The Seduction of Place
The History and Future of Cities
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
No other place on earth is as full both of promise and of dread as the city; it is at once alienating and exciting. These concentrations of people have not, however, come about as the result of vast immutable, impersonal forces, but because of human choices. The worsening or betterment of urban life will also be the result of choices. Our choices.
That cities display and represent the personal desires of their inhabitants is central to Joseph Rykwert’s argument in The Seduction of Place. Insisting that they are the physical constructs of communities, he travels through history to trace their roots in ancient times and outlines current attempts and future possibilities to improve the metropolis. Rykwert includes a broad range of urban landscapes: 18th-and 19th-century Paris and London, the current sprawl of Mexico City and Cairo, planned cities like Brasilia, and, finally, New York, the world capital.
Always opinionated and often controversial, Rykwert assesses how and why urban projects from the past succeeded or failed and what lessons can be drawn from them for the future. Ultimately, The Seduction of Place is a deeply felt and powerfully reasoned call for a commitment by every citizen to the creation of a more humane place to live.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The city is at the center of the modern world: whether we live in one or not, they affect our lives through commerce, culture and civitas. In this complexly argued, beautifully written and provocative meditation on the nature of cities, Rykerk (The Idea of a Town) investigates the intricate relationships between the individual and the urban. By examining the historical development of cities--from the invention of the water lock in mid-15th-century Italy that helped facilitate water transport, to the founding of U.S. utopian communities, such as New Harmony in the early 18th century, to the expansion of Manhattan into a grid of streets in the mid-19th century--he explores how cities grew to meet human needs, analyzing which needs remain unfulfilled. In full command of a wide range of knowledge, Rykwerk blithely moves from a discussion of how the aesthetics of John Ruskin and William Morris dovetailed with the political theories of Engles to how changes in tourism affected urban planning and development. These large themes match the "grandiloquence" of those great cities and the role they played in the development of the last three centuries. At the book's end, Rykwerk discusses how contemporary cities can be made more congenial, drawing upon examples such as the role of the car in modern China, the urban theories and activist agenda of Jane Jacobs and the place of museums in the urbanscape. Rykwerk uses nuance, practicality and foresight to show how, through "little plans" composed of "sobriety and effective actions," cities can be useful and wholesome to those who inhabit them.