Subject: Architecture / History / Contemporary (1945-)

Subject: Architecture / History / Contemporary (1945-)

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A Territory in Conflict

|9780822948452|Eras of Development and Urban Architecture in Gaza|A Territory in Conflict explores Israeli and Palestinian projects of modernization and development in the Gaza Strip, from the outset of Israel’s military occupation in 1967 to the Oslo Accords of 1993. Rather than reduce the Gaza Strip to an arena of war and violence, Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat resurrects the urban and architectural history of Gaza’s cities and the varied perspectives and identities of the people who shaped them. Through a close examination of planning activities in occupied Palestinian territory focusing on development, settlement, and security, her book highlights the collision between Israeli occupation,…

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Model Schools in the Model City

|9780822948469|Race, Planning, and Education in the Nation’s Capital|Access to educational resources has been a tool of liberation for Black Americans from the antebellum period to the present. With this book, Amber N. Wiley emphasizes the value of education as a means for social equality—Black Americans wanted the American Dream to apply to them, and equal opportunity for quality education was at the forefront of making that dream a reality. Model Schools in the Model City chronicles how Black Washingtonians used public education as a means of racial uplift in the face of entrenched white resistance and repeated assertions of white…

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Governing by Design

|9780822961789|Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century| Governing by Design offers a unique perspective on twentieth-century architectural history. It disputes the primacy placed on individuals in the design and planning process and instead looks to the larger influences of politics, culture, economics, and globalization to uncover the roots of how our built environment evolves. In these chapters, historians offer their analysis on design as a vehicle for power and as a mediator of social currents. Power is defined through a variety of forms: modernization, obsolescence, technology, capital, ergonomics, biopolitics, and others. The chapters explore the diffusion of power through…

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Improvised Cities

|9780822945369|Architecture, Urbanization, and Innovation in Peru| Beginning in the 1950s, an explosion in rural-urban migration dramatically increased the population of cities throughout Peru, leading to an acute housing shortage and the proliferation of self-built shelters clustered in barriadas, or squatter settlements. Improvised Cities examines the history of aided self-help housing, or technical assistance to self-builders, which took on a variety of forms in Peru from 1954 to 1986. While the postwar period saw a number of trial projects in aided self-help housing throughout the developing world, Peru was the site of significant experiments in this field and pioneering in its…

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Of Greater Dignity than Riches

|9780822965695|Austerity and Housing Design in India| Extreme poverty, which intensified in India during colonial rule, peaked in the 1920s—after decades of imperialist exploitation, famine, and disease—a time when architects, engineers, and city authorities proposed a new type of housing for India’s urban poor and industrial workers. As Farhan Karim argues, economic scarcity became a central inspiration for architectural modernism in the subcontinent. As India moved from colonial rule to independence, the Indian government, business entities, international NGOs, and intergovernmental agencies took major initiatives to modernize housing conditions and the domestic environment of the state’s low-income population. Of Greater Dignity than…

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