crusader wrote:

---

kinda random, but i was wondering if any of you smart people could direct me towards good books on urban planning/ urban sociology/ whateveryouwannacallit.

maybe along the lines of 'city of quartz'?

---

breakreep wrote:

---

God bless you man.

---

Quote:

---

Professor of sociology at the University of Leeds (and since 1990 emeritus professor), Bauman has become best known for his analyses of the links between modernity and the Holocaust, and of postmodern consumerism...In the mid and late 1990s Bauman's books[9] began to look at two different but interrelated subjects: postmodernity and consumerism. Bauman began to develop the position that a shift had taken place in modern society in the latter half of the 20th century - it had altered from being a society of producers to a society of consumers. This switch, Bauman argued, reversed Freud's 'modern' trade-off: this time security was given up in order to enjoy increased freedom, freedom to purchase, to consume, and to enjoy life. In his books in the 1990s Bauman wrote of this shift as being a shift from 'modernity' to 'post-modernity'. Since the turn of the millennium, his books have tried to avoid the confusion surrounding the term 'postmodernity' by using the metaphors of 'liquid' and 'solid' modernity. In his books on modern consumerism Bauman still writes of the same uncertainties that he portrayed in his writings on 'solid' modernity; but in these books he writes of these fears being more diffuse and harder to pin down. Indeed they are, to use the title of one of his books, 'liquid fears' - fears about paedophilia, for instance, which are amorphous and which have no easily identifiable referent.

---

Quote:

---

From amazon - In this new book Zygmunt Bauman examines the impact of consumerist attitudes and patterns of conduct on various apparently unconnected aspects of social life politics and democracy, social divisions and stratification, communities and partnerships, identity building, the production and use of knowledge, and value preferences.

The invasion and colonization of the web of human relations by the worldviews and behavioural patterns inspired and shaped by commodity markets, and the sources of resentment, dissent and occasional resistance to the occupying forces, are the central themes of this brilliant new book by one of the worlds most original and insightful social thinkers.

---

Quote:

---

The Critique of Everyday Life is perhaps the richest, most prescient work by one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers. The trilogy which provided the philosophy behind the 1968 student revolution in France, is considered to be the founding text of what we now know as Cultural Studies. Whether discussing sport, household gadgets, the countryside, surrealism, Charlie Chaplin or religion, Lefebvre always concentrates on the minutiae of lived experience in work and leisure, daydreams and festivities. A work of enourmous range and subtlety, Lefebvre takes as his starting-point and guide the trivial details of quotidian experience: an experience colonized by the commodity, shadowed by inauthenticity, yet one which remains the only source of resistance and change. Denounced by both the right and left when it was first published in France in 1947, today this text is recognized as path-breaking, radical and hugely influential. Volume 1 is a groundbreaking analysis of the alienating phenomena of daily life under capitalism. Volume 2 identifies categories within everyday life, such as the theory of the semantic field and the theory of moments. And, Volume 3 explores the crisis of modernity and the decisive assertion of technological modernism.

---

Quote:

---

This text provides a history of visual perception and its (re)production. Surveying art history, as well as the technologies of war and urban planning, Virilio provides an introduction to a new "logistics of the image". "The Vision Machine" also traces the history of "regimes of the visual", from the era of painting, engraving and architecture, via the photogram and, more recently, infographics to synthetic imagery.

---

Quote:

---

The European Graduate School EGS Media and Communications program, facilitating creative breakthroughs and theoretical paradigm shifts, brings together master's and doctoral students with the visionaries and philosophers of the media world who inspire learning about art, philosophy, communications, film, literature, internet, web and cyberspace studies from a cross-disciplinary perspective.

Our faculty includes Giorgio Agamben, Chantal Akerman, Pierre Alferi, Pierre Aubenque, Alain Badiou, Nicholson Baker, Judith Balso, Lewis Baltz, John Perry Barlow, Marcel Beyer, Yve-Alain Bois, Catherine Breillat, Victor Burgin, Judith Butler, Sophie Calle, Hélène Cixous, Diane Davis, Michel Deguy, Manuel DeLanda, Claire Denis, Suzanne Doppelt, Atom Egoyan, Tracey Emin, Bracha Ettinger, Chris Fynsk, Antony Gormley, Peter Greenaway, Durs Grünbein, Werner Hamacher, Barbara Hammer, Donna Haraway, Michael Hardt, Martin Hielscher, Michel Houellebecq, Shelley Jackson, Claude Lanzmann, Yang Lian, Greg Lynn, Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, Carl Mitcham, Colum McCann, Jean-Luc Nancy, Gaspar Noe, Ulrike Ottinger, Cornelia Parker, Quay Brothers, Jacques Ranciere, Larry Rickels, Avital Ronell, Jacques Roubaud, Wolfgang Schirmacher, Volker Schlöndorff, Michael Schmidt, Hendrik Speck, Bruce Sterling, Sandy Stone, Elia Suleiman, Margarethe von Trotta, Fred Ulfers, Gregory Ulmer, Agnès Varda, Paul Virilio, Victor J. Vitanza, Hubertus von Amelunxen, Samuel Weber, Lebbeus Woods, Krzysztof Zanussi, Siegfried Zielinski and Slavoj Zizek. Jean-François Lyotard was a guiding spirit during the founding phase, Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida amicably supported our work for many years and held several workshops until they passed away in March 2007 and April 2004.

---