Книги

Manuel Castells, the most influential urban theorist of our time, has revolutionized modern thought on the processes of advanced capitalism and the generation of inequality. This collection of Castells' classic writing, which also includes two new essays written specifically for this book, reflects the panoramic breadth of his knowledge, the clarity of his approach, and the scholarly rigor and intellectual depth of his theoretical methods. Editor Ida Susser, through her own experience and collaboration with Castells, has selected his most significant essays and placed them within a theoretical and historical context. The Castells Reader on Cities and Social Theory is an essential resource for students and scholars of sociology, anthropology, political science, and urban studies.

Harcourt, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Lewis Mumford's massive historical study brings together a wide array of evidence--from the earliest group habitats to medieval towns to the modern centers of commerce (as well as dozens of black-and-white illustrations)--to show how the urban form has changed throughout human civilization.

Данная хрестоматия адресована студентам, приступающим к изучению культурных исследований.Раскрываются история развития и ключевые понятия этой дисциплины, намечаются дальнейшие направления ее развития. Расширенное второе издание включает 38 эссе, которые предваряют краткие замечания редактора. Материалы хрестоматии охватывают теорию и методологию культурных исследований, дают представление о новейших научных разработках в данной области, в частности, о современном состоянии исследований по таким направлениям, как изчуение киберкультуры, глобализации, постколониализма, публичной сферы, культурной политики. Кроме того, книга содержит обширную библиографию и список литературы, рекомендованной для дальнейшего изучения.

An analysis of the communities, buildings, and surrounding regions which have characterized cities from medieval times to the present

The book advances two propositions, one in the field of archaeology, the other in economics. Traditional archaeologists had always presumed that a city could only appear where there was enough food for a great number of inhabitants not producing food exclusively to exist. Hence, agriculture logically preceded the city. Jacobs argues that the opposite is true. It is through trade in wild animals and grains that people in cities discovered agriculture and then exported it (like our modern factory towns) to the outskirts of the city itself. In this work Jacobs also tackles the question of economic booms. Great cities with flourishing economies have had one of these economic booms. She asserts that it is through import replacement that cities have such economic growth. She also asserts that cities are at the root of all economic growth (agricultural, manufacturing, technology, information, etc) and therefore import replacement is the cause to all economic growth. In an interview with Bill Steigerwald in Reason Magazine (06/01), Jacobs said that if she is remembered for being a great intellectual she will be remembered not for her work concerning city planning, but for the discovery of import replacement.

The movement for same-sex marriage has triggered an unprecedented crisis in the social norms and laws governing marriage. All great civilizations have sought to unite, in the institution of marriage, the goods of sexual intimacy, childbearing and childrearing, and life-long love between adults. But the last five decades have witnessed the erosion of marriage as a public institution in the developed world. The separation of the goods previously united in marriage has led thoughtful people to question why marriage should be denied to homosexuals. This volume brings together the best of contemporary scholarship on marriage from a variety of disciplines—history, ethics, economics, law and public policy, philosophy, sociology, psychiatry, political science—to inform, and reform, public debate. Rigorous yet accessible, these studies aim to rethink and re-present the case for marriage as a positive institution and ideal that is in the public interest and serves the common good. The essays in this volume were presented to an audience of scholars, journalists, public policy experts, and other professionals, at a conference sponsored by the Witherspoon Institute. The authors are among the most eminent authorities on marriage and public policy in the English-speaking world.

Книга-словарь представляет собой введение в историю и культурный контекст появления такого направления теоретической мысли, как постмодернизм. "Постмодернизм" является наиболее неопределенным понятием современной социальной мысли. В самом общем виде постмодернизм определяется авторами как понятие, имеющее непосредственное отношение к отрицанию культурных штампов, вокруг которых выстраивалась культурная мысль Запада на протяжении почти двух веков (начиная с XVIII в.). Этот словарь - попытка критического взгляда на постмодерную мысль. Первая часть книги состоит из четырнадцати эссе, посвященных различным аспектам постмодерной мысли. Вторая часть - словарь терминов и категорий, где можно найти сжатые описания основных теорий и культурных направлений, давших жизнь такому понятию, как посмодерн. Несмотря на сжатость, описания содержательны и информативны.

The subtitle to this, the tenth book by architecture professor (and lively writer) Joseph Rykwert--namely, "The City in the Twenty-First Century and Beyond"--is a whopping misnomer. It is only in the final chapter that Rykwert pays attention (and briskly, even then) to urban developments of recent years and to what we might expect in the 100 years to come. What this book really is, despite what its subtitlers intended, is at once a broad-ranging and satisfyingly detailed social history of some of the great cities of the modern world (mostly the Western one, with a marked emphasis on the two cities Rykwert calls home--New York and London--plus Paris) and an inquiry into how well they have served the material and spiritual lives of the people who inhabit them.

Ranging comfortably and coherently back and forth between the Old World and the New, Rykwert begins with the Industrial Revolution, its factories, the throngs of poor country people that flooded the cities to work in them, and the subsequent 150-year challenge faced by urban centres to house, transport and entertain these throngs cheaply, space-consciously and hygienically. But Seduction of Place is not so much a people's history of the city as it is a vibrantly researched and chronicled play-by-play of the big public--and some private--works of the major metropolises. The book also tackles the luminaries--including Haussmann, Olmstead and Vaux, L'Enfant, and Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (who pioneered the enduring school of axial planning at Paris' Ecole Polytechnique)--whose names are often uttered in the same breath as the parks, boulevards and edifices they brought to life.

Social critics like Tocqueville, Marx, Engels, Fourier and Ruskin are just as well represented here, however, ably providing the basis for Rykwert's persistent question of what cities ought to be and how responses to that have diverged and evolved over the years, apart from what they have become, for better or ill, and how they got that way. Even though the book takes a more or less familiar course through the 20th century--from the emergence of subways, skyscrapers, and modernism through post-war urban planning, suburban sprawl, and subsequent urban decay and attempts at renewal--Rykwert knows when to dart away from well-known people, places and things to chronicle the planning of lesser-known English "New Towns" or of distinctly 20th-century cities like New Delhi, Islamabad, Australia's Canberra, and--rather famously--Brasilia, the ultimate "zoned" city.

The final chapter pays the requisite nod to the postmodernist implications of, for example, Celebration, Florida, (Disney's controversial new spin on the "company town") but is really distinguished by Rykwert's startlingly on-the-mark reading of how such wildly popular mega-museums as the new international Guggenheim franchise (with Gehry's Bilbao "branch" currently eclipsing Wright's New York "flagship") have come to best personify the encroachment of corporate globalisation in the urban civic realm. It is a fitting conclusion for a book that manages so gracefully to wed an engrossing history of urban growth with the deeper intellectual, cultural and ethical questions it raises--the very questions that the speculators, preservationists and "ordinary citizens" will still have to answer in creating and sustaining the great cities of the 21st century. --Timothy Murphy --

We think of the city as a place where anything goes. Take the sensational fantasies and lurid antics of single women on Sex in the City or young men on Queer as Folk, and you might imagine the city as some kind of sexual playground—a place where you can have any kind of sex you want, with whomever you like, anytime or anywhere you choose.

But in The Sexual Organization of the City, Edward Laumann and company argue that this idea is a myth. Drawing on extensive surveys and interviews with Chicago adults, they show that the city is—to the contrary—a place where sexual choices and options are constrained. From Wicker Park and Boys Town to the South Side and Pilsen, they observe that sexual behavior and partnering are significantly limited by such factors as which neighborhood you live in, your ethnicity, what your sexual preference might be, or the circle of friends to which you belong. In other words, the social and institutional networks that city dwellers occupy potentially limit their sexual options by making different types of sexual activities, relationships, or meeting places less accessible.

To explain this idea of sex in the city, the editors of this work develop a theory of sexual marketplaces—the places where people look for sexual partners. They then use this theory to consider a variety of questions about sexuality: Why do sexual partnerships rarely cross racial and ethnic lines, even in neighborhoods where relatively few same-ethnicity partners are available? Why do gay men and lesbians have few public meeting spots in some neighborhoods, but a wide variety in others? Why are African Americans less likely to marry than whites? Does having a lot of friends make you less likely to get a sexually transmitted disease? And why do public health campaigns promoting safe sex seem to change the behaviors of some, but not others?

Considering vital questions such as these, and shedding new light on the city of Chicago, this work will profoundly recast our ideas about human sexual behavior.