Monrovia Modern

Monrovia Modern PDF Author: Danny Hoffman
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822373084
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
In Monrovia Modern Danny Hoffman uses the ruins of four iconic modernist buildings in Monrovia, Liberia, as a way to explore the relationship between the built environment and political imagination. Hoffman shows how the E. J. Roye tower and the Hotel Africa luxury resort, as well as the unfinished Ministry of Defense and Liberia Broadcasting System buildings, transformed during the urban warfare of the 1990s from symbols of the modernist project of nation-building to reminders of the challenges Monrovia's residents face. The transient lives of these buildings' inhabitants, many of whom are ex-combatants, prevent them from making place-based claims to a right to the city and hinder their ability to think of ways to rebuild and repurpose their built environment. Featuring nearly 100 of Hoffman's color photographs, Monrovia Modern is situated at the intersection of photography, architecture, and anthropology, mapping out the possibilities and limits for imagining an urban future in Monrovia and beyond.

Renaissance Years

Renaissance Years PDF Author: Richard Singer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781982039998
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 428

Book Description
Monrovia was a failing city, economically, socially and morally out of touch with a changing America. Just three decades later, this small California municipality was being hailed as an All-America City, a model community whose successes were being studied and emulated by towns across the country. This is the story of that amazing transformation, the re-launching of this once troubled community into a new and better era they called the Monrovia Renaissance. Here for the first time are the dramatic, comedic, ironic and cautionary tales of a town in the throes of change -- progress, preservation and petty personal politics in a great little American town!

The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture

The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture PDF Author: Swati Chattopadhyay
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317422651
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 949

Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture convenes a wide array of critical voices from architecture, art history, urbanism, geography, anthropology, media and performance studies, computer science, bio-engineering, environmental studies, and sociology that help us understand the meaning and significance of global architecture of the twenty-first century. New chapters by 36 contributors illustrated with over 140 black-and-white images are assembled in six parts concerning both real and virtual spaces: design, materiality, alterity, technologies, cityscapes, and practice.

Liberia in Pictures

Liberia in Pictures PDF Author: Thomas Streissguth
Publisher: Twenty-First Century Books
ISBN: 9780822524656
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 88

Book Description
Discusses the economy, geography, government, people, cultural life, and history of Liberia.

Quinine's Remains

Quinine's Remains PDF Author: Townsend Middleton
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520399129
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. What happens after colonial industries have run their course--after the factory closes and the fields go fallow? Set in the cinchona plantations of India's Darjeeling Hills, Quinine's Remains chronicles the history and aftermaths of quinine. Harvested from cinchona bark, quinine was malaria's only remedy until the twentieth-century advent of synthetic drugs, and it was vital to the British Empire. Today, the cinchona plantations--and the roughly fifty thousand people who call them home--remain. Their futures, however, are unclear. The Indian government has threatened to privatize or shut down this seemingly obsolete and crumbling industry, but the plantation community, led by strident trade unions, has successfully resisted. Overgrown cinchona fields and shuttered quinine factories may appear the stuff of postcolonial and postindustrial ruination, but quinine's remains are not dead. Rather, they have become the site of urgent efforts to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. Quinine's Remains offers a vivid historical and ethnographic portrait of what it means to forge life after empire.

Master Plans and Minor Acts

Master Plans and Minor Acts PDF Author: Shakirah E. Hudani
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226832740
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
An examination of planning, place, and the politics of repair in post-genocide Rwanda. Master Plans and Minor Acts examines a “material politics of repair” in post-genocide Rwanda, where in a country saturated with deep historical memory, spatial master planning aims to drastically redesign urban spaces. How is the post-conflict city reconstituted through the work of such planning, and with what effects for material repair and social conciliation? Through extended ethnographic and qualitative research in Rwanda in the decades after the genocide of 1994, this book questions how repair after conflict is realized amidst large-scale urban transformation. Bridging African studies, urban studies, and human geography in its scope, this work ties Rwanda’s transformation to contexts of urban change in other post-conflict spaces, bringing to the fore critical questions about the ethics of planning in such complex geographies.

Foreign Relations of the United States

Foreign Relations of the United States PDF Author: United States. Department of State
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 2148

Book Description


Framing the Holocaust

Framing the Holocaust PDF Author: Valerie Hébert
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 029934410X
Category : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
In December 1941, German police and their local collaborators shot 2,749 Jews at the beach in Sķēde, near Liepāja, Latvia. Twelve photographs were taken at the scene. These now-infamous images show people in extreme distress, sometimes without clothing. Some capture the very moments when women and children confronted their imminent deaths, while others show their dead bodies. They are nearly unbearable to look at--so why should we? Framing the Holocaust offers a multidimensional response to this question. While photographs are central to our memory of modern historical events, they often inhabit an ambivalent intellectual space. What separates the sincere desire to understand from voyeuristic curiosity? Comprehending atrocity photographs requires viewers to place themselves in the very positions of the perpetrators who took the images. When we engage with these photographs, do we risk replicating the original violence? In this tightly organized book, scholars of history, photography, language, gender, photojournalism, and pedagogy examine the images of the Sķēde atrocity along with other difficult images, giving historical, political, and ethical depth to the acts of looking and interpreting. With a foreword by Edward Anders, who narrowly escaped the December 1941 shooting, Framing the Holocaust represents an original approach to an iconic series of Holocaust photographs. This book will contribute to compelling debates in the emerging field of visual history, including the challenges and responsibilities of using photographs to teach about atrocity.

The Suburban Frontier

The Suburban Frontier PDF Author: Claire Mercer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520402383
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
"African cities are under construction. Beyond the dazzling urban redevelopment schemes and large-scale infrastructure projects reconfiguring central city skylines, the majority of urban residents are putting their cash, energy, and aspirations into finding land and building homes on city edges. In the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam, the self-built suburban frontier has become the place where the middle classes are shaped. This book examines how investment in property-land, houses, and landscape-is central to middle-class formation and urban transformation in contemporary Africa"--

State of Slum

State of Slum PDF Author: Paul Stacey
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786992051
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Book Description
Home to eighty thousand people, Accra's Old Fadama neighbourhood is the largest illegal slum in Ghana. Though almost all its inhabitants are Ghanaian born, their status as illegal 'squatters' means that they live a precarious existence, marginalised within Ghanaian society and denied many of the rights to which they are entitled as citizens. The case of Old Fadama is far from unique. Across Africa, over half the population now lives in cities, and a lack of affordable housing means that growing numbers live in similar illegal slum communities, often in appalling conditions. Drawing on rich, ethnographic fieldwork, the book takes as its point of departure the narratives that emerge from the everyday lives and struggles of these people, using the perspective offered by Old Fadama as a means of identifying wider trends and dynamics across African slums. Central to Stacey's argument is the idea that such slums possess their own structures of governance, grounded in processes of negotiation between slum residents and external actors. In the process, Stacey transforms our understanding not only of slums, but of governance itself, moving us beyond prevailing state-centric approaches to consider how even a society's most marginal members can play a key role in shaping and contesting state power.