Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750

Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750 PDF Author: Mikkel Thelle
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031469542
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description


Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750

Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750 PDF Author: Mikkel Thelle
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9783031469534
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This book explores the historical relationship between ‘technonatures’ and urban transformations in the Global North. In recent years, various interdisciplinary movements such as Urban Political Ecology, STS and New Materialism have affected urban history and generated new scholarly insights into the formation of cities and urban life based on notions of hybridity, entanglement and metabolism. While scholars have increasingly attempted to grasp the socio-natural and technical complexity of cities, studies dealing with urban transformation within urban history have, however, mostly concentrated on political actors or broader social and economic changes. Seeking to introduce the concept of technonatures to the field of urban environmental history, this book instead takes its empirical and analytical starting point in the technonatural fabric of cities. Focusing on urban rivers, dumps, railways, flood walls and housing, the chapters of the book thus examines how different entanglements of environment, technology and agency have shaped cities and processes of urbanization in the Global North from the seventeenth century onwards. By foregrounding the transformative role of urban natures, materialities and technologies in shaping the politics of urban life and cities more broadly, the book aspires to probe the potentiality of technonatures as a conceptual and analytical strategy for urban environmental historians.

Statistical Reference Index

Statistical Reference Index PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Statistics
Languages : en
Pages : 1036

Book Description


America, History and Life

America, History and Life PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Canada
Languages : en
Pages : 742

Book Description
Provides historical coverage of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Includes information abstracted from over 2,000 journals published worldwide.

Transport Planning and Mobility in Urban East Africa

Transport Planning and Mobility in Urban East Africa PDF Author: Nadine Appelhans
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100028879X
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Book Description
This book critically explores the relationship between mobility patterns, transport provision and urban development in East African cities. Bringing together contributions on the futures of mobility in urban East Africa, the chapters examine transport provision, mobility patterns, location-specific modes of transport and transformative factors for transport and mobility in the rapidly urbanising region. The book outlines different mobility needs to be addressed in transport planning to serve and shape the respective cities and examines the decision-making process in transport planning and the level of accountability to the public. The contributors show the dialectic between innovation in transport/mobility and urban development under rapid urbanisation and discusses how to practically integrate mobility and transport provision into urban development. This book will be of interest to scholars in urban planning, transport planning, transport geography, social sciences and African studies.

Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain

Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain PDF Author: Jon Agar
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1911576585
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Book Description
Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain brings together historians with a wide range of interests to take a uniquely wide-lens view of how technology and the environment have been intimately and irreversibly entangled in Britain over the last 300 years. It combines, for the first time, two perspectives with much to say about Britain since the industrial revolution: the history of technology and environmental history. Technologies are modified environments, just as nature is to varying extents engineered. Furthermore, technologies and our living and non-living environment are both predominant material forms of organisation – and self-organisation – that surround and make us. Both have changed over time, in intersecting ways. Technologies discussed in the collection include bulldozers, submarine cables, automobiles, flood barriers, medical devices, museum displays and biotechnologies. Environments investigated include bogs, cities, farms, places of natural beauty and pollution, land and sea. The book explores this diversity but also offers an integrated framework for understanding these intersections.

The Social Construction of Technological Systems, anniversary edition

The Social Construction of Technological Systems, anniversary edition PDF Author: Wiebe E. Bijker
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262517604
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 471

Book Description
An anniversary edition of an influential book that introduced a groundbreaking approach to the study of science, technology, and society. This pioneering book, first published in 1987, launched the new field of social studies of technology. It introduced a method of inquiry—social construction of technology, or SCOT—that became a key part of the wider discipline of science and technology studies. The book helped the MIT Press shape its STS list and inspired the Inside Technology series. The thirteen essays in the book tell stories about such varied technologies as thirteenth-century galleys, eighteenth-century cooking stoves, and twentieth-century missile systems. Taken together, they affirm the fruitfulness of an approach to the study of technology that gives equal weight to technical, social, economic, and political questions, and they demonstrate the illuminating effects of the integration of empirics and theory. The approaches in this volume—collectively called SCOT (after the volume's title) have since broadened their scope, and twenty-five years after the publication of this book, it is difficult to think of a technology that has not been studied from a SCOT perspective and impossible to think of a technology that cannot be studied that way.

In Our Own Backyard

In Our Own Backyard PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309048788
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Book Description
This volume takes a fresh lookâ€"primarily from a technological perspectiveâ€"at the nation's "infrastructure": a collection of diverse modes that function as a system supporting a wide range of economic and social activities. Within an infrastructure system, operating and maintenance procedures, management practices, and development policies (i.e., the software) must work together with the facilities' hardware. This study has a strongly local perspective, drawing valuable information from workshops held in Phoenix, Cincinnati, and Boston. These workshops illustrated common elements of local experience that offer infrastructure practitioners, policymakers, and the public at large both understanding and guidance in the form of specific strategies that can lead toward "win-win" situations, where parties with potentially opposing interests seek a way to resolve infrastructure issues so that all parties gain. Local issues, combined across many regions, give infrastructure its strategic national significance. The book recommends specific principles that should be applied in national policy to support effective local infrastructure development and management.

A Farewell to Alms

A Farewell to Alms PDF Author: Gregory Clark
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400827817
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution--and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it--occur in eighteenth-century England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? Why didn't industrialization make the whole world rich--and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer? In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark tackles these profound questions and suggests a new and provocative way in which culture--not exploitation, geography, or resources--explains the wealth, and the poverty, of nations. Countering the prevailing theory that the Industrial Revolution was sparked by the sudden development of stable political, legal, and economic institutions in seventeenth-century Europe, Clark shows that such institutions existed long before industrialization. He argues instead that these institutions gradually led to deep cultural changes by encouraging people to abandon hunter-gatherer instincts-violence, impatience, and economy of effort-and adopt economic habits-hard work, rationality, and education. The problem, Clark says, is that only societies that have long histories of settlement and security seem to develop the cultural characteristics and effective workforces that enable economic growth. For the many societies that have not enjoyed long periods of stability, industrialization has not been a blessing. Clark also dissects the notion, championed by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, that natural endowments such as geography account for differences in the wealth of nations. A brilliant and sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically developed through outside intervention, A Farewell to Alms may change the way global economic history is understood.

Material Powers

Material Powers PDF Author: Tony Bennett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134015151
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
This edited collection is a major contribution to the current development of a ‘material turn’ in the social sciences and humanities. It does so by exploring new understandings of how power is made up and exercised by examining the role of material infrastructures in the organization of state power and the role of material cultural practices in the organization of colonial forms of governance. A diverse range of historical examples is drawn on in illustrating these concerns – from the role of territorial engineering projects in seventeenth-century France through the development of the postal system in nineteenth-century Britain to the relations between the state and road-building in contemporary Peru, for example. The colonial contexts examined are similarly varied, ranging from the role of photographic practices in the constitution of colonial power in India and the measurement of the bodies of the colonized in French colonial practices to the part played by the relations between museums and expeditions in the organization of Australian forms of colonial rule. These specific concerns are connected to major critical re-examination of the limits of the earlier formulations of cultural materialism and the logic of the ‘cultural turn’. The collection brings together a group of key international scholars whose work has played a leading role in debates in and across the fields of history, visual culture studies, anthropology, geography, cultural studies, museum studies, and literary studies.