The World of Urban Decay 2


Book Description

Photographer Martin ten Bouwhuijs's regular urban exploration missions throughout Western Europe have culminated in this second collection of images made in abandoned buildings throughout the world. Each location is described in a brief history.




Urban Decay


Book Description

A roleplaying game of fast-moving beat 'em up action – take to the streets, take on the gangs, take back your City! As night falls over the City, a storm is brewing in the streets below. The gangs have taken over. They rule with an iron fist, their will enforced by armies of thugs and brawlers. Gutters run red. The authorities have either sold out or are stretched too thin to make a difference. Might makes right. You will not tolerate this any longer. Uniting with a crew of like-minded individuals, you head out to reclaim your home, protecting neighborhoods, inspiring others to take a stand, and clashing with gang enforcers as you work your way through their ranks, seeking to cut the head from the snake coiled at the heart of the City. Urban Decay is a roleplaying game of beat 'em up action inspired by classic arcade video games, movies, and comic-books. Players take on the roles of warriors, martial artists, vigilantes, and ordinary citizens, taking to the streets to face the gangs that control the City and to save the people and places they love. Streamlined character and crew creation produces distinct, capable heroes with shared goals and bonds, while the versatile Clash system emphasizes the brutal, gritty street-fights in which these heroes will find themselves. The City itself is built collaboratively, with players working together to define the districts and neighborhoods for which their heroes will go to war.




Redevelopment and Race


Book Description

In the decades following World War II, professional city planners in Detroit made a concerted effort to halt the city's physical and economic decline. Their successes included an award-winning master plan, a number of laudable redevelopment projects, and exemplary planning leadership in the city and the nation. Yet despite their efforts, Detroit was rapidly transforming into a notorious symbol of urban decay. In Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit, June Manning Thomas takes a look at what went wrong, demonstrating how and why government programs were ineffective and even destructive to community needs. In confronting issues like housing shortages, blight in older areas, and changing economic conditions, Detroit's city planners worked during the urban renewal era without much consideration for low-income and African American residents, and their efforts to stabilize racially mixed neighborhoods faltered as well. Steady declines in industrial prowess and the constant decentralization of white residents counteracted planners' efforts to rebuild the city. Among the issues Thomas discusses in this volume are the harmful impacts of Detroit's highways, the mixed record of urban renewal projects like Lafayette Park, the effects of the 1967 riots on Detroit's ability to plan, the city-building strategies of Coleman Young (the city's first black mayor) and his mayoral successors, and the evolution of Detroit's federally designated Empowerment Zone. Examining the city she knew first as an undergraduate student at Michigan State University and later as a scholar and planner, Thomas ultimately argues for a different approach to traditional planning that places social justice, equity, and community ahead of purely physical and economic objectives. Redevelopment and Race was originally published in 1997 and was given the Paul Davidoff Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning in 1999. Students and teachers of urban planning will be grateful for this re-release. A new postscript offers insights into changes since 1997.




The World of Urban Decay


Book Description

Arresting art photography takes the curious into the depths of worlds that normally remain hidden behind gardens overrun with wild vegetation and tall fences blazoned with "Keep Out!" signs. Photographer Martin ten Bouwhuijs's regular urban exploration missions throughout Western Europe have culminated in this collection of haunting images made in abandoned hospitals, morgues, monasteries, power plants, schools, factories, swimming pools, and castles. Each location is described in a brief history. Capturing the venues in various states of neglect, these photographs reveal remnants of once-habitable spaces: from furniture still in place but covered in thick dust to dramatic vaulted ceilings speckled in mold and water stains to walls that have given way in complete disrepair. More than 150 dramatic images continually heighten anticipation by showing long views down empty corridors and wide views of rooms with doors that lead elsewhere - you never really know what you are going to see around the next corner.




Decay


Book Description

In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment. Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert




Uncanny Collateral


Book Description

Alek Fitz is a reaper, a collection agent who works for the supernatural elements of the world, tracking down debtors and solving problems for clients as diverse as the Lords of Hell, vampires, Haitian loa, and goblins. He’s even worked for the Tooth Fairy on occasion. Based out of Cleveland, Ohio, Alek is the best in the game. As a literal slave to his job, he doesn’t have a choice. When Death comes looking for someone to track down a thief, Alek is flung into a mess of vengeful undead, supernatural bureaucracy, and a fledgling imp war. As the consequences of failure become dire, he has few leads, and the clock is ticking. Only with the help of his friend Maggie—an ancient djinn with a complex past—can he hope to recover the stolen property, save the world, and just maybe wring a favor out of the Great Constant himself. It’s a hell of a job, but somebody’s got to do it . . .




Urban Legends


Book Description

A cultural history of the South Bronx that reaches beyond familiar narratives of urban ruin and renaissance, beyond the “inner city” symbol, to reveal the place and people obscured by its myths. For decades, the South Bronx was America’s “inner city.” Synonymous with civic neglect, crime, and metropolitan decay, the Bronx became the preeminent symbol used to proclaim the failings of urban places and the communities of color who lived in them. Images of its ruins—none more infamous than the one broadcast live during the 1977 World Series: a building burning near Yankee Stadium—proclaimed the failures of urbanism. Yet this same South Bronx produced hip hop, arguably the most powerful artistic and cultural innovation of the past fifty years. Two narratives—urban crisis and cultural renaissance—have dominated understandings of the Bronx and other urban environments. Today, as gentrification transforms American cities economically and demographically, the twin narratives structure our thinking about urban life. A Bronx native, Peter L’Official draws on literature and the visual arts to recapture the history, people, and place beyond its myths and legends. Both fact and symbol, the Bronx was not a decades-long funeral pyre, nor was hip hop its lone cultural contribution. L’Official juxtaposes the artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s carvings of abandoned buildings with the city’s trompe l’oeil decals program; examines the centrality of the Bronx’s infamous Charlotte Street to two Hollywood films; offers original readings of novels by Don DeLillo and Tom Wolfe; and charts the emergence of a “global Bronx” as graffiti was brought into galleries and exhibited internationally, promoting a symbolic Bronx abroad. Urban Legends presents a new cultural history of what it meant to live, work, and create in the Bronx.




Image+ Vol. 2 #3


Book Description

Volume two of the Diamond Gem Award-winning comics magazine IMAGE+ continues with all the hard-hitting content you love. This issue features another 80 pages of interviews, previews, and in-depth features, plus exclusive comics content. SCOTT SNYDER and JOCK's horror series WYTCHES continues with the third chapter of "BAD EGG", plus the continuation of ED PISKOR's "IMAGE OF YOUTH" strip, and even more of the unstoppable ATOMAHAWK, courtesy of DONNY CATES, IAN BEDERMAN and TAYLOR ESPOSITO. IMAGE+ remains your number one source for news and information about Image Comics, and now's the perfect time to get in on the ground floor. IMAGE+ is once again available for the low, low price of FREE for anyone already purchasing a copy of Diamond's Previews.




ELLEgirl


Book Description

ELLEgirl, the international style bible for girls who dare to be different, is published by Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc., and is accessible on the web at ellegirl.elle.com/. ELLEgirl provides young women with insider information on fashion, beauty, service and pop culture in a voice that, while maintaining authority on the subject, includes and amuses them.




Research Issues


Book Description