Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Climate Change and Society
This book explores the significance of human behaviour to understanding the causes and impacts of changing climates and to assessing varied ways of responding to such changes. So far the discipline that has represented and modelled such human behaviour is economics. By contrast Climate Change and Society tries to place the ‘social’ at the heart of both the analysis of climates and of the assessment of alternative futures. It demonstrates the importance of social practices organised into systems. In the fateful twentieth century various interlocking high carbon systems were established. This sedimented high carbon social practices, engendering huge population growth, increasing greenhouse...
From the Ground Up
Little-known, and hidden between skyscrapers and wide avenues, some 650 community gardens dot New York City. Set within one of the densest and most expensive real estate markets, these gardens are attended by some of the least advantaged residents of the city. Urban residents use these spaces for horticulture, recreation, social gatherings, and artistic and cultural events. They manage the gardens collectively and with relative independence from top-down control. Despite continuous threats from market forces the gardens have been able to thrive as significant community spaces since the 1970s. This book shows how, in the process of attempting to protect these highly contested spaces, resident...
Lebanon
A subtle and reflective essay on whether the Lebanese will ever transcend their internal divisions and external challenges
Experimental Politics and the Making of Worlds
Creative strategies have been central to global social movements. From the theatrics of the 1999 Seattle protests, to the rebel clowns at the 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles and the antics of the Yes Men, the crossovers between art and politics have increasingly become more visible and prolific. This book explores an innovative form of creative and communicative politics: the ’performative encounter’, as a strategy for facilitating new ways of being, relating and making worlds. Unlike existing scholarship that frames such encounters in artistic or cultural terms, this book analyzes performative encounters through an organizational lens to accentuate their social-political potential, engagin...
Life with Durham Cathedral
An ethnographic account of daily life in Durham Cathedral, this book examines the processes of negotiation and change between a community and their cathedral. Focusing on the role of sound, light, time, space, building and dwelling, the author argues that Durham Cathedral is much more than just a backdrop to everyday life. Rather, through the constant processes of negotiation and change, it is a fully engaged participant in the daily lives of those who use Durham Cathedral. As such, it is not a place in which life happens, but a place with which life happens.
On South Bank: The Production of Public Space
Tensions over the production of urban public space came to the fore in summer 2013 with mass protests in Turkey sparked by a plan to redevelop Taksim Gezi Park, Istanbul. In London, concomitant proposals to refurbish an area of the ’South Bank’ historically used by skateboarders were similarly met by staunch opposition. Through an in-depth ethnographic examination of London’s South Bank, this book explores multiple dimensions of the production of urban public space. Drawing on user accounts of the significance of public space, as well as observations of how the South Bank is ’practised’ on a daily basis, it argues that public space is valued not only for its essential material char...
Contemporary Issues in Cultural Heritage Tourism
The perceived quality of a destination’s cultural offering has long been a significant factor in determining tourist choices of destination. More recently, the need to present touristic offerings that include cultural experiences and heritage has become widely recognised, that this aspect of the tourism experience is an important differentiator of destinations, as well as being amongst the most manageable. This has also led to an increase in the management of such experiences through special exhibitions, events and festivals, as well as through ensuring more routine and controlled access to heritage sites. Reflecting the increasing application of cultural heritage as a driver for tourism a...
Sunni City
Tripoli, Lebanon's 'Sunni City' is often presented as an Islamist or even Jihadi city. However, this misleading label conceals a much deeper history of resistance and collaboration with the state and the wider region. Based on more than a decade of fieldwork and using a broad array of primary sources, Tine Gade analyses the modern history of Tripoli, exploring the city's contentious politics, its fluid political identity, and the relations between Islamist and sectarian groups. Offering an alternative explanation for Tripoli's decades of political troubles – rather than emphasizing Islamic radicalism as the principal explanation – she argues that it is Lebanese clientelism and the decay of the state that produced the rise of violent Islamist movements in Tripoli. By providing a corrective to previous assumptions, this book not only expands our understanding of Lebanese politics, but of the wider religious and political dynamics in the Middle East.
Architecture, Power and Religion in Lebanon
In Architecture, Power and Religion in Lebanon, Ward Vloeberghs explores Rafiq Hariri’s patronage and his posthumous legacy to demonstrate how religious architecture becomes a site for power struggles in contemporary Beirut. By tracing the 150 year-long history of the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque – Lebanon’s principal Sunni mosque – and the subsequent development of the site as a commemoration venue, this account offers a unique illustration of how architecture, religion and power become discursively and visually entangled. Set in a multi-confessional society marked by social inequalities and political fragmentation, this interdisciplinary study analyses how architectural practice and urban reconfigurations reveal a nascent personality cult, communal mourning, and the consolidation of political territory in relation to constantly shifting circumstances.
Forms of Experienced Environments
This book explores ‘environmental forms’ in terms of their relationships to the socio-politico-ecological transformations currently in progress. Today, the environment is a central theme in political discourse, scientific work and everyday life. It is multi-dimensional: it is a living space, a socio-ecological system and a field of research and action. However, despite the presence and diversity of existing approaches, the ways in which policies address environmental issues remain mainly focused on control, highlighting the techno-ecological, managerial and curative dimensions of public actions. Although public action tends to instrumentalise the environment, the humanities and social sc...
