Tag: Books
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On the Map by Simon Garfield (Book Review)
(This book was first reviewed here by Jeffrey Barke in April 15, 2013. This is a second review). To satisfy our curiosity and wanderlust humans need two things, new modes of transportation and maps. Our proclivity to chart and map the world around us can be traced back to Babylonians, who divided a circle into 360 degrees, which…
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Lucknow, India: A City With a Glorious Past
The royal family of Oudh (1722-1858) were the historically-rich and powerful rulers of their north-Indian state. The Nawabs of Oudh were generous patrons of art, poetry and music. Their royal treasury paid stipends and pensions to dancers, musicians and poets. Public poetry readings were held at the expense of nawabs, where poets from all over the India were invited. These free poetry readings…
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Urban Design: A literature review
Whilst a grad student, I learned that the opinions on what urban design is, vary greatly between planners, architects, and landscape architects. It’s only fair to admit that most urban designers in the United States today are trained as architects. Some of them might argue that urban design is essentially a large-scale architectural exercise, where…
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Alice Munro Wins 2013 Noble Prize for Literature
The genesis of plaNYourCity was when some planners started to ask around for books of fiction that portrayed a distinct sense of place, particularly a city. Some of the first titles to surface were Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of Vanities which describes the racial tensions and environment of 1980’s New York, and Erik Larson’s The Devil in…
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Arsenal
So I recently discovered by way of the Guggenheim that there is going to be a new book published by Actar entitled, The Arsenal of Exclusion and Inclusion, out next spring (2014) on the subtle tactics and tools humans have used to shape their territories. Often this means excluding unwanted residents and visitors. The…
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Simon Garfield’s On the Map
Cartographers, like nature, abhor a vacuum and have traditionally filled the empty spaces on maps with large lettering, descriptive passages, drawings and/or certain labels that many of us may be familiar with, such as terra incognita (“unknown land”) or hic sunt dracones (“here be dragons”). However, as Simon Garfield tells us in his breezy romp…