Book Description
Over the last fifty years, the process of community building has been lost in the process of city building. City and suburban design divides us from others in our communities, destroys natural habitats, and fails to provide a joyful context for our lives. In Design for Ecological Democracy, Randolph Hester proposes a remedy for our urban anomie. He outlines new principles for urban design that will allow us to forge connections with our fellow citizens and our natural environment. He demonstrates these principles with abundantly illustrated examples--drawn from forty years of design and planning practice--showing how we can design cities that are ecologically resilient, that enhance community, and that give us pleasure.
Hester argues that it is only by combining the powerful forces of ecology and democracy that the needed revolution in design will take place. Democracy bestows freedom; ecology creates responsible freedom by explaining our interconnectedness with all creatures. Hester's new design principles are founded on three fundamental issues that integrate democracy and ecology: enabling form, resilient form, and impelling form. Urban design must enable us to be communities rather than zoning-segregated enclaves and to function as informed democracies. A simple bench at a centrally located post office, for example, provides an opportunity for connection and shared experience. Cities must be ecologically resilient rather than ecologically imperiled, adaptable to the surrounding ecology rather than dependent on technological fixes. Resilient form turns increased urban density, for example, into an advantage. And cities should impel us by joy rather than compel us by fear; good cities enrich us rather than limit us. Design for Ecological Democracy is essential reading for designers, planners, environmentalists, community activists, and anyone else who wants to improve a local community.
Book Description
Public spaces are no longer democratic places where all people are embraced and tolerated, but instead centers of commerce and consumption. Increasing privatization through collaborative public/private partnerships between municipalities and local businesses has transformed such places as Bryant Park and Union Square in the center of New York City into environments maintained by video surveillance and police control. Even city squares and village greens are no longer places for public discussion and casual loitering, but instead have become filled with regulated Green Markets, military re-enactments, and seasonal country fairs.
The linkage between public space and the globalizing political economy deserves closer scrutiny because societal mobilization about public space influences the shape of civil society, and by extension, democratic participation. With the increased globalization of the public realm, the boundaries of communication and social practices are increasingly informed by multiple culturalsettings creating new forms of public space. Studies of public spaces are rarely comparative much less global in their scope. This book expands this focus of work on public space to include a consideration of the transnational--in the sense of moving people and transformations in the nation/state--to expand our vision of what a public space is and how our notion of the "public" has changed.
Average customer rating:
- Democracy and the Knowledge of the Masses
- Surface View of Fight Club
- Another Tour de Force by Giroux
- A Book of Tremendous Insight -- Essential Reading
- Brilliant analysis of pressing social issues
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Public Spaces, Private Lives: Beyond the Culture of Cynicism (Culture and Politics)
Henry Giroux
Manufacturer: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
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ASIN: 0742515532 |
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Public Spaces, Private Lives argues for a new language of engaged hope, political action, and democratic public participation. In an era when Americans regard politicians and government cynically, this book challenges the assumption that politics is dead--and shows why and how citizens must claim a revitalized role in American public and democratic institutions.
Customer Reviews:
Democracy and the Knowledge of the Masses.......2003-09-22
In this latest cultural manifesto, Giroux analyzes how the current political focus on market-driven privileges and the elimination of everything "public" is affecting the education and culture of the masses. The result is a culture of cynicism in which the majority of people who are not included in the conservative elite are entrenched in public apathy, and disillusionment with a system that promises to do absolutely nothing for them. Giroux's recommendation for alleviating this social disaster is his specific field of "cultural pedagogy," as espoused in his generally dense uber-academic writing style. In layman's terms, we should refocus education of the public to include a greater emphasis on cultural and social knowledge, so people have stronger tools for making themselves part of the political system once again.
Key insights here include the contention in Chapter 5 that modern conservatism (in politics) and neo-liberalism (in economics) are pushing a utopian vision of perfect and efficient markets, which is an ideology as extreme and as divorced from reality as fascism or communism, and may prove to be just as destructive. Also, throughout the book and especially in Chapter 4, Giroux uncovers the elitism in right-wing attacks on education and media and how they are meant to exclude the non-elite masses from social power.
However, things take a major wrong turn in Chapter 3 as Giroux analyzes the film "Fight Club." This is a typically verbose academic over-analysis with an overload of obscure theories, tying the film in to huge social and political trends, then criticizing it for not discussing (and condemning) other huge trends and cultural effects. Giroux forgets that a film is a visual medium based on entertainment in addition to advancing ideas, and 90 minutes of audio/video is not sufficient for vast analyses such as Giroux's densely written academic thesis. Meanwhile, the book consists of five essays that were apparently written originally for different academic journals. This leads to a large amount of repetition throughout the book as Giroux makes the same statements (especially with introductory background and observations) for different audiences. But once you get past those problems, this is a very enlightening and insightful look at the dire trends in public society and how it could be destroyed by the current crush of private ideologies. [~doomsdayer520~]
Surface View of Fight Club.......2002-09-30
I bought this book for once reason- to read the analysis of Figh Club in it, as it's one of my favorite works and I enjoy reading criticism of it. Giroux's take on the film was so basic and surface it was an utter waste of my time and money. At least "The Cinema of Generation X" by Peter Hanson had more substance to it.
Another Tour de Force by Giroux.......2002-01-24
This book marks a new watershed in his trademark theorizing of schools and society. Taking on corporate-produced cynicism he draws on several important theorists to articulate a viable oppositional pedagogy. An absolute must read.
A Book of Tremendous Insight -- Essential Reading.......2002-01-22
Giroux's new book makes a major intervention in contemporary social thought as well as the field of education. Part of what makes the book so important is that it demonstates how a culture of cynicism about politics is produced largely by corporate media -- that is, how citizens are schooled into inaction and hopelessness by people and institutions who stand to benefit financially by doing so. But the book doesn't stop with social criticism. It suggests ways that teaching and other forms of culture work can reinvigorate the political scene and civic life to expand democratic participation. The book is even more important since 9-11 as we turn on the TV and learn that questioning foreign and domestic policy is un-American and that the way to be patriotic is to give public wealth to big corporations. Giroux's book shows how culture and money are central to the way power is wielded. Yet is a hopeful, inspiring, and even patriotic call for a critical and engaged citizenship and a shift of power to people.
Brilliant analysis of pressing social issues.......2002-01-22
Henry Giroux ressurects once again the vitality of dissent and its ability to pave the road of possibility. In this new book, Giroux provides a trenchant critique of neoliberalism's capacity to construct as common sense the need to dismantle all things public in the name of freedom. But as he shows, freedom in this context is not tied to social responsibility, but rather exists to atomize people, creating private lives that are often on public display, but nevertheless fail to become public concerns. As a teacher-educator, I would recommend this book to anyone who cares about the conflation of democracy and capitalism and its devastating effects on our sense of public values and social concerns. Giroux, once again, situates himself as an insurgent public intellectual in the tradition of Marcuse and Baldwin.
Average customer rating:
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Public Space and Democracy
Manufacturer: University of Minnesota Press
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Habermas and the Public Sphere (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)
ASIN: 0816633886 |
Book Description
Political Science/Media Studies
A timely look at the ways new technologies affect public life and power relationships.
Moving from classical Greece to the present, Public Space and Democracy provides both historical accounts and a comparative analytical framework for understanding public space both as a place and as a product of carious media, from speech to the Internet. How, the authors ask, is the political process of representation-so central to democratic politics since the seventeenth century-affected by the explosion of speed in the media? These essays make a powerful case for thinking of modern technological developments not as the end of public space, but as an opportunity for reframing the idea of the public and of the public space as the locus of power.
Contributors: Sylviane Agacinski, Institut des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; Benjamin R. Barber, Rutgers U; Marcel Detienne, Johns Hopkins U; Paul Dumouchel, U of Quebec, Montreal; J. Peter Euben, UC Santa Cruz; Marcel Hénaff, U of California, San Diego; Jacqueline Lichtenstein, U of Paris; Anne Norton, U of Pennsylvania; Tracy B. Strong, U of California, San Diego; Sigheki Tominaga, Kyoto U; Dana R. Villa, UC Santa Barbara; and Samuel Weber, UCLA.
A philosopher and anthropologist, Marcel Hénaff is professor at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Claude Lévi-Strauss (Minnesota, 1998) and Sade: Invention of the Libertine Body (Minnesota, 1999). Tracy B. Strong is professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Frederich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (2000), Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Politics of the Ordinary (2001) as well as other books and articles. He was editor of Political Theory from 1990 to 2000.
Book Description
The Internet has been billed by some proponents as an "electronic agora" ushering in a "new Athenian age of democracy." That assertion assumes that cyberspace's virtual environment is compatible with democratic practice. But the anonymous sociality that is intrinsic to the Internet seems at odds with theories of democracy that presuppose the possibility, at least, of face-to-face meetings among citizens. The Internet, then, raises provocative questions about democratic participation: Must the public sphere exist as a physical space? Does citizenship require a bodily presence?
In Cybering Democracy, Diana Saco boldly reconceptualizes the relationship between democratic participation and spatial realities both actual and virtual. She argues that cyberspace must be viewed as a produced social space, one that fruitfully confounds the ordering conventions of our physical spaces. Within this innovative framework, Saco investigates recent and ongoing debates over cryptography, hacking, privacy, national security, information control, and Internet culture, focusing on how different on-line practices have shaped this particular social space. In the process, she highlights fundamental issues about the significance of corporeality in the development of civic-mindedness, the exercise of citizenship, and the politics of collective action.
Diana Saco is an independent scholar based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Book Description
This is a bold new study of the recent emergence of democracy in Latin America. Leonardo Avritzer shows that traditional theories of democratization fall short in explaining this phenomenon. Scholars have long held that the postwar stability of Western Europe reveals that restricted democracy, or "democratic elitism," is the only realistic way to guard against forces such as the mass mobilizations that toppled European democracies after World War I. Avritzer challenges this view. Drawing on the ideas of Jürgen Habermas, he argues that democracy can be far more inclusive and can rely on a sphere of autonomous association and argument by citizens. He makes this argument by showing that democratic collective action has opened up a new "public space" for popular participation in Latin American politics.
Unlike many theorists, Avritzer builds his case empirically. He looks at human rights movements in Argentina and Brazil, neighborhood associations in Brazil and Mexico, and election-monitoring initiatives in Mexico. Contending that such participation has not gone far enough, he proposes a way to involve citizens even more directly in policy decisions. For example, he points to experiments in "participatory budgeting" in two Brazilian cities. Ultimately, the concept of such a space beyond the reach of state administration fosters a broader view of democratic possibility, of the cultural transformation that spurred it, and of the tensions that persist, in a region where democracy is both new and different from the Old World models.
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The European Union and the Public Sphere: A communicative space in the making? (Routledge Studies on Democratising Europe)
Fossum/Schlesin
Manufacturer: Routledge
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0415384567 |
Book Description
The European Union is often attacked for its Â`democratic deficitÂ', namely its deficiencies in representation, transparency and accountability, as well as its lack of popular support. Can these shortcomings be counteracted by the development of a viable European public sphere?
This book assesses the possible formation of a communicative space that might enable and engender the creation of a transnational or a supranational public. The contributors consider the EUÂ's democratic credentials and how well it communicates, and they also evaluate the major institutions and their links to general publics.
The European Union and the Public Sphere emphasizes a Â`deliberative democraticÂ' perspective on the public sphere, addressing some key questions:
• What are the prospects for a European public sphere?
• Should we think in terms of the EU having a single public sphere, or are overlapping public spheres a more viable option?
• What do this bookÂ's findings on the question of the public sphere tell us about the EU as a political entity?
Students and scholars of European democracy, political communication, and the politics of institutions will all be greatly interested by this book.
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Ordinary Place/ Extraordinary Events: Democracy Citizenship, and Public Space in Latin America (Planning, History and Environment)
Clara Irazabal
Manufacturer: Routledge
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ASIN: 0415354528 |
Book Description
This book reveals the recent urban history of ten major Latin American cities-- Mexico City, Havana, Santo Domingo, Caracas, Bogotá, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Lima, Santiago, and Buenos Aires--through studies of their public spaces and the events that have taken place there. The case studies provide an unprecedented opportunity to look at cities with comparable cultural and political histories, and to investigate the use and meaning of urban space by ordinary people in extraordinary, history-making events.
While some argue that public spaces are a prerequisite for the expression, representation and reinforcement of democracy, equally they can be said to be used in the pursuit of totalitarianism. In Latin America, there have been the experiences of the Santiago of Pinochet, the Buenos Aires of Videla, the Asuncion of Strossner, or the Caracas of Pérez Jiménez, among others. Yet even here political demonstrations in public spaces played a critical role in the eventual revocation of thoseregimes, and/or in the subsequent re-establishment of democracy.
For the two opposing political visions--democracy versus totalitarianism-public streets and spaces, in both the past and present, have been the site for the enactment and contestation of various stances on democracy and citizenship.
Indeed, the public sphere, as the intangible realm for the expression, reproduction, and/or recreation of a society's culture and polity, usually encompasses opposing political visions and nurtures acute social confrontations which are played out in tangible space.
By exploring the use and meaning of public spaces in Latin American cities over time, the book sheds light on contemporary redefinitions of citizenship and democracy in the Americas, and by extrapolation, the world.
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Creating Public Spaces in the Social Studies Classroom.: An article from: Social Education
Susan Adler
Manufacturer: National Council for the Social Studies
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Binding: Digital
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ASIN: B0008HMRE2
Release Date: 2005-07-28 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Social Education, published by National Council for the Social Studies on January 1, 2001. The length of the article is 5278 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Creating Public Spaces in the Social Studies Classroom.
Author: Susan Adler
Publication:
Social Education (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 2001
Publisher: National Council for the Social Studies
Volume: 65
Issue: 1
Page: 6
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This digital document is an article from First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, published by Institute on Religion and Public Life on October 1, 1997. The length of the article is 1983 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
From the supplier: The trend in domestic architecture of providing a bathroom for every bedroom in middle-class suburban dwellings reflects the growing privatization of American life and the shrinking of shared public culture in the US. American cultural values have shifted from emphasizing self-renunciation for the common good to fostering individual privacy and self-expression. Democracy demands some degree of self-denial and broader social focus to save it from disintegration, even as its espousal of the values of liberty and equality contribute to the rise of the individualism that could eventually destroy it.
Citation Details
Title: Democracy's private places. (changes in domestic architecture reflect social changes)
Author: Philip Bess
Publication:
First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life (Refereed)
Date: October 1, 1997
Publisher: Institute on Religion and Public Life
Issue: n76
Page: p16(3)
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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