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Price:
$22.00
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Summary:
Cities participate in the production of meaning by providing places populated with objects for words to refer to. Inscriptions on these objects (labels, billboards, newspapers, graffiti) provide another layer of meaning. And today, the flow of digital information - from one device to another in the urban scene - creates a digital network that also exists in physical space. "Placing Words" examines this emerging system of spaces, flows, and practices in a series of short essays - snapshots of the city in the twenty-first century. Mitchell questions the necessity of flashy downtown office towers in an age of corporate web sites. He casts the shocked-and-awed Baghdad as a contemporary Guernica. He describes architectural makeovers throughout history, listing Le Corbusier's Fab Five Points of difference between new and old architecture, and he discusses the architecture of Manolo Blahniks. He pens an open letter to the Secretary of Defense recommending architectural features to include in torture chambers. He compares Baudelaire, the Parisian flaneur, to Spiderman, the Manhattan traceur. He describes the iPod-like galleries of the renovated MoMA and he recognizes the camera phone as the latest step in a process of image mobilization that began when artists stopped painting on walls and began making pictures on small pieces of wood, canvas, or paper. The endless flow of information, he makes clear, is not only more pervasive and efficient than ever, it is also generating new cultural complexities.

Form:
books

Placing words : symbols, space and the city

Publication:
January 1900, Cambridge, Mass.

Author:
William J. Mitchell

Subject:
Architectural Theory

Form:
books

Title:
Walking between slums and skycrapers: illusions of open space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai

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Author:
Tsung-Yi Michelle Huang

Publication:
April 2004, Hong Kong

Title:
Walking between slums and skycrapers: illusions of open space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai

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Price:
$24.95
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Summary:
The book is concerned with the effects of globalization on living space focusing specifically on East Asian metropolises, such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai. Globalization has given rise to accessible catch-phrases such as the 'global village' and 'this is a small world.' In each part of the book the author juxtaposes a 'social' account of the city's urban space as it has been reshaped by the process of globalization with a 'private' account of the urban landscape as experienced by its walkers. Rather than rest here, the author wishes to show that for many of the inhabitants of the new global city, the 'shrinking world' phenomenon is deeply literal: the 'lived' space of everyday life is shrinking to make room for rezoning, construction of new infrastructure, and space modification - all in the name of urban development. Tsung-yi Michelle Huang received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her works on cinema, literature, cultural studies, global cities, and Hong Kong culture have been published in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of Narrative Theory, among others. Recently she has been working in a project that defines and examines specific East Asian metropolises as both 'linked' cities and distinctive global centers, mapping the tension within these domains. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English Literature at National Taiwan Normal University.

Form:
books