Seeks to understand the roles played by gardens from Roman antiquity to approximately 1850, particularly as they relate to public life in large cities.

"A brave foray into the interdisciplinary and a serious attempt to cover city life in all its complexity... Franklin′s optimism about the city is refreshing. He revels in the growing human and cultural diversity and the ′re-emergence and spread of a more tolerant, carnivalesque, culture-driven city life′, and he celebrates the city′s ability to offer shelter to the unexpected and the fragile. For Franklin, the city is a product of nature, with all its vicissitudes." - Times Higher Education "Franklin writes with barely restrained optimism as he emphasizes the excitement, vitality and potential of cities. This advances the idea of city lives as assemblages of ‘human and non-human networks of texts, software, culture, behaviour, architecture, trees and gardens’... Franklin uses a wide range of sources in making his case. Historical accounts, search engine statistics and social and cultural theory are all smoothly integrated into the narrative." - Sociology Cities are more important as cultural entities than their mere function as dormitories and industrial sites. Yet, the understanding of what makes a city ′alive′ and appealing in cultural terms is still hotly contested - why are some cities so much more interesting, popular and successful than others? In this engaging discussion of ′city life′ Adrian Franklin takes the reader on a tour of contemporary western cities exploring their historical development and arguing that it is the transformative, ritual and performative qualities of successful cities that makes a difference. Here is a new urban culture characterized by ecological frames of reference; tracking the making of contemporary city life from traditional times, through early modern, machinic and modernised stages of development. Adopting dynamic narrative structures and stories to develop its critical position this book creates a vibrant synthesis of city life from its key components of leisure and tourism, recreation and play, arts and culture, nature and environment, and architecture and public space. Emphasising the importance of experience the book represents the fluid complexity of the city as a living space, an environment and a posthumanist space of transformation. It will be of interest to all those engaging with the difficulties of urban life in sociology, human geography, tourism and cultural studies.

Innovative landscape architect Leberecht Migge espoused an idea of garden culture that reflected the progressive political currents of early twentieth-century Germany. Garden Culture of the Twentieth Century details his vision, including an emphasis on the socioeconomic benefits of urban agriculture that prefigured this now popular trend.

A century ago, Vienna and Budapest were the capital cities of the western and eastern halves of the increasingly unstable Austro-Hungarian empire and scenes of intense cultural activity. Vienna was home to such figures as Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal; Budapest produced such luminaries as Béla Bartók, Georg Lukács, and Michael and Karl Polanyi. However, as Péter Hanák shows in these vignettes of Fin-de-Siécle life, the intellectual and artistic vibrancy common to the two cities emerged from deeply different civic cultures. Hanák surveys the urban development of the two cities and reviews the effects of modernization on various aspects of their cultures. He examines the process of physical change, as rapid population growth, industrialization, and the rising middle class ushered in a new age of tenements, suburbs, and town planning. He investigates how death and its rituals--once the domain of church, family, and local community--were transformed by the commercialization of burials and the growing bureaucratic control of graveyards. He explores the mentality of common soldiers and their families--mostly of peasant origin--during World War I, detecting in letters to and from the front a shift toward a revolutionary mood among Hungarians in particular. He presents snapshots of such subjects as the mentality of the nobility, operettas and musical life, and attitudes toward Germans and Jews, and also reveals the striking relationship between social marginality and cultural creativity. In comparing the two cities, Hanák notes that Vienna, famed for its spacious parks and gardens, was often characterized as a "garden" of esoteric culture. Budapest, however, was a dense city surrounded by factories, whose cultural leaders referred to the offices and cafés where they met as "workshops." These differences were reflected, he argues, in the contrast between Vienna's aesthetic and individualistic culture and Budapest's more moralistic and socially engaged approach. Like Carl Schorske's famous Fin-de-Siécle Vienna, Hanák's book paints a remarkable portrait of turn-of-the-century life in Central Europe. Its particular focus on mass culture and everyday life offers important new insights into cultural currents that shaped the course of the twentieth century. Originally published in 1998. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The founder of the Garden City Association outlines his radical new approach to urban planning. First published in 1898.

This volume investigates how the structure and use of space developed and changed in cities, and examines the role of different societal groups in shaping urbanism. Culturally and chronologically diverse case studies provide a basis to examine recent theoretical and methodological shifts in the archaeology of ancient cities. The book's primary goal is to examine how ancient cities were made by the people who lived in them. The authors argue that there is a mutually constituting relationship between urban form and the actions and interactions of a plurality of individuals, groups, and institutions, each with their own motivations and identities. Space is therefore socially produced as these agents operate in multiple spheres.

This collection of essays examines the history of urban leisure cultures in Europe in the transition from the early modern to the modern period. The volume brings together research on a wide variety of leisure activities which are usually studied in isolation, from theatre and music culture, art exhibitions, spas and seaside resorts to sports and games, walking and cafes and restaurants. The book develops a new research agenda for the history of leisure by focusing on the complex processes of cultural transfer that were fundamental in transforming urban leisure culture from the British Isles to France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Austria and the Ottoman Empire. How did new models of organising and experiencing urban leisure pastimes 'travel' from one European region to another? Who were the main agents of cultural innovation and appropriation? How did entrepreneurs, citizens and urban authorities mediate and adapt foreign influences to local contexts? How did the increasingly 'entangled' character of European urban leisure culture impact upon the ways men and women from various classes identified with their social, cultural or (proto)national communities? Accessible and wide-ranging, this volume offers students and scholars a broad overview of the history of urban leisure culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. The agenda-setting focus on transnational cultural transfer will stimulate new questions and contribute to a more integrated study of the rise of modern urban culture.