Sprawl is an unsustainable pattern of growth that threatens to undermine the health of communities globally. It has been a dominant mid-to-late twentieth century growth pattern in developed countries and in the twenty-first century has shown widespread signs of proliferation in India; China; and other growing countries. The World Health Organization cites sprawl for its serious adverse public health consequences for humans and ecological habitats. The many adverse impacts of sprawl on the health of individuals; communities; and biological ecosystems are well documented. Architects have been rightly criticized for failing to grasp the aesthetic and functional challenge to create buildings and places that mitigate sprawl while simultaneously promoting healthier; active lifestyles in neighbourhoods and communities. Sprawling Cities and Our Endangered Public Health examines the past and present role of architecture in relation to the public health consequences of unmitigated sprawl and the ways in which it threatens our future. Topics examined include the role of twentieth century theories of architecture and urbanism and their public health ramifications; examples of current unsustainable practices; design considerations for the creation of health-promoting architecture and landscape urbanism; a critique of recent case studies of sustainable alternatives to unchecked sprawl; and prognostications for the future. Architects; public health professionals; landscape architects; town planners; and a broad range of policy specialists will be able to apply the methods and tools presented here to counter unmitigated sprawl and to create architecture that promotes active; healthier lifestyles. Stephen Verderber is an internationally respected evidence-based researcher/practitioner/educator in the emerging; interdisciplinary field of architecture; health; and society. This; his latest book on the interactions between our buildings; our cities and our health; is an invaluable reference source for everyone concerned with sustainable architecture and landscape urbanism.
#1750413 in eBooks 2012-06-13 2012-06-13File Name: B0087GZFSQ
Review
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful. An Excellent Series of LecturesBy R. GaitherUniversity of Chicago professor Mitchell has written an excellent. thought-provoking book. informed by art history and criticism. One reviewer here is dead wrong to suggest that "the core assumption is the patronizing notion that if only we had treated blacks. etc. differently and better. they would be psychologically identical to us. the Caucasian race. the model paradigm of all that is good and true." Appallingly. this reviewers quip verges on total misrepresentation. at best. More accurately. the authors argument is that those who suggest we are in a post-racial condition are kidding themselves; race and racism still persist. Professor Mitchell calls for a disciplinary re-evaluation of race as a kind of medium through which one might better examine. explore and extirpate racism. As an art historian. professor Mitchell invites readers to re-examine the concept of race for what it is: a medium through which the mind sifts to make sense or contextualize the mediated subject. much like various media artists use to construct art objects. Mitchells chapters or lectures. vary widely in their subject matter and philosophical aims. Briefly. the book counters a pervasive argument in the Humanities that we (Americans) have indeed reached the so-called "post-racial" moment. Mitchell dispenses with this idea in short order--and does so. cogently. eloquently. and constructively. I highly recommend this book of essays. These polemical essays enlighten and invite readers to ponder race more keenly before jumping on the post-racial bandwagon. Professor Mitchells subjects range from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to an engrossing critique of Poussins "The Adoration of the Golden Calf." and he investigates them through a range of themes. from cosmopolitanism to totemistic theory (James Frazier and Freud). This work does not pretend to be a comprehensive study of race. These essays do. however. begin to reclaim ground lost to many who trumpet the arrival of post-racialism in the academy without examining how de facto racism functions in everyday life. art. and regrettably. within the walls of academia itself. We would do well to heed Professor Mitchells call.2 of 26 people found the following review helpful. Writing around RaceBy elitistThese days. confronted with a book whose jacket claims it is a "staggeringly original and completely unprecedented achievement." or some such rubbish. the canny reader is likely to groan. roll his eyes heavenward. and steel his nerves for a stentorian recitation of the standard orthodoxy. a parade of commonplaces. clicheacute;s. and conventional wisdoms dressed up as the Latest Thing - as a bold iconoclastic challenge to conventional thinking.It is perhaps appropriate that these lectures were delivered as the WEB Du Bois lectures at Harvard University. because the notion that apparent differences in racial psychology originate in the history of racial discrimination. and not the other way around is - far from being the latest avant-garde notion - a hoary venerable idea originated and popularized by Du Bois himself in the 19th century.Of course. Mitchell takes the trouble to "torque" the rather commonplace notion that race is a fictional construct rather than a biological reality by treating it"...neither as an objective reality nor as a subjective illusion. but instead as a medium constituted by the encounter between fantasy and reality."The sort of pirouetting. all-encompassing ambiguity is the sort of squid ink which cultural theorists emit in order to finesse difficult questions in such a way that the reader is deeply ashamed of himself for being simpleminded enough to ask:Is this clever fellow saying race is a biological reality. or a fictional construct?What in the world is a "medium"?The reader is meant to feel rather stupid for not understanding how this evasive neither-nor position can be even remotely tenable - or even coherent.This kind of fancy dancing allows the author to avoid saying anything genuinely controversial. and to distance himself from interpretations of his work he finds embarrassing or demeaning later on.All of these tricks are familiar to the Ivy League educated intellectual type. and they are certainly straightforward enough to master. but may strike ordinary people as a kind of impressive forbidding sorcery.(The comparison with Judith Butlers lunatic diatribe Gender Trouble is apropos: she declared - incoherently. pointlessly. in a vain attempt to sound bracingly. shockingly original. as the patient reader soon discovers - the distinction between biological sex and cultural gender to be null and void. You are only pregnant after a member of the medical establishment says you are. pregnancy being a mere linguistic protocol and all that - which makes you wonder how women without physicians. not to mention all animals. have managed to reproduce without the benefit of their `interpolation into the symbolic code of the phal-logocentric masculo-thoritarian matrix of power or some similar gibberish.)Given the daily avalanche of new evidence for important and ineradicable racial differences in psychology which pour in from dozens of researchers in dozens of countries from dozens of different disciplines. ranging from psychology to genetics. from anthropology to political science. it is late in the day for such stolid. stale. unimaginative. and stubbornly unreal pronouncements of the nonexistence of race as a biological category.As it happens. leaders in the scientific and academic communities and the media have been queitly brainstorming floating experimental trial balloons for years. The trillion dollar question is:How to pave the way for the inevitable collapse of the firewall between science reality and the public discourse on race? Can we acknowledge the simple reality of racial differences in psychology without opening up a Pandoras box of toxic racism and xenophobia?A teachable moment indeed!!Fortunately for the opinion-makers and reality-shapers in academia and the media. it is the case that very few people on earth have ever believed the Official Orthodoxy - although this is difficult to believe outside of the magical. kaleidoscopic. floating. hermetically sealed soap bubble of academia and the media. with all of its "torquing" and virtuosic ambiguities.Most people of all races have always believed that their existing important psychological differences between the human races. that they are ineradicable. and that they are probably a good thing. variety being the spice of life.As it happens. the latest developments in genetics and population genetics. etc.. coincide with this commonsense view of the world. For my generation. and for that of Mitchell as well. blanket denials of racial difference in psychology rested on a statement by Stephen Jay Gould which no scientist on Earth has taken remotely serious for decades. to wit. that the human brain simply - magically. unaccountably. counterintuitively. and implausibly - stopped evolving 50.000 years ago - which is to say. stopped evolving at exactly the point at which both science and common sense would suggest it would have begun to evolve at an accelerating pace and in divergent ways. since that is the point in time when the human race dispersed from its point of origin in northeastern Africa throughout the world to occupy vastly different ecological niches and to evolve vastly different cultural and behavioral norms.According to the basics of modern biology and genetics. it is THEORETICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for all of the different human populations to have evolved exactly the same brain structure. and correspondingly. personality and psychology. over the past 50.000 years environments as diverse as Australia. Alaska. the ian rain forest. the Peruvian highlands. China. sub-Saharan Africa. the Mediterranean. Scandinavia. etc.As I said. no one on Earth believes any longer that the human brain stopped evolving 50.000 years ago. or even 2000 years ago. yet the orthodoxy on racial difference based upon this ludicrous and fallacious assertion remains intact.This is an instance of cognitive dissonance. and these days. the friction between these two and irreconcilable realities is throwing up interesting sparks.Throwing water on them are rigid exercises in thought control such as this one. which are - ironically - themselves the ultimate form of racism:the core assumption is the patronizing notion that if only we had treated blacks. etc. differently and better. they would be psychologically identical to us. the Caucasian race. the model paradigm of all that is good and true. As Noam Chomsky said in a filmed interview recently. this is little more than an ill-fated attempt to homogenize everyone according to the same corporate model.When I attended graduate school at an Ivy League university. "difference" was all the rage. was proselytized as the ultimate value. endowed with an aura of the sacred. But. of course. no one really meant it. The very idea of inherent racial and sexual differences was and remains anathema.Once the current orthodoxy dissolves into mist. as it must. given the scientific reality contradicting it. a lot of people will wonder:How could we ever have believed THAT?How indeed?
