Code and Clay, Data and Dirt

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Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452955425
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis Code and Clay, Data and Dirt by : Shannon Mattern

Download or read book Code and Clay, Data and Dirt written by Shannon Mattern and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For years, pundits have trumpeted the earthshattering changes that big data and smart networks will soon bring to our cities. But what if cities have long been built for intelligence, maybe for millennia? In Code and Clay, Data and Dirt Shannon Mattern advances the provocative argument that our urban spaces have been “smart” and mediated for thousands of years. Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt goes far beyond the standard historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Mattern shows that in their architecture, laws, street layouts, and civic knowledge—and through technologies including the telephone, telegraph, radio, printing, writing, and even the human voice—cities have long negotiated a rich exchange between analog and digital, code and clay, data and dirt, ether and ore. Mattern’s vivid prose takes readers through a historically and geographically broad range of stories, scenes, and locations, synthesizing a new narrative for our urban spaces. Taking media archaeology to the city’s streets, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt reveals new ways to write our urban, media, and cultural histories.

Code and Clay, Data and Dirt

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781517902445
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (24 download)

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Book Synopsis Code and Clay, Data and Dirt by : Shannon Christine Mattern

Download or read book Code and Clay, Data and Dirt written by Shannon Christine Mattern and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For years, pundits have trumpeted the earthshattering changes that big data and smart networks will soon bring to our cities. But what if cities have long been built for intelligence, maybe for millennia? In Code and Clay, Data and Dirt Shannon Mattern advances the provocative argument that our urban spaces have been "smart" and mediated for thousands of years. Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt goes far beyond the standard historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Mattern shows that in their architecture, laws, street layouts, and civic knowledge--and through technologies including the telephone, telegraph, radio, printing, writing, and even the human voice--cities have long negotiated a rich exchange between analog and digital, code and clay, data and dirt, ether and ore. Mattern's vivid prose takes readers through a historically and geographically broad range of stories, scenes, and locations, synthesizing a new narrative for our urban spaces. Taking media archaeology to the city's streets, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt reveals new ways to write our urban, media, and cultural histories.

Deep Mapping the Media City

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Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452945586
Total Pages : 58 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis Deep Mapping the Media City by : Shannon Mattern

Download or read book Deep Mapping the Media City written by Shannon Mattern and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-03-11 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Going beyond current scholarship on the “media city” and the “smart city,” Shannon Mattern argues that our global cities have been mediated and intelligent for millennia. Deep Mapping the Media City advocates for urban media archaeology, a multisensory approach to investigating the material history of networked cities. Mattern explores the material assemblages and infrastructures that have shaped the media city by taking archaeology literally—using techniques like excavation and mapping to discover the modern city’s roots in time. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

A City Is Not a Computer

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Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 069122675X
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

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Book Synopsis A City Is Not a Computer by : Shannon Mattern

Download or read book A City Is Not a Computer written by Shannon Mattern and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold reassessment of "smart cities" that reveals what is lost when we conceive of our urban spaces as computers Computational models of urbanism—smart cities that use data-driven planning and algorithmic administration—promise to deliver new urban efficiencies and conveniences. Yet these models limit our understanding of what we can know about a city. A City Is Not a Computer reveals how cities encompass myriad forms of local and indigenous intelligences and knowledge institutions, arguing that these resources are a vital supplement and corrective to increasingly prevalent algorithmic models. Shannon Mattern begins by examining the ethical and ontological implications of urban technologies and computational models, discussing how they shape and in many cases profoundly limit our engagement with cities. She looks at the methods and underlying assumptions of data-driven urbanism, and demonstrates how the "city-as-computer" metaphor, which undergirds much of today's urban policy and design, reduces place-based knowledge to information processing. Mattern then imagines how we might sustain institutions and infrastructures that constitute more diverse, open, inclusive urban forms. She shows how the public library functions as a steward of urban intelligence, and describes the scales of upkeep needed to sustain a city's many moving parts, from spinning hard drives to bridge repairs. Incorporating insights from urban studies, data science, and media and information studies, A City Is Not a Computer offers a visionary new approach to urban planning and design.

Deep Mediations

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Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452962944
Total Pages : 421 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis Deep Mediations by : Karen Redrobe

Download or read book Deep Mediations written by Karen Redrobe and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The preoccupation with “depth” and its relevance to cinema and media studies For decades the concept of depth has been central to critical thinking in numerous humanities-based disciplines, legitimizing certain modes of inquiry over others. Deep Mediations examines why and how this is, as scholars today navigate the legacy of depth models of thought and vision, particularly in light of the “surface turn” and as these models impinge on the realms of cinema and media studies. The collection’s eighteen essays seek to understand the decisive but evolving fixation on depth by considering the term’s use across a range of conversations as well as its status in relation to critical methodologies and the current mediascape. Engaging contemporary debates about new computing technologies, the environment, history, identity, affect, audio/visual culture, and the limits and politics of human perception, Deep Mediations is a timely interrogation of depth’s ongoing importance within the humanities. Contributors: Laurel Ahnert; Taylor Arnold, U of Richmond; Erika Balsom, King’s College London; Brooke Belisle, Stony Brook University; Jinhee Choi, King’s College London; Jennifer Fay, Vanderbilt U; Lisa Han, UC Santa Barbara; Jean Ma, Stanford U; Shaka McGlotten, Purchase College-SUNY; Susanna Paasonen, U of Turku, Finland; Jussi Parikka, U of Southampton; Alessandra Raengo, Georgia State U; Pooja Rangan, Amherst College; Katherine Rochester, VIA Art Fund in Boston; Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick (UK); Jordan Schonig, Michigan State U; John Paul Stadler, North Carolina State U; Nicole Starosielski, New York U; Lauren Tilton, U of Richmond.

The Filing Cabinet

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Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 145296372X
Total Pages : 350 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis The Filing Cabinet by : Craig Robertson

Download or read book The Filing Cabinet written by Craig Robertson and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture transformed our relationship with information The ubiquity of the filing cabinet in the twentieth-century office space, along with its noticeable absence of style, has obscured its transformative role in the histories of both information technology and work. In the first in-depth history of this neglected artifact, Craig Robertson explores how the filing cabinet profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used. Invented in the 1890s, the filing cabinet was a result of the nineteenth-century faith in efficiency. Previously, paper records were arranged haphazardly: bound into books, stacked in piles, curled into slots, or impaled on spindles. The filing cabinet organized loose papers in tabbed folders that could be sorted alphanumerically, radically changing how people accessed, circulated, and structured information. Robertson’s unconventional history of the origins of the information age posits the filing cabinet as an information storage container, an “automatic memory” machine that contributed to a new type of information labor privileging manual dexterity over mental deliberation. Gendered assumptions about women’s nimble fingers helped to naturalize the changes that brought women into the workforce as low-level clerical workers. The filing cabinet emerges from this unexpected account as a sophisticated piece of information technology and a site of gendered labor that with its folders, files, and tabs continues to shape how we interact with information and data in today’s digital world.

We the Dead

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Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469668300
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

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Book Synopsis We the Dead by : Brian Michael Murphy

Download or read book We the Dead written by Brian Michael Murphy and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2022-05-16 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Locked away in refrigerated vaults, sanitized by gas chambers, and secured within bombproof caverns deep under mountains are America's most prized materials: the ever-expanding collection of records that now accompany each of us from birth to death. This data complex backs up and protects our most vital information against decay and destruction, and yet it binds us to corporate and government institutions whose power is also preserved in its bunkers, infrastructures, and sterilized spaces. We the Dead traces the emergence of the data complex in the early twentieth century and guides readers through its expansion in a series of moments when Americans thought they were living just before the end of the world. Depression-era eugenicists feared racial contamination and the downfall of the white American family, while contemporary technologists seek ever denser and more durable materials for storing data, from microetched metal discs to cryptocurrency keys encoded in synthetic DNA. Artfully written and packed with provocative ideas, this haunting book illuminates the dark places of the data complex and the ways it increasingly blurs the lines between human and machine, biological body and data body, life and digital afterlife.

Urban Operating Systems

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262539810
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis Urban Operating Systems by : Andres Luque-Ayala

Download or read book Urban Operating Systems written by Andres Luque-Ayala and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new wave of enthusiasm for smart cities, urban data, and the Internet of Things has created the impression that computation can solve almost any urban problem. Subjecting this claim to critical scrutiny, in this book, Andrés Luque-Ayala and Simon Marvin examine the cultural, historical, and contemporary contexts in which urban computational logics have emerged. They consider the rationalities and techniques that constitute emerging computational forms of urbanization, including work on digital urbanism, smart cities, and, more recently, platform urbanism. They explore the modest potentials and serious contradictions of reconfiguring urban life, city services, and urban-networked infrastructure through computational operating systems—an urban OS. Luque-Ayala and Marvin argue that in order to understand how digital technologies transform and shape the city, it is necessary to analyze the underlying computational logics themselves. Drawing on fieldwork that stretches across eleven cities in American, European, and Asian contexts, they investigate how digital products, services, and ecosystems are reshaping the ways in which the city is imagined, known, and governed. They discuss the reconstitution of the contemporary city through digital technologies, practices, and techniques, including data-driven governance, predictive analytics, digital mapping, urban sensing, digitally enabled control rooms, civic hacking, and open data narratives. Focusing on the relationship between the emerging operating systems of the city and their traditional infrastructures, they shed light on the political implications of using computer technologies to understand and generate new urban spaces and flows.

A Geology of Media

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Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452944571
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis A Geology of Media by : Jussi Parikka

Download or read book A Geology of Media written by Jussi Parikka and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-03-27 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Media history is millions, even billions, of years old. That is the premise of this pioneering and provocative book, which argues that to adequately understand contemporary media culture we must set out from material realities that precede media themselves—Earth’s history, geological formations, minerals, and energy. And to do so, writes Jussi Parikka, is to confront the profound environmental and social implications of this ubiquitous, but hardly ephemeral, realm of modern-day life. Exploring the resource depletion and material resourcing required for us to use our devices to live networked lives, Parikka grounds his analysis in Siegfried Zielinski’s widely discussed notion of deep time—but takes it back millennia. Not only are rare earth minerals and many other materials needed to make our digital media machines work, he observes, but used and obsolete media technologies return to the earth as residue of digital culture, contributing to growing layers of toxic waste for future archaeologists to ponder. He shows that these materials must be considered alongside the often dangerous and exploitative labor processes that refine them into the devices underlying our seemingly virtual or immaterial practices. A Geology of Media demonstrates that the environment does not just surround our media cultural world—it runs through it, enables it, and hosts it in an era of unprecedented climate change. While looking backward to Earth’s distant past, it also looks forward to a more expansive media theory—and, implicitly, media activism—to come.

Design, Control, Predict

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Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452962111
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis Design, Control, Predict by : Aaron Shapiro

Download or read book Design, Control, Predict written by Aaron Shapiro and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth look at life in the “smart” city Technology has fundamentally transformed urban life. But today’s “smart” cities look little like what experts had predicted. Aaron Shapiro shows us the true face of the revolution in urban technology, taking the reader on a tour of today’s smart city. Along the way, he develops a new lens for interpreting urban technologies—logistical governance—to critique an urban future based on extraction and rationalization. Through ethnographic research, journalistic interviews, and his own hands-on experience, Shapiro helps us peer through cracks in the smart city’s facade. He investigates the true price New Yorkers pay for “free,” ad-funded WiFi, finding that it ultimately serves the ends of commercial media. He also builds on his experience as a bike courier for a food delivery startup to examine how promises of “flexible employment” in the gig economy in fact pave the way for strict managerial control. And he turns his eye toward hot-button debates around police violence and new patrol technologies, asking whether algorithms are really the answer to reforming our cities’ ongoing crises of criminal justice. Through these gripping accounts of the new technological urbanism, Design, Control, Predict makes vital contributions to conversations around data privacy and algorithmic governance. Shapiro brings much-needed empirical research to a field that has often relied on “10,000-foot views.” Timely, important, and expertly researched, Design, Control, Predict doesn’t just help us comprehend urbanism today—it advances strategies for critiquing and resisting a dystopian future that can seem inevitable.

Soil and Sacrament

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Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1451663307
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (516 download)

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Book Synopsis Soil and Sacrament by : Fred Bahnson

Download or read book Soil and Sacrament written by Fred Bahnson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recounts the author's experiences founding a faith-based community garden in rural North Carolina, and emphasizes how growing one's own food can help readers reconnect with the land and divine faith.

Program Earth

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Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452950172
Total Pages : 438 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis Program Earth by : Jennifer Gabrys

Download or read book Program Earth written by Jennifer Gabrys and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2016-04-13 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sensors are everywhere. Small, flexible, economical, and computationally powerful, they operate ubiquitously in environments. They compile massive amounts of data, including information about air, water, and climate. Never before has such a volume of environmental data been so broadly collected or so widely available. Grappling with the consequences of wiring our world, Program Earth examines how sensor technologies are programming our environments. As Jennifer Gabrys points out, sensors do not merely record information about an environment. Rather, they generate new environments and environmental relations. At the same time, they give a voice to the entities they monitor: to animals, plants, people, and inanimate objects. This book looks at the ways in which sensors converge with environments to map ecological processes, to track the migration of animals, to check pollutants, to facilitate citizen participation, and to program infrastructure. Through discussing particular instances where sensors are deployed for environmental study and citizen engagement across three areas of environmental sensing, from wild sensing to pollution sensing and urban sensing, Program Earth asks how sensor technologies specifically contribute to new environmental conditions. What are the implications for wiring up environments? How do sensor applications not only program environments, but also program the sorts of citizens and collectives we might become? Program Earth suggests that the sensor-based monitoring of Earth offers the prospect of making new environments not simply as an extension of the human but rather as new “technogeographies” that connect technology, nature, and people.

The Cult of Smart

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Publisher : All Points Books
ISBN 13 : 1250200385
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis The Cult of Smart by : Fredrik deBoer

Download or read book The Cult of Smart written by Fredrik deBoer and published by All Points Books. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of Vulture’s Top 10 Best Books of 2020! Leftist firebrand Fredrik deBoer exposes the lie at the heart of our educational system and demands top-to-bottom reform. Everyone agrees that education is the key to creating a more just and equal world, and that our schools are broken and failing. Proposed reforms variously target incompetent teachers, corrupt union practices, or outdated curricula, but no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: Academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In The Cult of Smart, educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability. Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place. This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes. We must create a world that has a place for everyone, not just the academically talented. But we’ll never achieve this dream until the Cult of Smart is destroyed.

Variations on Media Thinking

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Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452960704
Total Pages : 411 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis Variations on Media Thinking by : Siegfried Zielinski

Download or read book Variations on Media Thinking written by Siegfried Zielinski and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A diverse, enriching volume of media analysis from a pioneering thinker in the field Expanding on Siegfried Zielinski’s groundbreaking inquiry into “deep time” of the media, the essays in Variations on Media Thinking further the eminent media theorist’s unique method of expanded hermeneutics, which means for him interpreting technical artifacts as essential parts of our cultural lives. Covering such topics as the televisualized “Holocaust,” the ubiquity of media today, the Internet, the genealogy of sound art, and history’s first hacker movement, these essays further diversify Zielinski’s insight into the hidden layers of media development, which he first articulated in his pioneering work Deep Time of the Media. Including many previously untranslated and scarce essays, these “written time machines” open new lines of investigation for cultural scholars. From the automata of the Arabic-Islamic Renaissance (800–1200) to the largest and loudest techno-event ever, known as The Symphony of Sirens—which transformed Baku in 1922 into an immense music box of modern noise—Variations on Media Thinking covers Zielinski’s inquiries since 1975. Richly illustrated and full of provocation, brilliant insight, and fascinating research, this volume is perfect for students of media archaeology, philosophy, and technology, as well as any adventurous, rigorous thinkers engaged with culture and media.

Undoing Optimization

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Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300258666
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Undoing Optimization by : Alison B Powell

Download or read book Undoing Optimization written by Alison B Powell and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique examination of the civic use, regulation, and politics of communication and data technologies City life has been reconfigured by our use—and our expectations—of communication, data, and sensing technologies. This book examines the civic use, regulation, and politics of these technologies, looking at how governments, planners, citizens, and activists expect them to enhance life in the city. Alison Powell argues that the de facto forms of citizenship that emerge in relation to these technologies represent sites of contention over how governance and civic power should operate. These become more significant in an increasingly urbanized and polarized world facing new struggles over local participation and engagement. The author moves past the usual discussion of top-down versus bottom-up civic action and instead explains how citizenship shifts in response to technological change and particularly in response to issues related to pervasive sensing, big data, and surveillance in "smart cities".

Craving Earth

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231146094
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (311 download)

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Book Synopsis Craving Earth by : Sera L. Young

Download or read book Craving Earth written by Sera L. Young and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation Humans have eaten earth, on purpose, for more than 2,300 years. They also crave starch, ice, chalk and other unorthodox foods - but why? This book creates a portrait of pica, or non-food cravings, from humans' earliest ingestions to current trends and practices.

The Rule of Logistics

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Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452951535
Total Pages : 373 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis The Rule of Logistics by : Jesse LeCavalier

Download or read book The Rule of Logistics written by Jesse LeCavalier and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2016-08-26 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every time you wheel a shopping cart through one of Walmart’s more than 10,000 stores worldwide, or swipe your credit card or purchase something online, you enter a mind-boggling logistical regime. Even if you’ve never shopped at Walmart, its logistics have probably affected your life. The Rule of Logistics makes sense of its spatial and architectural ramifications by analyzing the stores, distribution centers, databases, and inventory practices of the world’s largest corporation. The Rule of Logistics tells the story of Walmart’s buildings in the context of the corporation’s entire operation, itself characterized by an obsession with logistics. Beginning with the company’s founding in 1962, Jesse LeCavalier reveals how logistics—as a branch of knowledge, an area of work, and a collection of processes—takes shape and changes our built environment. Weaving together archival material with original drawings, LeCavalier shows how a diverse array of ideas, people, and things—military theory and chewing gum, Howard Dean and satellite networks, Hudson River School painters and real estate software, to name a few—are all connected through Walmart’s logistical operations and in turn are transforming how its buildings are conceptualized, located, built, and inhabited. A major new contribution to architectural history and theory, The Rule of Logistics helps us understand how retailing today is changing our bodies, brains, buildings, and cities and predicts what future forms architecture might take when shaped by systems that exceed its current capacities.