The director of the Design Museum defines the greatest artefact of all time: the city We live in a world that is now predominantly urban. So how do we define the city as it evolves in the twenty-first century? Drawing examples from across the globe, Deyan Sudjic decodes the underlying forces that shape our cities, such as resources and land, to the ideas that shape conscious el...(展开全部)

In Imagined Cities, Robert Alter traces the arc of literary development triggered by the runaway growth of urban centres from the early nineteenth century through the first two decades of the twentieth. As new technologies and arrangements of public and private space changed the ways people experienced time and space, the urban panorama became less coherent - a metropolis defyi...(展开全部)

Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities, the latest addition to the Architecture Briefs series, is a handbook on how to write effectively and critically about the contemporary city. The book offers works by some of the best architecture critics of the twentieth century, including Ada Louise Huxtable, Lewis Mumford, Herbert Muschamp, Michael So...(展开全部)

How do cities use culture today? Building on the experience of New York as a "culture capital" Sharon Zukin shows how three notions of culture - as ethnicity, aesthetic, and marketing tool - are reshaping urban places and conflicts over revitalization. She rejects the idea that cities have either a singular urban culture or many different subcultures to argue that cultures are ...(展开全部)

In this magnificent new novel, the National Book Award-winning author of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing fashions a darkly beautiful elegy for the American frontier.   The setting is New Mexico in 1952, where John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are working as ranch hands. To the North lie the proving grounds of Alamogordo; to the South, the twin cities of El Paso and Juare...(展开全部)

This is Volume Three of the "Border Trilogy". In "Cities of the Plain", two men marked by the boyhood adventures of "All the Pretty Horses" and "The Crossing" now stand together, between their vivid pasts and uncertain futures, to confront a country changing beyond recognition. In the fall of 1952, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are cowboys on a New Mexico ranch encroached up...(展开全部)