Let Us Build Cities for Life


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Let Us Build Us a City


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Daugherty considers the principles of literary art in a series of essays that focus on the nature of artistic vision and the creative individual's relationship to the world. The book reads like a master class on writing as practice.




Soft City


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Imagine waking up to the gentle noises of the city, and moving through your day with complete confidence that you will get where you need to go quickly and efficiently. Soft City is about ease and comfort, where density has a human dimension, adapting to our ever-changing needs, nurturing relationships, and accommodating the pleasures of everyday life. How do we move from the current reality in most cites—separated uses and lengthy commutes in single-occupancy vehicles that drain human, environmental, and community resources—to support a soft city approach? In Soft City David Sim, partner and creative director at Gehl, shows how this is possible, presenting ideas and graphic examples from around the globe. He draws from his vast design experience to make a case for a dense and diverse built environment at a human scale, which he presents through a series of observations of older and newer places, and a range of simple built phenomena, some traditional and some totally new inventions. Sim shows that increasing density is not enough. The soft city must consider the organization and layout of the built environment for more fluid movement and comfort, a diversity of building types, and thoughtful design to ensure a sustainable urban environment and society. Soft City begins with the big ideas of happiness and quality of life, and then shows how they are tied to the way we live. The heart of the book is highly visual and shows the building blocks for neighborhoods: building types and their organization and orientation; how we can get along as we get around a city; and living with the weather. As every citizen deals with the reality of a changing climate, Soft City explores how the built environment can adapt and respond. Soft City offers inspiration, ideas, and guidance for anyone interested in city building. Sim shows how to make any city more efficient, more livable, and better connected to the environment.




A Little Piece of Ground


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A Little Piece Of Ground will help young readers understand more about one of the worst conflicts afflicting our world today. Written by Elizabeth Laird, one of Great Britain’s best-known young adult authors, A Little Piece Of Ground explores the human cost of the occupation of Palestinian lands through the eyes of a young boy. Twelve-year-old Karim Aboudi and his family are trapped in their Ramallah home by a strict curfew. In response to a Palestinian suicide bombing, the Israeli military subjects the West Bank town to a virtual siege. Meanwhile, Karim, trapped at home with his teenage brother and fearful parents, longs to play football with his friends. When the curfew ends, he and his friend discover an unused patch of ground that’s the perfect site for a football pitch. Nearby, an old car hidden intact under bulldozed building makes a brilliant den. But in this city there’s constant danger, even for schoolboys. And when Israeli soldiers find Karim outside during the next curfew, it seems impossible that he will survive. This powerful book fills a substantial gap in existing young adult literature on the Middle East. With 23,000 copies already sold in the United Kingdom and Canada, this book is sure to find a wide audience among young adult readers in the United States.




Arbitrary Lines


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What if scrapping one flawed policy could bring US cities closer to addressing debilitating housing shortages, stunted growth and innovation, persistent racial and economic segregation, and car-dependent development? It’s time for America to move beyond zoning, argues city planner M. Nolan Gray in Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. With lively explanations and stories, Gray shows why zoning abolition is a necessary—if not sufficient—condition for building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. The arbitrary lines of zoning maps across the country have come to dictate where Americans may live and work, forcing cities into a pattern of growth that is segregated and sprawling. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Reform is in the air, with cities and states across the country critically reevaluating zoning. In cities as diverse as Minneapolis, Fayetteville, and Hartford, the key pillars of zoning are under fire, with apartment bans being scrapped, minimum lot sizes dropping, and off-street parking requirements disappearing altogether. Some American cities—including Houston, America’s fourth-largest city—already make land-use planning work without zoning. In Arbitrary Lines, Gray lays the groundwork for this ambitious cause by clearing up common confusions and myths about how American cities regulate growth and examining the major contemporary critiques of zoning. Gray sets out some of the efforts currently underway to reform zoning and charts how land-use regulation might work in the post-zoning American city. Despite mounting interest, no single book has pulled these threads together for a popular audience. In Arbitrary Lines, Gray fills this gap by showing how zoning has failed to address even our most basic concerns about urban growth over the past century, and how we can think about a new way of planning a more affordable, prosperous, equitable, and sustainable American city.




Uses of Disorder


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The excitement of the brilliantly innovative book is that it challenges the reader to revise his concept of order—and to consider the seemingly disparate problems of the individual personality and the urban society in the light of a fresh, unified framework that has the shock of new truth. Drawing on recent ideas in psychology, sociology, and urban history, Sennett shows how the excessively “ordered” community freezes adults—both the fierce young idealists and their security-oriented parents—into rigid attitudes that originate in adolescence and stifle further personal growth. He explains how the accepted ideal of order generates patterns of behavior among the urban middle cases that are stultifying, narrow, and violence-prone. He demonstrates that most city planning has been conducted with the same rigidity, and shows, in specific and human terms, why that approach has not solved and cannot solve our cities problems. The Uses of Disorder is not only a critique of the ways in which the affluent city has failed as a place where the individual—even the affluent individual—can grow. It is also an exploration of new modes of urban organization through which city life can become richer and more life-affirming. The author proposes and projects in concrete terms (including a new use of the police) a functioning city that can incorporate anarchy, diversity, and creative disorder to bring into being adults who can openly respond to and dealt with the challenges of life. Thus, Richard Sennett, more aware of the nature of human nature than most Utopians of the past, sees progress in the creation of new urban relationships that will protect, not stability, but diversity and change. Out of his books, with its free and imaginative insights grounded in a strong sense of present-day realities, emerges the vision of a fully affluent and libertarian society—an arena that will welcome a rich variety of individuals, and accept the conflict that stem from such variety as not merely inevitable but life-giving.




City Comforts


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Life


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Biennial Report


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Heaven


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Our culture has a lot to say about heaven. But too much of it is based more on imaginative speculation or "supernatural" experiences than on the Bible itself. In the latest addition to the Theology in Community series, Christopher Morgan and Robert Peterson have assembled an interdisciplinary team of evangelical scholars to explore the doctrine of heaven from a variety of angles. Among other contributors, Ray Ortlund examines the concept of heaven in the Old Testament, Gerald Bray explores the history of theological reflection about heaven, and Ajith Fernando looks at persecuted saints' special relationship to heaven in the New Testament. This team of first rate scholars offers modern readers a comprehensive overview of this often misunderstood topic—shedding biblical light on the eternal hope of all Christians. Part of the Theology in Community series.