Mirror Cities

Employing Salman Rushdie as a guide to a historicized contemporary, this study offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the plurality of cities along his transnational trajectory. It engages with the geographically identifiable Bombay, Karachi, Islamabad, London or New York; the phantasmal, politically coded, Jahilia or Mildendo, the inspirational yet flawed urban precedents of Fatehpur Sikri or Renaissance Florence and the ways these cities generate, interact with and transform each other. The book situates Rushdie's cities in relation to developments in Bombay, Karachi, Islamabad and London writing and focuses on novels which shuttle between cities. Parashkevova attends to cities' cultural and historical contexts, to many of Rushdie's numerous literary, cinematic and artistic influences and to diverse events, processes and paradigms - earthquakes, translations, seductions - that politically re-position cities and citizens on the contemporary urban map.

The Routledge Companion to Smart Cities explores the question of what it means for a city to be ‘smart’, raises some of the tensions emerging in smart city developments and considers the implications for future ways of inhabiting and understanding the urban condition. The volume draws together a critical and cross-disciplinary overview of the emerging topic of smart cities and explores it from a range of theoretical and empirical viewpoints. This timely book brings together key thinkers and projects from a wide range of fields and perspectives into one volume to provide a valuable resource that would enable the reader to take their own critical position within the topic. To situate the topic of the smart city for the reader and establish key concepts, the volume sets out the various interpretations and aspects of what constitutes and defines smart cities. It investigates and considers the range of factors that shape the characteristics of smart cities and draws together different disciplinary perspectives. The consideration of what shapes the smart city is explored through discussing three broad ‘parts’ – issues of governance, the nature of urban development and how visions are realised – and includes chapters that draw on empirical studies to frame the discussion with an understanding not just of the nature of the smart city but also how it is studied, understood and reflected upon. The Companion will appeal to academics and advanced undergraduates and postgraduates from across many disciplines including Urban Studies, Geography, Urban Planning, Sociology and Architecture, by providing state of the art reviews of key themes by leading scholars in the field, arranged under clearly themed sections.

Technology doesn't flow smoothly; it's the big surprises that matter, and Yale computer expert David Gelernter sees one such giant leap right on the horizon. Today's small scale software programs are about to be joined by vast public software works that will revolutionize computing and transform society as a whole. One such vast program is the "Mirror World." Imagine looking at your computer screen and seeing reality--an image of your city, for instance, complete with moving traffic patterns, or a picture that sketches the state of an entire far-flung corporation at this second. These representations are called Mirror Worlds, and according to Gelernter they will soon be available to everyone. Mirror Worlds are high-tech voodoo dolls: by interacting with the images, you interact with reality. Indeed, Mirror Worlds will revolutionize the use of computers, transforming them from (mere) handy tools to crystal balls which will allow us to see the world more vividly and see into it more deeply. Reality will be replaced gradually, piece-by-piece, by a software imitation; we will live inside the imitation; and the surprising thing is--this will be a great humanistic advance. We gain control over our world, plus a huge new measure of insight and vision. In this fascinating book--part speculation, part explanation--Gelernter takes us on a tour of the computer technology of the near future. Mirror Worlds, he contends, will allow us to explore the world in unprecedented depth and detail without ever changing out of our pajamas. A hospital administrator might wander through an entire medical complex via a desktop computer. Any citizen might explore the performance of the local schools, chat electronically with teachers and other Mirror World visitors, plant software agents to report back on interesting topics; decide to run for the local school board, hire a campaign manager, and conduct the better part of the campaign itself--all by interacting with the Mirror World. Gelernter doesn't just speculate about how this amazing new software will be used--he shows us how it will be made, explaining carefully and in detail how to build a Mirror World using technology already available. We learn about "disembodied machines," "trellises," "ensembles," and other computer components which sound obscure, but which Gelernter explains using familiar metaphors and terms. (He tells us that a Mirror World is a microcosm just like a Japanese garden or a Gothic cathedral, and that a computer program is translated by the computer in the same way a symphony is translated by a violinist into music.) Mirror Worlds offers a lucid and humanistic account of the coming software revolution, told by a computer scientist at the cutting edge of his field.

How porous is the border between life and death? How do the dead influence the living and in what way? What can Heaven, Hell, Purgatory and the two Limbos tell us of our contemporary world today? In The Mirror of Death, Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte explores the hermeneutical potential of the regions in the hereafter. After an exciting voyage through the emergence of the afterlife and of the constancy of death’s presence in the history of humanity, Vanhoutte shows, through the study of the nature and genealogy of the various realms in the beyond, how an invigoratingly new and critical perspective of a wide variety of contemporary phenomena is unveiled when reading them through the interpretative lens of these regions where the dead dwell. Modern politics, our fellow human beings, the times of our lives, the capitalistic economic system, medicalization, wokism, and living in crisis will never look the same.

The wait is finally over for the third and final installment in The Passage trilogy, called "a The Stand-meets-The Road journey" by Entertainment Weekly. In the wake of the battle against The Twelve, Amy and her friends have gone in different directions. Peter has joined the settlement at Kerrville, Texas, ascending in its ranks despite his ambivalence about its ideals. Alicia has ventured into enemy territory, half-mad and on the hunt for the viral called Zero, who speaks to her in dreams. Amy has vanished without a trace. With The Twelve destroyed, the citizens of Kerrville are moving on with life, settling outside the city limits, certain that at last the world is safe enough. But the gates of Kerrville will soon shudder with the greatest threat humanity has ever faced, and Amy--the Girl from Nowhere, the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years--will once more join her friends to face down the demon who has torn their world apart . . . and to at last confront their destinies.

The autobiography of New Zealand's most significant writer New Zealand's preeminent writer Janet Frame brings the skill of an extraordinary novelist and poet to these vivid and haunting recollections, gathered here for the first time in a single volume. From a childhood and adolescence spent in a poor but intellectually intense railway family, through life as a student, and years of incarceration in mental hospitals, eventually followed by her entry into the saving world of writers and the "Mirror City" that sustains them, we are given not only a record of the events of a life, but also "the transformation of ordinary facts and ideas into a shining palace of mirrors." Frame's journey of self–discovery, from New Zealand to London, to Paris and Barcelona, and then home again, is a heartfelt and courageous account of a writer's beginnings as well as one woman's personal struggle to survive. This book contains selections from the long out–of–print collection entitled Janet Frame: An Autobiography (George Brazillier, 1991), which itself was originally published in three volumes: To the Is–land, An Angel at My Table, and The Envoy from Mirror City.

"Drawing on rich historical research filtered through cultural geography, Shortridge looks at the 118 communities that ever achieved a population of 2,500 and unravels the many factors that influenced the growth of urban Kansas. He tells how mercantilism dominated urban thinking in territorial days until after statehood, when cities competed for the capital, prisons, universities, and other institutions. He also shows how geography and size were employed by entrepreneurs and government officials to prepare strategies for economic development. And he describes how the railroads especially promoted the founding of cities in the nineteenth century - and how this system has fared since 1950 in the face of globalization and the growth of interstate highways."--BOOK JACKET.

In 1972, Italo Calvino published Invisible Cities, a literary book that masterfully combines philosophy and poetry, rigid structure and free play, theoretical insight and glittering prose. The text is an extended meditation on urban life, and it continues to resonate not only among literary scholars, but among social scientists, architects, and urban planners as well. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Invisible Cities, this collection of essays serves as both an appreciation and a critical engagement. Drawing from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives and geographical contexts, this volume grapples with the theoretical, pedagogical, and political legacies of Calvino’s work. Each chapter approaches Invisible Cities not only as a novel but as a work of evocative ethnography, place-writing, and urban theory. Fifty years on, what can Calvino’s dreamlike text offer to scholars and practitioners interested in actually existing urban life?