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The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City
The capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan, was, in its era, one of the largest cities in the world. Built on an island in the middle of a shallow lake, its population numbered perhaps 150,000, with another 350,000 people in the urban network clustered around the lake shores. In 1521, at the height of Tenochtitlan's power, which extended over much of Central Mexico, Hernando Cortés and his followers conquered the city. Cortés boasted to King Charles V of Spain that Tenochtitlan was \"destroyed and razed to the ground.\" But was it?Drawing on period representations of the city in sculptures, texts, and maps, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City builds a convincing case that this global capital remained, through the sixteenth century, very much an Amerindian city. Barbara E. Mundy foregrounds the role the city's indigenous peoples, the Nahua, played in shaping Mexico City through the construction of permanent architecture and engagement in ceremonial actions. She demonstrates that the Aztec ruling elites, who retained power even after the conquest, were instrumental in building and then rebuilding the city. Mundy shows how the Nahua entered into mutually advantageous alliances with the Franciscans to maintain the city's sacred nodes. She also focuses on the practical and symbolic role of the city's extraordinary waterworks—the product of a massive ecological manipulation begun in the fifteenth century—to reveal how the Nahua struggled to maintain control of water resources in early Mexico City.
eBook
The traffic systems of Pompeii
The Traffic Systems of Pompeii is the first sustained examination of the evidence for a regulated circulation of wheeled traffic in the ancient world. The setting to this system is the six-hundred-year evolution of Pompeii’s street network, the focus of which telescopes from the city’s urban grid to the shape of the streets, the treatment of their surfaces, and finally the individual elements of construction—the curbstones, stepping stones, and guard stones—where the evidence for traffic was inscribed. Although ruts are the most evocative evidence of ancient traffic, it is the wearing patterns on the vertical faces of street features that permit the determination of the directions that ancient carts were traveling and undergird the argument for their systematic regulation. Distilled from over five hundred locations recording multiple categories of evidence, all wholly new to archaeology and unique to this research, this book reveals the basic rules of the road and at the same time opens larger historical questions. What does the existence of a traffic system mean for our understanding of ancient urbanism? What other social forces are uncovered in the search for it? To explore these questions, the traffic system at Pompeii is set in its broader contexts as one infrastructural and administrative artifact of the Roman empire, an epiphenomenon of a deeply urban culture.
eBook
Taking the Land to Make the City
The history of the United States is often told as a movement westward, beginning at the Atlantic coast and following farmers across the continent. But cities played an equally important role in the country’s formation. Towns sprung up along the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, as Spaniards and Englishmen took Indian land and converted it into private property. In this reworking of early American history, Mary P. Ryan shows how cities—specifically San Francisco and Baltimore—were essential parties to the creation of the republics of the United States and Mexico. Baltimore and San Francisco share common roots as early trading centers whose coastal locations immersed them in an international circulation of goods and ideas. Ryan traces their beginnings back to the first human habitation of each area, showing how the juggernaut toward capitalism and nation-building could not commence until Europeans had taken the land for city building. She then recounts how Mexican ayuntamientos and Anglo American city councils pioneered a prescient form of municipal sovereignty that served as both a crucible for democracy and a handmaid of capitalism. Moving into the nineteenth century, Ryan shows how the citizens of Baltimore and San Francisco molded landscape forms associated with the modern city: the gridded downtown, rudimentary streetcar suburbs, and outlying great parks. This history culminates in the era of the Civil War when the economic engines of cities helped forge the East and the West into one nation.
eBook
Smaller cities in a shrinking world : learning to thrive without growth
\"World population growth has slowed to a crawl, and that according to the most sophisticated demographic analysts, the earth's population (outside of sub-Saharan Africa) will begin to decline, not hundreds of years from now, but within the lifetime of many of the people now living on the planet. In this book urban expert Alan Mallach seeks to understand how declining population and economic growth, coupled with the other forces that will influence their fates, particularly climate change, will affect the world's cities, particularly its smaller cities, over the coming decades. Not only will cities' populations decline along with everyplace else, but powerful migration trends will make declines highly uneven. Many cities will decline faster than their nations, while a smaller number of cities, mainly the largest ones, may keep growing, even where their nation's population is in decline. Life on a shrinking planet calls for ways of thinking that are likely to be very different from those we are used to. Mallach suggests a path by which smaller, shrinking cities can thrive in the future, despite population decline and its attendant challenges\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Scottish Town in the Age of the Enlightenment 1740-1820
A pioneering study of 18th century Scottish urbanism: dynamic but different This heavily illustrated and innovative study is founded upon personal documents, town council minutes, legal cases, inventories, travellers' tales, plans and drawings relating to some 30 Scots burghs of the Georgian period. It establishes a distinctive history for the development of Scots burghs, their living patterns and legislative controls, and shows that the Scottish urban experience was quite different from other parts of Britain. With population expansion, and economic and social improvement, Scots of the time experienced immense change both in terms of urban behaviour and the decay of ancient privileges and restrictions. This volume shows how the Scots Georgian burgh developed to become a powerfully controlled urban community, with disturbance deliberately designed out. This is a collaborative history, melding together political, social, economic, urban and architectural histories, to achieve a comprehensive perspective on the nature of the Scottish Georgian town. Not so much a history by growth and numbers, this pioneering study of Scottish urbanization explores the type of change and the quality of result. Key Features A pioneering study of how Scottish urban life changed during the 18th century, to be matched against the well-covered English town. Combines social, economic, architectural and urban history in a systematic, comparative manner. The product of an extensive 3-year AHRC-funded research project into extensive, yet untapped primary sources. This research significantly revises current historiography about the Scots urban evolution and the nature of 'British' towns. Heavily illustrated, the pictures being as much of the message as the text.
eBook
Shanghai gone
Shanghai has been demolished and rebuilt into a gleaming megacity in recent decades, now ranking with New York and London as a hub of global finance. But that transformation has come at a grave human cost. This compelling book is the first to apply the concept of domicide—the eradication of a home against the will of its dwellers—to the sweeping destruction of neighborhoods, families, and life patterns to make way for the new Shanghai. Here we find the holdouts and protesters, men and women who have stubbornly resisted domicide and demanded justice. Qin Shao follows, among others, a reticent kindergarten teacher turned diehard petitioner; a descendant of gangsters and squatters who has become an amateur lawyer for evictees; and a Chinese Muslim who has struggled to recover his ancestral home in Xintiandi, an infamous site of gentrification dominated by a well-connected Hong Kong real estate tycoon. Highlighting the wrenching changes spawned by China’s reform era, Shao vividly portrays the relentless pursuit of growth and profit by the combined forces of corrupt power and money, the personal wreckage it has left behind, and the enduring human spirit it has unleashed.
eBook