Transparent City

Transparent City
Author: Ondjaki
Publisher: Biblioasis
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2018-05-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1771961449

NOMINATED FOR THE 2019 BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD A VANITY FAIR HOT TYPE BOOK FOR APRIL 2018 A VULTURE MUST-READ TRANSLATED BOOK FROM THE PAST 5 YEARS A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF 2018 A LIT HUB FAVOURITE BOOK OF THE YEAR A WORLD LITERATURE TODAY NOTABLE TRANSLATION OF 2018 In a crumbling apartment block in the Angolan city of Luanda, families work, laugh, scheme, and get by. In the middle of it all is the melancholic Odonato, nostalgic for the country of his youth and searching for his lost son. As his hope drains away and as the city outside his doors changes beyond all recognition, Odonato’s flesh becomes transparent and his body increasingly weightless. A captivating blend of magical realism, scathing political satire, tender comedy, and literary experimentation, Transparent City offers a gripping and joyful portrait of urban Africa quite unlike any before yet published in English, and places Ondjaki, indisputably, among the continent’s most accomplished writers.

X-Urbanism

X-Urbanism
Author: Mario Gandelsonas
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 1999
Genre: City planning
ISBN: 1568981511

Examines configurations of urban space, analyzing them in ways that blur the traditional opposition between figure and ground.

The foundation for an open source city

The foundation for an open source city
Author: Jason Hibbets
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2013
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1300923172

Explore the five elements of an open source city using Raleigh, North Carolina as a case study. See how the open source characteristics of collaboration, transparency, and participation are shaping the open government and open data movements. This book showcases the open source culture, government policies, and economic development happening in Raleigh and acts as a guide for other cities to pursue their open source city brand.

City A-Z

City A-Z
Author: Steve Pile
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2000
Genre: Cities and towns
ISBN: 0415207274

A unique compendium by an international team of contributers which opens up the reader to surprise twists of the imagination, new forms of criticism and to new ways of finding ourselves in fragments of the urban.

Transforming City Governments for Successful Smart Cities

Transforming City Governments for Successful Smart Cities
Author: Manuel Pedro Rodríguez-Bolívar
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2015-07-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 3319031678

There has been much attention paid to the idea of Smart Cities as researchers have sought to define and characterize the main aspects of the concept, including the role of creative industries in urban growth, the importance of social capital in urban development, and the role of urban sustainability. This book develops a critical view of the Smart City concept, the incentives and role of governments in promoting the development of Smart Cities and the analysis of experiences of e-government projects addressed to enhance Smart Cities. This book further analyzes the perceptions of stakeholders, such as public managers or politicians, regarding the incentives and role of governments in Smart Cities and the critical analysis of e-government projects to promote Smart Cities’ development, making the book valuable to academics, researchers, policy-makers, public managers, international organizations and technical experts in understanding the role of government to enhance Smart Cities’ projects.

Consuming Media

Consuming Media
Author: Johan Fornäs
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2020-05-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000180719

Inspired by Walter Benjamin's classical Arcades Project, Consuming Media is a pioneering exploration of the interface between communication, shopping and everyday life. Based on a six-year study by over a dozen scholars on a specific site, it analyses the links between power, media and consumption in contemporary urban culture.Illustrated with rich ethnographic detail, Consuming Media scrutinises four main media circuits - print media, media images, sound and motion, and hardware machines - to assess how media texts and technologies are selected, purchased and used.Exploring the relations between different media, the nature of cultural citizenship and the power relations of public space, Consuming Media presents an ethnography of globalisation and develops a new approach to understanding media consumption.

In the Skin of the City

In the Skin of the City
Author: António Tomás
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2022-06-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478022760

With In the Skin of the City, António Tomás traces the history and transformation of Luanda, Angola, the nation’s capital as well as one of the oldest settlements founded by the European colonial powers in the Southern Hemisphere. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research alongside his own experiences growing up in Luanda, Tomás shows how the city’s physical and social boundaries—its skin—constitute porous and shifting interfaces between center and margins, settler and Native, enslaver and enslaved, formal and informal, and the powerful and the powerless. He focuses on Luanda’s “asphalt frontier”—the (colonial) line between the planned urban center and the ad hoc shantytowns that surround it—and the ways squatters are central to Luanda’s historical urban process. In their relationship with the state and their struggle to gain rights to the city, squatters embody the process of negotiating Luanda’s divisions and the sociopolitical forces that shape them. By illustrating how Luanda emerges out of the continual redefinition of its skin, Tomás offers new ways to understand the logic of urbanization in cities across the global South.

Theories and Practices of Architectural Representation

Theories and Practices of Architectural Representation
Author: Mike Christenson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2019-03-25
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1351677780

Theories and Practices of Architectural Representation focuses on the study of architectural knowledge approached through the lens of representation: the making of things-about-buildings. Architectural knowledge systems continue to shift away from traditional means, such as books and photographs, into modes dominated by digital technologies. This shift parallels earlier ones developed by craftspeople into the knowledge of painters and writers, or shifts from manually produced knowledge into the mode of photography and film. These historical shifts caused profound disruptions to established patterns, and in general the shift currently underway is no different. This book considers essential questions including: How does architecture become known? How is knowledge about architecture produced, structured, disseminated, and consumed? How in particular do historical patterns of knowledge production persist within contemporary culture and society? How are these patterns affected by changes in technology, and how does technology create new opportunities? These questions are examined through five chapters dealing with exemplary buildings and representational methods selected from worldwide locations including the United States, Japan, and Italy. Theories and Practices of Architectural Representation proposes that historical theories and practices of architectural representation remain distinct, robust, and uniquely viable within the context of rapidly changing technologies. It is an essential read for students of architectural theory of representation.

Cities Made Differently

Cities Made Differently
Author: David Graeber
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 121
Release: 2024-11-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0262549336

Full of playful graphics, provocative questions, and curious facts, this book asks what makes a city and how we might make them differently. What makes a city a city? Who says? Drafted over decades out of a dialogue between artist and author Nika Dubrovsky, the late anthropologist David Graeber, and Nika’s then four-year-old son, this delightful and provocative book Cities Made Differently opens a space for invention and collaboration. Fusing anthropology, literature, play, and drawing, the book is essentially a visual essay that asks us to reconsider our ideas about cities and the people who inhabit them. Drawing us into a world of history and myth, science and imagination, Graeber and Dubrovsky invite us to rethink the worlds we inhabit—because we can, and nothing is too strange or too wonderful to be true. With inspired pictures and prompts, Cities Made Differently asks what a city is, or could be, or once was. Sleeping at the bottom of the ocean? Buried in lava? What were those cities of long ago, and what will the cities of the future be? They might be virtual, ruled by AI, or islands of beautiful architecture afloat in seas of greenery. They might be utopian places of refuge or refugee camps as far as the eye can see. On land, underground or aloft, excavated or imagined, cities, this book tells us in provocative and funny ways, can be anything we want them to be—and what we want them to be can tell us something about who we are, what it is to be human, and what’s possible when we make way for wonder. Cities Made Differently exists in two versions, one for reading and thinking, the other, downloadable at a4kids.org, for drawing and dreaming.

Smart Master Planning for Cities

Smart Master Planning for Cities
Author: T. M. Vinod Kumar
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2022-05-16
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9811923868

This book, based on international collaborative research, presents a state-of-the-art design for “Smart Master Planning” for all metropolises, megacities and meta cities as well as at sub-city zonal and community and neighborhood level. Smart Master Planning accepts that all cities are a smart city in making in a limited way as far as the six components for Smart Cities; namely, smart people, smart economy, smart environment, smart mobility and smart Governance are concerned. Smart Master Planning in any city can only be designed and executed by active roles of Smart People and Smart City Government and is a joint and synchronous effort of E-Democracy, E-Governance and ICT-IOT system in a 24 hour 7-day framework on all activities. In addition to use of Information and Communication Technologies, and Remote Sensing, the design of smart Master Planning utilizes domain specific tools of many aspects of a city to realize the coordinated, effective and efficient planning, management, development and conservation that improve ecological, social, biophysical, psychological and economic well-being in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of development ecosystems and stakeholders. This book will present 12 case studies covering more than 12 cities or more cities centered on domain-specific smart planning components. Case studies of Domain Innovations include Urban Land management, Master Planning for Water Management, Comprehensive Master Planning Innovations, Smart Use of Master Plan basics, Integrated Smart Master Planning, and Citizen-Centric Master Planning.