Flammable Cities

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Author :
Publisher : University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN 13 : 0299283836
Total Pages : 419 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (992 download)

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Book Synopsis Flammable Cities by : Greg Bankoff

Download or read book Flammable Cities written by Greg Bankoff and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2012-01-19 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In most cities today, fire has been reduced to a sporadic and isolated threat. But throughout history the constant risk of fire has left a deep and lasting imprint on almost every dimension of urban society. This volume, the first truly global study of urban conflagration, shows how fire has shaped cities throughout the modern world, from Europe to the imperial colonies, major trade entrepôts, and non-European capitals, right up to such present-day megacities as Lagos and Jakarta. Urban fire may hinder commerce or even spur it; it may break down or reinforce barriers of race, class, and ethnicity; it may serve as a pretext for state violence or provide an opportunity for displays of state benevolence. As this volume demonstrates, the many and varied attempts to master, marginalize, or manipulate fire can turn a natural and human hazard into a highly useful social and political tool.

The New Urban Frontier

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Publisher : UNSW Press
ISBN 13 : 9780868402680
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (26 download)

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Book Synopsis The New Urban Frontier by : Lionel Frost

Download or read book The New Urban Frontier written by Lionel Frost and published by UNSW Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores changes in city density by comparing Melbourne, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Auckland and other new frontier cities. Includes a new interpretation of the effect of development on problems faced by frontier cities, and a detailed bibliography. The author lectures on economics and economic history at La Trobe University.

Eating Smoke

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Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421412500
Total Pages : 450 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Eating Smoke by : Mark Tebeau

Download or read book Eating Smoke written by Mark Tebeau and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the period of America's swiftest industrialization and urban growth, fire struck fear in the hearts of city dwellers as did no other calamity. Before the Civil War, sweeping blazes destroyed more than $200 million in property in the nation's largest cities. Between 1871 and 1906, conflagrations left Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, and San Francisco in ruins. Into the twentieth century, this dynamic hazard intensified as cities grew taller and more populous, confounding those who battled it. Firefighters' death-defying feats captured the popular imagination but too often failed to provide more than symbolic protection. Hundreds of fire insurance companies went bankrupt because they could not adequately deal with the effects of even smaller blazes. Firefighters and fire insurers created a physical and cultural infrastructure whose legacy—in the form of heroic firefighters, insurance policies, building standards, and fire hydrants—lives on in the urban built environment. In Eating Smoke, Mark Tebeau shows how the changing practices of firefighters and fire insurers shaped the built landscape of American cities, the growth of municipal institutions, and the experience of urban life. Drawing on a wealth of fire department and insurance company archives, he contrasts the invention of a heroic culture of firefighters with the rational organizational strategies by fire underwriters. Recognizing the complexity of shifting urban environments and constantly experimenting with tools and tactics, firefighters fought fire ever more aggressively—"eating smoke" when they ventured deep into burning buildings or when they scaled ladders to perform harrowing rescues. In sharp contrast to the manly valor of firefighters, insurers argued that the risk was quantifiable, measurable, and predictable. Underwriters managed hazard with statistics, maps, and trade associations, and they eventually agitated for building codes and other reforms, which cities throughout the nation implemented in the twentieth century. Although they remained icons of heroism, firefighters' cultural and institutional authority slowly diminished. Americans had begun to imagine fire risk as an economic abstraction. By comparing the simple skills employed by firefighters—climbing ladders and manipulating hoses—with the mundane technologies—maps and accounting charts—of insurers, the author demonstrates that the daily routines of both groups were instrumental in making intense urban and industrial expansion a less precarious endeavor.

Empires of Panic

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Author :
Publisher : Hong Kong University Press
ISBN 13 : 9888208446
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (882 download)

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Book Synopsis Empires of Panic by : Robert Peckham

Download or read book Empires of Panic written by Robert Peckham and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empires of Panic is the first book to explore how panics have been historically produced, defined, and managed across different colonial, imperial, and post-imperial settings—from early nineteenth-century East Asia to twenty-first-century America. Contributors consider panic in relation to colonial anxieties, rumors, indigenous resistance, and crises, particularly in relation to epidemic disease. How did Western government agencies, policymakers, planners, and other authorities understand, deal with, and neutralize panics? What role did evolving technologies of communication play in the amplification of local panics into global events? Engaging with these questions, the book challenges conventional histories to show how intensifying processes of intelligence gathering did not consolidate empire, but rather served to produce critical uncertainties—the uneven terrain of imperial panic. Robert Peckham is associate professor in the Department of History and co-director of the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine at the University of Hong Kong. "Charting the relays of rumor and knowledge that stoke colonial fears of disease, disorder, and disaster, Empires of Panic offers timely and cautionary insight into how viscerally epidemics inflame imperial anxieties, and how words and their communication over new technologies accelerate panic, rally government intervention, and unsettle and entrench the exercise of global power. Relevant a century ago and even more so today." — Nayan Shah, University of Southern California; author ofContagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown "Empires generated anxiety as much as ambition. This fine study focuses on anxieties generated by disease. It is the first book of its kind to track shifting forms of panic through different geopolitical regimes and imperial formations over the course of two centuries. Working across medical and imperial histories, it is a major contribution to both." — Andrew S. Thompson, University of Exeter; author of Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914(with Gary B. Magee)

Vestal Fire

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Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 0295803525
Total Pages : 680 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (958 download)

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Book Synopsis Vestal Fire by : Stephen J. Pyne

Download or read book Vestal Fire written by Stephen J. Pyne and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2012-04-01 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stephen Pyne has been described as having a consciousness "composed of equal parts historian, ecologist, philosopher, critic, poet, and sociologist." At this time in history when many people are trying to understand their true relationship with the natural environment, this book offers a remarkable contribution--breathtaking in the scope of its research and exhilarating to read. Pyne takes the reader on a journey through time, exploring the terrain of Europe and the uses and abuses of its lands as well as, through migration and conquest, many parts of the rest of the world. Whether he is discussing the Mediterranean region, Russia, Scandinavia, the British Isles, central Europe, or colonized islands; whether he is considering the impact of agriculture, forestry, or Enlightenment thinking, the author brings an unmatched insight to his subject. Vestal Fire takes its title from Vesta, Roman goddess of the hearth and keeper of the sacred fire on Mount Olympus. But the book's title also suggests the strengths and limitations of Europe's peculiar conception of fire, and through fire, of its relationship to nature. Between the untamed fire of the wilderness and the tended fire of the hearth lies a never-ending dialectic in which human beings struggle to control natural forces and processes that in fact can sometimes be directed but never wholly dominated or contained.

Urbanization and the Pacific World, 1500–1900

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351876341
Total Pages : 665 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (518 download)

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Book Synopsis Urbanization and the Pacific World, 1500–1900 by : Lionel Frost

Download or read book Urbanization and the Pacific World, 1500–1900 written by Lionel Frost and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1500 and 1900 there was a constant growth in the numbers of large cities and networks of smaller towns throughout the Pacific world in which traders and primary producers did business. The essays in Urbanization and the Pacific World explore the increasingly complex economic relationships that connected cities in and around the Pacific world to each other, and pay particular attention to the impact that growing cities had on the economies of their hinterlands. The volume also contains articles that examine the problems that city growth created and the ways in which people were able to cope with them. Along with the new introduction, the essays cover all of the regions of the Pacific world in which city growth took place, and will allow the reader to consider a wide range of common and contrasting urban experiences.

Fire

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Author :
Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 0295803274
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (958 download)

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Book Synopsis Fire by : Stephen J. Pyne

Download or read book Fire written by Stephen J. Pyne and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The fate of humanity, like the fate of the earth, is tied to the fires that have made the world as we know it�the fires whose history is told as well in this book as it has ever been told before. If one wants to understand just how completely the story of the human past is also the story of fire on earth, there is no better place to start than this small book."�William Cronon Here, in one concise book, is the essential story of fire. Noted environmental historian Stephen J. Pyne describes the evolution of fire through prehistoric and historic times down to the present, examining contemporary attitudes from a long-range, informed perspective. Fire: A Brief History surveys the principles behind aboriginal and agricultural fire practices, the characteristics of urban fire, and the relationship between controlled combustion and technology. Pyne describes how fire�s role in cities, suburbs, exurbs, and wildlands has been shaped by an industrialized, urban way of thinking. Fire: A Brief History will be of value to readers interested in the environment from the standpoint of anthropology, geography, forestry, science and technology, history, or the humanities.

Barriers to Growth

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Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030442748
Total Pages : 157 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (34 download)

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Book Synopsis Barriers to Growth by : Eric L. Jones

Download or read book Barriers to Growth written by Eric L. Jones and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-04-04 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals sequentially with major impediments to economic growth and their slow dissolution. It is original and quite different from standard economic history, which has always sought for one prime mover of the industrial revolution after another. These supposed positive forces are usually depicted as novel and little reference is made to inertia. Instead the barriers dealt with here run, in the first section, from early misallocations of resources to nineteenth-century reforms which of their nature indicate the problems to be overcome. The second section deals with more physical impediments and shocks, such as floods and settlement fires. These too are ignored in ordinary treatments, which this book will supplement or even replace. It will be of interest to academic economic historians and practitioners of neighbouring subjects such as economists, historians, historical geographers, and of course their students.

Pyrotechnic Cities

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Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000583821
Total Pages : 239 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis Pyrotechnic Cities by : Liam Ross

Download or read book Pyrotechnic Cities written by Liam Ross and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-06-24 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the relationship between architecture, government and fire. It posits that, through the question of fire-safety standardisation, building design comes to be both a problem for, and a tool of, government. Through a close study of fire-safety standards it demonstrates the shaping effect that architecture and the city have on the way we think about governing. Opening with an investigation into the Grenfell Tower fire and the political actors who sought to enrol it in programmes of governmental reform before contextualising the research in current literature, the book takes four city studies, each beginning with a specific historic fire: The 1654 Great Fire of Meirecki, Edo; the 1877 town fire of Lagos; the 1911 Empire Palace Theatre fire, Edinburgh; and the 2001 World Trade Centre attack, New York. Each study identifies the governmental response to the fire, safety standards and codes designed in its wake and how these new processes spread and change. Drawing on the work of sociologists John Law and Anne Marie Mol and their concept of ‘Fire Space’, it describes the way that architectural design, through the medium of fire, is an instrument of political agency. Pyrotechnic Cities is a critical investigation into these political implications, written for academics, researchers and students in architectural history and theory, infrastructure studies and governance.

Seismic City

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Author :
Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 029574247X
Total Pages : 377 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (957 download)

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Book Synopsis Seismic City by : Joanna L. Dyl

Download or read book Seismic City written by Joanna L. Dyl and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On April 18, 1906, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake shook the San Francisco region, igniting fires that burned half the city. The disaster in all its elements — earthquake, fires, and recovery — profoundly disrupted the urban order and challenged San Francisco’s perceived permanence. The crisis temporarily broke down spatial divisions of class and race and highlighted the contested terrain of urban nature in an era of widespread class conflict, simmering ethnic tensions, and controversial reform efforts. From a proposal to expel Chinatown from the city center to a vision of San Francisco paved with concrete in the name of sanitation, the process of reconstruction involved reenvisioning the places of both people and nature. In their zeal to restore their city, San Franciscans downplayed the role of the earthquake and persisted in choosing patterns of development that exacerbated risk. In this close study of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Joanna L. Dyl examines the decades leading up to the catastrophic event and the city’s recovery from it. Combining urban environmental history and disaster studies, Seismic City demonstrates how the crisis and subsequent rebuilding reflect the dynamic interplay of natural and human influences that have shaped San Francisco.

Ineffably Urban: Imaging Buffalo

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351927701
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (519 download)

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Book Synopsis Ineffably Urban: Imaging Buffalo by : Miriam Paeslack

Download or read book Ineffably Urban: Imaging Buffalo written by Miriam Paeslack and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buffalo, in New York state, is 'ineffable': a typical city in transition between its past and future. It is a classic example of one of many 'shrinking cities' in North America and elsewhere which once prospered because of heavy industrialization, but which now have to deal with various degrees of urban decay. Bringing together a range of scholars from the humanities, the social sciences, art and architecture, this volume looks at both the literal city image and urban representation generated by photographs, video, historical and contemporary narratives, and grass-root initiatives. It investigates the notion of agency of media in the city and, in return, what the city’s agency is. This agency matters particularly as it is both transforming - shrinking, fading, being redefined - and being shaped through its visual and spatial mediation. While illustrated by Buffalo in particular, the book examines a broader phenomenon: the identity of those cities that were built and blossomed during the late 19th and early 20th century and are now in different stages of decline and disintegration. However, while such cities are all confronted with complex issues of economic instability, social and racial segregation, urban sprawl and shrinking processes both in the inner city and more and more in their ex-urban belts, they are too often described through dramatically simplifying visual and linguistic tropes. In Buffalo such tropes refer dialectically either to the city’s past glory or its presumed current cultural, political and economical stasis and decline. This book takes such tired, and familiar tropes and questions them.

Studies in Pacific History

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351742485
Total Pages : 438 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (517 download)

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Book Synopsis Studies in Pacific History by : Dennis O. Flynn

Download or read book Studies in Pacific History written by Dennis O. Flynn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-18 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2002.In recent years scholars have begun to conceptualize the history of the Pacific Ocean as a subset of world history. This question is taken up in the introductory chapter of this volume, which sets out four periods of modern Pacific history: a silver period, 1570s-1750; a period of early integration, 1750-1850; a gold period, 1850-c.1900; and a period of imperial strategies after the gold rushes. The next chapter looks at the fur trade of the Pacific coast of America, and its dependence on markets in China and Russia, followed by a set which focus on the era of the gold rushes, in California, Australia and New Zealand, when the pace of Pacific integration grew rapidly and new markets opened across the ocean. The last chapters examine aspects of the subsequent evolution of the Pacific Ocean into an ’American lake’, looking in particular at the interlocking of politics and migration. This volume carries forward study of the ’Pacific Centuries’, promoting the conceptualization of the Pacific Ocean as a coherent unit of analysis, and providing further important steps toward provision of the multi-century framework that is required for proper understanding of today’s ’Pacific Century’.

The Great Fire of London

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Author :
Publisher : The History Press
ISBN 13 : 0752475703
Total Pages : 207 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (524 download)

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Book Synopsis The Great Fire of London by : Stephen Porter

Download or read book The Great Fire of London written by Stephen Porter and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great Fire of London was the greatest catastrophe of its kind in Western Europe. Although detailed fire precautions and fire-fighting arrangements were in place, the fire raged for four days and destroyed 13,200 houses, 87 churches and 44 of the City of London's great livery halls. The 'great fire' of 1666 closely followed by the 'great plague' of 1665; as the antiquary Anthony Wood wrote left London 'much impoverished, discontented, afflicted, cast downe'. In this comprehensive account, Stephen Porter examines the background to 1666, events leading up to and during the fire, the proposals to rebuild the city and the progress of the five-year programme which followed. He places the fire firmly in context, revealing not only its destructive impact on London but also its implications for town planning, building styles and fire precautions both in the capital and provincial towns.

Prometheus Tamed

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Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004431225
Total Pages : 563 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (44 download)

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Book Synopsis Prometheus Tamed by : Cornel Zwierlein

Download or read book Prometheus Tamed written by Cornel Zwierlein and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-01-11 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Large city fires were a huge threat in premodern Central European every-day life; only quite late, institutional forms of fire insurances emerged as a post-disaster instrument of damage recovery. During the nineteenth century, insurance agencies spread through the World forming a plurality of modernities, safe or unsafe.

Coming Full Circle

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429719191
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (297 download)

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Book Synopsis Coming Full Circle by : Eric Jones

Download or read book Coming Full Circle written by Eric Jones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzing the long-term, historical development of the major economies around the Pacific Rim in language aimed at the general reader, Coming Full Circle throws light on the most important relationships in the region today as well as on the prospects for future economic development and political cooperation. The authors begin with a critique of the popular notion of an integrated "Pacific region," paying particular attention to the influence of geography and environment on population distribution and patterns of regional economic activity. Their study covers the diverse indigenous development of pre-European times, later periods of direct European influence, and the evolution of modern-day urban societies in the region. Finally, they track the rise of the United States and Japan as the dominant regional economic powers and forecast changes we can expect to see in the years ahead, noting in particular the increasing importance of China.

Technological Change and the City

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Author :
Publisher : Federation Press
ISBN 13 : 9781862871847
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (718 download)

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Book Synopsis Technological Change and the City by : Patrick Nicol Troy

Download or read book Technological Change and the City written by Patrick Nicol Troy and published by Federation Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at the complex relationships between cities, technology, economic factors, environmental factors and social factors. It points out how the form and structure of today's Australian cities, the conditions in our cities, and the choices about how we want our cities to be in the future are dependent on the decisions, practices, activities and investments made yesterday and today. Reporting research on the major effects on the city of changes in the retailing industry, land use and transport, water sewerage and drainage services, communications, manufacturing and building, it describes inter alia how the information age, global economics, innovation in the production system and environmental considerations are changing not only the way life is lived and business is done in the city, but also how urban space is used and organised, and how in turn these changes raise important social questions and challenge the very meaning of what constitutes a city.

Investing in the Early Modern Built Environment

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Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004231161
Total Pages : 431 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (42 download)

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Book Synopsis Investing in the Early Modern Built Environment by : Carole Shammas

Download or read book Investing in the Early Modern Built Environment written by Carole Shammas and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-08-01 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investing in the Early Modern Built Environment represents the first attempt to delve into the period’s enhanced architectural investment—its successes, its failures, and the conflicts it provoked globally.