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Explains why an awareness of Earth's temporal rhythms is critical to planetary survival and offers suggestions for how to create a more time-literate society.
In 1945 Germany's cities lay in ruins, destroyed by Allied bombers `hat left major architectural monuments badly damaged and much of the housing stock reduced to rubble. At the war's end, observers thought that it would take forty years to rebuild, but by the late 1950s West Germany's cities had risen anew. The housing crisis had been overcome and virtually all important monuments reconstructed, and the cities had reclaimed their characteristic identities. Everywhere there was a mixture of old and new: historic churches and town halls stood alongside new housing and department stores; ancient street layouts were crossed or encircled by wide arteries; old city centers were balanced by garden ...
Large housing estates of the post-war era have shaped the face of many cities throughout Europe. In the original plans of the 1950s-1980s they were to amend the urban structure and in many cases they were expected to enable a superior form of communality and urbanity. The estates were built to ease the housing shortage, but were also thought to quite literally become the home for a “new society”, be it under socialist regimes or the democratic welfare state. The reformation of society was expected to be supported by the environment of the newly built estates and, most crucially, their community spaces. The different manifestations of these community spaces were the subject of the second ...
The presence of the refugee in the contemporary metropolis is marked by precarity, a quality that has become a characteristic feature of the neoliberal urban milieu. Bringing together essays from diverse disciplines, from architectural history to cultural anthropology and urban planning, this collection sheds light on both the specificities of the contemporary urban condition that affects the refugees and the multi-dimensional impact that the refugees have on the city. The authors propose investigating this connection through three interlinked themes: identity (informality, imagination and belonging); place (transnational homemaking practices); and site (the navigation of urban space). In re...
In the years that followed World War II, both the United States and the newly formed West German republic had an opportunity to remake their economies. Since then, much has been made of a supposed “Americanization” of European consumer societies—in Germany and elsewhere. Arguing against these foggy notions, Jan L. Logemann takes a comparative look at the development of postwar mass consumption in West Germany and the United States and the emergence of discrete consumer modernities. In Trams or Tailfins?, Logemann explains how the decisions made at this crucial time helped to define both of these economic superpowers in the second half of the twentieth century. While Americans splurged ...
The history of eugenics and racial nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe is a neglected topic of analysis in contemporary scholarship. Moreover, national historiographies in Central and Southeast Europe have either marginalized eugenics and racial nationalism or deemed them incompatible with their respective national traditions. Accordingly, this volume has a two-fold ambition: to excavate the hitherto unknown eugenic movements in Central and Southeast Europe and to explain their relationship with racism, nationalism and anti-Semitism. On the one hand, the historiographic perspective substantiated in this volume connects developments in the history of racial anthropology, genetics and eugenics with political ideologies such as racial nationalism and anti-Semitism; on the other hand, it contests the 'Sonderweg' approach adopted by scholars dealing these phenomena in Central and Southeast Europe by arguing that concerns with eugenics and race were as widely disseminated in these regions as they were in Western Europe and North America. Book jacket.
Since before recorded history, people have congregated near water. But as growing populations around the globe continue to flow toward the coasts on an unprecedented scale and climate change raises water levels, our relationship to the sea has begun to take on new and potentially catastrophic dimensions. The latest generation of coastal dwellers lives largely in ignorance of the history of those who came before them, the natural environment, and the need to live sustainably on the world’s shores. Humanity has forgotten how to live with the oceans. In The Human Shore, a magisterial account of 100,000 years of seaside civilization, John R. Gillis recovers the coastal experience from its orig...
This richly illustrated book details the wide-ranging construction and urban planning projects launched across Germany after the Nazi Party seized power. Hagen and Ostergren show that it was far more than just an architectural and stylistic enterprise. Instead, it was a series of interrelated programs intended to thoroughly reorganize Germany’s economic, cultural, and political landscapes. The authors trace the specific roles of its component parts—the monumental redevelopment and cleansing of cities; the construction of new civic landscapes for educational, athletic, and leisure pursuits; the improvement of transportation, industrial, and military infrastructures; and the creation of networked landscapes of fear, slave labor, and genocide. Through distinctive examples, the book draws out the ways in which combinations of place, space, and architecture were utilized as a cumulative means of undergirding the regime and its ambitions. The authors consider how these reshaped spaces were actually experienced and perceived by ordinary Germans, and in some cases the world at large, as the regime intentionally built a new Nazi Germany.
Seaports, as part of urban centers, play a major role in the cultural, social and economic life of the cities in which they are located, and through the links they provide to the outside world. Port-cities in Europe have faced significant change, first with the loss of heavy industry, emergence of Eastern European democracies, and the widening of the European Community (now European Union) during the second half of the twentieth century, and more recently through drivers to change including the global Sustainable Development Agenda and the European Union Circular Economy Agenda. This book examines the role of modern seaports in Europe and consider how port-cities are responding to these majo...