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Seemingly messy and chaotic, the landscapes and urban life of cities in Asia possess an order and hierarchy that often challenges understanding and appreciation. With contributions by a cross-disciplinary group of authors, Messy Urbanism: Understanding the “Other” Cities of Asia examines a range of cases in Asia to explore the social and institutional politics of urban informality and the contexts in which this “messiness” emerges or is constructed. The book brings a distinct perspective to the broader patterns of informal urban orders and processes as well as their interplay with formalized systems and mechanisms. It also raises questions about the production of cities, cityscapes, ...
Heritage Conservation in Postcolonial India seeks to position the conservation profession within historical, theoretical, and methodological frames to demonstrate how the field has evolved in the postcolonial decades and follow its various trajectories in research, education, advocacy, and practice. Split into four sections, this book covers important themes of institutional and programmatic developments in the field of conservation; critical and contemporary challenges facing the profession; emerging trends in practice that seek to address contemporary challenges; and sustainable solutions to conservation issues. The cases featured within the book elucidate the evolution of the heritage con...
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Discourse about water and power in the modern era have largely focused on human power over water: who gets to own and control a limited resource that has incredible economic potential. As a result, discussion of water, even in the humanities, has traditionally focused on fresh water for human use. Today, climate extremes from drought to flooding are forcing humanities scholars to reimagine water discourse. This volume exemplifies how interdisciplinary cultural approaches can transform water conversations. The manuscript is organized into three emergent themes in water studies: agency of water, fluid iden...
Inspired by Chicago’s successful 1893 World Columbian Exposition, the cities of Portland, Seattle, San Diego, and San Francisco all held fairs between 1905 and 1915. From the start of the Lewis and Clark Exposition to the close of the Panama-California Exposition a decade later, millions of Americans visited exhibits, watched live demonstrations and performances, and wandered amusement zones. Millions more thumbed through brochures or read news articles. Fair publicity directors embraced the emerging science of consumer marketing. Conceived to attract new citizens, showcase communities, and highlight farming and industrial opportunities, the four expositions’ promotional campaigns and ve...
Metaphors are diversly and intricately embedded in architectural practice and discourse. Precisely for this reason, this volume argues and sets out to explore, how they can be engaged to critically interrogate architecture’s social, cultural and political dimensions – past and present – and to productively challenge and intervene with established perspectives, debates and practices. Mapping out not just potentials but also addressing the challenges, limitations and dangers inherent in using metaphors in architectural research and practice, the volume prominently illustrates the ambiguity and contradictoriness inherent in both metaphors and the process of engaging and exploiting them. C...
Seeking a Future for the Past: Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City examines the complexities and changing sociopolitical dynamics of urban renewal in contemporary China. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in the northeastern Chinese city of Qingdao, the book tells the story of the slow, fragmented, and contentious transformation of Dabaodao—an area in the city’s former colonial center—from a place of common homes occupied by the urban poor into a showcase of architectural heritage and site for tourism and consumption. The ethnography provides a nuanced account of the diverse experiences and views of a range of groups involved in shaping, and being shaped, by the ur...
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This guide provides an overview of the thematic areas, analytical aspects, and avenues of research which, together, form a broader conversation around doing spatial history. Spatial history is not a field with clearly delineated boundaries. For the most part, it lacks a distinct, unambiguous scholarly identity. It can only be thought of in relation to other, typically more established fields. Indeed, one of the most valuable utilities of spatial history is its capacity to facilitate conversations across those fields. Consequently, it must be discussed in relation to a variety of historiographical contexts. Each of these have their own intellectual genealogies, institutional settings, and conceptual path dependencies. With this in mind, this guide surveys the following areas: territoriality, infrastructure, and borders; nature, environment, and landscape; city and home; social space and political protest; spaces of knowledge; spatial imaginaries; cartographic representations; and historical GIS research.
This book argues that understanding global urbanism in the twenty-first century requires us to cast our gaze upon vast city-regions without an urban core.
Many of our global cities are distressed and facing a host of issues: economic collapse in the face of rising expectations, social disintegration and civil unrest, and ecological degradation and the threats associated with climate change, including more frequent and more severe natural disasters. Our long-held assumptions about man and nature and how they interact are defunct. We realize now that we can no longer continue to build without addressing the long-term impacts of our actions and their spillovers. Energy and natural resources are finite. The way we configure economies has come into question. In the developed world, especially in the United States, infrastructure and the notions tha...