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Henkin explores the influential but little-noticed role reading played in New York City's public life between 1825 and 1865. The "ubiquitous urban texts"--from newspapers to paper money, from street signs to handbills--became both indispensable urban guides and apt symbols for a new kind of public life that emerged first in New York.
Reading the Islamic City offers insights into the implications the practices of the Maliki school of Islamic law have for the inhabitants of the Islamic city, the madinah. The problematic term madinah fundamentally indicates a phenomenon of building, dwelling, and urban settlement patterns that evolved after the 7th century CE in the Maghrib (North Africa) and al-Andalusia (Spain). Madinah involves multiple contexts that have socio-religious functions and symbolic connotations related to the faith and practice of Islam, and can be viewed in terms of a number of critiques such as everyday lives, boundaries, utopias, and dystopias. The book considers Foucault's power/knowledge matrix as it applies to an erudite cadre of scholars and legal judgments in the realm of architecture and urbanism. It acknowledges the specificity of power/knowledge insofar as it provides a dominant framework to tackle property rights, custom, noise, privacy, and a host of other subjects. Scholars of urban studies, religion, history, and geography will greatly benefit from this vivid analysis of the relevance of the juridico-discursive practice of Maliki Law in a set of productive or formative discourses in the Islamic city.
A corrupt police officer trawls the streets of Cairo on the most important assignment of his career: the answer to the truth of all existence… A young journalist struggles over the obituary of a nightclub dancer… A man slowly loses his mind in one of the city’s new desert developments... There is a saying that, whoever you are, if you come to Cairo you will find a hundred people just like you. For over a thousand years, the city on the banks of the Nile has welcomed travellers from around the world. But in recent years Cairo has also been a stage for expressions of short-lived hope, political disappointments and a violent repression that can barely be written about. These ten short stories showcase some of the most exciting, emerging voices in Egypt, guiding us through one of the world’s largest and most historic cities as it is today – from its slums to its villas, its bars and its balconies, through its infamous traffic. Appearing in English for the first time, these stories evoke the sadness and loss of the modern city, as well as its humour and beauty. Translated by Adam Talib, Raphael Cohen, Basma Ghalayini, Thoraya El-Rayyes, Raph Cormack, Andrew Leber, Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, Elisabeth Jaquette, Kareem James Abu-Zeid & Yasmine Seale. One of World Literature Today's 75 Notable Translations of 2019. '[The Book of Cairo] has no need for camels or pyramids or an exaggeration of whatever the Western eye is looking for. Reading it feels like sitting in a cafe in Cairo with young literary men and women, listening to their stories that dig deep into what Cairo is and is not.' - Asymptote Journal 'Though each story in The Book of Cairo is unique – ten stories by ten writers, translated by ten translators – they feed into one another artfully, like a movie soundtrack, a concept album, or a full novel. The cogs of Cairo turn through this book, and they move faster and more erratically as the pages turn – just as life in Cairo itself does.' - Books and Bao
A shape-shifter arrives at Tokyo harbour in human form, set to embark on an unstoppable rampage through the city’s train network… A young woman is accompanied home one night by a reclusive student, and finds herself lured into a flat full of eerie Egyptian artefacts… A man suspects his young wife’s obsession with picnicking every weekend in the city’s parks hides a darker motive… At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to stray from their daily routines to engage with them. But Tokyo being the city it is, random encounters inevitably take place – a naïve book collector, mistaken for a French speaker, is drawn into a world he never knew existed; a woman seeking psychiatric help finds herself in a taxi with an older man wanting to share his own peculiar revelations; a depressed divorcee accepts an unexpected lunch invitation to try Thai food for the very first time… The result in each story is a small but crucial change in perspective, a sampling of the unexpected yet simple pleasure of other people’s company. As one character puts it, ‘The world is full of delicious things, you know.’
How did neighborhood groceries, parish halls, factories, and even saloons contribute more to urban vitality than did the fiscal might of postwar urban renewal? With a novelist’s eye for telling detail, Douglas Rae depicts the features that contributed most to city life in the early “urbanist” decades of the twentieth century. Rae’s subject is New Haven, Connecticut, but the lessons he draws apply to many American cities. City: Urbanism and Its End begins with a richly textured portrait of New Haven in the early twentieth century, a period of centralized manufacturing, civic vitality, and mixed-use neighborhoods. As social and economic conditions changed, the city confronted its end of urbanism first during the Depression, and then very aggressively during the mayoral reign of Richard C. Lee (1954–70), when New Haven led the nation in urban renewal spending. But government spending has repeatedly failed to restore urban vitality. Rae argues that strategies for the urban future should focus on nurturing the unplanned civic engagements that make mixed-use city life so appealing and so civilized. Cities need not reach their old peaks of population, or look like thriving suburbs, to be once again splendid places for human beings to live and work.
"Grady Clay looks hard at the landscape, finding out who built what and why, noticing who participates in a city's success and who gets left in a 'sink,' or depressed (often literally) area. Clay doesn't stay in the city; he looks at industrial towns, truck stops, suburbs—nearly anywhere people live or work. His style is witty and readable, and the book is crammed with illustrations that clarify his points. If I had to pick up one book to guide my observations of the American scene, this would be it."—Sonia Simone, Whole Earth Review "The emphasis on the informal aspects of city-shaping—topographical, historical, economic and social—does much to counteract the formalist approach to American urban design. Close-Up...should be required reading for anyone wishing to understand Americans and their cities."—Roger Cunliffe, Architectural Review "Close-Up is a provocative and stimulating book."—Thomas J. Schlereth, Winterthur Portfolio "Within this coherent string of essays, the urban dweller or observer, as well as the student, will find refreshing strategies for viewing the environmental 'situations' interacting to form a landscape."—Dallas Morning News "Clay's Close-Up, first published in 1973, is still a key book for looking at the real American city. Too many urban books and guidebooks concentrate on the good parts of the city....Clay looks at all parts of the city, the suburbs, and the places between cities, and develops new terms to describe parts of the built environment—fronts, strips, beats, stacks, sinks, and turf. No one who wants to understand American cities or to describe them, should fail to know this book. The illustrations are of special interest to the guidebook writer."—American Urban Guidenotes
Hawk, the daughter of Maximum Ride, teams with her mother up to help save their beloved but dangerous city in this action-packed thriller. For Hawk, being a hero weighs heavily on her wings. In the City of the Dead, life happens in the shadows. That's why a war is brewing against an enemy no one can see. Hawk and Maximum Ride never back down from a conflict, or from each other, and they argue more than they agree. But as the dead begin to outnumber the living, a mother's experience and a daughter's instinct can make for one powerful arsenal.
In this beautifully illustrated picture book, one little girl and her father are on their way to school as the whole city wakes up around them! The gumdrop sun rises high in the cotton candy sky. A woman stretches. She starts to run. The city morning has begun! The city is still fast asleep when a young girl and her father leave the house. But slowly, little by little, light starts to creep up over the buildings, and the city starts to wake up. As they walk through the drowsy streets, a woman begins her morning jog, street sweepers clean up the roads, stores begin to open, and food deliveries are made to stores and restaurants. Join these two on their morning walk to school through the city in this beautifully illustrated picture book.
An award-winning kaleidoscope of a book that "shocks and stirs the urban heart," capturing city life on the edge of the twenty-first century. What kind of person is a city person? This is a question of increasing importance, Colette Brooks suggests, as the city begins to spread, inexorably, into the furthest reaches of the modern mind. One possibility: a city person is someone "who doesn't feel the need to finish a jigsaw puzzle, who relishes jagged edges and orphaned curves, stray bits of data, stories parsed from sentences half overheard on the streets." Someone who is willing, sometimes eager, to immerse herself in mystery. Winner of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award, In the City is an idiosyncratic, lyrical, edgy exploration of the urban experience. This daring, unpredictable work breathes new life into the nonfiction form. Chronicling the often haphazard lives of city dwellers and cities themselves, In the City is a window into the urban psyche. An unnamed narrator roams the streets of an unnamed city, practicing "random acts of awareness" as she gathers disjointed pieces of the puzzle. She is sometimes in a city that seems to be New York, and sometimes in cities halfway around the world. In her wanderings she collects bits of stories, some taken from the headlines, some from the streets, some from the distant past. She studies criminals, innocent bystanders, commuters; a renowned painter who fled to the country; a bomber who sends unsuspecting city dwellers lethal packages marked "personal"; a blind, deaf woman who loves to ride the subway; a young cabdriver who keeps an open dictionary at his side as he drives, struggling to learn a strange language; a perplexed explorer who finds himself, against all expectation, stranded at the very edge of the earth. All of these people, she discovers, are city people, whether they know it yet or not. Some will flourish, others will be lost, victims of chance and mischance: the woman who drinks by herself in a brownstone apartment; the ancient city dwellers who couldn't outrun fire or flood; the children whose faces end up on posters on a wall. Those who survive learn, sooner or later, that everyone keeps company with ghosts who walk alongside. In the City shows us that the city is a place where past and present are commingled, where questions rarely have answers, where danger, difficulty, and exhilaration are interwoven in ways we can hardly begin to explain. Welcome to the city, the place where all contrary indications hold true.