Welcome To Your World

One of the nation's chief architecture critics reveals how the environments we build profoundly shape our feelings, memories, and well-being, and argues that we must harness this knowledge to construct a world better suited to human experience. Taking us on a fascinating journey through some of the world's best and worst landscapes, buildings, and cityscapes, Sarah Williams Goldhagen draws from recent research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology to demonstrate how people's experiences of the places they build are central to their well-being, their physical health, their communal and social lives, and even their very sense of themselves. From this foundation, Goldhagen presents a powerful case that societies must use this knowledge to rethink what and how they build: the world needs better-designed, healthier environments that address the complex range of human individual and social needs. By 2050 America's population is projected to increase by nearly seventy million people. This will necessitate a vast amount of new construction--almost all in urban areas--that will dramatically transform our existing landscapes, infrastructure, and urban areas. Going forward, we must do everything we can to prevent the construction of exhausting, overstimulating environments and enervating, understimulating ones. Buildings, landscapes, and cities must both contain and spark associations of natural light, greenery, and other ways of being in landscapes that humans have evolved to need and expect. Fancy exteriors and dramatic forms are never enough, and may not even be necessary; authentic textures and surfaces, and careful, well-executed construction details are just as important. Erudite, wise, lucidly written, and beautifully illustrated with more than one hundred color photographs, Welcome to Your World is a vital, eye-opening guide to the spaces we inhabit, physically and mentally, and a clarion call to design for human experience.

Library of Science Book Club selection Discover magazine “What to Read” selection “A really great book.” —IRA FLATOW, Science Friday “One of the finest science writers I’ve ever read.” —Los Angeles Times “Ellard has a knack for distilling obscure scientific theories into practical wisdom.” —New York Times Book Review “[Ellard] mak[es] even the most mundane entomological experiment or exegesis of psychological geekspeak feel fresh and fascinating.” —NPR “Colin Ellard is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on the neuroscience of urban design. Here he offers an entirely new way to understand our cities—and ourselves.” —CHARLES MONTGOMERY, author of Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design Our surroundings can powerfully affect our thoughts, emotions, and physical responses, whether we’re awed by the Grand Canyon or Hagia Sophia, panicked in a crowded room, soothed by a walk in the park, or tempted in casinos and shopping malls. In Places of the Heart, Colin Ellard explores how our homes, workplaces, cities, and nature—places we escape to and can’t escape from—have influenced us throughout history, and how our brains and bodies respond to different types of real and virtual space. As he describes the insight he and other scientists have gained from new technologies, he assesses the influence these technologies will have on our evolving environment and asks what kind of world we are, and should be, creating. Colin Ellard is the author of You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall. A cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo and director of its Urban Realities Laboratory, he lives in Kitchener, Ontario.

One of the nation’s chief architecture critics reveals how the environments we build profoundly shape our feelings, memories, and well-being, and argues that we must harness this knowledge to construct a world better suited to human experience. Taking us on a fascinating journey through some of the world’s best and worst landscapes, buildings, and cityscapes, Sarah Williams Goldhagen draws from recent research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology to demonstrate how people’s experiences of the places they build are central to their well-being, their physical health, their communal and social lives, and even their very sense of themselves. From this foundation, Goldhagen presents a powerful case that societies must use this knowledge to rethink what and how they build: the world needs better-designed, healthier environments that address the complex range of human individual and social needs. By 2050 America’s population is projected to increase by nearly seventy million people. This will necessitate a vast amount of new construction—almost all in urban areas—that will dramatically transform our existing landscapes, infrastructure, and urban areas. Going forward, we must do everything we can to prevent the construction of exhausting, overstimulating environments and enervating, understimulating ones. Buildings, landscapes, and cities must both contain and spark associations of natural light, greenery, and other ways of being in landscapes that humans have evolved to need and expect. Fancy exteriors and dramatic forms are never enough, and may not even be necessary; authentic textures and surfaces, and careful, well-executed construction details are just as important. Erudite, wise, lucidly written, and beautifully illustrated with more than one hundred color photographs, Welcome to Your World is a vital, eye-opening guide to the spaces we inhabit, physically and mentally, and a clarion call to design for human experience.

Welcome To The World is a delightful book celebrating the arrival of a new baby.The story follows a charming little elephant, on a colorful journey, discovering all the wonders the world has to offer. Beautifully illustrated in full color this book is hard backed with cheerful end papers.With space for you to write a personal message in the front this book is a wonderful keepsake and makes the perfect gift for baby showers and newborn presents.Our You're The Biggest Book compliments this title and makes the perfect gift for the older sibling who has just become the biggest.

Welcome to my world. Welcome to my thoughts. Welcome to my visions. So begins Welcome to my world, poems that navigate the author’s search for “the stars, the moon, the ultimate tune,” alongside his road to healing from satanic abuse and drug addiction. Whilst some poems speak of suffering, others are full of joy—celebrating survival, the act of writing, and the sacred connection to Mother Earth, the Four Directions, and to the Creator. An act of prayer and acceptance, they are also an invitation to find humor and enjoy the present moment. Watching the junkie make the play moving and grooving the shuck and jive live a life of constant strife. Thinking, downtown style. No desire for the game doing it clean and serene. Still thinking, downtown style moving and grooving living and loving thinking, downtown style freedom, downtown style living it clean and serene all the way, downtown style.

A book of humor and satire covers topics from baseball to Macbeth.

Sweeping from the gentler confines of late 1940s small town America to the tough side of the New York media circus in the '70s, Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! mines golden seams of goodness and gritty determination, prejudice and despair, love and survival, in the story of a young TV interviewer, Dena Nordstrom, whose future looks full of promise, whose present is an emotional mess, and whose past is marked by mystery. With a cast of unforgettable characters, from the comic masterpiece that is Neighbour Dorothy (broadcasting home tips and good news to the midwest from her own front room) to the monstrosity that is Ira Wallace, TV network head - Fannie Flagg's novel is a funny, constantly surprising novel that keeps you guessing and turing the page right up to the last.