A novel of a 21st century dystopia where urbanization has reached its limits.

The No-Nonsense Guide For Country Dreamers Though moving to the country takes determination, every ex-urbanite says it was the best decision they ever made. The same rings true for Alissa Hessler, who relocated from Seattle to rural Maine years ago and has never looked back. In this book she uses her wit, charm and experience to help you chart a path to successful country living. Ditch the City and Go Country covers the ins and outs of how to find a home, how to keep your current job remotely or where to look for a new one, how to own livestock and prepare for disasters, how to make a smooth transition and become a part of your new community and how to embrace the seasons. With this must-have guide, you’ll be able to stop daydreaming and finally live the life you’ve always wanted in the country. Alissa Hessler was inspired to launch her blog Urban Exodus after relocating to Maine in 2011. She has been featured in Modern Farmer, Popular Photography, Click Magazine and Maine Home.

In this book Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and co-author Raaj Sah address one of development's major issues. During the early phases of economic development, there are often serious conflicts between the interests of town and country. The Corn Law Debate in England, the economic conflictsbetween the North and the South prior to the US Civil War, and the Soviet Industrialization Debate are among the historical examples.Most of today's countries face town versus country tensions of increasing severity, including such issues as who should pay how much in taxes, who should get how much in subsidies, and what forms the taxes and subsidies should take. This volume analyses these tensions and issues, taking into accountthe great diversity of institutions and economic environments observed in different developing countries.While dealing primarily with today's developing countries, the book also sheds some new light on some of the historical controversies. Each chapter contains a non-technical statement of the problems at hand and a summary of the analysis. The book will be of interest to public finance economists, andpractitioners and researchers of economic development, as well as to economic historians.

Some cities have grown into mega cities and some into uncontrolled sprawl; others have seen their centres decline with populations moving to the suburbs. In such times, questions of the public realm and public space in cities warrant even greater attention than previously received. Concerned with the borders and boundaries, constraints and limits on accepting, acknowledging and celebrating difference in public, Sophie Watson, through ethnographic studies, interrogates how difference is negotiated and performed. Focusing on spaces where to outside observers tension is relatively absent or invisible, Watson also reveals how the boundaries between the public and private are being negotiated and redrawn, and how public and private spaces are mutually constitutive. Through her investigation of the more ordinary and less dramatic forms of encounter and contestation in the city, Watson is able to conceive an urban public realm and urban public space that is heterogeneous and potentially progressive. With numerous photographs and drawings City Publics not only throws new light on encounters with others in public space, but also destabilizes dominant, sometimes simplistic, universalized accounts and helps us re-imagine urban public space as a site of potentiality, difference, and enchanted encounters.

Denounced as parasitical under Chairman Mao and devalued by the norms of traditional Chinese ethics, the city now functions as a site of individual and collective identity in China. Cities envelop the countryside, not only geographically and demographically but also in terms of cultural impact. Robin Visser illuminates the cultural dynamics of three decades of radical urban development in China. Interpreting fiction, cinema, visual art, architecture, and urban design, she analyzes how the aesthetics of the urban environment have shaped the emotions and behavior of people and cultures, and how individual and collective images of and practices in the city have produced urban aesthetics. By relating the built environment to culture, Visser situates postsocialist Chinese urban aesthetics within local and global economic and intellectual trends. In the 1980s, writers, filmmakers, and artists began to probe the contradictions in China’s urbanization policies and rhetoric. Powerful neorealist fiction, cinema, documentaries, paintings, photographs, performances, and installations contrasted forms of glittering urban renewal with the government’s inattention to a livable urban infrastructure. Narratives and images depicting the melancholy urban subject came to illustrate ethical quandaries raised by urban life. Visser relates her analysis of this art to major transformations in urban planning under global neoliberalism, to the development of cultural studies in the Chinese academy, and to ways that specific cities, particularly Beijing and Shanghai, figure in the cultural imagination. Despite the environmental and cultural destruction caused by China’s neoliberal policies, Visser argues for the emergence of a new urban self-awareness, one that offers creative resolutions for the dilemmas of urbanism through new forms of intellectual engagement in society and nascent forms of civic governance.

A leading historian reconstructs the forgotten history of medieval Africa From the birth of Islam in the seventh century to the voyages of European exploration in the fifteenth, Africa was at the center of a vibrant exchange of goods and ideas. It was an African golden age in which places like Ghana, Nubia, and Zimbabwe became the crossroads of civilizations, and where African royals, thinkers, and artists played celebrated roles in the globalized world of the Middle Ages. The Golden Rhinoceros brings this unsung era marvelously to life, taking readers from the Sahara and the Nile River Valley to the Ethiopian highlands and southern Africa. Drawing on fragmented written sources as well as his many years of experience as an archaeologist, François-Xavier Fauvelle painstakingly reconstructs an African past that is too often denied its place in history—but no longer. He looks at ruined cities found in the mangrove, exquisite pieces of art, rare artifacts like the golden rhinoceros of Mapungubwe, ancient maps, and accounts left by geographers and travelers—remarkable discoveries that shed critical light on political and architectural achievements, trade, religious beliefs, diplomatic episodes, and individual lives. A book that finally recognizes Africa’s important role in the Middle Ages, The Golden Rhinoceros also provides a window into the historian’s craft. Fauvelle carefully pieces together the written and archaeological evidence to tell an unforgettable story that is at once sensitive to Africa’s rich social diversity and alert to the trajectories that connected Africa with the wider Muslim and Christian worlds.