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Chapters: Geography of Anaheim, California, Geography of Bakersfield, California, Geography of Fremont, California, Geography of Fresno, California, Geography of Huntington Beach, California, Geography of Irvine, California, Geography of Long Beach, California, Geography of Los Angeles, California, Geography of Oakland, California, Geography of Oxnard, California, Geography of Riverside, California, Geography of Sacramento, California, Geography of San Bernardino, California, Geography of San Diego, California, Geography of San Francisco, California, Geography of San Jose, California, Geography of Santa Ana, California, San Andreas Fault, Signal Hill, California, Golden Gate, El Rio, California, Port Hueneme, California, Channel Islands Beach, California, Yerba Buena Island, John Wayne Airport, Santa Ana River, Los Angeles River, San Diego-tijuana, University of California, Irvine Campus, Point Loma, San Diego, California, Farallon Islands, Potrero Point, Lake Merritt, Salt Lake Oil Field, Downtown San Bernardino, Beverly Hills Oil Field, Kern River, Long Beach Oil Field, Riverside National Cemetery, Mount Soledad, Angel Island, Huntington State Beach, Rincon Hill, San Francisco, Colonia, Oxnard, California, Children's Pool Beach, San Bruno Mountain, Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve, Midway, San Diego, California, Mission Peak, the Wiggle, Temescal Creek, Orange County Great Park, Black's Beach, Berkeley Hills, Port of Oakland, Santa Clara River, Mountain View Cemetery (Oakland, California), San Diego Bay, Woodbridge, Irvine, California, Twin Peaks (San Francisco, California), Mount Rubidoux, South San Diego, Downtown Sacramento, Chaffee Zoological Gardens, List of Hills in San Francisco, Rancho Jurupa, Downtown Historic District (San Jose, California), Long Beach Green Belt Path, Shelter Island, San Diego, California, Forest Falls, California, Old Sacramento State Historic Park, Verdemont, San Bernardino, California, Arrowhea...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=695922 ... Read more

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Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Not illustrated. Excerpt: Kern River - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Kern River is the southernmost river in the San Joaquin Valley. It begins in the Sierra Nevada on the eastern side of Tulare County and ends on the west side of Kern County where it is mainly diverted for local water supplies. The main branch of the river (sometimes called the North Fork Kern River) rises from several small lakes west of Mount Whitney in the high Sierra Nevada mountains in northeastern Tulare County, in the northeast corner of Sequoia National Park. It flows south through the mountains, passing through Inyo and Sequoia national forests, and the Golden Trout Wilderness. The Little Kern River joins from the northwest at a site called Forks of the Kern. At Kernville the river emerges from its narrow canyon into a widening valley where it is impounded in Lake Isabella, a reservoir formed by Isabella Dam. The area was once known as Whiskey Flat, the former location of the town of Kernville. The South Fork Kern River joins in Lake Isabella. Like the North Fork, the South Fork rises in Tulare County and flows mainly south, through Inyo National Forest. After entering Kern County the South Fork curves to the west and flows into Lake Isabella. Below Isabella Dam the Kern River flows southwest through a spectacular rugged canyon along the south edge of the Greenhorn Mountains, emerging from mountains east of Bakersfield, the largest city on the river. In the Kern's lower course downstream from Bakersfield the river is highly diverted through a series of canals to irrigate the farms of the southern San Joaquin Valley and provide municipal water supplies to the City of Bakersfield and surrounding areas. In this region near Bakersfield the Kern River once spread out into v... More: http://booksllc.net/?id=744480 ... Read more

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Culture is big business. It is at the root of many urban regeneration schemes throughout the world. It is also one of the leaders of the post-Fordist economic revolution, yet the economy of culture is under-theorized and under-developed.

In this wide-ranging and penetrating volume, the economic logic and structure of the modern cultural industries is explained. The connection between cultural production and urban-industrial concentration is demonstrated and the book shows why global cities are the homelands of the modern cultural industries. This book covers many sectors of cultural economy, from craft industries such as clothing and furniture, to modern media industries such as cinema and music recording.

The role of the global city as a source of creative and innovative energy is examined in detail, with particular attention paid to Paris and Los Angeles. The book provides an invaluable discussion of the political economy of cultural commodities and of the predicaments associated with the increasing commercialization and globalization of culture. It will be required reading for serious students of sociology, cultural studies and geography.

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Ellis Island, at the mouth of the Hudson River in New York Harbor, is the location of what was from January 1, 1892, until November 12, 1954 the main entry facility for immigrants entering the United States; the facility replaced the state-run Castle Garden Immigration Depot (1855?1890) in Manhattan. It is owned by the Federal government and is now part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, under the jurisdiction of the US National Park Service. Ellis Island was also the subject of a border dispute between the states of New York and New Jersey (see below). It is situated predominantly in Jersey City, New Jersey, although a small portion of its territory falls within neighboring New York City. ... Read more

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Since its birth in 1781, Los Angeles has come to define both the material and spiritual force of American civilization. The American dream is realized, experienced, and lost in the City of Angels. Unmasking L.A.: Third Worlds and the City, an interdisciplinary collection of essays, dialogues, and photographs, seeks to reveal the third world geographies, cultures, and populations of Los Angeles. It examines the social, political, cultural, and literary climate of the city, bringing together diverse responses to the complexities facing Los Angeles from respected intellectuals, writers, and artists such as Mike Davis, Deepak Chopra, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. By uncovering the forces that marginalize Los Angeles's ever-shifting populations into internal third worlds, the collection unmasks the raw contradictions, the grim paradoxes, and the understated ironies of the global city.
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On summer nights on downtown Los Angeles's Bunker Hill, Grand Performances presents free public concerts for the people of the city. A hip hop orchestra, a mariachi musician, an Afropop singer, and a Chinese modern dance company are just a few examples of the eclectic range of artists employed to reflect the diversity of LA itself. At these concerts, shared experiences of listening and dancing to the music become sites for the recognition of some of the general aspirations for the performances, for Los Angeles, and for contemporary public life.

In Sound, Space, and the City, Marina Peterson explores the processes—from urban renewal to the performance of ethnicity and the experiences of audiences—through which civic space is created at downtown performances. Along with archival materials on urban planning and policy, Peterson draws extensively on her own participation with Grand Performances, ranging from working in an information booth answering questions about the artists and the venue, to observing concerts and concert-goers as an audience member, to performing onstage herself as a cellist with the daKAH Hip Hop orchestra. The book offers an exploration of intersecting concerns of urban residents and scholars today that include social relations and diversity, public space and civic life, privatization and suburbanization and economic and cultural globalization.

At a moment when cities around the world are undertaking similar efforts to revitalize their centers, Sound, Space, and the City conveys the underlying tensions of such projects and their relevance for understanding urban futures.

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Lessons that can be learned about the values, advantages & pitfalls of urban projects for space dedicated to public performances
Anthropologist Marina Peterson presents Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles, a study of how urban public performances transform and revitalize civic space. From hip-hop to orchestra to mariachi music, Afropop, and Chinese modern dance, these diverse expressions and celebrations affect their audience in a diversity of ways, both immediate and long term. Sound, Space, and the City draws upon archival records of urban planning and policy, the author's own extensive experience with public performances, the vocalized concerns of modern urban residents and scholars, and more. The result is a collection of the lessons that can be learned about the values, advantages, and pitfalls of urban projects for space dedicated to public performances, particularly invaluable in today's modern era when more and more cities are embracing the arts as a means to revitalize their core territory. "Representation, recognition, and participation, tenets of democracy, structure public concerts as civic performances. At civic performances these terms are at once performative and political, organizing cultural identity and civic membership."
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This engaging environmental history explores the rise, fall, and rebirth of one of the nation's most important urban public landscapes, and more significantly, the role public spaces play in shaping people's relationships with the natural world. Ari Kelman focuses on the battles fought over New Orleans's waterfront, examining the link between a river and its city and tracking the conflict between public and private control of the river. He describes the impact of floods, disease, and changing technologies on New Orleans's interactions with the Mississippi. Considering how the city grew distant--culturally and spatially--from the river, this book argues that urban areas provide a rich source for understanding people's connections with nature, and in turn, nature's impact on human history. ... Read more

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get "Rising Tide" instead
There's nothing wrong with this book. It's a good book. But it pales beside a great book, John Barry's "Rising Tide," that covers much of the same material in greater depth, is infinitely better written, and which this book seems to have borrowed from. Kelman does give more of the early history than does Barry, as well as more about such things things as yellow fever. From an acadmeic perspective re: the geography of New Orleans, Richard Campanella's work is better also.

Interesting But Uneven
This is a book by an academic for academics. That being said, this topic ached to be addressed. Kelman has done his homework concerning the first two centuries of New Orleans' relationship with the Mississippi. The third (1918-present) seems to stop with the defeat of the notorious riverfront expressway. The river is likely (according to some scientists) to shift away from New Orleans, leaving the riverfront a muddy trickle. Kelman is silent on this. The degree of pollution and the efforts to clean up the lower part of the river go unsung as well. The last parts of the book have a rushed feeling, as if the expansive early history sapped the author's resources and there was little left worth saying. Lively it's not, but the book is important and a good reference work for further research. ... Read more

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While the official history of planning as a defined profession celebrates the state and its traditions of city building and regional development, this collection of essays reveals a flip side. This scrutiny of the class, race, gender, ethnic, or other biased agendas previously hidden in planning histories points to the need for new planning paradigms for our multicultural cities of the future. ... Read more

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The postborder metropolis of Bajalta California stretches from Los Angeles in the north to Tijuana and Mexicali in the south. Immigrants from all over the globe flock to Southern California, while corporations are drawn to the low wage industry of the Mexican border towns, echoing developments in other rapid growth areas such as Phoenix, El Paso, and San Antonio. This incredibly diverse, transnational megacity is giving birth to new cultural and artistic forms as it rapidly evolves into something unique in the world. Mixed Feelings is a genuinely interdisciplinary investigation of the hybrid culture on both sides of the increasingly fluid U.S. - Mexico border, spanning the disciplines of art and art history, urban planning, geography, Latina/o studies, and American studies. ... Read more

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This landmark book offers a truly integrated perspective for understanding the formation of Jewish and Palestinian Arab identities and relations in Palestine before 1948. Beginning with the late Ottoman period Mark LeVine explores the evolving history and geography of two cities: Jaffa, one of the oldest ports in the world, and Tel Aviv, which was born alongside Jaffa and by 1948 had annexed it as well as its surrounding Arab villages. Drawing from a wealth of untapped primary sources, including Ottoman records, Jaffa Shari'a court documents, town planning records, oral histories, and numerous Zionist and European archival sources, LeVine challenges nationalist historiographies of Jaffa and Tel Aviv, revealing the manifold interactions of the Jewish and Palestinian Arab communities that lived there.
At the center of the book is a discussion of how Tel Aviv's self-definition as the epitome of modernity affected its and Jaffa's development and Jaffa's own modern pretenses as well. As he unravels this dynamic, LeVine provides new insights into how popular cultures and public spheres evolved in this intersection of colonial, modern, and urban space. He concludes with a provocative discussion of how these discourses affected the development of today's unified city of Tel Aviv-Yafo and, through it, Israeli and Palestinian identities within in and outside historical Palestine. ... Read more

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Los Angeles has grown from a scattered collection of towns and villages to one of the largest megacities in the world. The editors of THE CITY have assembled a variety of essays examining the built environment and human dynamics of this extraordinary modern city, emphasizing the dramatic changes that have occurred since 1960. 58 illustrations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

The City
Although I don't like living in big cities I am fascinated with them. The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century is a collection of essays on the history and culture of Los Angeles.

The City is one of the most serious books I've read in ages. It was nice to exercise the old brain cells again. Topics covered include a brief history of the city, it's architecture, urbanism, transportation policy, loss of agriculture, metropolitan space, urban art, industrial development, racial issues, and homelessness.

My favorite essay in the book is "The Evolution of Transportation Policy in Los Angeles: Images of Past Policies and Future Prospects." It covers the on-going competition between mass transit (rail and bus) and the automobile. At the time that the book was published, Los Angeles had just completed its first round of subway and light rail construction. Since then the Pasadena Gold Line has opened. While the rail lines aren't back to what they once were there is more careful (although bureaucratic) oversight to the system. This essay explains the flaws of the previous rail system and it proposes ways to avoid those problems in the future.

The early LA School
This is a broad collection of readings that exposes the roots of what is now postmodern urban theory as seen by most of the major thinkers of the LA School. It is an intellectual contemporary of Soja's Thirdspace, and predates Michael Dear's "Postmodern Urbanism" by two years.
This was one of the first coherent statements of purpose from LA School, and as should be expected from a nascient effort it is a bit scattered and not very convincing for the reader who is not aware of the ontologic project that motivated the collection. In short, this volume was a concerted response to the reassertion of cultural materialism led by David Harvey and others against the wave of postmodern theory that swept urban studies following the publication of Soja's "Postmodern Geographies" in 1989.
For those who find Keno Capitalism an interesting metaphor for the city I strongly suggest "From Chicago to LA" (Dear 2002, Sage,)which is a much more mature statement from some of the same authors and a much stronger collection.
I give this book high marks more for its value in tracing the intellectual geneology of the authors and for its importance as a respose to David Harvey's critique of Postmodern Theory than for any of the articles in particular.

Occasional substance in inaccesible academic prose
The City starts with admirable intentions in its attempts to identify the major problems currently besetting Los Angeles.To a wide-eyed USC urban theory grad student, this collection of essays succeeds, replete as it is with jargon such as "post-fordist economies" and such.However, to any other reader, the writing style seems to be an attempt at making the book inaccesible to anyone without a Masters degree. If the writers wished to be read only by academics, then they should state that aim on the cover.Despite the "urban planners symposium synopsis" feel of The City, several valuable points are made.Most notable was the interesting explanations of the dangers of the current hour-glass economy and the subsequent creation of first-world and third-world cities within a city.In addition, the multi-aspect historical essays exploring the growth of the cities (I especially enjoyed the "L.A. as a design product" piece) were interesting and even occasionally enjoyable.However, the essays, in their self-described (and laudable) and not entirely succesful attempts at approaching urban theory from multi-disciplinary viewpoints, became somewhat redundant (not necessarily a bad thing considering the density of the stuff) in trying to force a tie-in to each other. Finally, the authors clearly mark their territory as knee-jerk liberals with their conclusions regarding the so-called LA 4 as "angry young men in search of social justice and making a point by beating Reginald Denny to a bloody pulp."As a former and soon to return resident of Los Angeles, I felt that such an apologist point of view is sorely out of touch with the realities of the place.Their points on racial and social injustice in the city are well-taken, but this sort of racialist pandering is absurd.If you can keep your eyes from glazing over while reading this, there are some valuable conclusions here which make The City worth reading.But be prepared to wade through a morass of academi! c dribble on the way. ... Read more

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A brilliant, morally impassioned guide to the supernova of world cities. Mike Davis From Taco trucks to mayoral politics, from ethnic gerrymandering to the multicoloured patchwork of local states, Roger Keil weaves a dark-hued tapestry of this dynamic, most contradictory of world cities. John Friedmann Los Angeles — City of Angels, of the globalized Hollywood Dream, home to sunshine, palmtrees, big cars and beautiful people. Los Angeles — the ultimate dystopia, the city which brought us race riots, gridlock, sprawl, drive by killings and became the stuff of science-fiction nightmares. Los Angeles has manufactured itself as the image of the city, the symbol of all urban growth, the likely picture for all cities — from Tokyo to London to Sydney — of what the Twenty-First Century will look like. This book is a quest for a different Los Angeles, a city formed at the intersection of its own global and local struggles. Combining a history of urbanization with a geography of social change, the book focuses on the politics, ecology and culture of the contemporary city. The authors long experience of living in LA ensures a command of the gritty detail of Los Angeles life and a fine-tuned sense of the shifting nature of power and consensus in the city. Ultimately, this is a book about the spaces inhabited by the people of Los Angeles. It is also about the spaces which shape urban life in what may well prove to be the city of the future. ... Read more

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Condensing centuries of history into one volume, Cities of the World traces the historic form and special character of the world's greatest cities through a breathtaking collection of maps and panoramic views. Peter Whitfield focuses on more than sixty cities--from Athens to Brasilia, Washington to Moscow, San Francisco to Saigon, and Venice to Lhasa. He presents an extremely wide range of maps, historic prints, and photographs from many periods that show how the architectural form and the social life of our cities have been shaped--not only by their geographical setting, but also by religion, royal power, commerce, social ideals, and occasionally artistic vision. These images illustrate the historic heart of the cities: the ancient harbors, the hilltop fortresses, the encircling walls, and the houses, churches, and palaces that have been added over the centuries. For the armchair traveler or anyone passionate about the history of human civilization, this beautiful, unique book captures the richness of the urban fabric and reflects the collective memory of each metropolis.
Cities of the World demonstrates how the city was linked to the birth and progress of civilization itself, how it has acted as a focus for ideas and technologies, arts and sciences, and even religious devotion. It shows the ways that some cities grew slowly into haphazard, unplanned beauties, while others were shaped by the will of masterful individuals. Whitfield chose the cities featured here not only because they are richly and beautifully illustrated, but also because they demonstrate a notion of spirit--an outward and inward uniqueness.
Many of these historic maps have a pictorial quality that vanished long ago from the functional town-plan. Depicting the classical city-state, the medieval fortress, the baroque capital, and the industrial metropolis, the sumptuous illustrations in this book chronicle how simple outlines found on Babylonian clay tablets evolved into the stylized pictures of medieval times and spectacular bird's-eye panoramic views, finally culminating in the highly functional mass-produced maps of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Wonderfully evocative of the places they depict and the artistic tastes of their time, these maps shed new light on civilization itself, with all of its contradictions, shortcomings, energy, and aspirations.
Copub: British Library ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Substantial
This book is suitable for a coffee table, but also could be considered a college planning course text book.As a geographer, I found this book intriging and filled with information about the development of cities, as well as many maps, both modern and historic.

A thin, lazy, uninteresting book
The worst anthology of maps I have ever encountered, lacking depth or a point of view, and with no historical or cartographic intelligence. How can you reveal anything about a place ot a culture with two maps? How can you pretend to say anything about Rome or its cartographic history without Nolli's 1748 masterpiece? A ridiculous effort.

A Unique Way to Show History
The author has collected some 150 maps from the history of about sixty cities from around the world. I expected these maps to be beautiful works of art, but I didn't expect that the differences in the maps would show much more than that. The nature of the maps seem to show a lot about how the map maker viewed the city. The maps date from several hundred years ago when map makers were not all using Mercator projection in a more or less standard fashion.

Here are maps of many styles. Some show the roads of a city, some show the fortifications, some are more concerned with making a pictorial representation of the city. ==As the subtitle of the book says, here in only a few pages the history of the city can be seen. The cities grow, and the view of the city changes with the will and skill of the map maker.

This book gives me a completely different view of maps and what they can show. Highly recommended. ... Read more

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Where did California get its name? Or for that matter where did a thousand and one cities and countries, peaks and valleys, rivers and bays get their names? This little book succinctly gives the why, how, when, and where of the more frequently encountered names on the land of California, from Abalone to Zaca.
From Abadi Creek to Zzyzyx Spring, thousands of discoveries await the reader of California Place Names. This is the fourth edition, extensively revised and expanded, of a classic work of Californiana. It has been updated to incorporate the latest research on California place names published by local historians in the various parts of the state and to include new names that have been added to the California map since 1969. ... Read more

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Many people live and work in areas that are miles from downtown. This title looks at living in cities that have spread from the centre far into the countryside. It features Los Angeles, California as an example, and focuses on family life in a typical suburb. ... Read more

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In Picturing Casablanca, Susan Ossman probes the shape and texture of mass images in Casablanca, from posters, films, and videotapes to elections, staged political spectacles, and changing rituals. In a fluid style that blends ethnographic narrative, cultural reportage, and the author's firsthand experiences, Ossman sketches a radically new vision of Casablanca as a place where social practices, traditions, and structures of power are in flux.
Ossman guides the reader through the labyrinthine byways of the city, where state bureaucracy and state power, the media and its portrayal of the outside world, and people's everyday lives are all on view. She demonstrates how images not only reflect but inform and alter daily experience. In the Arab League Park, teenagers use fashion and flirting to attract potential mates, defying traditional rules of conduct. Wedding ceremonies are transformed by the ubiquitous video camera, which becomes the event's most important spectator. Political leaders are molded by the state's adept manipulation of visual media.
From Madonna videos and the TV's transformation of social time, to changing gender roles and new ways of producing and disseminating information, the Morocco that Ossman reveals is a telling commentary on the consequences of colonial planning, the influence of modern media, and the rituals of power and representation enacted by the state. ... Read more