An illustrated city walking guide like no other. Whether you’re a city-dweller who wants to explore your home turf, or a keen country walker who likes the idea of trying something different, or a discerning weekend breaker who wants to get under the skin of a city in a day or two, Urban Rambles is the book to inspire you to get out and explore your nearest city on foot. Each of these 20 walks includes: a GPS enabled map configured for your mobile device specially commissioned illustrations of the route and walk data inspiring photographs of the things you will see along the way information on green spaces and architectural gems recommended cafes, pubs and independent shops England's cities have become much more walkable places in the last decade, with huge investments in green spaces, redevelopment of old industrial areas and a complete urban planning re-think in favour of pedestrians. Walking in a city is the healthy lifestyle choice, offering you the chance to exercise and the calming powers of green spaces. Choose from cathedral cities like York and Lincoln, seats of learning like Cambridge and Oxford, trading ports like Bristol and Liverpool, cities designed for pleasure like Brighton and Bath. Choose to visit Victorian industrial cities Manchester, Sheffield and Birmingham, and of course the nation’s capital, where a new 25-mile circular route takes you from urban regeneration through the Olympic Park and past rivers, parks and palaces.

Berkeley Walks celebrates the things that make Berkeley such a wonderful walking city—diverse architecture, panoramic views, tree-lined neighborhoods, historic homes, unusual gardens, secret pathways, hidden parks, vibrant street life, trend-setting restaurants, and intriguing history. Fascinating and surprising sidelights include the apartment building from which Patty Hearst was kidnapped; Ted Kaczynski’s home before he became the Unabomber; and the residences of Nobel laureates and literary Berkeleyans such as Thornton Wilder, Ann Rice, and Philip K. Dick. Bob Johnson and Janet Byron—longtime city residents and tour guides—designed these 18 walks to showcase the many elements that make Berkeley’s neighborhoods, shopping districts, and academic areas such fun to explore. Visitors will discover a vibrant community beyond the University of California campus borders, while locals will be surprised and delighted by the treasures in their own backyards. Highlights of the book include a focus on architects Joseph Esherick, John Galen Howard, Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan, James Plachek, Walter Ratcliff, Jr., and John Hudson Thomas, 100 archival and original photos, and 20 maps, including a map of Berkeley bookstores.

Manifesto on the urban commons from the acclaimed theorist.

The author writes about her passion for Marseilles--a city she has known for half a century--describing all aspects of past and present life in the ancient seaport

A hiking trail through majestic mountains. A raw, unpeopled wilderness stretching as far as the eye can see. These are the settings we associate with our most famous books about nature. But Gavin Van Horn isn’t most nature writers. He lives and works not in some perfectly remote cabin in the woods but in a city—a big city. And that city has offered him something even more valuable than solitude: a window onto the surprising attractiveness of cities to animals. What was once in his mind essentially a nature-free blank slate turns out to actually be a bustling place where millions of wild things roam. He came to realize that our own paths are crisscrossed by the tracks and flyways of endangered black-crowned night herons, Cooper’s hawks, brown bats, coyotes, opossums, white-tailed deer, and many others who thread their lives ably through our own. With The Way of Coyote, Gavin Van Horn reveals the stupendous diversity of species that can flourish in urban landscapes like Chicago. That isn’t to say city living is without its challenges. Chicago has been altered dramatically over a relatively short timespan—its soils covered by concrete, its wetlands drained and refilled, its river diverted and made to flow in the opposite direction. The stories in The Way of Coyote occasionally lament lost abundance, but they also point toward incredible adaptability and resilience, such as that displayed by beavers plying the waters of human-constructed canals or peregrine falcons raising their young atop towering skyscrapers. Van Horn populates his stories with a remarkable range of urban wildlife and probes the philosophical and religious dimensions of what it means to coexist, drawing frequently from the wisdom of three unconventional guides—wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold, Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu, and the North American trickster figure Coyote. Ultimately, Van Horn sees vast potential for a more vibrant collective of ecological citizens as we take our cues from landscapes past and present. Part urban nature travelogue, part philosophical reflection on the role wildlife can play in waking us to a shared sense of place and fate, The Way of Coyote is a deeply personal journey that questions how we might best reconcile our own needs with the needs of other creatures in our shared urban habitats.

First published in 1850, New York by Gas-Light explores the seamy side of the newly emerging metropolis: "the festivities of prostitution, the orgies of pauperism, the haunts of theft and murder, the scenes of drunkenness and beastly debauch, and all the sad realities that go to make up the lower stratum—the underground story—of life in New York!" The author of this lively and fascinating little book, which both attracted and offended large numbers of readers in Victorian America, was George G. Foster, reporter for Horace Greeley's influential New York Tribune, social commentator, poet, and man about town. Foster drew on his daily and nightly rambles through the city's streets and among the characters of the urban demi-monde to produce a sensationalized but extraordinarily revealing portrait of New York at the moment it was emerging as a major metropolis. Reprinted here with sketches from two of Foster's other books, New York by Gas-Light will be welcomed by students of urban social history, popular culture, literature, and journalism. Editor Stuart M. Blumin has provided a penetrating introductory essay that sets Foster's life and work in the contexts of the growing city, the development of the mass-distribution publishing industry, the evolving literary genre of urban sensationalism, and the wider culture of Victorian America. This is an important reintroduction to a significant but neglected work, a prologue to the urban realism that would flourish later in the fiction of Stephen Crane, the painting of George Bellows, and the journalism of Jacob Riis.

From Charles Dickens’ London to today’s megacities, a fascinating exploration of what urban walking tells us about modern life—for fans of Rebecca Solnit, Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, and literary history. “A labyrinthine journey into the literature of walking and thinking,” as seen in the lives and works of Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Ray Bradbury, and other literary greats (Guardian). There is no such thing as a false step. Every time we walk we are going somewhere. Especially if we are going nowhere. Moving around the modern city is not a way of getting from A to B, but of understanding who and where we are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont retraces episodes in the history of the walker since the mid-19th century. From Dickens’s insomniac night rambles to restless excursions through the faceless monuments of today’s neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of self-discovery and self-escape, of disappearances and secret subversions. Pacing stride for stride alongside literary amblers and thinkers such as Edgar Allan Poe, André Breton, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life. Through these writings, Beaumont asks: Can you get lost in a crowd? What are the consequences of using your smartphone in the street? What differentiates the nocturnal metropolis from the city of daylight? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? And can we save the city—or ourselves—by taking to the pavement?

Images of the Street captures the vitality, excitements and tensions of the street. Using examples from the U.K, India, Australia and North America the contributors draw on research in cultural geography, sociolgy, cultural studies and planning to explore the making and meaning of urban space. Among the themes examined are:1.the way streetscapes are shaped by interplay between politics, planning and local political economy 2.social differences of individuals experiences' of the street 3.how social identities are shaped and represented in fiction and film 4.the meaning and significance of streets as settings to play out social practices 5.how social life is regulated on the street, formerly by police and indirectly through architecture and urban design

A passionate, thought-provoking exploration of walking as a political and cultural activity, from the author of Orwell's Roses Drawing together many histories--of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores--Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking. Arguing that the history of walking includes walking for pleasure as well as for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit focuses on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from philosophers to poets to mountaineers. She profiles some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction--from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja--finding a profound relationship between walking and thinking and walking and culture. Solnit argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in our ever more car-dependent and accelerated world.

The experiences we enjoy, endure, or miss out on are influenced by what our surroundings allow and invite us to do. Just like our food diet, our experience diet influences our health and so our chances of finding happiness and fulfilling our potential. A healthy experience diet offers inspiration, reassurance, delight, and play. It nurtures physical, cognitive, and emotional health, builds resilience, and fosters confidence and self-esteem. An unhealthy experience diet lacks these things and consigns people to lives diminished in quantity and quality. Recipes for Urban Happiness offers an innovative way of looking at the relationship between people and place and redefines what good urban design is. The book outlines what designers and non-designers can do to create urban places where nurturing behaviours are both possible and preferable. Recipes for Urban Happiness will be relevant to public health, community development, and design practitioners, as well as students and academics.