Developing "sustainable" architectural and agricultural technologies was the intent behind Blueprint Farm, an experimental agricultural project designed to benefit farm workers displaced by the industrialization of agriculture in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Yet, despite its promise, the very institutions that created Blueprint Farm terminated the project after just four years (1987-1991).In this book, Steven Moore demonstrates how the various stakeholders' competing definitions...

The book shines light on the problem of judgment, particularly in the realm of architectural "technics" and the codes that regulate it. The struggle to define "sustainability," and thus judge architecture through such lenses, is but one dimension of the contemporary problem of judgment. By providing the reader with an inherently interdisciplinary study of a particular discipline—architecture, it brings to the topic lenses that challenge the too frequently unexamined assumptions of the disc...

This second edition of Pragmatic Sustainability proposes a pragmatic, discursive and pluralistic approach to thinking about sustainability.. Rather than suggesting a single solution to the problem of how to live sustainably, this collection discusses broader approaches to social and environmental change.Eight continuing authors and seven new ones adjust their dispositions toward rapidly changing and still unsustainable conditions, forging agreements and disagreements on fi...

As buildings are responsible for fifty per cent of CO2 emissions, their design has become the focus of intense technical scrutiny. Knowing how to build more technically efficient, or ecologically responsible, buildings, and being able to assemble the social resources to do so, requires different forms of knowledge and practice. There is wide contestation over the optimal pathways to greener buildings design and great diversity in practices of sustainable architecture.This volume br...

Utopian thought and experimental approaches to societal organization have been rare in the last decades of planning and politics. Instead, there is a widespread belief in ecological modernization, that sustainable societies can be created within the frame of the current global capitalist world order by taking small steps such as eco-labeling, urban densification, and recycling. However, in the context of the current crisis in which resource depletion, climate change, uneven development, an...

Why do Internet, financial service, and beer commercials dominate Super Bowl advertising? How do political ceremonies establish authority? Why does repetition characterize anthems and ritual speech? Why were circular forms favored for public festivals during the French Revolution? This book answers these questions using a single concept: common knowledge.Game theory shows that in order to coordinate its actions, a group of people must form "common knowledge." Each person wants to p...

"Crisp and illuminating . . . well worth reading."—Wall Street JournalThe publication of The Marketplace of Ideas has precipitated a lively debate about the future of the American university system: what makes it so hard for colleges to decide which subjects are required? Why are so many academics against the concept of interdisciplinary studies? From his position at the heart of academe, Harvard professor Louis Menand thinks he's found the answer...

The projects illustrated here exemplify the way contemporary urban planning is moving in practice, and how it is precisely in the effective transformation of cities and landscapes that it is finding the theoretical and practical forms of its action. An urban planning that, as has recently been pointed out, having emancipated itself from the typo-morphological tradition focused on the built, is now coming to embrace the open spaces of the city within the horizon of the landscape, allowing i...

Exploring a number of trends in our popular culture, Andrew Potter argues that our pursuit of the authentic is fraught with irony and self-defeat.Thought provoking and revelatory, The Authenticity Hoax exposes how the search for the "true" and "real" is rooted in a society obsessed with individual elitists suckered into believing that their lifestyles are the only genuine ones in a fake world. Manipulated by the inescapable consumerism and sound bi...

In The Landscape Urbanism Reader Charles Waldheim—who is at the forefront of this new movement—has assembled the definitive collection of essays by many of the field's top practitioners. Fourteen essays written by leading figures across a range of disciplines and from around the world—including James Corner, Linda Pollak, Alan Berger, Pierre Bolanger, Julia Czerniak, and more—capture the origins, the contemporary milieu, and the aspirations of this relatively new field. The La...

A guide to political struggle for a generation that is deeply ambivalent about power. While many activists gravitate toward mere self-expression and identity-affirming rituals at the expense of serious political intervention, Smucker provides an apologia for leadership, organization, and collective power, a moral argument for its cultivation, and a discussion of dilemmas that movements must navigate in order to succeed.

It is possible to overcome barriers to minority success in Canada. The stance of this book is that new immigrants, refugees and international students do not have to settle for underachievement despite the cultural and structural disadvantages they face in Canada. The fact is, the unequal social structure of Canada has some cracks, and many minorities have used strategic resources to open up these cracks and achieved tremendous upward social mobility in Canadian society from the margins. Thes...