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Title:
Asmara : Africa's secret modernist city

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Asmara, the capital of the small east African country of Eritrea, bordering the Red Sea, is one of the most important and exciting architectural ‘discoveries’ of recent years. Built almost entirely in the 1930s by the Italians, Asmara has one of the highest concentrations of modernist architecture anywhere in the world, and has evocatively been described as “the Miami of Africa”. Desperate to build quickly, the colonial government of the time allowed radical architectural experimentation that would not have found favour in the more conservative European environment. Asmara therefore became one of the world’s prime locations for architectural innovation during the Modern Movement. That this occurred at all is remarkable enough, but that these buildings should have survived in such numbers today makes it one of the finest modernist cities in the world. This is a building-by-building survey, illustrated with rare archival material and specially commissioned photographs

Title:
Houses in motion : the experience of place and the problem of belief in urban Malaysia

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This publication is about the transformation of urban space and the reordering of the demographic character of Brickfields, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Kuala Lumpur. The author offers an ethnographic account of the complex attempts on the part of the state and the community to reconcile techno-rational conceptions of law, development, and city planning with local experiences of place, justice, relatedness, and possibilities for belief in an aggressively changing world.

Title:
Taming the disorderly city: the spatial landscape of Johannesburg after Apartheid

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In postapartheid Johannesburg, tensions of race and class manifest themselves starkly in struggles over "rights to the city." Real-estate developers and the very poor fight for control of space as the municipal administration steps aside, almost powerless to shape the direction of change. Having ceded control of development to the private sector, the Johannesburg city government has all but abandoned residential planning to the unpredictability of market forces. This failure to plan for the civic good--and the resulting confusion--is a perfect example of the entrepreneurial approaches to urban governance that are sweeping much of the Global South as well as the cities of the North. Martin J. Murray brings together a wide range of urban theory and local knowledge to draw a nuanced portrait of contemporary Johannesburg. In Taming the Disorderly City, he provides a focused intellectual and political critique of the often-ambivalent urban dynamics that have emerged after the end of apartheid. Exploring the behaviors of the rich and poor, each empowered in their own way, as they rebuild a new Johannesburg, we see the entrepreneurial city: high-rises, shopping districts, and gated communities surrounded by and intermingled with poverty. In graceful prose, Murray offers a compelling portrait of the everyday lives of the urban poor as seen through the lens of real-estate capitalism and revitalization efforts.

Title:
Tbilisi: it's complicated

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Composed of artistic accounts that critically reflect on recent urban and social changes in Georgia's capital Tbilisi, this book unveils multifaceted perspectives on a city trying to negotiate its complex heritage, its contentious present and potential for the future. It also serves as an alternative guidebook.

Title:
Early art and architecture of Africa

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This new history of over 5000 years of African art reveals its true diversity for the first time. Challenging centuries of misconceptions that have obscured the sophisticated nature of African art, Peter Garlake uses the latest research and archaeological finding to offer exciting new insights into the period between 2000BC and 1500AD. All the main regions are covered : southern Africa, Nubia, Aksum, the Niger River, West Africa, Great Zimbabwe, and the East African coast. Aknowledging the universal allure of the African art object, this book restores it to its original social and historical context, helping us to understand more about the ways in which this art was produced, used, and received.

Title:
Maroc : les palais et jardins royaux

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$115.00
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Les palais et jardins royaux du Maroc, le titre invite à la rêverie, surtout lorsqu'on parle d'une contrée au climat relativement aride. Ériger de beaux édifices et tenter de faire reculer le désert dans ce pays est le défi permanent de l'homme : creuser des puits, faire jaillir de l'eau, aménager des canaux et des ruisseaux, pour, enfin, créer des jardins, univers fertiles et luxuriants... Comment l'art des jardins a-t-il pu naître et se développer dans de telles Conditions ? Tout d'abord grâce au pouvoir monarchique qui régna sans discontinuer pendant plus de mille ans, assurant par la maîtrise politique et technique de l'eau, le développement de ces résidences royales aux jardins merveilleux, tant chantés par les lettrés musulmans. De ce point de vue, les sites de Fès, Marrakech, Rabat et Meknès, capitales d'empire, furent remarquablement choisis. Véritables cités hydrauliques, ces quatre villes et leurs palais étaient dotés de différentes techniques d'adduction d'eau. Ensuite, l'héritage spirituel, empreint d'images du paradis tel que promis aux fidèles, incita les musulmans à créer et à multiplier les jardins terrestres supposés imiter, certes de façon toujours imparfaite, le jardin d'Éden. Enfin, les apports culturels d'Orient suscitèrent une floraison d'œuvres majestueuses que le Maroc musulman réalisa admirablement, dans le cadre d'une civilisation hispano-mauresque brillante dont il est encore le principal héritier. Ce livre explore les jardins royaux du Maroc selon un cheminement à la fois généalogique, patrimonial et esthétique. De l'agdâl, grand jardin planté aux bassins immenses où se reflètent les pavillons exquis destinés aux plaisirs des princes, aux riyâd, jardins intérieurs aux jets d'eau rafraîchissants, toute une combinaison hiérarchisée d'espaces verdoyants se compose harmonieusement, selon une logique de structuration de l'architecture des palais royaux marocains : extérieur/intérieur et privé/public. Au confluent de 1'Espagne mauresque et de l'Orient arabe, une riche tradition artistique s'y est développée; palais et jardins témoignent donc d'une virtuosité exceptionnelle et d'un savoir-faire remarquable. Cet ouvrage en restitue la beauté et la magnificence.

Title:
Histories of dirt: media and urban life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos

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In "Histories of dirt," Stephanie Newell traces the ways in which urban spaces and urban dwellers come to be regarded as dirty, as exemplified in colonial and postcolonial Lagos. Newell conceives dirt as an interpretive category that facilitates moral, sanitary, economic, and aesthetic evaluations of other cultures under the rubric of uncleanliness. She examines a number of texts ranging from newspaper articles by elite Lagosians to colonial travel writing, public health films, and urban planning to show how understandings of dirt came to structure colonial governance. Seeing Lagosians as sources of contagion and dirt, British colonizers used racist ideologies and discourses of dirt to justify racial segregation and public health policies. Newell also explores possibilities for non-Eurocentric methods for identifying African urbanites' own values and opinions by foregrounding the voices of contemporary Lagosians through interviews and focus groups in which their responses to public health issues reflect local aesthetic tastes and values. In excavating the shifting role of dirt in structuring social and political life in Lagos, Newell provides new understandings of colonial and postcolonial urban history in West Africa.

Title:
Modern architecture in Africa

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This publication is one of the few Western studies of modern African architecture. The architect Antoni Folkers calls into question the moralistic, simplified Western Modernism that has become stranded in the African savannah. The critique of the one-sidedness of Western architecture is not only theoretical, but also assumes a practical form in the pluriform and multi-coloured architecture of Africa.

Title:
The bazaar in the Islamic city : design, culture, and history

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The Middle Eastern bazaar is much more than a context for commerce: the studies in this book illustrate that markets, regardless of their location, scale, and permanency, have also played important cultural roles within their societies, reflecting historical evolution, industrial development, social and political conditions, urban morphology, and architectural functions. This interdisciplinary volume explores the dynamics of the bazaar with a number of case studies from Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, Nablus, Bursa, Istanbul, Sanaa, Kabul, Tehran, and Yazd. Although they share some contextual and functional characteristics, each bazaar has its own unique and fascinating history, traditions, cultural practices, and structure. One of the most intriguing aspects revealed in this volume is the thread of continuity from past to present exhibited by the bazaar as a forum where a society meets and intermingles in the practice of goods exchange—a social and cultural ritual that is as old as human history.