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While global cities have mostly been characterized as sites of intensive and extensive economic activity, the quest for global city status also increasingly rests on the creative production and consumption of culture and the arts. Arts, Culture and the
Urban reuse, creative production, consumerism, and heritage protection have formed an alliance for the transformation of inner-city districts of Shanghai. This in-depth study, based on the author’s intimate familiarity of the local scene and supplemented by her critical outsider’s insights, describes the strategies, players, and processes of a uniquely Chinese model of urban transformation. Concepts like "Urban Loopholes", "Preservation via inhabitation", and "Gentrification with Chinese characteristics" characterize the specific mechanisms for urban development in Shanghai. Urban Loopholes invites the reader to rethink the necessity of urban resilience in the face of globalization’s impact for change.
Urban Politics blends the most insightful classic and current political science and related literature with current issues in urban affairs. The book’s integrative theme is ‘power,’ demonstrating that the study of urban politics requires an analysist to look beyond the formal institutions and procedures of local government. The book also develops important subthemes: the impact of globalization; the dominance of economic development over competing local policy concerns; the continuing importance of race in the urban arena; local government activism versus the ‘limits’ imposed on local action by the American constitutional system and economic competition; and the impact of national ...
This study, the first of two parts, gives a comprehensive account of Chinese textiles and textile technology and deals with the evolution of bast fibre spinning and silk-reeling in the history of China. These operations are the basic techniques in the production of yarn and thread, pre-requisite to weaving, and any study of Chinese textile technology must start with the raw material obtained from fibre plants such as hemp, ramie, jute, cotton, etc, and silk reeled off from cocoons of the domestic silkworm. The time-span covered runs from the neolithic to the nineteenth century. Archaeological and pictoral evidence, the bulk of it hitherto unpublished in the West, is brought together with Chi...