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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2024

        The machinic city

        Media, performance and participation

        by Marcos P. Dias

        As human and machine agency become increasingly intermingled and digital media is overlaid onto the urban landscape, The machinic city argues that performance art can help us to understand contemporary urban living. Dias analyses interventions from performance artists such as Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Rimini Protokoll, which draw from a rich history of avant-garde art movements to create spaces for deliberation and reflection on urban life, and speculation on its future. While cities are increasingly controlled by autonomous processes mediated by technical machines, Dias analyses the performative potential of the aesthetic machine, as it assembles with media, capitalist, human and urban machines. The aesthetic machine of performance art in urban space is examined through its different components - design, city and technology actants. This unveils the unpredictable nature and emerging potential of performance art as it unfolds in the machinic city.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        October 2008

        The encompassing city

        Streetscapes in early modern art and culture

        by Stuart Blumin

        The streetscape - the closely observed, faithfully rendered view of the city's streets, squares, canals, buildings and people - was a new artistic genre of the early modern era, a period in which the city itself was assuming new forms and taking on new roles in Europe and America. This unique book reopens the window of the early city view makers by tracing earlier forms of urban representation in European art into the sudden coalescence of the new genre in Italy and the Low Countries during the middle years of the seventeenth century. It explores the rapid expansion and diffusion of the genre through the eighteenth century, its appeal to such artists as Canaletto, Bernardo Bellotto, Francesco Guardi, and Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and its embrace of a culture of secular improvement more commonly understood through the writings of Enlightenment philosophes. To examine the long history of the genre is to learn much about the early modern city, and to rediscover many beautiful and long-forgotten works of art. ;

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2022

        Jacopo da Varagine's Chronicle of the city of Genoa

        by C. E. Beneš

        This book offers the first English translation of the Chronicle of the city of Genoa by the thirteenth-century Dominican Jacopo da Varagine, an author best known for his monumental book of saints' lives, the Golden legend. Jacopo's Chronicle presents a coherent vision of Genoa's place in history, the cosmos and Creation as written by the city's own archbishop - mixing eyewitness accounts with scholarly research about the city's origins and didactic reflections on the proper conduct of public and private life. Accompanied by an extensive introduction, this complete translation provides a unique perspective on a dynamic medieval city-state from one of its most important officials, broadening the available literature in English on medieval Italian urban life.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2019

        Jacopo da Varagine's Chronicle of the city of Genoa

        by Carrie Beneš, Rosemary Horrox

        This book offers the first English translation of the Chronicle of the city of Genoa by the thirteenth-century Dominican Jacopo da Varagine, an author best known for his monumental book of saints' lives, the Golden legend. Jacopo's Chronicle presents a coherent vision of Genoa's place in history, the cosmos and Creation as written by the city's own archbishop - mixing eyewitness accounts with scholarly research about the city's origins and didactic reflections on the proper conduct of public and private life. Accompanied by an extensive introduction, this complete translation provides a unique perspective on a dynamic medieval city-state from one of its most important officials, broadening the available literature in English on medieval Italian urban life.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2019

        Jacopo da Varagine's Chronicle of the city of Genoa

        by C. E. Beneš, Rosemary Horrox

        This book offers the first English translation of the Chronicle of the city of Genoa by the thirteenth-century Dominican Jacopo da Varagine, an author best known for his monumental book of saints' lives, the Golden legend. Jacopo's Chronicle presents a coherent vision of Genoa's place in history, the cosmos and Creation as written by the city's own archbishop - mixing eyewitness accounts with scholarly research about the city's origins and didactic reflections on the proper conduct of public and private life. Accompanied by an extensive introduction, this complete translation provides a unique perspective on a dynamic medieval city-state from one of its most important officials, broadening the available literature in English on medieval Italian urban life.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2010

        The flâneur and his city

        Patterns of daily life in Paris 1815–1851

        by Richard D. E. Burton, Mike Thompson

        The book provides a 'flâneur's eye view' of Parisian life in the first half of the nineteenth century: dress, cafés and restaurants, but also shops and passages, the omnibus, bals publics and carnival. The author provides general conclusions about the private and public spheres in 'le vieux Paris'. Like the flâneur, the author concentrates less on factual information for its own sake - which may be found in the secondary works cited in the text and footnotes - than on the 'semiological' or anthropological significance of the cultural forms in question. Links are drawn between cultural institutions and class relations in pre-1850 Paris, with particular emphasis on cultural inequality, on the persistence of cross-class contacts, and the growing differences between classes as reflected in behaviour and attitudes. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Geography & the Environment
        August 2020

        Urban transformations and public health in the emergent city

        by Michael Keith, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, Susan Parnell

        The imperatives of public health shaped our understanding of the cities of the global north in the first industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are doing so again today, reflecting new geographies of the urban age of the twenty-first. Emergent cities in parts of the globe experiencing most profound urban growth face major problems of economic, ecological and social sustainability when making sense of new health challenges and designing policy frameworks for public health infrastructures. The rapid evolution of complex 'systems of systems' in today's cities continually reconfigure the urban commons, reshaping how we understand urban public health, defining new problems and drawing on new data tools for analysis that work from the historical legacies and geographical variations that structure public health systems.

      • Trusted Partner
        November 2021

        The Metropolitan Age

        The decisive force in the Anthropocene

        by German Environmental Foundation (Ed.)

        Three quarters of the world’s population live in cities. One in eight people lives in a metropolitan area. Megacities swallow up land, energy and resources – and at the same time are particularly hard hit by the current climate crisis that they fuel. However, in the metropolises of the overcrowded world plenty of committed people have heard the warning signals and establish networks to use the potential of cities to reorganize the participative and social-ecological activity that is urgently needed. The contributions to this Yearbook for Ecology focus on the present and future of cities from wide-ranging viewpoints and highlight perspectives for their creative transformation towards liveable sustainability.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2021

        The machinic city

        by Marcos P. Dias, Hannah Knox

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2002

        City of Revolution

        Restructuring Manchester

        by Jamie Peck, Kevin Ward, Martin Hargreaves

        Provides a critical account of one of Europe's most celebrated examples of urban transformation, getting beneath the hype to ask what has really changed in the 'new' Manchester.. The first comprehensive account of contemporary political and economic change in Manchester.. Explores the costs and consequences of making the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial or 'entrepreneurial' city, with broad implications for other major cities. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        September 2024

        The renewal of post-war Manchester

        Planning, architecture and the state

        by Richard Brook

        A compelling account of the project to transform post-war Manchester, revealing the clash between utopian vision and compromised reality. Urban renewal in Britain was thrilling in its vision, yet partial and incomplete in its implementation. For the first time, this deep study of a renewal city reveals the complex networks of actors behind physical change and stagnation in post-war Britain. Using the nested scales of region, city and case-study sites, the book explores the relationships between Whitehall legislation, its interpretation by local government planning officers and the on-the-ground impact through urban architectural projects. Each chapter highlights the connections between policy goals, global narratives and the design and construction of cities. The Cold War, decolonialisation, rising consumerism and the oil crisis all feature in a richly illustrated account of architecture and planning in post-war Manchester.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2021

        African cities and collaborative futures

        Urban platforms and metropolitan logistics

        by Michael Keith, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, Susan Parnell

        This groundbreaking volume brings together scholars from across the globe to discuss the infrastructure, energy, housing, safety and sustainability of African cities, as seen through local narratives of residents. Drawing on a variety of fields and extensive first-hand research, the contributions offer a fresh perspective on some of the most pressing issues confronting urban Africa in the twenty-first century. At a time when the future of the region as a whole will be determined in large part by its cities, the implications of these developments are profound. With case studies from cities in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania, this volume explores how the rapid growth of African cities is reconfiguring the relationship between urban social life and its built forms. While the most visible transformations in cities today can be seen as infrastructural, these manifestations are cultural as well as material, reflecting the different ways in which the city is rationalised, economised and governed. How can we 'see like a city' in twenty-first-century Africa, understanding the urban present to shape its future? This is the central question posed throughout this volume, with a practical focus on how academics, local decision makers and international practitioners can collaborate to meet the challenge of rapid growth, environmental pressures and resource gaps.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2025

        Growing up and going out

        Youth culture, commerce, and leisure space in post-war Britain

        by Sarah Kenny

        In the decades following the Second World War, youthful sociability was remade as young people across Britain flocked to newly-opened coffee bars, beat clubs, and discos. These spaces, increasingly unknown and unfamiliar to the adults who passed by them, played a remarkable role in reshaping town and city centres after dark as sites of leisure and recreation. Telling the history of youth in post-war Britain from the ground up, through the towns and cities that young people moved through, this book traces how the new spaces of post-war youth leisure transformed both young people's relationship with their local environment and adults' perceptions of the possibilities and dangers of modern leisure. Growing up and going out offers a timely study of youth, commerce, and leisure that explores the reimagination, remaking, and regulation of the post-war city after dark.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2010

        A sacred city

        Consecrating churches and reforming society in eleventh-century Italy

        by Louis Hamilton, Steve Rigby

        The so-called Investiture Conflict was a watershed moment in the political life of the Latin West and the history of the papacy. Occurring at a time of rapid social change and political expansion, the eleventh-century reform movement became a debate centered on a ritual: the investment of bishops with the signs of their sacred and secular authority. The consecration of bishops, however, was only one of several contemporaneous conflicts over the significance of consecrations. Less well known is that which occurred over the dedication of churches. This book provides an examination of the consecration, placing the fundamental questions of the Gregorian Reform and Investiture Conflict back into their original liturgical framework. This context allows us to consider the symbolic richness of the liturgy that attracted large numbers of people. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2016

        Ephemeral city

        by Rosa Salzberg

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