Postmodern Cities and Spaces PDF Download

Author: Sophie Watson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cities and towns
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Author: Paula Geyh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135852197
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This book is about the contemporary city and those who live in it. It is thus also about the urban world of the era (extending roughly from the 1960s to the present) that we see as postmodern, and specifically about how the postmodern city is changing under the impact of globalization and new information and communication technologies. In particular, Geyh explores how the urban spaces of postmodernity (parks, plazas, streets, sidewalks) and postmodern urban subjectivities and communities respond to and create each other – how they become mutually constructing. While there is much in this book about what makes a city "postmodern," its primary focus is on how the postmodern city is experienced by its inhabitants, and in this respect the book is also a study of everyday life in the postmodern era. As such, it deals not only with the ways in which the postmodern city has developed out of economic, technological, political, and cultural structures that are different from those of the modern city, but also with how the postmodern city changes our ways of knowing and experiencing the world and ourselves as postmodern urban subjects, as citizens of postmodernity.

Author: Michael Pacione
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0415462010
Category : Urban geography
Languages : en
Pages : 745

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Book Description
This is the most comprehensive and readable book on urban geography in the array of contemporary literature on the subject.

Author: Markus Widmer
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640202724
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 29

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Book Description
Essay from the year 1998 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1 (A), University of Aberdeen (English Department), course: Read the City - Read the Text, 11 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Edward W. Soja called Los Angeles 'the quintessential postmodern metropolis'. This, however, shall not be the premise of my argument in this essay, because of the obvious danger of circularity. Yet I will use postmodern critics and compare my findings to postmodern models of culture, space and society. I will not discuss the term postmodernism itself, simply because the range of this essay does not allow my entering this ongoing debate. The term will be used as denoting both a period, beginning, for my purposes, in the 1960s, and a theory of cultural tendencies in contemporary life. For this essay, I will assume that postmodernism is a fact, a part of everyday reality, and that it differs substantially from modernism. The main body of this essay will consist of a discussion of the fundamental factors which define Los Angeles as postmodern space. I will focus on particularities that distinguish Los Angeles from other cities, most of all from those which have not yet crossed the threshold of postmodernity. Firstly, I will investigate the geographical instability of the city; the fact that it is threatened to be annihilated by natural forces such as earthquakes and the desert. Secondly, I will address the idea of the city as a desert, its horizontality, its vastness, its lack of centre. Thirdly, the structure on this flat surface will be addressed; the freeways as an arterial network, and the structure of segregating walls, both literal and metaphorical. Finally, I will conclude by investigating the parallels between the idea of instability that underlies all of the factors I discuss, and the notion of the unstable in postmodernism.

Author: Madhu Dubey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226167283
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Signs and Cities is the first book to consider what it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African-American literature. Dubey argues that for African-American studies, postmodernity best names a period, beginning in the early 1970s, marked by acute disenchantment with the promises of urban modernity and of print literacy. Dubey shows how black novelists from the last three decades have reconsidered the modern urban legacy and thus articulated a distinctly African-American strain of postmodernism. She argues that novelists such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, and John Edgar Wideman probe the disillusionment of urban modernity through repeated recourse to tropes of the book and scenes of reading and writing. Ultimately, she demonstrates that these writers view the book with profound ambivalence, construing it as an urban medium that cannot recapture the face-to-face communities assumed by oral and folk forms of expression.

Author: Kate Darian-Smith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134804555
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Text, Theory, Space is a landmark in post-colonial criticism and theory. Focusing on two white settler societies, South Africa and Australia, the contributors investigate the meaning of 'the South' as an aesthetic, political, geographical and cultural space. Drawing upon a wide range of disciplines which include literature, history, urban and cultural geography, politics and anthropology, the contributors examine crucial issues including: * defining what 'the South' encompasses * investigating ideas of space, history, land and landscape * claiming, naming and possessing land * national and personal boundaries * questions of race, gender and nationalism

Author: Prof David Herbert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134089341
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
This is the third major revision of a text first published in 1982 with the title Urban Geography: A First Approach and in 1990 as Cities in Space: City as Place. The study of urban geography remains an important part of the geographical curriculum both in schools and in higher education. This book analyses life in an urban society and in a world which is being transformed by the processes of urbanization: to study urban geography is to study environments and phenomena significant to our everyday lives. This is an introductory text which aims to present both more traditional and newer approaches to urban geography in an accessible and educational way.

Author: Michael J. Dear
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing
ISBN: 9780631217824
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description
"Documents the emergence and impact of postmodern thought in human geography. Intended as a companion volume to Michael Dear's The postmodern urban condition (Blackwell, 2000)."--Pref.

Author: Clare Copley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350081558
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Bringing together approaches from cultural and urban history, as well as German studies and political theory, Clare Copley's probing study reflects on post-unification responses to iconic Nazi architecture to reveal insights into power, legitimacy and memory politics in the Berlin Republic. Analysing public debates, physical interventions into the buildings and the structuring of the memory landscapes around them, the book demonstrates that the politics of memory impact not just upon the built environment of the post-dictatorship city, but upon the way decisions about it are made. In doing so, Nazi Buildings, Cold War Traces and Governmentality in Post-Unification Berlin makes the case for conceiving of a specifically 'post-authoritarian' governmentality and uses the responses to constructions like Goering's Aviation Ministry, Tempelhof Airport and the Olympic complex to explore its features.

Author: David B. Clarke
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415205146
Category : Capitalism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Working through the often controversial ideas of the consumer society's most influential theorists, Jean Baudrillard and Zygmunt Bauman, this book assesses the ways in which consumerism is reshaping the nature and meaning of the city.