John Dewey is known as a pragmatic philosopher and progressive architect of American educational reform, but some of his most important contributions came in his thinking about art.Dewey argued that there is strong social value to be found in art, and it is artists who often most challenge our preconceived notions. Dewey for Artists shows us how Dewey advocated for an "art of democracy." Identifying the audience as co-creator of a work of art by virtue of their experience, ...

Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930–2017) is known for her iconic installations that explored the relationship between humanity and nature, as well as the strength of the collective versus the individual. Today the power of her art, like predications from the past, are rivetingly real. This publication offers rich intellectual insight into the relevance of this Polish artist to the threatened present—a time in which geopolitical shifts between East and West and predictions of the Club of Rome (197...

The collection of lectures and publications from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics represents some of the foremost voices on a new economics.According to Jane Jacobs the healthiest economic regions are those which have strong and innovative import-replacing cities of their own. The economies of such city-regions are shaped and reshaped by complex, economically enlivening, interrelating forces originating within their own regions. Such regions, she says, become capable of pr...

In this classic text, Jane Jacobs set out to produce an attack on current city planning and rebuilding and to introduce new principles by which these should be governed. The result is one of the most stimulating books on cities ever written.Throughout the post-war period, planners temperamentally unsympathetic to cities have been let loose on our urban environment. Inspired by the ideals of the Garden City or Le Corbusier's Radiant City, they have dreamt up ambitio...

“Jane Jacobs is the kind of writer who produces in her readers such changed ways of looking at the world that she becomes an oracle, or final authority.” —The New York SunHailed by the New York Times Book Review as “perhaps the single most influential work in the history of town planning,” Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities was instantly recognized as a masterpiece upon its publication in 1961. In the decades that f...

In this book, Jane Jacobs, building on the work of her debut, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, investigates the delicate way cities balance the interplay between the domestic production of goods and the ever-changing tide of imports. Using case studies of developing cities in the ancient, pre-agricultural world, and contemporary cities on the decline, like the financially irresponsible New York City of the mid-sixties, Jacobs identifies the main drivers of urban prospe...

“What artists don’t know—but need to know.” —Jack Becker, Public Art ReviewA Comprehensive Guide to the Complex World of Public ArtLearn how to find, apply for, compete for, and win a public art commission. First-hand interviews with experienced public artists and arts administrators provide in-the-trenches advice and insight, while a chapter on public art law, written by Barbara T. Hoffman, the country's leading public art law atto...

The image of a tortured genius working in near isolation has long dominated our conceptions of the artist’s studio. Examples abound: think Jackson Pollock dripping resin on a cicada carcass in his shed in the Hamptons. But times have changed; ever since Andy Warhol declared his art space a “factory,” artists have begun to envision themselves as the leaders of production teams, and their sense of what it means to be in the studio has altered just as dramatically as their practices.

With intelligence and clarity of observation, the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities addresses the moral values that underpin working life.In Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs identifies two distinct moral syndromes—one governing commerce, the other, politics—and explores what happens when these two syndromes collide. She looks at business fraud and criminal enterprise, government’s overextended subsidies to agriculture, and transit police who ab...

In this eye-opening work of economic theory, Jane Jacobs argues that it is cities—not nations—that are the drivers of wealth. Challenging centuries of economic orthodoxy, in Cities and the Wealth of Nations the beloved author contends that healthy cities are constantly evolving to replace imported goods with locally-produced alternatives, spurring a cycle of vibrant economic growth. Intelligently argued and drawing on examples from around the world and across the ages, here Jacobs...

Jane Jacobs, writing from her adoptive country, uses the problems facing an independence-seeking Quebec and Canada as a whole to examine the universal problem of sovereignty and autonomy that nations great and small have struggled with throughout history. Using Norway’s relatively peaceful divorce from Sweden as an example, Jacobs contends that Canada and Canadians—Quebecois and Anglophones alike—can learn important lessons from similar sovereignty questions of the past.

Critics have long voiced concerns about the wisdom of living in cities and the effects of city life on physical and mental health. For a century, planners have tried to meet these issues. John Sewell traces changes in urban planning, from the pre-Depression garden cities to postwar modernism and a revival of interest in the streetscape grid.In this far-ranging review, Sewell recounts the arrival of modern city planning with its emphasis on lower densities, limited access streets, s...