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9781421421506 Academic Inspection Copy

The Modern Urban Landscape

1880 to the Present
  • ISBN-13: 9781421421506
  • Publisher: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
    Imprint: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
  • By E. C. Relph
  • Price: AUD $64.99
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 14/11/2016
  • Format: Paperback 304 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: Landscape art & architecture [AMV]
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For E. C. Relph, the landscape of late twentieth-century cities must be envisioned as a total environment—not just streets and buildings but billboards and parking meters as well. The Modern Urban Landscape traces the developments since 1880 in architecture, technology, planning, and society that have formed the visual context of daily life. Each of these shaping influences is often viewed in isolation, but Relph surveys the ways in which they have operated independently to create what we see when we walk down a street, shop in a mall, or stare through a windshield on an expressway.

Two sets of ideas and fashions, Relph argues, have had an especially important impact on urban landscapes in the twentieth century. An ""internationalism"" made possible by new building technologies and design ideologies has replaced regional style and custom as the dominant feature of city appearance, while a firm belief in the merits of self-consciousness has imposed logical analysis and technical manipulation on such commonplace objects as curbstones and park benches. ""As a result,"" writes Relph, ""the modern urban landscape is both rationalized and artificial, which is another way of saying that it is intensely human.""

This edition features a new preface in which the author identifies the major visible changes in urban landscapes over the past thirty years, including destination architecture, coffee shops, condominium towers, revitalized downtown streets, and the creation of edge cities. He also considers the less visible yet pervasive impacts associated with the emergence of electronic technologies and sustainable development.

""Brings together urban history, urban form, public planning history, the literature of utopianism, and the architecture of cities in an intelligent, coherent, lively, and controversial portrayal of the evolution of the physical characteristics of Anglo-American urban environments since 1880.""

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