The industrialization of the nineteenth-century European city facilitated developing conceptions of the model city, and allowed for large scale urban transformations. The urban discourse in the latter half of the nineteenth century was consequently dominated by a dialectic exchange between the ideal and the practical, a debate played out in the formation of the modern metropolis. Manifestoes and Transformations is the first work to deal with urban utopias and their relationship with actual urban interventions. Bringing together a carefully chosen, wide-ranging team of experts, the book provides a broad, contextual exploration of the ideas and urban practices which are the foundations of our conception of the contemporary city. As such, it is a valuable resource for students interested in the formation of the modernist city.

The industrialization of the nineteenth-century European city facilitated developing conceptions of the model city, and allowed for large scale urban transformations. The urban discourse in the latter half of the nineteenth century was consequently dominated by a dialectic exchange between the ideal and the practical, a debate played out in the formation of the modern metropolis. Manifestoes and Transformations is the first work to deal with urban utopias and their relationship with actual urban interventions. Bringing together a carefully chosen, wide-ranging team of experts, the book provides a broad, contextual exploration of the ideas and urban practices which are the foundations of our conception of the contemporary city. As such, it is a valuable resource for students interested in the formation of the modernist city.

The Yearbook of Transnational History is dedicated to disseminating pioneering research in the field of transnational history. This third volume is dedicated to the transnational turn in urban history. It brings together articles that investigate the transnational and transatlantic exchanges of ideas and concepts for urban planning, architecture, and technology that served to modernize cities across East and Central Europe and the United States. This collection includes studies about regionals fairs as centers of knowledge transfer in Eastern Europe, about the transfer of city planning among developing urban centers within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, about the introduction of the Bauhaus into American society, and about the movement for constructing paved roads to connect cities on a global scale. The volume concludes with a historiographical article that discusses the potential of the transnational perspective to urban history. The articles in this volume highlight the movement of ideas and practices across various cultures and societies and explore the relations, connections, and spaces created by these movements. The articles show that modern cities across the European continent and North America emerged from intensive exchanges of ideas for almost every aspect of modern urban life.

This is a book about the long cultural shadow cast by a single bestselling novel, Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), which introduced Ruritania, a colourful pocket kingdom. In this swashbuckling tale, Englishman Rudolf Rassendyll impersonates the king of Ruritania to foil a coup, but faces a dilemma when he falls for the lovely Princess Flavia. Hope's novel inspired stage and screen adaptations, place names, and even a board game, but it also launched a whole new subgenre, the "Ruritanian romance". The new form offered swordplay, royal romance, and splendid uniforms and gowns in such settings as Alasia, Balaria, and Cadonia. This study explores both the original appeal of The Prisoner of Zenda, and the extraordinary longevity and adaptability of the Ruritanian formula, which, it is argued, has been rooted in a lingering fascination with royalty, and the pocket kingdom's capacity to hold a looking glass up to Britain and later the United States. Individual chapters look at Hope's novel and its stage and film adaptations; at the forgotten American versions of Ruritania; at the chocolate-box principalities of the musical stage; at Cold War reworkings of the formula; and at Ruritania's recent reappearance in young adult fiction and made-for-television Christmas movies. The adventures of Ruritania have involved a diverse list of contributors, including John Buchan, P.G Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Vladimir Nabokov, and Ian Fleming among the writers; Sigmund Romberg and Ivor Novello among the composers; Erich Von Stroheim and David O. Selznick among the film-makers; and Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Peter Ustinov, Peter Sellers, and Anne Hathaway among the performers.

The British countryside is a national institution; most people aspire to live there, many people use it for leisure and recreation and we can all watch rural life played out on our television screen, read about it in novels or consume its imagery in art and cinematography. The aim of this book is to explore the way that these aspirations and perceptions influence the way that the term "rural" is interpreted across different academic disciplines. Definitions of rural are not exact, leaving room for these interpretations to have a significant impact on the meanings conveyed in different areas of research and across different economic, social and spatial contexts. In this book contributors present research across a range of subjects allowing critical reflections upon their personal and disciplinary interpretations of "rural". This resulting volume is a collection of diverse chapters that gives an emergent sense of how the notion of "rural" changes and blurs as the disciplinary lens is adjusted. In drawing together these strands, it becomes clear that human relations with rural space morph materiality into highly complex representations wherein both disadvantage and social exclusion persist within a rurality that is also commodified, consumed and cherished.

In Fashioning Spaces, Heidi Brevik-Zender argues that in the years between 1870 and 1900 the chroniclers of Parisian modernity depicted the urban landscape not just in public settings such as boulevards and parks but also in “dislocations,” spaces where the public and the intimate overlapped in provocative and subversive ways. Stairwells, theatre foyers, dressmakers' studios, and dressing rooms were in-between places that have long been overlooked but were actually marked as indisputably modern through their connections with high fashion. Fashioning Spaces engages with and thinks beyond the work of critics Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin to arrive at new readings of the French capital. Examining literature by Zola, Maupassant, Rachilde, and others, as well as paintings, architecture, and the fashionable garments worn by both men and women, Brevik-Zender crafts a compelling and innovative account of how fashion was appropriated as a way of writing about the complexities of modernity in fin-de-siècle Paris.

The current trend for constructing experimental structures is now an international phenomenon. It has been taken up worldwide by design professionals, researchers, educators and students alike. There exist, however, distinct and significant tendencies within this development that require further investigation. This issue of AD takes on this task by examining one of the most promising trajectories in this area, the rise of intensely local architectures. In his seminal essay of 1983, Kenneth Frampton redefined Critical Regionalism by calling for an intensely local approach to architectural design. Today, Frampton’s legacy is regaining relevance for a specific body of work in practice and education focused on the construction of experimental structures. Could this ultimately provide the seeds for a compelling and alternative approach to sustainable design? Contributors include: Barbara Ascher, Peter Buchanan, Karl Otto Ellefsen, David Jolly Monge, Lisbet Harboe, David Leatherbarrow, Areti Markopoulou, Philip Nobel, Rodrigo Rubio, Søren S Sørensen, Defne Sunguroðlu Hensel. Featured practices: Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Rintala Eggertsson, SHoP, Studio Mumbai, TYIN tegnestue.

This major new book offers a much-needed introduction to the work of Siegfried Kracauer, one of the main intellectual figures in the orbit of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. It is part of a timely revival and reappraisal of his unique contribution to our critical understanding of modernity, the interrogation of mass culture, and the recognition of both the dynamism and diminution of human experience in the hustle and bustle of the contemporary metropolis. In stressing the extraordinary variety of Kracauer’s writings (from scholarly philosophical treatises to journalistic fragments, from comic novels to classified reports) and the dazzling diversity of his themes (from science and urban architectural visions to slapstick and dancing girls), this insightful book reveals his fundamental and formative influence upon Critical Theory and argues for his vital relevance for cultural analysis today. Kracauer’s work is distinguished by an acute sensitivity to the ‘surface manifestations’ of popular culture and a witty, eminently readable literary style. In exploring and making accessible the work of this remarkable thinker, this book will be indispensable for scholars and students working in many disciplines and interdisciplinary fields: sociology and social theory; film, media and cultural studies; urban studies, cultural geography and architectural theory; philosophy and Critical Theory.

In 1859, Charles Baudelaire is writing the poetry and criticism of the new urban cultural and social world which would make him described by a number of historians as the first modern. Indeed, it is he who coined the term ‘modernity’. In the east, Ivan Turgenev with On the Eve begins reflections about Russia and modernity which would result in his next novel, set in 1859, Fathers and Sons. The latter still resonates today. In Switzerland, Jacob Burckhardt is inventing the Renaissance as a means of understanding what is happening in his own time. Indeed, we never talked about a Renaissance until Burckhardt published his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy in 1860, something he wrote in order to better understand his own times. In the West, several important and central works of European culture are being written in England by both British writers and exiles. Marx is researching Das Capital and writing A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Mazzini is writing his major work on modern nationalism, The Duties of Man, just as Italy is beginning its decade of unification and the European map is beginning a period of extraordinary change. John Stuart Mill published his On Liberty in early 1859, still the work that is the modern ground of democratic ideas dealing with the relationship between liberty and authority. And in November 1859 one of the dozen or so most influential works of all of European history and science, one that shattered many pre-modern concepts, The Origin of Species, was published by Charles Darwin. The thinkers who were prominent at the time were, in a full sense, public intellectuals. Their works were read, debated, applauded, feared, defended and scorned in the public forums, what philosophers sometimes called the marketplace. It was in 1859 that modernity, the world as we now know it, gets confronted and encountered. As a result concepts and ideas we still use, then new, get thought about and become part of the public discourse. From this point on, the dialogue is forever transformed.