Inventing Greenland

Inventing Greenland
Author: Bert De Jonghe
Publisher: Actar D, Inc.
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2022-03-25
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1638408068

Inventing Greenland is a critical and timely assemblage of stories highlighting a shifting landscape – one born from the imagination, projections, and ambitions of a wide range of actors. Geared towards a design audience, this book combines spatial sensibilities with Greenland's local cultural, social, and environmental realities. Inventing Greenland is a critical and timely assemblage of stories highlighting a shifting landscape – one born from the imagination, projections, and ambitions of a wide range of actors. Today, especially within the design discipline, there is a lack of understanding of Greenland as a complex constellation of perspectives, histories, and forces. This book aims to fill that knowledge vacuum. Geared towards architects, landscape architects, and urban planners, this book combines spatial sensibilities with local cultural, social, and environmental realities. More specifically, spatial sensibility is a way of responding to and reading beyond a diverse array of relationships in the built environment. Furthermore, Inventing Greenland provides a broad understanding of a unique island undergoing intense transformation while drawing attention to its historical and current challenges and emerging opportunities. Distinctly, each individual story is anchored to a common thread and interest in architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism. Such discourse may serve to prepare designers at large as they take on projects in a rapidly developing Arctic. In the past, the extremeness of Greenland's landscape did not impede the first immigration of Inuit hunting tribes, Norsemen from becoming Greenland Vikings, and European explorers from searching for new trade routes and eventually reaching the North Pole. Every single one of them read, saw, and understood the Greenlandic landscape differently, while projecting their hopes and dreams onto new landscapes, seascapes, and icescapes. As will become apparent, similar hopes and dreams of the early settlers and explorers continue in postcolonial times in a different set of actors, among them the U.S. military, foreign investors, and an Inuit-run government.

Design and the Built Environment of the Arctic

Design and the Built Environment of the Arctic
Author: Leena Cho
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2023-12-22
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1003828787

Design and the Built Environment of the Arctic is a concise introductory guide to the design and planning of the built environments in the Arctic region. As the global forces of change are becoming more pronounced in the Arctic, the future trajectories for living environments, city-making processes, and their adaptive capacities need to be addressed directly. This book presents 11 new and original contributions from both leading and emerging scholars and practitioners, positioning the Arctic as a dynamic, diverse, and lived place at the nexus of unprecedented socioenvironmental transformations. The volume offers key concepts for understanding and spatializing Arctic cities and landscapes; similarities and differences in the development of design and planning approaches responsive to specific climatic and cultural conditions; and historical and geographic case studies that provide unique perspectives for the management of the built environment, from the scales of a building and infrastructure to cities and territories. Altogether, the contributions expand regional Arctic design scholarship to understand how the variability of the Arctic context influences the designed urban, architecture, and landscape systems, and offer numerous lessons for design and other forms of spatial practice both within and beyond the Arctic. This is a unique resource for researchers, creative practitioners, policymakers, and community decision-makers, as well as for advanced undergraduate and graduate students.

Far and Away

Far and Away
Author: Andrew Solomon
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 640
Release: 2017-05-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1476795053

From the winner of the National Book Award and the National Books Critics’ Circle Award—and one of the most original thinkers of our time—“Andrew Solomon’s magisterial Far and Away collects a quarter-century of soul-shaking essays” (Vanity Fair). Far and Away chronicles Andrew Solomon’s writings about places undergoing seismic shifts—political, cultural, and spiritual. From his stint on the barricades in Moscow in 1991, when he joined artists in resisting the coup whose failure ended the Soviet Union, his 2002 account of the rebirth of culture in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban, his insightful appraisal of a Myanmar seeped in contradictions as it slowly, fitfully pushes toward freedom, and many other stories of profound upheaval, this book provides a unique window onto the very idea of social change. With his signature brilliance and compassion, Solomon demonstrates both how history is altered by individuals, and how personal identities are altered when governments alter. A journalist and essayist of remarkable perception and prescience, Solomon captures the essence of these cultures. Ranging across seven continents and twenty-five years, these “meaty dispatches…are brilliant geopolitical travelogues that also comprise a very personal and reflective resume of the National Book Award winner’s globe-trotting adventures” (Elle). Far and Away takes a magnificent journey into the heart of extraordinarily diverse experiences: “You will not only know the world better after having seen it through Solomon’s eyes, you will also care about it more” (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Nature

Nature
Author: Sir Norman Lockyer
Publisher:
Total Pages: 688
Release: 1905
Genre: Electronic journals
ISBN:

Collapse

Collapse
Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 608
Release: 2013-03-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0141976969

From the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive is a visionary study of the mysterious downfall of past civilizations. Now in a revised edition with a new afterword, Jared Diamond's Collapse uncovers the secret behind why some societies flourish, while others founder - and what this means for our future. What happened to the people who made the forlorn long-abandoned statues of Easter Island? What happened to the architects of the crumbling Maya pyramids? Will we go the same way, our skyscrapers one day standing derelict and overgrown like the temples at Angkor Wat? Bringing together new evidence from a startling range of sources and piecing together the myriad influences, from climate to culture, that make societies self-destruct, Jared Diamond's Collapse also shows how - unlike our ancestors - we can benefit from our knowledge of the past and learn to be survivors. 'A grand sweep from a master storyteller of the human race' - Daily Mail 'Riveting, superb, terrifying' - Observer 'Gripping ... the book fulfils its huge ambition, and Diamond is the only man who could have written it' - Economis 'This book shines like all Diamond's work' - Sunday Times

Inventing the Immigration Problem

Inventing the Immigration Problem
Author: Katherine Benton-Cohen
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2018-05-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674985648

In 1907 the U.S. Congress created a joint commission to investigate what many Americans saw as a national crisis: an unprecedented number of immigrants flowing into the United States. Experts—women and men trained in the new field of social science—fanned out across the country to collect data on these fresh arrivals. The trove of information they amassed shaped how Americans thought about immigrants, themselves, and the nation’s place in the world. Katherine Benton-Cohen argues that the Dillingham Commission’s legacy continues to inform the ways that U.S. policy addresses questions raised by immigration, over a century later. Within a decade of its launch, almost all of the commission’s recommendations—including a literacy test, a quota system based on national origin, the continuation of Asian exclusion, and greater federal oversight of immigration policy—were implemented into law. Inventing the Immigration Problem describes the labyrinthine bureaucracy, broad administrative authority, and quantitative record-keeping that followed in the wake of these regulations. Their implementation marks a final turn away from an immigration policy motivated by executive-branch concerns over foreign policy and toward one dictated by domestic labor politics. The Dillingham Commission—which remains the largest immigration study ever conducted in the United States—reflects its particular moment in time when mass immigration, the birth of modern social science, and an aggressive foreign policy fostered a newly robust and optimistic notion of federal power. Its quintessentially Progressive formulation of America’s immigration problem, and its recommendations, endure today in almost every component of immigration policy, control, and enforcement.

Norse Greenland

Norse Greenland
Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2012-12-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1101629355

A timely and fascinating exploration of the collapse of prehistoric Norse society in Greenland—excerpted from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jared Diamond’s Collapse This excerpt from the New York Times–bestselling book Collapse takes a timely and fascinating look at prehistoric Norse Greenland—the closest approximation of a controlled experiment in collapse in history. One island, two unique societies (Norse and Inuit). Only one of these societies would succeed—the other would fail. But how? With his trademark accessibility and comprehensiveness, Diamond documents how environmental damage, climate change, loss of friendly contacts and the rise of hostile ones, and the unique political, economic, and social settings of prehistoric Greenland combine to demonstrate exactly why and how societies choose to fail or succeed. Jared Diamond's latest book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, is available from Viking.

Inventing Reality

Inventing Reality
Author: Jeffrey Schrank
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2020-03-15
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1642379360

You are a reality inventor. People simply don't give you enough credit; in fact, you don't appreciate your own creative ability. What does it mean to be a reality inventor? Isn't reality simply stuff that's out there? We see,hear, taste, feel, and smell it; but we certainly don't invent it. This book claims that you do. Humans are animals who create stories. We are unable to not story--we speak and think in stories called sentences. INVENTING REALITY explores the psychology of story making and confabulation. We confabulate when we create stories without an awareness of our authorship. These confabulations are not perceived as invented stories; instead they become our personal reality.