City Builder

America's westward expansion involved more than pushing the frontier across the Mississippi toward the Pacific; it also consisted of urbanizing undeveloped regions of the colonial states. In 1810, New York's future governor DeWitt Clinton marveled that the "rage for erecting villages is a perfect mania." The development of Rochester and Syracuse illuminates the national experience of internal economic and cultural colonization during the first half of the nineteenth century. Architectural historian Diane Shaw examines the ways in which these new cities were shaped by a variety of constituents—founders, merchants, politicians, and settlers—as opportunities to extend the commercial and social benefits of the market economy and a merchant culture to America's interior. At the same time, she analyzes how these priorities resulted in a new approach to urban planning. According to Shaw, city founders and residents deliberately arranged urban space into three segmented districts—commercial, industrial, and civic—to promote a self-fulfilling vision of a profitable and urbane city. Shaw uncovers a distinctly new model of urbanization that challenges previous paradigms of the physical and social construction of nineteenth-century cities. Within two generations, the new cities of Rochester and Syracuse were sorted at multiple scales, including not only the functional definition of districts, but also the refinement of building types and styles, the stratification of building interiors by floor, and even the coding of public space by class, gender, and race. Shaw's groundbreaking model of early nineteenth-century urban design and spatial culture is a major contribution to the interdisciplinary study of the American city.

This book is an investigation of the cultural phenomenon of branding and its transformational effects on the contemporary spatial – and urban – reality. It develops a novel understanding of the rationale behind the construction of large-scale architectural complexes that relate to corporate brands, and of its tremendous cultural effects. The author suggests that what we see today is the creation of "global mass ornaments", of a thorough ornamentalization of the entire globe. The origins of this are discussed with regard to examples of corporate brand-building from Europe and China (Autostadt Wolfsburg, BMW Welt Munich and Anting New Town). Additional cases are several simulated spaces in Berlin and the space-branding activities of companies like Apple or Prada. Theoretically, the author develops an innovative poststructuralist framework, combining ideas from Gilles Deleuze with the space philosophy of Peter Sloterdijk. He analyzes how the corporate redefinition of space makes the city enter into a mode of virtual urbanity. This idea leads to a notion of a "global urban" and, ultimately, the "global mass ornament". This concept of a global mass ornament is developed here with reference to Sloterdijk’s concept of a world of "spheres". The latter is used to understand the new mode of spatiality of mediatized spaces. The book makes the point that our world is involved in a process of mass ornamentalization that has only just begun. The concept of the global mass ornament is the first to come to grips with a culture in which branding is effectively changing the physiognomy of the earth. The global mass ornament is a banner for a cultural transformation that employs architecture, sign theory and mechanisms borrowed from traditional advertising and from social media, as well as social processes – and that we have yet to properly understand. This book is a significant step forward in this respect.

City Builder: A Guide to Designing Communities is a manual specifically designed to help guide Game Masters through the process of creating exciting and compelling urban areas and other sorts of communities and places within them for their campaigns. It is a universal resource that is not specific to any particular game system and is intended to be compatible with the needs of almost any ancient, Dark Ages, Middle Ages, Renaissance, fantasy, or other role-playing milieu. This comprehensive, fully-illustrated book is divided into 14 sections and includes: * An Introduction that describes the scope of the book and how to use the material it contains; * A chapter on Communities that examines the Characteristics of Communities, including thorps, hamlets, villages, towns, cities, military bases, and plantations, along with regional and racial influences on their development; Buildings; the Physical Characteristics of Cities, including fortifications, lighting, and conditions on, above, and below city streets; and Disasters. * Chapters devoted to 10 specific sorts of places, including Craftsman Places, Entertainment Places, Professional Places, Tradesman Places, Mercantile Places, Service Places, Scholarly Places, Religious Places, Governmental Places, and Underworld Places. * Descriptions of nearly 70 different sorts of places, including eight created specifically for this book that have never before appeared elsewhere. * One to four Adventure Hooks tying in with each described sort of place. * An appendix on Guilds that discusses Guild Organization and Common Guild Regulations and includes a series of tables for Random Guild Generation. City Builder has also been written so as to be fully compatible with the various Skirmisher Publishing LLC d20 publications, including Experts v.3.5, Warriors, and Tests of Skill v.3.5. The contents of City Builder were initially released in 11 different volumes and these have been combined and expanded in this unified edition of the book. "City Builder is one of the most useful city building tools to come around in this half of the decade," DriveThruRPG staff reviewer Nathan Collins wrote of the individual volumes. "Strong writing accompanies fantasy element nicely. Whether you need to develop one isolated building the PCs are set to encounter, or a city that needs to 'pop up' quickly, there is something in this set that will greatly help you.

Atlanta and Environs is, in every way, an exhaustive history of the Atlanta Area from the time of its settlement in the 1820s through the 1970s. Volumes I and II, together more than two thousand pages in length, represent a quarter century of research by their author, Franklin M. Garrett—a man called “a walking encyclopedia on Atlanta history” by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. With the publication of Volume III, by Harold H. Martin, this chronicle of the South's most vibrant city incorporates the spectacular growth and enterprise that have characterized Atlanta in recent decades. The work is arranged chronologically, with a section devoted to each decade, a chapter to each year. Volume I covers the history of Atlanta and its people up to 1880—ranging from the city's founding as “Terminus” through its Civil War destruction and subsequent phoenixlike rebirth. Volume II details Atlanta's development from 1880 through the 1930s—including occurrences of such diversity as the development of the Coca-Cola Company and the Atlanta premiere of Gone with the Wind. Taking up the city's fortunes in the 1940s, Volume III spans the years of Atlanta's greatest growth. Tracing the rise of new building on the downtown skyline and the construction of Hartsfield International Airport on the city's perimeter, covering the politics at City Hall and the box scores of Atlanta's new baseball team, recounting the changing terms of race relations and the city's growing support of the arts, the last volume of Atlanta and Environs documents the maturation of the South's preeminent city.

Before World War I, Southern women's participation in the workforce consisted of black women's domestic labor and white working-class women's industrial or manufacturing work, but after the war, Southern women flooded business offices as stenographers, typists, clerks, and bookkeepers. This book examines their experiences in the clerical workforce, using both traditional labor sources and exploring the cultural institutions that evolved from these women's work-related milieu. Businessmen throughout the South molded this workforce to meet their needs using both labor-saving management techniques and exploiting social mores to enforce gender boundaries that limited women's workplace opportunities. This study traces the social and economic implications of Southern women's increased participation in clerical labor after World War I. While it increased the civic activities of white middle-class southern women, it also confined them to a routinized days work and limited venues of occupational achievement. Through a varied network of business women's clubs and organizations, women struggled with their new identities as workers and attempted to integrate their work lives with their community and family obligations. (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1995; revised with new Introduction and Preface)

These essays explore the idea of the city in the Hebrew Bible by means of thematic and textual studies. The essays are united by their portrayal of how the city is envisaged in the Hebrew Bible and how the city shapes the writing of the literature considered. In its conceptual framework the volume draws upon a number of other disciplines, including literary studies, urban geography and psycho-linguistics, to present chapters that stimulate further discussion on the role of urbanism in the biblical text. The introduction examines how cities can be conceived and portrayed, before surveying recent studies on the city and the Hebrew Bible. Chapters then address such issues as the use of the Hebrew term for 'city', the rhythm of the city throughout the biblical text, as well as reflections on textual geography and the work of urban theorists in relation to the Song of Songs. Issues both ancient and modern, historical and literary, are addressed in this fascinating collection, which provides readers with a multi-faceted and interdisciplinary view of the city in the Hebrew Bible.

A History of American State and Local Economic Development relates the history of American local and state economic development from 1790 to 2000. This multi-variable, multi-disciplinary history employs a bottom-up policy-making systems approach while exploring the three eras of economic development.