Don Shockley may be the only person in America who likes to wait. He has discovered that active waiting opens the door to spiritual experiences that are often humorous as well as serious and deep. He believes that the key to prayer is not in the act of asking but in the art of listening. For more than twenty-five years he has transformed the necessity to wait into an opportunity to look, listen and learn. More often than not this distinctive form of meditation has been practiced in urban environments: waiting rooms of doctors and dentists; on buses, planes and trains; in bakeries, coffee shops and college cafeterias; in libraries, parks and bars. These spiritual interludes have been captured in exceptionally vivid writing; you can "see" what the author is saying. When the late Howard Thurman, one of America's foremost spiritual thinkers, saw some of the early pieces included in this book, he said they were "precisely on target" and should be shared. Over the years since, these Private Prayers in Public Places have been well received when read before various groups, and at long last they are now available in print.

This book explores the relationship between architecture and philosophy through a discussion on threshold spaces linking public space with publicly accessible buildings. It explores the connection between exterior and interior and how this creates and affects interactions between people and the social dynamics of the city. Building on an existing body of literature, the book engages with critical philosophy and discusses how it can be applied to architecture. In a similar vein to Walter Benjamin’s descriptions of the Parisian Arcades in the nineteenth century, the book identifies the conditions under which thresholds reveal and impact social life. It utilises a wide range of illustrated international case studies from architects in Japan, Norway, Finland, France, Portugal, Italy, the USA, Australia, Mexico, and Brazil. Within the examples, thresholds become enhancers of social interactions and highlight broader socio-political contexts in public and private space. Architecture of Threshold Spaces is an enlightening contribution to knowledge on contemporary architecture, politics and philosophy for students, academics, and architects.

Picturing America: Photography and the Sense of Place argues that photography is a prevalent practice of making American places. Its collected essays epitomize not only how pictures situate us in a specific place, but also how they create a sense of such mutable place-worlds. Understanding photographs as prime sites of knowledge production and advocates of socio-political transformations, a transnational set of scholars reveals how images enact both our perception and conception of American environments. They investigate the power photography yields in shaping our ideas of self, nation, and empire, of private and public space, through urban, landscape, wasteland and portrait photography. The volume radically reconfigures how pictures alter the development of American places in the past, present, and future.

As cities globally re-design their urban landscapes, they produce a different urban aesthetic and create new experiential milieus. Urban regeneration processes generate radical physical, social and cultural changes in neighbourhoods that demand new conceptual frameworks to address their impact upon daily urban life. Sensing Cities investigates the reconfiguration of contemporary public space and life through the prism of the senses. The book explores how the increased stylization of cityscapes requires an understanding of public life as a spatial-sensuous encounter. Degen examines how power relations in public spaces are embedded in, exercised and resisted through the sensuous geography of place. This sensory paradigm is then applied to compare two emblematic regeneration projects, namely el Raval in Barcelona and Castlefield in Manchester. By combining detailed ethnographic analysis and interviews with those involved in planning regeneration processes and those experiencing them, the book argues that a changing sensuous landscape is crucial in redefining people’s social practices, attachments and experiences in places. Focusing on two European cities at the forefront of urban design, Barcelona and Manchester, Degen draws on sociology, geography, anthropology, cultural and architectural studies to provide a critical account of the politics of publicness in the entrepreneurial city. With numerous photographs and maps this book stresses the ongoing, embodied and active nature of regeneration as a lived social process rather than merely a physical or economic exercise. Ultimately, Sensing Cities examines how urban regeneration is made effective through the organisation of sensory experience. This book is essential reading for students and researchers of Architecture, Urban Studies and Human Geography.

This book provides a balanced, multi-disciplinary perspective to what can otherwise be a highly technical subject,, reflecting the author's unusual blend of experience as a lawyer, risk manager and corporate leader.

"The acrobatic art of Saia photographs nearly 100 human beings at commodes. Absolutely a volume of curiosity". -- Los Angeles Times