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"A masterful study. . . . It does for ecological history what the writings of Marx and Engels did for the study of class relations and social production."—Michael Adas, Rutgers University
Starting from the catastrophic floods and terrorist attacks of recent years, Prakash reaches back to the sixteenth-century Portuguese conquest to reveal the stories behind Mumbai's historic journey. Examining Mumbai's role as a symbol of opportunity and reinvention, he looks at its nineteenth-century development under British rule and its twentieth-century emergence as a fabled city on the sea. Different layers of urban experience come to light as he recounts the narratives of the Nanavati murder trial and the rise and fall of the tabloid Blitz, and Mumbai's transformation from the red city of trade unions and communists into the saffron city of Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena. Starry-eyed planners and elite visionaries, cynical leaders and violent politicians of the street, land sharks and underworld dons jostle with ordinary citizens and poor immigrants as the city copes with the dashed dreams of postcolonial urban life and lurches into the seductions of globalization. --
Shows how to combine the forces of ecological science and participatory democracy to design urban landscapes that enable us to act as communities, are resilient rather than imperiled, and touch our hearts. Over the last fifty years, the process of community building has been lost in the process of city building. City and suburban design divides us from others in our communities, destroys natural habitats, and fails to provide a joyful context for our lives. In Design for Ecological Democracy, Randolph Hester proposes a remedy for our urban anomie. He outlines new principles for urban design that will allow us to forge connections with our fellow citizens and our natural environment. He demon...
From rainbows, river meanders, and shadows to spider webs, honeycombs, and the markings on animal coats, the visible world is full of patterns that can be described mathematically. Examining such readily observable phenomena, this book introduces readers to the beauty of nature as revealed by mathematics and the beauty of mathematics as revealed in nature. Generously illustrated, written in an informal style, and replete with examples from everyday life, Mathematics in Nature is an excellent and undaunting introduction to the ideas and methods of mathematical modeling. It illustrates how mathematics can be used to formulate and solve puzzles observed in nature and to interpret the solutions....
The full spectrum of Ansel Adams' work in a single volume, offering the largest available compilation from his legendary photographic career capturing American landscapes. The photographs are arranged chronologically into five major periods, from his first photographs made in Yosemite and the High Sierra in 1916 to his work in the National Parks in the 1940s up to his last important photographs from the 1960s. An introduction and brief essays on selected images provide information about Adams' life, document the evolution of his technique, and give voice to his artistic vision. Few artists of any era can claim to have produced four hundred images of lasting beauty and significance. It is a testament to Adams' vision and lifetime of hard work that a book of this scale can be compiled. ANSEL ADAMS: 400 PHOTOGRAPHS is a must-have for anyone who appreciates photography and the allure of the natural world.
Landscape ecology - the ecology of large heterogeneous areas, landscapes, regions, or simply of land mosaics, has rapidly emerged in the past decade as an important and useful tool for land-use planners and landscape architects. Landscape Ecology Principles in Landscape Architecture and Land-Use Planning is an essential handbook that presents and explains principles of landscape ecology and provides numerous examples of how those principles can be applied in specific situations.
Early modern India—a period extending from the fifteenth to the late eighteenth century—saw dramatic cultural, religious, and political changes as it went from Sultanate to Mughal to early colonial rule. Witness to the rise of multiple literary and devotional traditions, this period was characterized by immense political energy and cultural vibrancy. Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India brings together recent scholarship on the languages, literatures, and religious traditions of northern India. It focuses on the rise of vernacular languages as vehicles for literary expression and historical and religious self-assertion, and particularly attends to ways in which these regional spoken languages connect with each other and their cosmopolitan counterparts. Hindu, Muslim, and Jain idioms emerge in new ways, and the effect of the volume as a whole is to show that they belong to a single complex cultural conversation.
Originally published in 1956, this concise book brought together wisdom from V. Gordon Childe based upon 10 years of his lectures on the principles of archaeological classification, terminology and interpretive concepts. It examines meanings of technical terms and methodologies used in prehistoric archaeology, for those new to the area.
Patrick Geddes is one of the most important figures in planning history, variously presented as an inspiration to regional planning, environmental planning and sustainability, grass-roots planning, citizen democracy, historic preservation, neighbourhood upgrading, university-community partnership, lifelong learning, and co-operative housing. Though well-known and often praised by planning historians, his scholarship extended across a much broader range of disciplines, with extensive publication on biology and on civics, and significant contributions to sociology, economics, geography, education, and the arts and humanities. With the exception of his plan of Dunfermline, published in 1904, hi...
Kaiwan Mehta takes the reader for a walk through the streets and past the buildings of the 'native town' of colonial Bombay, reading their histories and excavating their memories, while continuing to negotiate their present context. This historic neighbourhood of Mumbai, fondly referred to as Bhuleshwar, has remained a residential and religious hub as before, while thriving as the city's essential commercial marketplace today. Alice in Bhuleshwar is also a story of the people who have lived in these buildings: unsung icons like Premiji and Saroj Pathak, famed artistes like Jayashankar 'Sundari', and others who have inhabited these buildings which breathe in the salty air of Mumbai and speak to those who care to listen. Kaiwan Mehta has studied Architecture, Literature, Indian Aesthetics and Cultural Studies. He is currently pursuing a doctorate at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore. While being involved in teaching, writing and research on architecture and the city, he has been associated with many institutions like KRV Institute for Architecture, Mumbai, Jnanapravaha, Mumbai and Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart.