Reinventing An Urban Vernacular

With increasing population and its associated demand on our limited resources, we need to rethink our current strategies for construction of multifamily buildings in urban areas. Reinventing an Urban Vernacular addresses these new demands for smaller and more efficient housing units adapted to local climate. In order to find solutions and to promote better urban communities with an overall environmentally responsible lifestyle, this book examines a wide variety of vernacular building precedents, as they relate to the unique characteristics and demands of six distinctly different regions of the United States. Terry Moor addresses the unique landscape, climate, physical, and social development by analyzing vernacular precedents, and proposing new suggestions for modern needs and expectations. Written for students and architects, planners, and urban designers, Reinventing an Urban Vernacular marries the urban vernacular with ongoing sustainability efforts to produce a unique solution to the housing needs of the changing urban environment.

Preserved buildings and historic districts, museums and reconstructions have become an important part of the landscape of cities around the world. Beginning in the 1970s, Tokyo participated in this trend. However, repeated destruction and rapid redevelopment left the city with little building stock of recognized historical value. Late twentieth-century Tokyo thus presents an illuminating case of the emergence of a new sense of history in the cityÕs physical environment, since it required both a shift in perceptions of value and a search for history in the margins and interstices of a rapidly modernizing cityscape. Scholarship to date has tended to view historicism in the postindustrial context as either a genuine response to loss, or as a cynical commodification of the past. The historical process of TokyoÕs historicization suggests other interpretations. Moving from the politics of the public square to the invention of neighborhood community, to oddities found and appropriated in the streets, to the consecration of everyday scenes and artifacts as heritage in museums, Tokyo Vernacular traces the rediscovery of the pastÑsometimes in unlikely formsÑin a city with few traditional landmarks. Tokyo's rediscovered past was mobilized as part of a new politics of the everyday after the failure of mass politics in the 1960s. Rather than conceiving the city as national center and claiming public space as national citizens, the post-1960s generation came to value the local places and things that embodied the vernacular language of the city, and to seek what could be claimed as common property outside the spaces of corporate capitalism and the state.

Managing Urban America guides students through the challenges, politics, and practice of urban management—including managing conflict through politics, adapting to demographic and social changes, balancing budgets, and delivering a myriad of goods and services to citizens in an efficient, equitable, and responsive manner. The Eighth Edition has been thoroughly updated to include a discussion of the difficulties cities confront as they deal with the lingering economic challenges of the 2008 recession, the concept of e-government and how it affects the theory and practice of management, and the implications of environmental issues for urban government management.

Kinshasa is sub-Saharan Africa‘s second largest city. The seven million Congolese who live there have a rich reputation for the courageous and innovative ways in which they survive in a harsh urban environment. They have created new social institutions, practices, networks and ways of living to deal with the collapse of public provision and a malfunctioning political system. This book describes how ordinary people, in the absence of formal sector jobs, hustle for a modest living; the famous ‘bargaining‘ system ordinary Kinois have developed; and how they access food, water supplies, health and education. The NGO-ization of service provision is analysed, as is the quite rare incidence of urban riots. The contributors also look at popular discourses, including street rumor, witchcraft, and attitudes to ‘big men‘ such as musicians and preachers. This is urban sociology at its best - richly empirical, unjargonized, descriptive of the lives of ordinary people, and weaving into its analysis how they see and experience life.

This is a unique title; no current showcase of the best contemporary music videos exists, despite the area being a popular, flourishing hub of creative activity. If you want to succeed in this area, you need this book! Reinventing Music Videos provides a showcase of the best of the next generation of international music video directors, who are creating work for best-selling and cutting-edge music artists. The up and coming are contrasted with an icons of the genre' section on big name music video directors such as Chris Cunningham and Spike Jonze to give the complete overview of this area. Stunning visuals dominate the book, along with questions and answers with the creators, and their sketches, treatments, and test visuals. This is an invaluable reference guide, a source of inspiration and process with an exploration of the underlying technologies and techniques alongside the showcase for everyone working in music videos and those wanting to get into this highly sought after genre of filmmaking. * This is an invaluable, high-profile resource on a hot button area of filmmaking with insider information not available elsewhere * Contains visuals from high-profile, internationally best-selling music artists * Learn from a renowned authority on alternate' moving image

Urban India is undergoing a rapid transformation, which also encompasses the educational sector. Since 1991, this important new market in private English-medium schools, along with an explosion of private coaching centres, has transformed the lives of children and their families, as the attainment of the best education nurtures the aspirations of a growing number of Indian citizens. Set in urban Kerala, the book discusses changing educational landscapes in the South Indian city of Kochi, a local hub for trade, tourism, and cosmopolitan middle-class lifestyles. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, the author examines the way education features as a major way the transformation of the city, and India in general, are experienced and envisaged by upwardly-mobile residents. Schooling is shown to play a major role in urban lifestyles, with increased privatisation representing a response to the educational strategies of a growing and heterogeneous middle class, whose educational choices reflect broader projects of class formation within the context of religious and caste diversity particular to the region. This path-breaking new study of a changing Indian middle class and new relationships with educational institutions contributes to the growing body of work on the experiences and meanings of schooling for youths, their parents, and the wider community and thereby adds a unique, anthropologically informed, perspective to South Asian studies, urban studies and the study of education.

Brudny argues that the rise of the Russian nationalist movement was a combined result of the reinvention of Russian national identity by a group of intellectuals, and the Communist Party's active support of this reinvention in order to gain greater political legitimacy.