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An Unnatural Metropolis

An Unnatural Metropolis PDF Author: Craig E. Colten
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807132004
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
Strategically situated at the gateway to the Mississippi River yet standing atop a former swamp, New Orleans was from the first what geographer Peirce Lewis called an "impossible but inevitable city." How New Orleans came to be, taking shape between the mutual and often contradictory forces of nature and urban development, is the subject of An Unnatural Metropolis. Craig E. Colten traces engineered modifications to New Orleans's natural environment from 1800 to 2000 and demonstrates that, though all cities must contend with their physical settings, New Orleans may be the city most dependent on human-induced transformations of its precarious site. In a new preface, Colten shows how Hurricane Katrina exemplifies the inability of human artifice to exclude nature from cities and he urges city planners to keep the environment in mind as they contemplate New Orleans's future. Urban geographers frequently have portrayed cities as the antithesis of nature, but in An Unnatural Metropolis, Colten introduces a critical environmental perspective to the history of urban areas. His amply illustrated work offers an in-depth look at a city and society uniquely shaped by the natural forces it has sought to harness.

An Unnatural Metropolis

An Unnatural Metropolis PDF Author: Craig E. Colten
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807132004
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
Strategically situated at the gateway to the Mississippi River yet standing atop a former swamp, New Orleans was from the first what geographer Peirce Lewis called an "impossible but inevitable city." How New Orleans came to be, taking shape between the mutual and often contradictory forces of nature and urban development, is the subject of An Unnatural Metropolis. Craig E. Colten traces engineered modifications to New Orleans's natural environment from 1800 to 2000 and demonstrates that, though all cities must contend with their physical settings, New Orleans may be the city most dependent on human-induced transformations of its precarious site. In a new preface, Colten shows how Hurricane Katrina exemplifies the inability of human artifice to exclude nature from cities and he urges city planners to keep the environment in mind as they contemplate New Orleans's future. Urban geographers frequently have portrayed cities as the antithesis of nature, but in An Unnatural Metropolis, Colten introduces a critical environmental perspective to the history of urban areas. His amply illustrated work offers an in-depth look at a city and society uniquely shaped by the natural forces it has sought to harness.

An Unnatural Metropolis

An Unnatural Metropolis PDF Author: Craig E. Colten
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807147818
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Strategically situated at the gateway to the Mississippi River yet standing atop a former swamp, New Orleans was from the first what geographer Peirce Lewis called an "impossible but inevitable city." How New Orleans came to be, taking shape between the mutual and often contradictory forces of nature and urban development, is the subject of An Unnatural Metropolis. Craig E. Colten traces engineered modifications to New Orleans's natural environment from 1800 to 2000 and demonstrates that, though all cities must contend with their physical settings, New Orleans may be the city most dependent on human-induced transformations of its precarious site. In a new preface, Colten shows how Hurricane Katrina exemplifies the inability of human artifice to exclude nature from cities and he urges city planners to keep the environment in mind as they contemplate New Orleans's future. Urban geographers frequently have portrayed cities as the antithesis of nature, but in An Unnatural Metropolis, Colten introduces a critical environmental perspective to the history of urban areas. His amply illustrated work offers an in-depth look at a city and society uniquely shaped by the natural forces it has sought to harness.

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West PDF Author: William Cronon
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393072452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 592

Book Description
A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Winner of the Bancroft Prize. "No one has written a better book about a city…Nature's Metropolis is elegant testimony to the proposition that economic, urban, environmental, and business history can be as graceful, powerful, and fascinating as a novel." —Kenneth T. Jackson, Boston Globe

Mind the Gap

Mind the Gap PDF Author: Christopher Golden
Publisher: Diversion Books
ISBN: 1635763843
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
Fleeing her mother’s murderers, a London teenager discovers an underground world of thieves and ghosts in this dark urban fantasy series debut. Jasmine Towne and her mother have always been taken care of by men known only as the Uncles. But Jazz was raised to always beware. And she discovers why on the day she finds her paranoid mother murdered. Her mother’s last words, scrawled in her own blood, demand action: JAZZ HIDE FOREVER. Seeking cover in the London Underground, Jazz slips through a mysterious gate—and seemingly through time. Inside an abandoned city of bomb shelters and forgotten Tube stations, she finds temporary refuge with a gang of petty thieves. But flashes of the past, spectral and haunting, share the tunnels with no regard for the living. Now Jazz must ask herself a difficult question: how long can she hide from the terrors of both her worlds? "Magical realism at its finest…with mystery, magic, ghosts and a fascinating subterranean world.”—Sfrevu.com

The Horse in the City

The Horse in the City PDF Author: Clay McShane
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801892317
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Book Description
Honorable mention, 2007 Lewis Mumford Prize, American Society of City and Regional Planning The nineteenth century was the golden age of the horse. In urban America, the indispensable horse provided the power for not only vehicles that moved freight, transported passengers, and fought fires but also equipment in breweries, mills, foundries, and machine shops. Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, prominent scholars of American urban life, here explore the critical role that the horse played in the growing nineteenth-century metropolis. Using such diverse sources as veterinary manuals, stable periodicals, teamster magazines, city newspapers, and agricultural yearbooks, they examine how the horses were housed and fed and how workers bred, trained, marketed, and employed their four-legged assets. Not omitting the problems of waste removal and corpse disposal, they touch on the municipal challenges of maintaining a safe and productive living environment for both horses and people and the rise of organizations like the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. In addition to providing an insightful account of life and work in nineteenth-century urban America, The Horse in the City brings us to a richer understanding of how the animal fared in this unnatural and presumably uncomfortable setting.

The Chicago River

The Chicago River PDF Author: Libby Hill
Publisher:
ISBN: 080933707X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description
Originally published: Lake Claremont Press, 2000.

The Place with No Edge

The Place with No Edge PDF Author: Adam Mandelman
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807173193
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Book Description
In The Place with No Edge, Adam Mandelman follows three centuries of human efforts to inhabit and control the lower Mississippi River delta, the vast watery flatlands spreading across much of southern Louisiana. He finds that people’s use of technology to tame unruly nature in the region has produced interdependence with—rather than independence from—the environment. Created over millennia by deposits of silt and sand, the Mississippi River delta is one of the most dynamic landscapes in North America. From the eighteenth-century establishment of the first French fort below New Orleans to the creation of Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan in the 2000s, people have attempted to harness and master this landscape through technology. Mandelman examines six specific interventions employed in the delta over time: levees, rice flumes, pullboats, geophysical surveys, dredgers, and petroleum cracking. He demonstrates that even as people seemed to gain control over the environment, they grew more deeply intertwined with—and vulnerable to—it. The greatest folly, Mandelman argues, is to believe that technology affords mastery. Environmental catastrophes of coastal land loss and petrochemical pollution may appear to be disconnected, but both emerged from the same fantasy of harnessing nature to technology. Similarly, the levee system’s failures and the subsequent deluge after Hurricane Katrina owe as much to centuries of human entanglement with the delta as to global warming’s rising seas and strengthening storms. The Place with No Edge advocates for a deeper understanding of humans’ relationship with nature. It provides compelling evidence that altering the environment—whether to make it habitable, profitable, or navigable —inevitably brings a response, sometimes with unanticipated consequences. Mandelman encourages a mindfulness of the ways that our inventions engage with nature and a willingness to intervene in responsible, respectful ways.

Citizens Without a City

Citizens Without a City PDF Author: Jan-Jonathan Bock
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253058872
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
In 2009, after seismic tremors struck the Italian mountain town of L'Aquila, survivors were subjected to a "second earthquake"—invasive media attention and a relief effort that left them in a state of suspended citizenship as they were forcibly resettled and had to envision a new future. In Citizens without a City, Jan-Jonathan Bock reveals how a disproportionate government response exacerbated survivors' sense of crisis, divided the local population, and induced new types of political action. Italy's disenfranchising emergency reaction relocated citizens to camps and sites across a ruined townscape, without a plan for restoration or return. Through grassroots politics, arts and culture, commemoration rituals, architectural projects, and legal avenues, local people now sought to shape their hometown's recovery. Bock combines an analysis of the catastrophe's impact with insights into post-disaster civic life, urban heritage, the politics of mourning, and community fragmentation. A fascinating read for anyone interested in urban culture, disaster, and politics, Citizens without a City illustrates how survivors battled to retain a sense of purpose and community after the L'Aquila earthquake.

Crisis Cities

Crisis Cities PDF Author: Kevin Fox Gotham
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199752214
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
"Every urban crisis is also an opportunity, and in this penetrating study of post-disaster New York and New Orleans, Kevin Gotham and Miriam Greenberg show how and why the market-model of redevelopment does so little for the people and places that need it most. Crisis Cities is insightful, sophisticated, and, alas, timely. It belongs not only in the classroom, but on every mayor's desk." --Eric Klinenberg, author of Heat Wave and Going Solo"In this wide-ranging and carefully researched book, Gotham and Greenberg explore the crisis-driven strategies of urbanization that have been pursued in two major post-disaster U.S. cities and their deeply uneven, polarizing and destructive impacts upon the social and ecological fabric. A fundamental and original analysis of early twenty-first century urban transformations in the age of disaster capitalism, this book is a superb demonstration of how the methods of critical urban studies can illuminate the powerful social, political, economic and ideological forces that are reshaping cities and regions today." --Neil Brenner, Professor of Urban Theory, Harvard Graduate School of Design "Crisis Cities is a critical revelation of the political and economic forces that direct the resources offered to cities after catastrophes. The authors clearly show how the resources are not necessarily directed to the rebuilding and recovery projects that serve all segments of the communities and would provide a successful collective future. Drawing on catastrophes in two well-known American cities the dangers of this common path are clearly presented." --Shirley Laska, Professor Emerita of Sociology, University of New Orleans.

The Trouble with City Planning

The Trouble with City Planning PDF Author: Kristina Ford
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300168772
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 532

Book Description
After the vast destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans faces a rare chance to rebuild, with an unprecedented opportunity to plan what gets built. As the cityʹs director of planning from 1992 until 2000, Kristina Ford is uniquely placed to use these opportunities as a springboard for an eye-opening discussion of the intransigent problems and promising possibilities facing city planners across the nation and beyond. In The Trouble with City Planning, Ford argues that almost no part of our usual understanding of the phrase "city planning" is accurate: not our conception of the plan itself, nor our sense of what city planners do or who plans are made for or how planners determine what citizens want. Most important, our conventional understanding does not tell us how a plan affects what gets built in any city in America. Ford advances several planning innovations that, if adopted, could be crucial for restoring New Orleans, but also transformative wherever citizens are troubled by the results of their cityʹs plan. This keenly intelligent book is destined to become a classic for planners and citizens alike. -- Publisher description.