The Topography Of Wellness

The COVID-19 pandemic has reignited discussions of how architects, landscape designers, and urban planners can shape the environment in response to disease. This challenge is both a timely topic and one with an illuminating history. In The Topography of Wellness, Sara Jensen Carr offers a chronological narrative of how six epidemics transformed the American urban landscape, reflecting changing views of the power of design, pathology of disease, and the epidemiology of the environment. From the infectious diseases of cholera and tuberculosis, to so-called social diseases of idleness and crime, to the more complicated origins of today’s chronic diseases, each illness and its associated combat strategies has left its mark on our surroundings. While each solution succeeded in eliminating the disease on some level, sweeping environmental changes often came with significant social and physical consequences. Even more unexpectedly, some adaptations inadvertently incubated future epidemics. From the Industrial Revolution to present day, this book illuminates the constant evolution of our relationship to wellness and the environment by documenting the shifting grounds of illness and the urban landscape. Preparation of this volume has been supported by Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund

The COVID-19 pandemic has re-ignited discussions of how architects, landscapes, and urban planners can shape the environment in response to disease. This challenge is both a timely topic and one with an illuminating history. In The Topography of Wellness, Sara Jensen Carr offers a chronological narrative of how six epidemics transformed the American urban landscape, reflecting changing views of the power of design, pathology of disease, and the epidemiology of the environment. From the infectious diseases of cholera and tuberculosis, to so-called "social diseases" of idleness and crime, to the more complicated origins of today's chronic diseases, each illness and its associated combat strategies has left its mark on our surroundings. While each solution succeeded in eliminating the disease on some level, sweeping environmental changes often came with significant social and physical consequences. Even more unexpectedly, some adaptations inadvertently incubated future epidemics. From the Industrial Revolution to present day, this book illuminates the constant evolution of our relationship to wellness and the environment by documenting the shifting grounds of illness and the urban landscape.

"Includes access to Oxford Medicine Online"--Cover.

An immense land, China is approximately the same size as the United States. Yet it is home to more than four times as many people as live within U.S. borders--and the population is concentrated in the eastern half of the country because much of the west consists of rugged mountains and inhospitable desert. The Geography of China presents a wealth of information on such topics as topography, climate, natural resources, regions, cities, and environmental issues. It will be a valuable resource for students of this emerging nation.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this “ambitious and challenging” (The New York Review of Books) work, the bestselling author of Monsoon and Balkan Ghosts offers a revelatory prism through which to view global upheavals and to understand what lies ahead for continents and countries around the world. In The Revenge of Geography, Robert D. Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world’s hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands. The Russian steppe’s pitiless climate and limited vegetation bred hard and cruel men bent on destruction, for example, while Nazi geopoliticians distorted geopolitics entirely, calculating that space on the globe used by the British Empire and the Soviet Union could be swallowed by a greater German homeland. Kaplan then applies the lessons learned to the present crises in Europe, Russia, China, the Indian subcontinent, Turkey, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. The result is a holistic interpretation of the next cycle of conflict throughout Eurasia. Remarkably, the future can be understood in the context of temperature, land allotment, and other physical certainties: China, able to feed only 23 percent of its people from land that is only 7 percent arable, has sought energy, minerals, and metals from such brutal regimes as Burma, Iran, and Zimbabwe, putting it in moral conflict with the United States. Afghanistan’s porous borders will keep it the principal invasion route into India, and a vital rear base for Pakistan, India’s main enemy. Iran will exploit the advantage of being the only country that straddles both energy-producing areas of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Finally, Kaplan posits that the United States might rue engaging in far-flung conflicts with Iraq and Afghanistan rather than tending to its direct neighbor Mexico, which is on the verge of becoming a semifailed state due to drug cartel carnage. A brilliant rebuttal to thinkers who suggest that globalism will trump geography, this indispensable work shows how timeless truths and natural facts can help prevent this century’s looming cataclysms.

In Education under Siege, Peter Mortimore considers the UK education system as it is and as it might be. Concluding that the United Kingdom has some of the best teachers in the world but one of the most muddled systems, Mortimore proposes radical changes to help all British schools become good schools. He argues that the government should outlaw selection practices, integrate private schools into the state system, and establish processes to ensure that each school has effective teachers and a fair balance of students who learn easily and those who do not. In a concluding call to action, he asks readers who share his concerns to demand that politicians alter the course of education policy.

Architecture of Health is a story about the design and life of hospitals-about how they are born and evolve, about the forces that give them shape, and the shifts that conspire to render them inadequate. Reading architecture through the history of hospitals is a deciphering tool for unlocking the elemental principles of architecture and the intractable laws of human and social conditions that architecture serves in each of our lives.This book encounters brilliant and visionary designers who were hospital architects but also systems designers, driven by the aim of social change. They faced the contradictions of health care in their time and found innovative ways to solve for specific medical dilemmas. Less-known designers like Filarete, Lluís Domènech i Montaner, Albert Schweitzer, Max Fry and Jane Drew, John Dawe Tetlow, Gordon Friesen, Thomas Wheeler, and Eberhard Zeidler are studied here, while the medical spaces of more widely-known architects like Isambard Brunel, Aalvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, and Paul Rudolph also help inform this history. All these characters were polymaths and provocateurs, but none quite summarizes this history more succinctly than Florence Nightingale, who in laying out her guidelines for ward design in 1859, shows how the design of a medical facility can influence an entire political and social order.Architecture of Health, richly illustrated with images and never before published renderings and drawings from the MASS Design Group, charts historical epidemics alongside modern and contemporary architectural transformations in service of medicine, health, and habitation; it explores how infrastructure facilitates healing and architecture's greater role in constructing our societies.