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Latin America: Social Structure and Political Institutions examines the region's historical, social, and political evolution from the colonial era to the modern day. The book traces Latin America's unique trajectory, marked by its early colonial development, the delayed progress of its nation-states post-independence, and the complex interplay between social hierarchies and political structures. The colonial legacy of Iberian rule, characterized by rigid social stratification, concentrated land ownership, and economic dependency, laid a foundation that hindered post-independence progress. Even as independence movements in the 19th century fragmented the region into sovereign states, they failed to dismantle the entrenched colonial social fabric, delaying economic diversification and democratic governance. The book further explores Latin America's tumultuous political history, highlighting cycles of dictatorship, revolution, and reform. The region's regimes, often modeled after U.S.-style presidential systems, evolved uniquely to address local challenges, balancing the need for centralized authority with efforts to uphold democratic principles. Economic potential, fueled by vast natural resources and growing populations, underscores the region's importance on the global stage. Despite setbacks, including political instability and social inequality, the text emphasizes Latin America's persistent quest for balanced development. It argues that the region's ongoing political experiments, blending elements of democratic and authoritarian governance, could offer valuable insights into the challenges of modern nation-building. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967.

While sectarian violence has greatly diminished on the streets of Belfast and Derry, proxy battles over the right to define Northern Ireland's identity through its new symbolic landscapes continue. Offering a detailed ethnographic account of Northern Ireland's post-conflict visual transformation, this book examines the official effort to produce new civic images against a backdrop of ongoing political and social struggle. Interviews with politicians, policymakers, community leaders, cultural workers, and residents shed light on the deeply contested nature of seemingly harmonized urban landscapes in societies undergoing radical structural change. Here, the public art process serves as a vital means to understanding the wider politics of a transforming public sphere in an age of globalization and transnational connectivity.

This book explores the relationship between the city of Rome and the Aurelian Wall during the six centuries following its construction in the 270s AD, a period when the city changed and contracted almost beyond recognition, as it evolved from imperial capital into the spiritual center of Western Christendom. The Wall became the single most prominent feature in the urban landscape, a dominating presence which came bodily to incarnate the political, legal, administrative, and religious boundaries of urbs Roma, even as it reshaped both the physical contours of the city as a whole and the mental geographies of 'Rome' that prevailed at home and throughout the known world. With the passage of time, the circuit took on a life of its own as the embodiment of Rome's past greatness, a cultural and architectural legacy that dwarfed the quotidian realities of the post-imperial city as much as it shaped them.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the intellectual developments in urban conservation. The authors offer unique insights from UNESCO's World Heritage Centre and the book is richly illustrated with colour photographs. Examples are drawn from urban heritage sites worldwide from Timbuktu to Liverpool to demonstrate key issues and best practice in urban conservation today. The book offers an invaluable resource for architects, planners, surveyors and engineers worldwide working in heritage conservation, as well as for local authority conservation officers and managers of heritage sites.

Aimed at prospective and new students, this book gives a comprehensive introduction to the nature and practice of landscape architecture, the professional skills required and the latest developments. After discussing the history of the profession, the book explains the design process through principles such as hierarchy, human scale, unity, harmony, asymmetry, colour, form and texture. It looks at how design is represented through both drawing and modelling, and through digital techniques such as CAD and the use of GIS (Geographic Information Systems). This is followed by an examination of project management and landscape management techniques. Finally, the book explores educational and employment opportunities and the future of the profession in the context of climate change and sustainability. Illustrated with international examples of completed projects, Landscape Architecture provides an invaluable, one-stop resource for anyone considering studying or a career in this field.

James and Nancy Duncan look at how the aesthetics of physical landscapes are fully enmeshed in producing the American class system. Focusing on an archetypal upper class American suburb-Bedford in Westchester County, NY-they show how the physical presentation of a place carries with it a range of markers of inclusion and exclusion. James Duncan is a University Lecturer in Geography at Cambridge University, and Nancy Duncan is Affiliated Lecturer of Geography at Cambridge University.

Context In the U.S., landscape architecture researchers are interested in how “research through designing” as a lens (RTD lens) can advance the understanding of how designed landscapes can contribute to landscape sustainability. These scholars provide evidence of why spatial design is an effective research strategy for investigating and evaluating which designed landscapes are optimal for the sustainability of urban and urbanizing areas. Objectives The primary objective of this article is to propose a conceptual framework that categorizes and compares the four major research approaches using the RTD lens (four approaches) in the U.S. that integrates ecology and design thought to enhance the sustainability of designed landscapes. Methods To create the conceptual framework, the author used her knowledge and experience at the intersection of landscape architecture, ecological sciences, and landscape sustainability to qualitatively review, synthesize, and compare the relevant literature. Results Four approaches are included in the conceptual framework: (1) landscape ecological design, (2) novel urban ecosystem design, (3) sustainable landscape performance design, and (4) resilient infrastructure design. The definitions of the four approaches are explained, including key areas, topics, concepts, and frameworks that integrate ecological and design concepts. Three lessons learned from the conceptual framework are reviewed for how they might influence future research directions. Conclusion Landscape architecture researchers in the U.S. have used the four approaches to increase the credibility and legitimacy of spatial design in theoretical and applied research. Their scholarship provides evidence that “knowing” ecology from a design point of view broadens the impact and relevance of this science to society and provides important insights to advance landscape sustainability.

Winner of the Western History Association's 2009 Hal K. Rothman Award Finalist in the Western Writers of America Spur Award for the Western Nonfiction Contemporary category (2008). The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the world's most beautiful cities. Despite a population of 7 million people, it is more greensward than asphalt jungle, more open space than hardscape. A vast quilt of countryside is tucked into the folds of the metropolis, stitched from fields, farms and woodlands, mines, creeks, and wetlands. In The Country in the City, Richard Walker tells the story of how the jigsaw geography of this greenbelt has been set into place. The Bay Area s civic landscape has been fought over acre by acre, an arduous process requiring popular mobilization, political will, and hard work. Its most cherished environments--Mount Tamalpais, Napa Valley, San Francisco Bay, Point Reyes, Mount Diablo, the Pacific coast--have engendered some of the fiercest environmental battles in the country and have made the region a leader in green ideas and organizations. This book tells how the Bay Area got its green grove: from the stirrings of conservation in the time of John Muir to origins of the recreational parks and coastal preserves in the early twentieth century, from the fight to stop bay fill and control suburban growth after the Second World War to securing conservation easements and stopping toxic pollution in our times. Here, modern environmentalism first became a mass political movement in the 1960s, with the sudden blooming of the Sierra Club and Save the Bay, and it remains a global center of environmentalism to this day. Green values have been a pillar of Bay Area life and politics for more than a century. It is an environmentalism grounded in local places and personal concerns, close to the heart of the city. Yet this vision of what a city should be has always been informed by liberal, even utopian, ideas of nature, planning, government, and democracy. In the end, green is one of the primary colors in the flag of the Left Coast, where green enthusiasms, like open space, are built into the fabric of urban life. Written in a lively and accessible style, The Country in the City will be of interest to general readers and environmental activists. At the same time, it speaks to fundamental debates in environmental history, urban planning, and geography.

In much the same way that views of the earth from the Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s led indirectly to the inauguration of Earth Day and the modern environmental movement, the dawn of aviation ushered in a radically new way for architects, landscape designers, urban planners, geographers, and archaeologists to look at cities and landscapes. As icons of modernity, airports facilitated the development of a global economy during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, reshaping the way people thought about the world around them. Professionals of the built environment awoke to the possibilities offered by the airports themselves as sites of design and by the electrifying new aerial perspective on landscape. InFlights of Imagination,Sonja Dümpelmann follows the evolution of airports from their conceptualization as landscapes and cities to modern-day plans to turn decommissioned airports into public urban parks. The author discusses landscape design and planning activities that were motivated, legitimized, and facilitated by the aerial view. She also shows how viewing the earth from above redirected attention to bodily experience on the ground and illustrates how design professionals understood the aerial view as simultaneously abstract and experiential, detailed and contextual, harmful and essential. Along the way, Dümpelmann traces this multiple dialectic from the 1920s to the land-camouflage activities during World War II, and from the environmental and landscape planning initiatives of the 1960s through today.

Follies in America examines historicized garden buildings, known as \"follies,\" from the nation's founding through the American centennial celebration in 1876. In a period of increasing nationalism, follies—such as temples, summerhouses, towers, and ruins—brought a range of European architectural styles to the United States. By imprinting the land with symbols of European culture, landscape gardeners brought their idea of civilization to the American wilderness. Kerry Dean Carso's interdisciplinary approach in Follies in America examines both buildings and their counterparts in literature and art, demonstrating that follies provide a window into major themes in nineteenth-century American culture, including tensions between Jeffersonian agrarianism and urban life, the ascendancy of middle-class tourism, and gentility and social class aspirations.