and 1920-60). A major part of Leonia's history, Mattingly reveals, was its role as an attractive community for artists and writers, many contributors to national magazines, who created a 'suburban' aesthetic. The work done by generations of Leonias' artists provides an important vantage and a wonderful set of tools for exploring evolving notions of suburban culture and landscape, which have broad implications and applications. Oral histories, census records, and the extensive work of Leonia's many artists and writers come together to trace not only the community's socially diverse history, but to show how residents viewed the growth and transformation of Leonia as well.

Author : Laura R. Barraclough
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820336807
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Making the San Fernando Valley written by Laura R. Barraclough and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first book-length scholarly study of the San Fernando Valley—home to one-third of the population of Los Angeles—Laura R. Barraclough combines ambitious historical sweep with an on-theground investigation of contemporary life in this iconic western suburb. She is particularly intrigued by the Valley's many rural elements, such as dirt roads, tack-and-feed stores, horse-keeping districts, citrus groves, and movie ranches. Far from natural or undeveloped spaces, these rural characteristics are, she shows, the result of deliberate urbanplanning decisions that have shaped the Valley over the course of more than a hundred years. The Valley's entwined history of urban development and rural preservation has real ramifications today for patterns of racial and class inequality and especially for the evolving meaning of whiteness. Immersing herself in meetings of homeowners' associations, equestrian organizations, and redistricting committees, Barraclough uncovers the racial biases embedded in rhetoric about “open space” and “western heritage.” The Valley's urban cowboys enjoy exclusive, semirural landscapes alongside the opportunities afforded by one of the world's largest cities. Despite this enviable position, they have at their disposal powerful articulations of both white victimization and, with little contradiction, color-blind politics.

Author : Paul H. Mattingly
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801866807
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Suburban Landscapes written by Paul H. Mattingly and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2001-12-20 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work, Paul Mattingly provides a model for understanding suburban development through his narrative history of Leonia, New Jersey, an early commuter suburb of New York City.

Author : June Williamson
Publisher : Island Press
ISBN 13 : 1610915275
Total Pages : 161 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Designing Suburban Futures written by June Williamson and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suburbs deserve a better, more resilient future. June Williamson shows that suburbs aren't destined to remain filled with strip malls and excess parking lots; they can be reinvigorated through inventive design. Today, dead malls, aging office parks, and blighted apartment complexes are being retrofitted into walkable, sustainable communities. Williamson provides a broad vision of suburban reform based on the best schemes submitted in Long Island's highly successful "Build a Better Burb" competition. Many of the design ideas and plans operate at a regional scale, tackling systems such as transit, aquifer protection, and power generation. While some seek to fundamentally transform development patterns, others work with existing infrastructure to create mixed-use, shared networks. Designing Suburban Futures offers concrete but visionary strategies to take the sprawl out of suburbia, creating a vibrant new, suburban form.

Author : Jill Desimini
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813946336
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cyclical City written by Jill Desimini and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2021-07-12 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As cities evolve and resources shift with time, spaces within those cities are often left fallow and abandoned. Cyclical City tells the stories behind these sites, from Philadelphia’s Liberty Lands park to Lisbon’s Green Plan, and it looks at the ways in which these narratives can be leveraged toward future engagement and use. Jill Desimini posits a fundamental role for spatial design practice to transform abandoned urban landscapes through time. She argues for approaches that promote the specific affordances of the land itself (hydrology, vegetation, topography, geology, infrastructural capacity, occupation potential); the importance of cyclical change; and the particularities of the cultural, political, and physical context. These themes are explored in five cities—Philadelphia, Berlin, Lisbon, Amsterdam, and Saint Louis—and across centuries, from periods of great upheaval to ones of relative stability and even economic growth. Desimini considers what landscape-driven design can bring to cities losing people and economic resources, how design practice can be more inclusive in a context of market failure, and the ways in which abandoned landscapes can become our commons.

Author : June Williamson
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1119149177
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia written by June Williamson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-01-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brand-new collection of 32 case studies that further demonstrate the retrofitting of suburbia This amply-illustrated book, second in a series, documents how defunct shopping malls, parking lots, and the past century’s other obsolete suburban development patterns are being retrofitted to address current urgent challenges they weren’t designed for: improving public health, increasing resilience in the face of climate change, leveraging social capital for equity, supporting an aging society, competing for jobs, and disrupting automobile dependence. Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges provides summaries, data, and references on how these challenges manifest in suburbia and discussion of successful urban design strategies to address them in Part I. Part II documents how innovative design strategies are implemented in a range of northern American contexts and market conditions. From modest interventions with big ripple effects to ambitious do-overs, examples of redevelopment, reinhabitation, and regreening of changing suburban places from coast to coast are described in depth in 32 brand new case studies. Written by the authors of the highly influential Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs Demonstrates changes that can and already have been realized in suburbia by focusing on case studies of retrofitted suburban places Illustrated in full-color with photos, maps, plans, and diagrams Full of replicable lessons and creative responses to ongoing problems and potentials with conventional suburban form, Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges is an important book for students and professionals involved in urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, development, civil engineering, public health, public policy, and governance. Most of all, it is intended as a useful guide for anyone who seeks to inspire revitalization, justice, and shared prosperity in places they know and care about.

Author : E. C. Relph
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801835605
Total Pages : 876 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Modern Urban Landscape written by E. C. Relph and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1987-08 with total page 876 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do the cities of the late twentieth century look as they do? What values do their appearance express and enfold? Their sheer scale and the durability of their materials assure that our cities will inform future generations about our era, in the same way that gothic cathedrals and medieval squares tell us something of the Middle Ages. In the meantime, our urban landscapes can tell us much about ourselves. For E. C. Relph, the urban landscape must be envisioned as a total environment—not just streets and buildings but billboards and parking meters as well. The Modern Urban Landscape traces the developments since 1880 in architecture, technology, planning, and society that have formed the visual context of daily life. Each of these shaping influences is often viewed in isolation, but Relph surveys the ways in which they have operated independently to create what we see when we walk down a street, shop in a mall, or stare through a windshield on an expressway. Two sets of ideas and fashions, Relph argues, have had an especially important impact on urban landscapes in the twentieth century. An "internationalism" made possible by new building technologies and more rapid communications has replaced regional style and custom as the dominant feature of city appearance, while a firm belief in the merits of self-consciousness has imposed logical analysis and technical manipulation on such commonplace objects as curbstones and park benches. "As a result," writes Relph, "the modern urban landscape is both rationalized and artificial, which is another way of saying that it is intensely human."

Author : Ronald J. Sider
Publisher : Baker Books
ISBN 13 : 9781441201874
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Linking Arms, Linking Lives written by Ronald J. Sider and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the various lines drawn between people in the church--male and female, young and old, black and white, rich and poor, Republican and Democrat--there is the line between the urban and the suburban. The stereotypes of the edgy, socially active, multicultural urban Christian and the middle-class, comfortable, upwardly mobile suburban Christian mix fact and fiction. Linking Arms, Linking Lives looks beyond stereotypes and makes a compelling case for partnership that crosses urban and suburban for effective ministry among the poor. Drawing from a growing network of development practitioners, pastors, and theologians, this book focuses on the experiences of partnership between urban and suburban entities to provide both theological foundations and practical guidelines for those who desire to partner effectively. All who want to find viable ways to help the poor will welcome this thoughtful and hope-filled book. Includes a Foreword by Noel Castellanos.