Suchergebnisse

Chronicler of the California dark side and LA's underbelly, proclaiming a troubling, menacing reality beneath the bright and sunny facade, Mike Davis is one of California's most significant contemporary writers. His most controversial books led critics to label him anything from a left-wing lunatic to a prophet of gloom and peddler of "the pornography of despair." Yet much of his personal story and evolution are intimately touched by his experience and close reading of deeply California realities: life as part of the working class, the struggle for better working conditions, and a genuine connection to the difficulties here. His most well known books, City of Quartz and The Ecology of Fear are unsparing in their assessments of those difficulties. He invited architectural educator and Director of UCLA's cityLAB, Dana Cuff, and Dean of UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, Jennifer Wolch, into his San Diego home to discuss his career, his writings, and his erstwhile and ongoing efforts to understand Los Angeles.

The megacities arising around the planet are like the Internet where many events are taking place simultaneously. The urban scape today is becoming more a space of flows—migrants, trade, capital, information, microbes—than a space of places rooted in an historical identity.The megaurban condition today encompasses many realities, from the glittering generic city‐state of Singapore to the slums climbing up the hillsides around Mexico City or Sao Paulo. In these spaces we work, love and live out the intimate moments of our lives. In these spaces we consume and spew out climate warming gases.In this section, two of the world's "star architects"—Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry—the visionary "arcologist" Paolo Soleri and the Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, grasp at chronicling the reality of where we live.

The author first met Betita Martinez in 1964 when she was working with Friends of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in New York City. She played a brief but seminal role in my political education and was one of the chief organizers of a pioneering anti-apartheid demonstration that might also be characterized in retrospect as the first 'Occupy Wall Street.' Todd Gitlin, a member of Students for a democratic Society (SDS) and his friend Chris Hobson developed the strategy of the Chase Manhattan demonstration. Gitlin proposed the action to the December 1964 SDS National Council meeting with the explicit hope of collaborating with SNCC. In late January or early February 1965, Martinez rescued the Chase Manhattan project. She was simply dazzling, as were the tough, sophisticated kids in Friends of SNCC who were readying their 'new nonviolence' to put under siege the federal courthouse in Foley Square and the Johnson administration in Washington, DC. Adapted from the source document.

Panoramic survey of America's political landscape as revealed by November's vote, with age, gender, ethnicity and geography the volatile determinants of Obama's victory. Within an increasingly polarized ideological force field, how will the coming struggles unfold between Democratic President and Senate and a Republican House, itself consumed by turmoil? Adapted from the source document.

A personal debate between pessimistic & optimistic perspectives contends that the first stage of the battle against global warming has already been lost; the Kyoto Protocol has failed to seriously impact climate change; & greenhouse gas accumulation cannot be curtailed enough to prevent a "radical reshaping of ecologies; water resources, & agricultural systems." As a result, rich countries will have little incentive to share resources with poor subtropical countries, thereby increasing socio-economic inequalities. On the optimistic side, the urbanization of humanity (primary cause of global warming) is "potentially the principle solution to the problem of human survival." It is imperative to return to utopian thinking by beginning to build an ark from such materials as pirate technologies, rebel science, & bootlegged media in order to help developing countries adapt to climate shock. The combination of equality & ecological sustainability that is the hallmark of green urbanism is the starting point for alternative thinking about global warming that has the potential to save the world from devastation. Adapted from the source document.

Résumé « Notre mode de vie n'est pas négociable » : on se souvient de la réplique du président G. W. Bush, marquant son mépris à l'égard des enjeux environnementaux. Pourtant, comme rappelle le sociologue Mike Davis, pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, les citoyens américains devaient renoncer – pour une courte durée – à leur culture de la consommation et du gaspillage et découvrir les joies du vélo, du jardinage et du co-voiturage.