Mapping key co-ordinates of meaning, identity and power across sites of body and city, the author explores a wide range of critical thinking including Lefebvre and Freud and analyses the dialectic between the individual and the external.

From Classical Greece and Rome to medieval and Renaissance Europe, from Hogarth's London to the metropolis of today, cities have been at the centre of human existence for thousands of years. By examining individual cities at their most pivotal moments in history, and the way people lived in them, Richard Sennett traces changing attitudes to concepts such as space, burial, sanctuary and planning. He provides fascinating insights into the interaction between the human body and the spaces of the city it inhabits, evoking the sounds, smells and bustle throughout the centuries. And he asks whether modern cities starve people's sensual experience.

Over the last century, psychoanalysis has transformed the ways in which we think about our relationships with others. Psychoanalytic concepts and methods, such as the unconscious and dream analysis, have greatly impacted on social, cultural and political theory. Reinterpreting the ways in which Geography has explored people's mental maps and their deepest feelings about places, The Body and the City outlines a new cartography of the subject. The author maps key coordinates of meaning, identity and power across the sites of body and city. Exploring a wide range of critical thinking, particularly the work of Lefebvre, Freud and Lacan, he analyses the dialectic between the individual and the external world to present a pathbreaking psychoanalysis of space.

A provocative survey of new research in the history of urban public health, Body and City links the approaches of demographic and medical history with the methodologies of urban history and historical geography. It challenges older methodologies, offering new insights into the significance of cultural history, which has largely been overlooked by previous histories of public health. This book explores important issues and experiences in the public health arena in diverse European settings from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century.

Plague and the City uncovers discourses of plague and anti-plague measures in the city during the medieval, early modern and modern periods, and explores the connection between plague and urban environments including attempts by professional bodies to prevent or limit the outbreak of epidemic disease. Bringing together leading scholars of plague working across different historical periods, this book provides an inter-disciplinary study of plague in the city across time and space. The chapters cover a wide range of periods, geographical locations and disciplinary approaches but all seek to answer significant questions, including whether common motives can be identified, and how far knowledge about plague was based on an understanding of the urban space. It also examines how maps and photographs contribute to understanding plague in the city through exploring the ways in which the relationship between plague and the urban environment has been visualised, from the poisoned darts of plague winging their way towards their victims in the votive pictures from the Renaissance, to the mapping of the spread of disease in late nineteenth-century Bombay and photographing Honolulu’s great plague fire in 1900. Containing a series of studies that illuminate plague’s urban connection as a key social and political concern throughout history, Plague and the City is ideal for students of early modern history, and of the early modern city and plague more specifically.

This volume reveals the extent to which aural perception influences our spatial awareness. Spanning various fields and practices, from psychology to geography, and from zoology to urban planning, it covers a range of environments in which sounds contribute to forming our sense of space and place. The contributions gathered here lead from the mother’s womb, through the habitats of insects and owls, to the resonating bodies of buildings and the city, to artistic endeavours that aim to consciously reveal the spatiality of sound. In this progression, the book demonstrates the profoundly constitutive role of hearing and listening at all stages of our biological and social development, as well as the epistemological, phenomenological and emotional importance of sound in relation to our construction of space. As such, it will appeal not only to architects, town-planners and artists, but also to the growing community of scientists and scholars intrigued by sonic issues. Differing from both quantitative acoustics and sound design, its approach opens new perspectives on the sonic dimension and aural understanding of our environment by tracing analogies between a diversity of spaces formed when sound interacts with listening as a mode of attention.

This completely unique history tells the story of urban life over 2,500 years through the bodily experience of men and women: what sights, smells, and noises they took in, how they dressed, how they made love, when they bathed, and more--in great cities from ancient Athens to modern New York.

Set against the contemporary thinking of the city as a spectacle, SpaceDBodyDRitual: Performativity in the City establishes everyday life in the city as a ground for authentic experience. Reena Tiwari emphasizes the city as a space of lived experience-an intricately layered space giving people a poetic experience, responding to their memories and desires. She also explores the conflict between two ideas: the idea of thee 'city as text' to be read and understood from a distance, and the 'city as body,' where the body, after writing the text through its performance, achieves the capacity to read and understand it. SpaceDBodyDRitual demonstrates that the abstract 'seeing' embedded in the 'city as a text' is underwritten by the idea of power operating at deeper levels in the city. This hidden power is the power of the user's body in space. Furthermore, Tiwari proposes that an understanding of the 'city as body' through lived experience-through rhythmanalysis, where rhythms of everyday and extra everyday practices are understood-leads to the design of an environment that is evocative and is able to generate a bodily response from the user. To understand the rhythms, it becomes essential to know the way users inhabit, understand and map or present the city spaces by their bodies. SpaceDBodyDRitual will compel its readership to think of the parameters of spatial design as cultural generator.

Charles LaSalle and his City Gym Boys first gained notoriety with their ripped bodies and popular beefcake calendars. But since LaSalle founded the group in 1997, they have made it their mission to mentor urban youth on the lifelong benefits of fitness and exercise. With practical advice on everything from diet to turning household objects into workout tools, Get a Bangin' Body explains why pumping iron is passé, and shares a body-weight-only program that anyone-whatever their age, income, or fitness level-can undertake. This unique exercise book encourages communities across the country to take charge of their health by implementing a workout program of push-ups, pull-ups, lunges, squats, and planks that will build a naturally lean, toned, and healthy physique. Get a Bangin' Body will show readers how to inexpensively, conveniently, and effectively build the body of their dreams.

This vivid history of the city in Western civilization tells the story of urban life through bodily experience. Flesh and Stone is the story of the deepest parts of life—how women and men moved in public and private spaces, what they saw and heard, the smells that assailed them, where they ate, how they dressed, the mores of bathing and of making love—all in the architecture of stone and space from ancient Athens to modern New York. Early in Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett probes the ways in which the ancient Athenians experienced nakedness, and the relation of nakedness to the shape of the ancient city, its troubled politics, and the inequalities between men and women. The story then moves to Rome in the time of the Emperor Hadrian, exploring Roman beliefs in the geometrical perfection of the body. The second part of the book examines how Christian beliefs about the body related to the Christian city—the Venetian ghetto, cloisters, and markets in Paris. The final part of Flesh and Stone deals with what happened to urban space as modern scientific understanding of the body cut free from pagan and Christian beliefs. Flesh and Stone makes sense of our constantly evolving urban living spaces, helping us to build a common home for the increased diversity of bodies that make up the modern city.