Gated Communities provides a historic; socio-political and contemporary cultural perspective of gated communities. In doing so it offers a different lens through which to view the historical vernacular background of this now global phenomenon. The book presents a collection of new writing on the issue by an international and interdisciplinary group of contributors. The authors review current thinking on gated communities and consider the sustainability issues that these contemporary lifestyle communities raise. The authors argue that there are links that can be drawn between the historic gated homesteads and cities; found in much of the world; and todays Western-style secure complexes. Global examples of gated communities; and their historical context; are presented throughout the book. The authors also comment on how sustainability issues have impacted on these communities. The book concludes by considering how the historic measures up with the contemporary in terms of sustainability function; and aesthetic.
#730971 in eBooks 2012-01-01 2011-12-18File Name: B006VFCV50
Review
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Insightful and readableBy mysterydancerI truly enjoyed this book. The topic was of great interest to me. as I find the politics of dance very interesting. and it was readable. Prevot is a wonderful academic. She did serious in depth research for the book. but she did not feel the need to use vocabulary that "proves" her intellectual ability. A great book if you are at all interested in this topic.0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. FundamentalBy Sara Martins Pereira da SilvaVery good book4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. High HopesBy Kevin KillianI had high hopes for this book that it did not fulfill fully. I wrote about it briefly over at HTML Giant but I find myself returning to it and wondering what ultimately left me unsatisfied. For those of you who dont know anything about the book. Dr Naima Prevots studied the transcriptions of the Dance Panel of the Presidents Emergency Fund for International Affairs. an initiative of Dwight Eisenhower to use the arts as a weapon in the Cold war of the 1950s. These records had been only hastily used before if at all by previous Cold War scholars and a full length analysis of what happened should be able to tell us a lot.Basically dance experts got together and decided which dancers and choreographers would receive money to finance foreign tours and performances. Other divisions of the Fund voted on writers. visual artists. theater companies and so on. but the Dance Panel was seen almost as the apex to the effort to depoliticize the arts in an effort to make America palatable and admirable to skeptical nations in Europe. Asia. South America and Africa.Martha Graham got a lot of funding. even though she had been a leftist. exactly the same sort of creature that the House Un-American Affairs Committee was coming down so hard on at pretty much the same time. Prevots is most successful when she can make plain this sort of cultural schizophrenia and can link it to something within dance itself that allows for this free play of image--possibly the turn from language that dance embodies? Thus dance can be understood by non-English speakers and must have seemed especially attractive to the funders. There was also a racial element to their calculations. for America was being vilified by communist critics for its racism and lynching and resistance to social justice. so the Dance Panel could send out partially integrated dance companies. and even all black companies like Alvin Aileys. to make the silent argument that. look. here in the USA we treat our black citizens with pride and shower them with bouquets.Te book also shows us which dancers did not meet with the approval of the panel. In some cases. avant-garde experimentalism was downgraded because. after all. we wanted to send human beings as our ambassadors. not weird Paul Taylor dancers with movements like Lincoln Logs scattered by a childs unruly hand. And some dancers and choreographers were quietly labelled mentally or emotionally unfit to travel. while "Grahams message was universal and reached across many barriers." the author says. Where the book falls down is in the authors thorough endorsement of every one of the Panels decisions. One chapter concludes with this sentence: "The Dance Panel was right to reject the Ballet Russe be Monte Carlo: it chose. instead. to give the world a vision of ballet that was contemporary. exciting. and made in the U.S.A."In other words. anything that helped the US during the Cold war seems perfectly fine with Prevots. which is a shame. since we have the right to expect a little more independent analysis from such a fine researcher.
