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Jane Jacobs is universally recognized as one of the key figures in American urbanism. The author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she uncovered the complex and intertwined physical and social fabric of the city and excoriated the urban renewal policies of the 1950s. As the legend goes, Jacobs, a housewife, single-handedly stood up to Robert Moses, New York City's powerful master builder, and other city planners who sought first to level her Greenwich Village neighborhood and then to drive a highway through it. Jacobs's most effective weapons in these David-versus-Goliath battles, and in writing her book, were her powers of observation and common sense. What is missing from suc...
The classic #1 New York Times bestseller that answers the age-old question Why is incompetence so maddeningly rampant and so vexingly triumphant? The Peter Principle, the eponymous law Dr. Laurence J. Peter coined, explains that everyone in a hierarchy—from the office intern to the CEO, from the low-level civil servant to a nation’s president—will inevitably rise to his or her level of incompetence. Dr. Peter explains why incompetence is at the root of everything we endeavor to do—why schools bestow ignorance, why governments condone anarchy, why courts dispense injustice, why prosperity causes unhappiness, and why utopian plans never generate utopias. With the wit of Mark Twain, the psychological acuity of Sigmund Freud, and the theoretical impact of Isaac Newton, Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull’s The Peter Principle brilliantly explains how incompetence and its accompanying symptoms, syndromes, and remedies define the world and the work we do in it.
Jane Jacobs is an icon in urban planning. She became world-famous with her book 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities'. Through her book and her street-level activism in 1960s New York, she became a key figure in urban planning issues, and her efforts following her breakthrough have been continuously interpreted and discussed. In this anthology, thirteen writers consider unique aspects of the burning questions she raises concerning what fundamentally makes a society sustainable. Together the contributors provide a sweeping portrait of Jacobs activities from the 1930s to the 2000s and situate her work in contemporary contexts.
This book provides a comprehensive, critical overview of the developments in architecture from 1960 to 2010. The first section provides a presentation of major movements in architecture after 1960, and the second, a geographic survey that covers a wide range of territories around the world. This book not only reflects the different perspectives of its various authors, but also charts a middle course between the 'aesthetic' histories that examine architecture solely in terms of its formal aspects, and the more 'ideological' histories that subject it to a critique that often skirts the discussion of its formal aspects.
A collection of 28 essays written by a range of educators, including presidents, deans, faculty members, students, and religious life professionals, on themes of religious pluralism and spirituality in higher education. Essays provide scholarly analysis, practical information, and inspiration for those who agree that higher education can combine both head and heart in the teaching and learning process and in campus and community life. Kazanjian is Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life and Co-Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Program at Wellesley College. Laurence is Co-Founder and Director of the Education as Transformation Project at Wellesley College. Material stems from a September 1998 meeting. The volume lacks a subject index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Chronicles the life of the founder of Liberty Media, from his protests against the Vietnam War and his jam sessions with Sha Na Na through his work as a political consultant and businessman and his battle against cancer.
Telling Our Lives explores how three working-class women--from Jewish, African-American, and Irish-American backgrounds--connect across their differences through storytelling and conversation. Three distinct voices intertwine in this book as the authors, now college professors, discuss family legacies of diaspora and dislocation, analyzing how these have shaped their personal and professional lives. Social class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and spirituality intersect and diverge in these pages, as the authors reflect on how they have been enriched and transformed by the relationships forged in the process of storytelling.
In the 1970s, New York City hit rock bottom. Crime was at its highest, the middle class exodus was in high gear, and bankruptcy loomed. Many people credit New Yorks ''master builder'' Robert Moses with turning Gotham around, despite his brutal, undemocratic. and demolition-heavy ways. Urban critic and journalist Roberta Brandes Gratz contradicts this conventional view. New York City, Gratz argues, recovered precisely because of the waning power of Moses. His decline in the late 1960s and the drying up of big government funding for urban renewal projects allowed New York to organically regenerate according to the precepts defined by Jane Jacobs in her classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and in contradiction to Mosess urban philosophy. As American cities face a devastating economic crisis, Jacobss philosophy is again vital for the redevelopment of metropolitan life. Gratz who was named as one of Planetizens Top 100 Urban Thinkers gives an on-the-ground account of urban renewal and community success.
Vast interior spaces have become ubiquitous in the contemporary city. The soaring atriums and concourses of mega-hotels, shopping malls and transport interchanges define an increasingly normal experience of being 'inside' in a city. Yet such spaces are also subject to intense criticism and claims that they can destroy the quality of a city's authentic life 'on the outside'. Interior Urbanism explores the roots of this contemporary tension between inside and outside, identifying and analysing the concept of interior urbanism and tracing its history back to the works of John Portman and Associates in 1960s and 70s America. Portman – increasingly recognised as an influential yet understudied ...