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Urban Landscape Perspectives explores how landscape terminology can be usefully brought into the urban debate. The articles are by scholars who have a particular interest in and experience of the city project at various operative scales. They include theoretical reflections on the landscape as an eminently project-like figure. The book describes new methods and approaches dealing with the contemporary environment, whether it is from the point of view of the city or the landscape.
Walkscapes deals with strolling as an architecture of landscape. Walking as an autonomous form of art, a primary act in the symbolic transformation of the territory, an aesthetic instrument of knowledge and a physical transformation of the 'negotiated' space, which is converted into an urban intervention. From primitive nomadism to Dada and Surrealism, from the Lettrist to the Situationist International, and from Minimalism to Land Art, this book narrates the perception of landscape through a history of the traversed city.
This book explores new forms and modalities of relations between people and space that increasingly affect the life of the city. The investigation takes as its starting point the idea that in contemporary societies the loss of our relationship with place is a symptom of a breakdown in the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. This in turn has caused a crisis not only in taste, but also in our sense of beauty, our aesthetic instinct, and our moral values. It has also led to the loss of our engagement with the landscape, which is essential for cities to function. The authors argue that new, fertile forms of interaction between people and space are now happening in what they call the ‘i...
This book summarizes work being undertaken within the School Activates Resources—stitching the lost heritage of the suburbs (ScAR) project, which addressed cultural heritage in a broad sense, as a system of values identified by the populations and in constant evolution. This tangible and intangible heritage fuels the promotion of intergenerational and intercultural dialogue and represents an opportunity for resilient social and territorial development. The book ponders the experience gained and the points of view of the different disciplines involved, examines issues such as children and youth participation in civil life or education in cultural heritage and landscape, and presents real-world experiences of heritage education in everyday landscape in difficult contexts and/or concerning poorly recognized and valued cultural heritage.
The book contains the Proceedings of the 2010 Conference of the Italian Systems Society. Papers deal with the interdisciplinary study of processes of changing related to a wide variety of specific disciplinary aspects. Classical attempts to deal with them, based on generalising approaches used to study the movement of bodies and environmental influence, have included ineffective reductionistic simplifications. Indeed changing also relates, for instance, to processes of acquisition and varying properties such as for software; growing and aging biological systems; learning/cognitive systems; and socio-economic systems growing and developing through innovations. Some approaches to modelling suc...
This volume contains a selection of the proceedings of a conference on European problems of identity titled Europe and its Others, which was held in St Andrews in July 2007. It looks at some of the histories and stories that connect the European margins to an imagined or imaginary centre of this complex continent as seen mostly from within, and with self-reflective insights from literary, socio-historical and cinematic perspectives. By following the marginal route created by the essays, the volume juxtaposes, as in a mosaic, a range of artistic discourses produced in many European languages. Each of these discourses highlights a different perception of belonging or not belonging to Europe; and each of these discourses brings to the fore in its respective society a fresh perspective on new European territories seen not as 'the other' but rather as contiguous tiles in a mosaic of idiosyncrasies. Lying one next to the other, these territories engage in dialogue poetically - harmoniously or dissonantly - in an attempt to create through their juxtaposition an enigmatic poetic discourse of the margins.
Building Performance Evaluation (BPE) informs and enhances the usability and sustainability of building designs with lessons learned from evaluation of building performance throughout the building life cycle, from initial planning through occupancy to adaptive re-use. A key feature of BPE is that it examines design and technical performance of buildings alongside human performance criteria. That is, it seeks to examine facilities in order to determine whether they will work for the people that will use and occupy them. Rigorous BPE helps to improve design practice by providing feedback on the effectiveness of the choices made about the building to ensure that its design is optimised for stak...
By taking as its point of departure the privileged relationship between the crime novel and its setting, this book is the most wide-ranging examination of the way in which Italian detective fiction in the last 20 years has become a means to articulate the changes in the social landscape of the country. Nowadays there is a general acknowledgment of the importance of place in Italian crime novels. However, apart from a limited scholarship on single cities, the genre has never been systematically studied in a way that so comprehensively spans Italian national boundaries. The originality of this volume also lies in the fact that the author have not limited her investigation to a series of cities...
Sprawl. The word calls to mind a host of troublesome issues such as city flight, runaway suburban development, and the conversion of farmland to soulless housing developments. In Sprawltown, architectural historian Richard Ingersoll makes the surprising claim that sprawl is an inevitable reality of modern life that should be addressed more thoughtfully and recognized as its own new form of urbanism rather than simply being criticized and condemned. In five thought-provoking chapters, covering topics such as tourism, film, and the automobile, Ingersoll takes the position that any solution to the problems of sprawl—including pressing issues like resource use and energy waste—must take into consideration its undeniable success as a social milieu. No screed against the suburb, this book offers a more sophisticated and nuanced view of the way we think about its rapid development and growth.