Communities Books - Page 17

The Buddha in the Jungle

Kamala Tiyavanich

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Review of Buddha in the Jungle 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful.

Dr. Kamala Tiyavanich's latest book,"The Buddha in the Jungle," is a wonderful collection of fascinating tales, rich in the exotic beauty and mystery of 19th century Buddhist Thailand. From the horrors of the charnel grounds to the quiet serenity of tropical forest shrines, Dr. Tiyavanich's stories of Buddhist practioners and saints will captivate, inspire and teach the reader. A native of Thailand and a Buddhist practitioner in the Thai Theravada trdition, Dr. Tiyavanich writes in her characteristic style of detail and clarity, making this scholarly work fresh, exciting and easily accessible to every reader. I found this book to be a joy to read and I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in Bhuddism.

Editorial Review:

In "The Buddha in the Jungle", real-life stories about 19th and early 20th century Buddhist monks in Thailand are ingeniously intermingled with experiences recorded by their Western contemporaries. The stories tell of giant snakes, bandits, boatmen, midwives, and guardian spirits and collectively portray a Buddhist culture in all its imaginative and geographical concreteness. By juxtaposing these eyewitness accounts, Kimala Tiyavanich presents a new and vivid picture of Buddhism as it was lived and of the natural environments in which the Buddha's teachings were practiced.

Cities and Urban Cultures (Issues in Cultural and Media Studies)

Deborah Stevenson

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Editorial Review:

*What is distinctive about urban life?
*What key trends have shaped the contemporary city?
*How have the city and urban cultures been explained by sociology and cultural studies?

This is the first book to explore cities and urban life from the perspectives of both sociology and cultural theory. Through an interdisciplinary approach and use of case material, the book demonstrates that the 'real' city of physicality and struggle and the 'imagined' city of representations are entwined in the construction of urban cultures.

Starting with a comparison of the rural and the urban, the book considers ways of imagining the city and of conceptualising urban cultures. It goes on to investigate the implications of several pivotal urban and cultural trends, such as the use of the arts and local cultures in city re-imaging, and the ways in which modernism, postmodernism and globalisation have shaped the built environment and the orientation of academic enquiry. Also examined is the way in which representations of the urban landscape in film, literature, art, and popular texts, have informed dominant ideas about the way certain city spaces - including city centres, urban waterfronts, and so-called 'global cities' - should look, function and 'feel'.

Designed as a text for undergraduate courses in cultural studies, sociology and wider social science, this book traces the development of urban environments from the nineteenth century to the present, and illuminates the nature of urban life.

Concise Townscape

Gordon Cullen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

The Answer to Every Question 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

If Gordon Cullen's book 'The Concise Townscape' were required reading for anyone entering an architectural education, the level of discourse on design would skyrocket. Cullen puts to words and images some of the more intangible qualities of space that nevertheless affect how we view our surroundings. It is, in my opinion, a categorization of experiences... discussing things like 'serial vision' (the progression of visual experience as one moves along a path) 'outdoor room and indoor landscape', 'looking into enclosure', 'viscosity', etc. etc. This book is more than a dictionary or thesaurus of spatial terms, however. It is primarily a book on experience- getting to the heart of how a space actually feels; how it is occupied, how it CAN be occupied, and what are the qualities that make it that way. If read for what it truly is, it renders the current fashion of architectural pornography rather silly.

And this, my friend, is where its true strength in Academia comes into play. Sexy renderings only take one so far, but your design professor has most likely read this book. Understanding Cullen's work will bring the discourse up, and move your work beyond a visual one-liner.

But that's just my opinion, and I could be wrong.

Editorial Review:

This book pioneered the concept of townscape. 'Townscape' is the art of giving visual coherence and organization to the jumble of buildings, streets and space that make up the urban environment. It has been a major influence on architects, planners and others concerned with what cities should look like.

The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City

Neil Smith

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Great ideas spoilt by the style 3 out of 5 stars.
14 of 20 people found this review helpful.

I have to be careful when writing about the book that has become the backbone to my undergraduate dissertation. Smith goes where others have not dared by suggesting the real reasons behind change in New York and other western cities. His ideas are sound, but as with so many reactionary books I got the impression that he had decided on the answers before asking the questions. Research has little balance at all, and you begin to worry about its values when the book somehow manages to link revanchism to such wide ranging issues as "the organized murder of street kids in Rio de Janeiro, the Hindu massacres in Bombay, the pre-election slaughter of South Africans in Durban, the mayhem in Baghdad streets after the barbaric US bombing in 1991". However once he gets down from his socialist soapbox, the theories of revanchism can be useful for interperating change in western inner-cities. Not a book you will put down easily, but also one not to taken at face value...

If you are interested in this subject check out M. Davis (1990) City of Quartz, H. Liggett & D. Perry (1995) Spatial Practices, and P. Knox (1992) The Restless Urban Landscape.

Editorial Review:

Documenting in gritty detail the conflicts that gentrification brings to the new urban "frontiers", the book explores the interconnections of urban policy, eviction and homelessness.

The Living City

Roberta Brandes Gratz

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A great look at how cities live and die! 5 out of 5 stars.
12 of 14 people found this review helpful.

Gratz explores how and why cities survive, thrive and die and explores why small, incremental change is often a more successful revitalization strategy than super "downtown malls" or sportsplexes.

It turns out the key to a lively and lovely city is people of all socioeconomic brackets who actually LIVE downtown, which attracts business, arts and culture!

A very pleasant story about urban revitalization 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I have read a lot of books about the issue and they use to be boring and very dificcult to read. This one is the great exception! I really have enjoyed the way the stories are narrated, and the complete information they provide. As an architect specialized in Urban Economics at Buenos Aires , I have found this book very useful for my own research on the issue.

Doesn't Puzzle The Reader 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

After working on a project with Roberta in New Orleans, it was a delight to read her book. The subject matter was never something that interested me, but she writes it in such a way that it is relateable for everyone, just not architects or city planners. Her style is interesting and her ideas are well thought out.

Classic Readings in Urban Planning: An Introduction

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Good book painfully marred by errors 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This text contains many important writings on planning theory. However, the book contains so many errors that it becomes tedious to read and, in some cases, the meaning of the original writing is obscured completely. There is a piece written by John Forester that has a section from one paragraph mistakenly placed within another paragraph, causing that particular portion of Forester's work to make no sense. My recommendation would be to wait for a revised edition. I think it is shameful to publish a text with so many errors--especially when the text is often used in graduate-level courses, where students are often criticized for their own writing errors.

Editorial Review:

Urban Planning is a broad based field which seeks to apply systematic thinking and innovative knowledge to the problems of both natural and man-made environments. Planning involves using and interpreting government regulatory powers in a comprehensive manner to meet public objectives of balancing urban growth with the protection and preservation of our environments. Realizing that urban planning involves aspects of social policy, transportation, housing, economic development, and the environment, Stein created a text of classic readings that focused on all these areas of urban design. The majority of selected articles were drawn from academic journals, and a brief introduction or overview is provided for each chapter.

The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life

Richard, Sennett

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Intellectually intriguing though practically problematic 4 out of 5 stars.
11 of 11 people found this review helpful.

An intriguing and convincing argument: modern affluent societies suffer from a malaise. People are tending to isolate themselves into communities of other people whom they judge to be just like themselves. But the homogeneity of these "purified communities" is as much a myth as the threat from outsiders who are different. These myths are in fact convenient excuses for not undertaking the difficult and painful process of really getting to know each other. The capacity for developing such myths arises during adolescence; the ability to persist in believing them derives from affluence; and a peculiarly modern intensification of family life propagates them into the society at large. The design of our communities has come to reflect and to reinforce these myths. The model for a community so afflicted can be found in American suburbia.

The result: people in affluent, technological societies are frozen in an adolescent stage of development, unable to see each other as individuals behind the preconceived abstractions of that stage. They are disinclined to get involved in their communities, except to lash out in violent reaction against feared outsiders.

Equally intriguing, but less convincing, is the proposed solution: destroy the myths of purified community. Destroy them by designing our cities in such a way that they force diverse people to encounter one another under conditions of conflict. Reduce the municipal bureaucracy's control of schooling and zoning. Stop central planning of land use in advance. Increase the density of urban environments; integrate socioeconomic and racial groups. By turning control and policing over to the residents of dense, diverse urban communities, by thus forcing people to work together to "survive," we can force them also to get to know each other as individuals, to break through the stereotypes formed by groups in isolation.

These new "survival communities" will not necessarily be happy places. Tension and conflict are to be expected; there will be no general sense of "belonging" or of "fitting in"--only an endless succession of encounters with diverse individuals whose collaboration one needs in order to solve problems in the community.

What will make someone want to live in a survival community? The primary motivation that Mr. Sennett identifies is boredom, "a specifically modern kind of boredom" with the sterility of purified suburbia: " . . . the tiredness with routine that men now experience will be the conscious force moving people step by step into encountering social diversity (p. 187)."

Bored as I may be, I remain skeptical of the power of this "force." I lived for ten years in east Rogers Park in Chicago--the same kind of dense, diverse, unstable neighborhood that Mr. Sennett advocates. In much the same way as Mr. Sennett describes, its urban "richness" appealed to me when I was young. After a few years, however, the "encounters" with people engaged in littering, illegal parking, trespassing, drug dealing, and a host of other obnoxious and inconsiderate acts wore me down. I freely admit to using the police force and the city government to help me with a lot of these problems. Even if I had the will to be a community activist, I certainly did not have the time.

I moved to Oak Park (a suburb on Chicago's western border) six years ago. Oak Park prides itself on being "diverse," but I believe that "diverse" is just one more attribute of the "purified myth" that this community subscribes to. It is just another word for the refreshing discovery that underneath the superficial differences of skin color there are after all lots of people "just like us." But who knows? Maybe I like it that way. My life is certainly a lot easier. The only community action that threatens is the yearly block party, where our differences remain submerged--in a keg of beer.

At any rate, if a person like me--having a choice and having, I believe, more than the average taste for diversity--can't hack it in the survival community, I doubt whether there are significant numbers of people who can. Intellectually, I sympathize, but practically I'm just not up to it.

Now, it is true that my big city neighborhood did not have ALL of the attributes of Mr. Sennett's "survival community." Certainly, it had none of the independence from central bureaucratic control that he prescribes. Maybe I would have liked it better had city government not assumed every power but the power to complain--and then again, maybe not.

Aside from my skepticism over the power of boredom to push us into the survival community, I found this book to offer a compelling hypothesis for the cause of a social phenomenon that is all too easy to see.

There are many fascinating subordinate observations and arguments that my synopsis above overlooks. Particularly interesting is the psychological explanation of the development of "purified identity" during adolescence and its extension through the "intensified" family into a myth of purified communal identity.

Perhaps even more interesting is the author's explanation of the psychosocial dynamic of the "constructive failure" whereby the individual's purified adolescent identity breaks down in the face of unmanageable complexity. From this failure comes a strengthened selfhood that paradoxically awakens one's concern for others. The goal of the survival community is to trigger this constructive failure in every citizen.

I was surprised by the resonance between Mr. Sennett's ideas and others circulated much more recently by authors on a subject as seemingly remote as software development. Just as Mr. Sennett's "adult" personality, these authors have recognized the impossibility of controlling complexity--in the form of a software development project. Like him, many of them are also urging discontinuation of traditional, centralized, task-oriented direction of any group of people engaged in a collaborative effort in a complex environment. Superior results will emerge, they argue, if the group is left alone to work out its own solutions in the presence merely of a clear goal and a few simple rules.

So enough said. Read it yourself. It's worth the trouble.

Editorial Review:

Richard Sennett is one of the world's leading sociologists, and this book, first published in 1970, was his first single-authored work. It launched his exploration of communities and how they live in cities, and outlined his view that order breeds narrow, violence-prone lives, while an 'equilibrium of disorder' brings vigour and diversity to urban life. "The New York Times" described it as 'the best available contemporary defence of anarchism'. "The Uses of Disorder" followed the student and urban rebellions of the late 1960s. But it remains uncannily apposite to the problems of city life forty years on. In a new preface Sennett considers the response to the book over those years, and relates it to the circumstances faced by the inhabitants of cities in the twenty-first century. The body of the text remains unchanged, ready for a new generation of readers.

Reasons for Success: Learning from Instructive Experiences in Rural Development (International Development)

Norman Uphoff, Milton J. Esman, Anirudh Krishna

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Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Economics -> Economic Policy & Development

Editorial Review:

Reasons for Success draws lessons presented in the earlier work, Reasons for Hope. It is enriched by the knowledge and insights the authors have gained from decades of participation, observation, and scholarship on Third World development. Concerned that rural development is increasingly neglected in economic development circles, the authors demonstrate that improving rural living standards depends more on ideas, leadership, and appropriate methods and less on money alone.

City Lights: Urban-Suburban Life in the Global Society

E. Barbara Phillips

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Editorial Review:

Fully updated for the 1990's and skillfully blending perspectives from the social sciences with insights from the visual arts and humanities, this lively, imaginative text provides a comprehensive introduction to cities and how they work. Focusing on issues facing cities in an ever-shrinking global society, it covers urbanization and suburbanization, community, spatial and social structure, the urban economy and landscape. Incorporating over 160 illustrations plus literary excerpts and suggestions for further reading, this updated edition also examines such specialized topics as the AIDS epidemic, homelessness, the effect of recent technological advances in communications and architecture, and the state of race relations and various multi-cultural issues. The author looks at classical theories and integrates modern urban theory into discussions of topics like the world urban systems, metropolitan space and local power structures, and offering numerous case studies and first-hand accounts of important and timely subjects.

Gold Rush Capitalists: Greed and Growth in Sacramento

Mark A. Eifler

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Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> State & Local -> California
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> State & Local -> General

Editorial Review:

Sacramento, California, was one of the largest cities in the West during the later half of the nineteenth century. Situated between the bay and the Sierra foothills, Sacramento seemed to fit a pattern of natural urban growth that capitalized upon natural resources and transportation routes. The city was also the capital of one of the most powerful states in the nation, but oddly, it has received little attention from urban historians. As a supply center for gold rush miners in the mid-nineteenth century, Sacramento was visited daily by thousands of wide-eyed adventurers who wrote detailed letters and journals about their travels in the West. Hundreds of amateur reporters compiled a rich record of the early years of city development, providing a rare opportunity for researchers to trace the economic and social development of a western city.

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the city was also battered by a series of natural and man-made disasters and one of the most violent land riots in California’s history. Through this turmoil, Sacramento’s many resident and visiting observers commented on what they perceived as the strengths and weaknesses of its urban leaders in great detail, thus providing a window onto the seemingly daily struggle for leadership and authority in a boom city.

Eifler takes the reader on a journey into early western urbanization with his study of Sacramento. He examines the earliest founding of the city by speculators looking to cash in on gold rush trade, uncovering the rampant competition between a handful of men intent on creating a city that would dominate the mining trade. The arrival of thousands of miners into the region, who had their own ideas about what role a city should play in an isolated mining frontier, provides another complication in Sacramento’s growth as miners and city founders clashed on nearly every civic issue. Rising tensions between these groups erupted into open warfare just twenty months after the city’s founding.

Eifler analyzes the aftermath of the riot, which discredited both founders and miner/settlers and gave rise to a new urban commercial class removed from the labors of mining. Thus, Sacramento’s residents sought to create stable urban institutions that could, hopefully, safely negotiate the travails of unrestricted commercialism. Gold Rush Capitalists is an engaging, valuable glimpse of western urban development through the eyes of classes and individuals often at odds with each other but never completely divorced.