The social and material production of urban nature has recently emerged as an important area in urban studies, human/environmental interactions and social studies. This has been prompted by the recognition that the material conditions that comprise urban environments are not independent from social, political, and economic processes, or from the cultural construction of what constitutes the ‘urban’ or the ‘natural’. Through both theoretical and empirical analysis, this groundbreaking collection offers an integrated and relational approach to untangling the interconnected processes involved in forming urban landscapes.

The essays in this book attest that the re-entry of the ecological agenda into urban theory is vital both in terms of understanding contemporary urbanization processes, and of engaging in a meaningful environmental politics. They debate the central themes of whose nature is, or becomes, urbanized, and the uneven power relations through which this socio-metabolic transformation takes place.

Including urban case studies, international research and contributions from prominent urban scholars, this volume will enable students, scholars and researchers of geographical, environmental and urban studies to better understand how interrelated, everyday economic, political and cultural processes form and transform urban environments.

Suitable for self study Use real examples and real data sets that will be familiar to the audience Introduction to the bootstrap is included – this is a modern method missing in many other books

'Vita di una donna licenziosa' è uno dei più celebrati romanzi galanti (i kòshokubon) di Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693). 'Questo testo kòshoku indica erotismo e sensualità,' scrive Ivan Morris 'del tutto privi degli aspetti romantici o sentimentali dell'amore. Il libro descrive infatti la progressiva degradazione della protagonista nella sua ricerca del piacere sessuale e per vivere dal punto di vista economico come donna sola nella dura società feudale del suo tempo. Oltre a una natura altamente erotica, l'eroina è dotata di notevole bellezza fisica, e il suo ambiente naturale è rappresentato dai quartieri di piacere, all'interno dei quali si svolge la maggior parte della vicenda.'

From the most distant past to the modern day, some things never change including words. The modern Egyptian Arabic dialect is one of the most distinctive in the Arabic-speaking world precisely because of its illustrious heritage from the country's ancient past. Ahmad Abdel-Hamid Youssef spends a day in the Egyptian countryside, taking note of the many expressions that once fell from the lips of the ancient Egyptians and that continue to be heard on the tongues of the modern Egyptians in their everyday speech. His charming tale of Bayoumi, a farmer, his wife Sawsan, and their baby provides the backdrop for tracing the persistence of these words and phrases. What these average Egyptians do, what tools they use, what they eat, how they organize their life, even how they interact all can be described with words that hark back to the age of the pharaohs.

In telling his story, Dr. Youssef integrates the ancestry of these common expressions, with the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and Coptic and Arabic words appearing alongside transliterations and translations into English. Both entertaining and instructive, this volume includes a series of glossaries in Egyptian, Coptic, and Arabic.
With an introduction by Fayza Haikal, an Egyptologist who specializes in Egyptian language, and illustrations by cartoonist Golo, this book is sure to appeal to anyone who has an interest in Egypt, ancient or modern.

Perhaps the greatest migration in America's history is the early twentieth-century movement of African Americans from the southern states to the urban Northeast and Midwest. Up South captures the totality of this pivotal black experience in a single volume. Including photographs, letters, and turn-of-the-century items in the Chicago Defender, Crisis, and Opportunity, as well as writings by Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, Mary McLeod Bethune, and W. E. B. du Bois, Up South is a moving and eye-opening anthology of African American literature, scholarship, and journalism from the first half of this century.