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Humanities & Social SciencesFebruary 2023Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan
Young men and the digital economy
by Hannah Schilling
Digital technologies promise efficiency and comfort, but the smoothness of platform services relies on the hidden social labour of those who keep the gig economy running. This book presents a comparative ethnography of young men making a living through digital technologies: selling mobile airtime in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, and app-based delivery riders in Berlin, Germany. These case studies explore the significance of symbolic capital in urban youth's social existence and organisation of livelihood in the digital economy, and the technological mechanisms producing a new form of urban precarity. Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan puts forward an original comparative approach to develop a global urban sociology for the digital era. It provides an innovative analytical toolbox that decentres discussions of precarity from the standard of a normal employment contract. With its focus on symbolic capital, the ethnography shows the consequences of the proliferating gig economy for status struggles among urban youth, and carefully embeds the densification of software and services into the socio-material relations on which these new urban infrastructures are built.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2023Rural quality of life
by Pia Heike Johansen, Anne Tietjen, Evald Bundgård Iversen, Henrik Lauridsen Lolle, Jens Kaae Fisker
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Geography & the EnvironmentJune 2026Living the urban periphery
by Paula Meth, Sarah Charlton, Tom Goodfellow, Alison Todes
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Geography & the EnvironmentJune 2025Demystifying informal urban design and planning
Insights from Asia
by Mahyar Arefi
Touting informal settlements or informality in general as illegal, crime-ridden, unsafe, filthy, chaotic, and formal developments as legal, orderly or safe, and so forth has not solved anything and informality as a way of life or an economic reality lingers and grows. Demystifying informal urban design and planning delves deeper into this conundrum and seeks to debunk some common misguided perceptions about it. Borrowing popular philosophical and political analogies from Isaiah Berlin and Gregory Treverton and others, it encourages urban designers and planners to become multitaskers like foxes rather than hedgehogs who can do one thing right. The book ends with some general takeaways on assuming more proactive roles in informal urban design issues and avoiding two potential pitfalls while interacting with them.
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Geography & the EnvironmentMarch 2021Sanctuary cities and urban struggles
by Jonathan Darling, Harald Bauder
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2024The second half of your life - a manual
Tips and strategies for successful ageing
by Dr. Petra Kiedaisch
In the middle of our lives, the cards are reshuffled: marriages are divorced, careers are questioned, friendships are ended, questions of meaning are asked, bodies change - and not just hormonally. At the same time, children leave home and parents become carers. From the age of 45, the majority of our population is at the centre of a second upheaval that affects all facets of our lives and leaves us at a loss in many ways. Not only in our daily lives, but also when it comes to planning for our own old age. This guide is designed to help us find our way. It presents the most important information from all areas relevant to a good life after 45. Leading experts from the fields of medicine, nutrition, philosophy, theology, psychology, care, law and finance give recommendations on what to look out for and what tools are needed to get through these challenging years unscathed. Useful checklists round off the articles. The book shows us the unique opportunity to see these challenges not as a crisis but as a source of strength. Not only can we come through this period of our lives healthy and happy, but we can also shape it so that the next age threshold is no longer frightening. During the second phase of adolescence, we lay the foundations for whether and how we will grow older. Be it in terms of health or living together with family and friends. With contributions from: Prof. Dr. Martin Gessmann (philosophy), Dipl. Psych. Claudia Kühner (psychology), Dr Suso Lederle (medicine), Dr Petra Forster (nutrition), Christian Hald, Anja Heine (law), Prof Dr Philipp Schreiber (finance), Prof Dr Thomas Klie (nursing care insurance), Georg Eberhardt (religion).
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Humanities & Social SciencesOctober 2006The experience of urban poverty, 1723–82
Parish, charity and credit
by Alannah Tomkins
This comparative study of urban poverty is the first to chart the irregular pulse of poverty's encounters with officialdom. It exploits an unusual methodology to secure new perspectives from familiar sources. The highly localised characteristics of the welfare economy generated a peculiarly urban environment for the poor. Separate chapters examine the parameters of workhouse life when the preconceptions of contemporaries have been stripped away; the reach of institutional charities such as almshouses, schools and infirmaries; and the surprisingly broad clientele of urban pawnbrokers. Detailed analysis of the poor is achieved via meticulous matching of individuals who fell within the purview of two or more authorities. The result is a unique insight into the survival economics of urban poverty, arising not from a tidy network of welfare but from a loose assembly of options, where the impoverished positioned themselves repeatedly to fit official, philanthropic, or casual templates of the 'deserving'. This book will be essential reading for historians of English poverty and welfare, and eighteenth-century social and economic life. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesOctober 2025Social democracy and the urban scene
Party responses to the diversifying centre-left
by Nik. Brandal, Øivind Bratberg
Social democratic parties struggle to appeal to a divided electorate. Particularly prescient is the clash between working-class voters thatare socially conservative and middle-class voters who are liberally inclined but economicallyleft. Are politics and policies that appeal to both even a possibility? Nowhere is thatdebate more acute than in European cities, yet in no other political space are answers more likely to be found.Where urban voters turn left, they are increasingly attracted by radical and green alternatives to social democracy.Social democracy and urban politicsdelves into the changing relationship between these three party families on the urban scene. Mapping electoral geography, governing strategies and the interface between parties and social movements on the left, the authors reflect upon the formation and dilemmas of a broader progressive alliance.
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Humanities & Social SciencesAugust 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.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2026
The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia
by Alexandrina Vanke
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April 2021On the Purposes of Life and Whether They Exist
A philosophical fitting
by Axel Braig
The musician, doctor and philosopher Axel Braig considers philosophy a little like the weather: he looks for the right clothes for every situation. Braig is primarily concerned with practical, effective things from the two-and-a-half millennia fund of (Western) thinking, such as helpful approaches in existential crises. In this book, he introduces us to philosophical thinkers from Plato to Montaigne to Levinas and Feyerabend. Braig not only shares his own philosophical biography, but above all encourages us to philosophise ourselves.
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Biography & True StoriesMay 2026Punk rock ruined my life
And other stories
by John Robb
The irresistible story of a one-man cultural phenomenon. Minister for the Counterculture, Mancunian mainstay and alternative national treasure John Robb has lived a life in music. In this book he charts his adventures on the cultural frontline, chronicling the making of a DIY icon. Robb's quest began in his hometown of Blackpool - where punk was a battle against the odds - and went international when he toured the world with his band. The first person to interview Nirvana, he also discovered The Stone Roses for weekly newspaper Sounds and did early interviews with The Jesus and Mary Chain and The Manics, before moving on to legends such as Mark E. Smith, Nick Cave and Patti Smith. Along the way, he became an on-screen commentator and author of bestselling books. Robb's memoir tells of deep friendships with figures from Poly Styrene to Chris Packham. Packed with riotous stories, it provides an alternative account of British musical and cultural history and a triumphant blueprint for a punk rock life.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJune 2025
Living with water
Everyday encounters and liquid connections
by Charlotte Bates, Kate Moles
Living with water brings together sociologists, geographers, artists, writers and poets to explore the ways in which water binds, immerses and supports us. Drawing from international research on river crossings, boat dwelling, wild swimming, sea fishing, and drought impacts, and navigating urban waters, glacial lagoons, barrier reefs and disappearing tarns, the collection illuminates the ways that we live with and without water, and explores how we can think and write with water on land. Water offers a way of attending to emerging and enduring social and ecological concerns and making sense of them in lively and creative ways. By approaching Living with water from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives, and drawing on research from around the world, this collection opens up discussions that reinvigorate and renew previously landlocked debates. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 6, Clean water and sanitation
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November 2016Coming to Terms with Life
by Matthias Wengenroth
Do you struggle with thoughts and feelings that make life difficult? Have you tried all sorts of ways of dealing with this without getting anywhere? Do you feel that life is passing you by? Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), which this book describes in a clear and entertaining way, provides new and very enlightening insights into the causes of human suffering. At the same time, ACT shows how we can improve the way we handle the difficult aspects of being human, while also developing our abilities and strengths. This title shows how using the described simple but effective methods can lead you to a happier, better life. Target Group: people who want to utilize their potential more fully, people interested in acceptance and commitment therapy, people practicing or interested in psychotherapy (psychologists, doctors, coaches, social workers)
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July 2021My Life with Viruses
A researcher’s history of the fascinating world of pathogens
by Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker in association with Jeanne Rubner
In times of the coronavirus pandemic many people have certainly condemned them, but Professor Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker has dedicated his life to researching them and is intrigued by viruses – even if sometimes he is keenly aware of their fatal effects. To mark his 80th birthday the biochemist describes the co-evolution and co-existence as well as the eternal ‘battle’ between humans and viruses. Winnacker takes up the cause of these ‘biological elements between animate and inanimate nature’ because they play an important role in fundamental research and genetic technology, and without them human beings would not be what they are.
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The ArtsJanuary 2019The secret life of romantic comedy
by Celestino Deleyto
The secret life of romantic comedy offers a new approach to one of the most popular and resilient genres in the history of Hollywood. Steering away from the rigidity and ideological determinism of traditional accounts of the genre, this book advocates a more flexible theory, which allows the student to explore the presence of the genre in unexpected places, extending the concept to encompass films that are not usually considered romantic comedies. Combining theory with detailed analyses of a selection of films, including To Be or Not to Be (1942), Rear Window (1954), Kiss Me Stupid (1964), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Before Sunset (2004), the book aims to provide a practical framework for the exploration of a key area of contemporary experience - intimate matters - through one of its most powerful filmic representations: the genre of romantic comedy. Original and entertaining, The secret life of romantic comedy is perfect for students and academics of film and film genre.
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Biography & True StoriesJune 2014A Biography of Paul Watzlawick
The Discovery of the Present Moment
by Andrea Köhler-Ludescher
This book, the world's first biography of Paul Watzlawick, written by his great-niece, describes the life of this philosopher, therapist, and best-selling author. Paul Watzlawick had a talent for languages and he led an adventurous life, from his childhood in Villach to studying in Venice after the war, to analyst training under C. G. Jung in Zurich, an attempt at establishing himself in India and then in El Salvador as a therapist, and finally to the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in the United States, headed by Don D. Jackson, a venerable scientist. This marked the beginning of the second half of his life, his amazing career as a communication researcher, a pioneer of systemic therapy, a radical constructivist, and a great thinker regarding the divisions between East and West. With many letters, lectures, interviews, and statements from contemporary witnesses and family members, this book makes Paul Watzlawick accessible as a human being and as a spiritually inspired, leading 20th century thinker. It includes a variety of unpublished material from Watzlawick, and introduces a comprehensive and exciting picture of the scientist and cosmopolitan person, Paul Watzlawick. Target Group: For people interest in Paul Watzlawick, communication sciences, systemic therapy, and constructivism.
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Geography & the EnvironmentAugust 2020Urban 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.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2021African 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.
