Producing and living the high-rise: New contexts, old questions?

Edited by Manoel Rodrigues Alves, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil et al.

The purpose of the book is to assess the process of urban verticalization in different contexts through time, to provide insight into the relationships between highrise design and the way inhabitants negotiate them in their everyday lives, to assess how planners, politicians, and designers negotiate residential highrises in the strategies they develop for building the city and to introduce urban narratives and cartographies. Verticalization, although not new, currently takes place in a very different context than post-1945. Today, highrise residential buildings are more than architectural solutions: they are commodities in a global market where capital flows are fixed by developers and municipalities. Our exploration of residential verticalization is anchored in case studies, revealing different types of local-global negotiations in the design of the city, and has been framed by three interrelated dynamics: first, the complex relationships within the financialization of real estate markets, revealing differences in the types of local-global negotiations in the construction of the neo-liberal city; secondly, the most developed, anchors residential verticalization in the processes of socio-spatial differentiation within cities (mostly identified as gentrification associated to processes of urban renewal and densification; the third, related to readings and interpretations of the urban landscape and social, spatial practices and its iconographic and cartographic representations. This book is of interest to academics, students, planners, architects, and urban studies professionals. It shows that the chosen research object is an increasingly relevant angle of analysis of the contemporary city. It also provides a better knowledge of the processes of residential verticalization, their impact on the privatization of the urban space, and on urban segregation or fragmentation.

Development in Africa's Informal Settlements: Below the Proletariat

Angela R. Pashayan, American University, Washington, DC

This book discusses the effectiveness of international development programs in African informal settlements (slums). It also represents the voices of slum dwellers and how they view the programs offered. With over 60% of Africans living in slums, the book intends to foster dialogue among development professionals to determine how to improve service to their clients, people experiencing extreme poverty. This book examines the critical thinking disconnect between development professionals and slum dwellers. It enables practitioners, professors, and their students to investigate the gap between the types of development programs offered versus what is most beneficial to reduce extreme poverty in slum communities. With a sample of 500 residents from Mukuru Slum in Nairobi, Kenya, and 100 development professionals with expertise in poverty reduction in slums, this book sheds light on the similarities and differences between various programs. Most importantly, this book provides a theoretical way forward (The Theory of Extreme Poverty Reduction) based on Freirean pedagogy to stimulate discussion on how to program new strategies for authentic dialogue with slum dwellers that leads to the critical consciousness necessary for successful poverty reduction.

The Complex City: Social and Built Approaches and Methods

Edited by Caroline Donnellan, Boston University; Global Programs, London, UK

'The Complex City: Social and Built Approaches and Methods' explores different ways of understanding the city. The social city approach proceeds from the ground-up, it focuses on human interactions shaped by economic and environmental processes. The built city method looks through a top-down lens, examining policy and planning for buildings and infrastructure, including utilities and energy networks. This volume is different from other city anthologies in that it explores them through their differences, by presenting each chapter in one of the two categories. While there is invariably an overlap between the two areas, they are distinct positions. In doing so the book identifies how, despite their often adversarial approaches, they both belong to the same city. As essential components of the city they should not necessarily be resolved, as it is in this friction where creativity and innovation happens. 'The Complex City: Social and Built Approaches and Methods' is concerned about the ideas and solutions that they both offer. The book’s originality stems from this duality, and from its recognition that cities are living, organic, protean places of opportunity, crisis, conflict and challenge. The chapters demonstrate the complexity of cities as a set of ideas concerning what they engender, how they function and why they continue to act as a catalyst for different kinds of human activity. They explore issues of socio-political import and questions of the city as a physically constructed space. The themes are diverse and include the inception of the city as a place of competition to centres of regeneration and urban withdrawal. They cover a range of city and urban regions from Athens to Wellington from site specific singular perspectives to comparative assessments. The questions they raise include how do we inhabit urban areas, how do we make plans for them, and how do we, at times, ignore them entirely.

Paris in the Americas: Yesterday and Today

Edited by Carole Salmon, Furman University

Across centuries, France -and especially its capital city, Paris- established itself as a major source of influence across the Americas through colonization, diplomacy and political influence, but also through intellectualism and cultural productions of all sorts, either by imposition, exportation or as a trend of fashion via a bilateral transatlantic movement of people and ideas. In itself, the influence of Paris, the “capital of the world,” as Patrice Higonnet (2002) analyzes it, is similar to a phantasmagoria, which results in a transatlantic fascination for the city of lights and all the tangible or intangible elements that function as its embodiment. As Stuart Hall explains, understanding cultures and languages and their representations through various manifestations presupposes that we can identify, understand and interpret the signs that constitute their core identity. (Hall 2013). In an interdisciplinary approach, this multi-authored, edited volume examines the long-established relationships between Paris and cities across the American continent, in the past as well as in the present time. In order to explore all aspects of Paris’s influence(s) in the Americas, this volume is organized around two main axes of analysis: first, in a geographical progression from North to South, the reader is invited to reflect upon cultural productions that demonstrate the many influences of Paris in the Americas through theater, literature, philosophy, fashion and cinema (chapters 1 to 6). In the following chapters (7 to 11), the volume focuses particularly on a variety of urban connections that take the reader from South to North this time, analyzing tangible architectural and urban design influences of Paris in major cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, New York, or Washington D.C. In today’s global world, this multifaceted study of Paris’ visible and invisible influences in the Americas clearly reveals the transnational intersections of spaces, languages, people and cultures.

Participatory Practice in Space, Place, and Service Design

Questions of Access, Engagement and Creative Experience

Edited by Kelly L. Anderson, Monash University

'Participatory Practice in Space, Place, and Service Design' is premised on a belief in the importance of participatory practices in finding creative solutions to the plethora of problems we face today. It argues that engaging professions with the public in mutual exploration, analysis, and creative thinking is essential. It not only ensures better quality products, places, services, and a greater sense of civic agency but also facilitates fuller access to them and the life opportunities they can unleash. This book offers a uniquely varied perspective of the myriad ways in which participatory practices operate across disciplines and how they impact the worlds and communities we create and inhabit. This book suggests that participatory practices are multi-disciplinary and relevant in fields as diverse as design, architecture, education, health care, sustainability, and community activism, to name a few of those discussed here. How do designed objects and environments affect wellness, creativity, learning, and a sense of belonging? How do products and services affect everyday experience and attitudes towards issues such as sustainability? How does giving people a creative voice in their own education, services, and built environments open up their potential and strengthen identity and civic agency? Addressing these questions requires a rethinking of relations between people, objects, and environments; it demands attention to space, place, and services.

Rethinking Territorial Development Policies: A new framework for territorial stakeholders

Theory, methods and implementations

Michel Felix, Skema Business School and Philippe Vaesken, Lille University, France

This book provides an analytical framework and toolkit for anyone involved — theoretically or practically — with the economic, social, ecological or cultural development of a territory. This work provides an overview of the various territorial development processes, inclusive of both individual and collective actions. In pursuance of its objectives, the book re-examines the classical concepts of governance and regulation in order to position them in an integrative model of the initiatives which contribute dynamically to territorial development. According to this model, the concepts of governance and regulation become two axes, revealing four main reference situations which differentiate between the local initiatives (ground-up) and public actions (top-down) that coexist in a territory. The model emphasizes the need to consider the place of territorial stakeholders in regulatory processes. The book enriches this concept, familiar in a legislative context, and describes it as an area of influence of and negotiation with stakeholders. It contributes to a territorial governance system which encourages development offers. It reveals the inseparable link between influence and development processes that lead to value creation. The logic of governance specifies the various sources of value creation, while the logic of regulation seeks to maximize the acceptability of such value creation by making it into an attractive proposition for stakeholders.

Culture-Led Urban Regeneration in South Korea

Milyung Son, The University of Sheffield

There is a continuing academic and policy interest in the potential for culture-based urban regeneration across the world. Such regeneration is intended to attract investment, re-imagine spaces and create employment, business and urban planning opportunities. This book seeks to examine the use of culture and arts in the urban regeneration sphere of South Korea. Specifically, a one-year-long cultural event (Culture City of East Asia) is used as a case study for exploring wider debates around and understandings of the relationships between culture-led urban regeneration initiatives and the impacts on communities in South Korea. Despite the proliferation of culture-led initiatives aiming to tackle broad social issues, there is a lack of in-depth research into the efficacy of such urban regeneration. Previous researches have asked such questions as: What benefits can cultural elements (e.g. mega-events or signature buildings) bring into a city? What is the role of culture in economic development (e.g. tourism and internal investment)? What is the economic value of cultural goods and services? This is not to say that such questions should be the only concerns in assessing a culture-led urban regeneration strategy. However, the evaluation process of culture-led regeneration frequently fails to ask questions about the impact on human communities: Are cultural resources being used to spread culture, or just to focus on economic development? Are cultural initiatives like mega-events being used to benefit local citizens? How can residents shape a culture-led regeneration strategy? This book is intent on examining residents’ opinions and perspectives about culture-led urban regeneration. It recognizes how culture-led regeneration schemes interact with local communities, focusing on the actual views of local people rather than being coldly theoretical.

Identity in Question: The Study of Tibetan Refugees in the Indian Himalayas

Swati Akshay Sachdeva, Sikkim University, India and Yumnam Surjyajeevan, Sikkim Manipal University, India

"Identity in Question: The Study of Tibetan Refugees in Indian Himalayas" focuses on the socio-economic profile and the question of identity among the diasporic Tibetan communities, particularly those settled in Indian Himalaya. Through incorporating the notion of integration, essential in the formation and formulation of an individual’s identity, this book explores Tibetan refugees’ feelings as to whether a shared consensus between themselves and others exists, or whether a sense of dislocation is experienced. This important and timely work also sheds light on the question of identity crisis among Tibetan youths as well as conflicting gender role identity of the Tibetan women refugees. Delving into such topics is essential for the increased understanding of the various situations encountered by the diasporic communities of Tibet. Therefore, individuals who are seeking to understand the issue by means of academic engagement and through a policy framework process will benefit from this work.

Ireland's Hope: The “peculiar theories” of James Fintan Lalor

James P. Bruce

In 1847 and 1848 a little-known farmer named James Fintan Lalor wrote a series of newspaper articles in which he outlined his vision for Ireland after the Great Famine. Although they have been reprinted and republished many times since, until now there has been no systematic study of the principles and proposals that Lalor expounded. In this book, the author considers Lalor’s brief career as a writer and offers new insights into his treatment of the national and land questions. By elucidating Lalor’s ideas on these questions, exploring possible influences on his thinking, and assessing the impact of his writings on his contemporaries, the author seeks to address what he regards as two deficiencies in the historiography. The first of these is the tendency to assign only a minor, supporting role to Lalor during the brief heyday of Young Ireland. Academic studies typically portray him as little more than a catalyst in the radicalisation of figures like John Mitchel, rather than as a profoundly original thinker in his own right. The second issue is the commonly held perception of Lalor’s proposals on land tenure as foreshadowing the creation of a “peasant proprietary” later in the century. The author argues that Lalor advocated a much more radical plan that would link his two primary objectives: the creation of a sovereign Irish republic, and transfer of control over landholding from a small number of landlords to the entire Irish people. By comparing and contrasting Lalor’s theories with those of earlier figures such as Thomas Paine and James ‘Bronterre’ O’Brien, this ground-breaking book broadens the perspective on Lalor and his writings beyond the context of Irish nationalism. As the author concludes, Lalor’s unique contribution to Irish radical thought merits a more prominent place in nineteenth-century intellectual history than it has hitherto received. This book will be of great value to anyone interested in Irish history since 1800, especially in the areas of the Great Famine, the Young Ireland movement, and the Land War.

Nigeria's Resource Wars

Edited by Egodi Uchendu, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria

'Nigeria’s Resource Wars' reflects on the diversity of conflicts over access to, and allocation of, resources in Nigeria. From the devastating effects of crude oil exploration in the Niger Delta to desertification caused by climate change, and illegal gold mining in Zamfara, to mention a few, Nigeria faces new dimensions of resource-related struggles. The ravaging effects of these resource conflicts between crop farmers and Fulani herders in Nigeria’s Middlebelt and states across Southern Nigeria call for urgent scholarly interventions; with the Fulani cattle breeders’ onslaught altering the histories of many Nigerian families through deaths, loss of homes and investments, and permanent physical incapacity. Currently, there is an almost total breakdown of interethnic relations, with political commentators acknowledging that Nigeria has never been so divided as it presently is in its history. The struggles have now degenerated into kidnaps, armed robbery, and incessant targeted and random killings across the country; compounding the already complex problem of insecurity in Nigeria. The chapters in this volume engage with these issues, presenting the different arguments on resource conflicts in Nigeria. They draw insights from similar conflicts in Nigeria’s colonial/post-independence past and events from around the world to proffer possible solutions to resource-related confrontations in Africa. By offering a collection of different intellectual perspectives on resource conflicts in Nigeria, this volume will be an important reference material for understanding the diversity of thought patterns that underpin the struggle and policy approaches towards resolving conflict situations in Africa. This volume will be of considerable interest to scholars of Africa, researchers in the humanities, social sciences, and conflict studies, and policymakers interested in understanding the resource crisis in Africa.

The Dynamics of Bride Price in Zimbabwe and the UK Diaspora

Ottis Mubaiwa

The tradition of Bride Price has been at the heart of marriage for many centuries in numerous cultures across the globe. The Dynamics of Bride Price presents new research data from Zimbabwe and the UK highlighting the transnational dimension of the practice, its diversity in different contexts and across generations, and its influence on the structure of gender relationships and inequalities. The transnational element of its investigation into the institution and traditions of African marriage sets this book apart from existing study and offers its readers a nuanced and complex understanding of the perceptions and experiences of Bride Price across diverse contexts. This original contribution will be of great interest to those studying and teaching courses on Gender and Development, as well as researchers and policymakers of cultural practices.

No Laughing Matter: Race Joking and Resistance in Brazilian Social Media

Luiz Valério P. Trindade, IPIE – International Panel on the Information Environment, Switzerland

‘No Laughing Matter: Race Joking and Resistance in Brazilian Social Media’ examines the social phenomenon of construction and dissemination of colonial-like racist discourses fostered against upwardly-mobile black women through disparagement humour on social media platforms, adopting a fresh and innovative perspective. In this book, Luiz Valério P. Trindade explores the idea that disparagement humour might not be as exempt of social impact as the jokers might believe, and that, in fact, this kind of humour reveals the hidden facet of deep-seated colonial ideologies still present in Brazilian society despite being hailed as a unique model of a post-racial society. The author argues that these ideologies establish and naturalise superior social positions and symbolic privileges to whites while undermining and delegitimising black women’s upward social mobility. Social media platforms enable the proponents of these beliefs not only to engage in the practice of online hate speech but also to attract a considerable number of like-minded people, creating a long-lasting echo chamber effect in the cyberspace. This way, they manage to amplify the reach and reverberation of their racist discourses in the online environment in ways not commonly seen in Brazilian offline social contexts. This monograph is of great interest and relevance to students, scholars, and researchers across a variety of disciplines, most notably Critical Race Studies, Media Communication Studies and Critical Humour Studies, and also academics in other areas such as Critical Discourse Analysis, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies and Latin American Studies.

City of Children

Francesco Tonucci, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the National Research Council, Italy

The city, born to be a place of meeting and exchange, has for several decades taken as a default model the strong citizen, man, adult and worker, thereby transforming it into a hostile space for the weakest: the elderly, the disabled, the poor and the children. The automobile, the toy of choice for the privileged citizen, is also taken to be the principal 'citizen' of the city, thus endangering the health, aesthetics and mobility of the rest of us. This book proposes a new philosophy of city governance that takes children as the default citizens, with the confidence that a city sensitive to the needs of childhood will be healthier for everybody. This work recovers elements of the 1989 Convention of the Rights of the Child that recognize the full citizenship of children to suggest two principle axioms for optimal city design: the participation of children in city governance and the restitution of their autonomy, which allows them to stay with their friends and play freely. Boys and girls, in this way, represent all those excluded from decisions and power. This book is primarily written for politicians and city managers so that they can take on board the ideas within. Yet it is also important for teachers and parents so that they can respect the rights provided in the convention. City of Children should be made available to students on teacher-training courses, and also to the children who are the book’s true protagonists. At present, more than two hundred cities in Spain, Italy, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Brazil and Costa Rica have joined this project. This book is a translation of “La città dei bambini” and was translated as part of the Bridging Language and Scholarship initiative. The English edition by Vernon Press follows previous editions of this important work in Italian and the four languages of the Spanish nation (Galego, Basque, Catalan and Castilian), French and Portuguese to make available for the first time this important work to a broader international audience.

Hermeneutics, Metacognition, and Writing

Edited by Maryann Pasda DiEdwardo, Lehigh University; University of Maryland Global Campus

'Hermeneutics, Metacognition, and Writing' investigates the social functionality of actions as an essential criterion of study. It focuses on hermeneutics: interpretation through the lens of philosophy of metacognition. Vital contributions to the book include several chapters by Dr. Maryann P. DiEdwardo herself, which explore various facets of the central topic, including the intersectionality of hermeneutics, metacognition, and semiotics, as well as social movements. Dr. Juliet Emmanuel writes on the subject of the connections between hermeneutics, metacognition, and writing, and Jill Kroeger Kinkade presents a chapter on D.H.Lawrence, Hilda Doolittle, and Virginia Woolf’s portrayals of consciousness. Patricia Pasda discusses what links Sr. Francis of Assisi, dogs, and hermeneutics; Dr. T. Madison Peschock presents a feminist paper concerning abuse of those not wielding power. Susan Stangeland offers her expertise and scholarship in the area of Biblical Hermeneutics. This collection of critiques and case studies examines the imagined cultural landscape of specific works and associated activities such as fine art, music, poetry, and digital humanities, which aim to initiate self-monitoring as metacognition, or meta-reflection, by creating interior interpersonal space to overcome adversity. This edited volume will be of particular interest to scholars and students of textual hermeneutics as it relates to prose writing and artistic works in non-verbal media.

Designing for Health & Wellbeing: Home, City, Society

Edited by Matthew Jones, Birmingham City University et al.

Rapid urbanization represents major threats and challenges to personal and public health. The World Health Organisation identifies the ‘urban health threat’ as three-fold: infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases; and violence and injury from, amongst other things, road traffic. Within this tripartite structure of health issues in the built environment, there are multiple individual issues affecting both the developed and the developing worlds and the global north and south. Reflecting on a broad set of interrelated concerns about health and the design of the places we inhabit, this book seeks to better understand the interconnectedness and potential solutions to the problems associated with health and the built environment. Divided into three key themes: home, city, and society, each section presents a number of research chapters that explore global processes, transformative praxis and emergent trends in architecture, urban design and healthy city research. Drawing together practicing architects, academics, scholars, public health professional and activists from around the world to provide perspectives on design for health, this book includes emerging research on: healthy homes, walkable cities, design for ageing, dementia and the built environment, health equality and urban poverty, community health services, neighbourhood support and wellbeing, urban sanitation and communicable disease, the role of transport infrastructures and government policy, and the cost implications of ‘unhealthy’ cities etc. To that end, this book examines alternative and radical ways of practicing architecture and the re-imagining of the profession of architecture through a lens of human health.

Perplexing Patriarchies: Fatherhood Among Black Opponents and White Defenders of Slavery

Pierre Islam, Yale University

Perplexing Patriarchies examines the rhetorical usage (and lived experience) of fatherhood among three African American abolitionists and three of their white proslavery opponents in the United States during the nineteenth century. Both the prominent abolitionists (Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Henry Garnet), as well as the prominent proslavery advocates (Henry Hammond, George Fitzhugh, and Richard Dabney), appealed to the popular image of the father, husband, and head of household in order to attack or justify slavery. How and why could these opposing individuals rely on appeals to the same ideal of fatherhood to come to completely different and opposing conclusions? This book strives to find the answer by first acknowledging that both the abolitionists and the proslavery men shared similar concerns about the contested status of fatherhood in the nineteenth century. However, due to subtle differences in their starting assumptions, and different choices of what parts of a father’s responsibilities to emphasize, the black abolitionists conceived of an ideal father who protected the autonomy of his dependents, while the proslavery men conceived of one whose authority necessitated the subordination of those he protected. Finding that these differences arose from choices in starting assumptions and emphases rather than total disagreement on what the role of the father should be, this work reveals that black abolitionists were not radically critiquing the gender conventions of their day, but innovatively working within those conventions to turn them towards social reform. This discovery opens up a new way for historians to consider how oppressed peoples negotiated the intellectual boundaries of the societies which oppressed them: Not necessarily breaking entirely from those boundaries, nor passively accepting them, but ingeniously synthesizing a worldview from within their confines that still allowed for freedom and personal autonomy.

New Perspectives on African Childhood

Constructions, Histories, Representations and Understandings

Edited by De-Valera NYM Botchway, University of Cape Coast, Ghana et al.

What does it mean to be a child in Africa? In the detached Western media, narratives of penury, wickedness and death have dominated portrayals of African childhood. The hegemonic lens of the West has failed to take into account the intricacies of not only what it means to be an African child in local and culturally specific contexts, but also African childhood in general. Challenging colonial discourses, this edited volume guides the reader through different comprehensions and perspectives of childhood in Africa. Using a blend of theory, empiricism and history, the contributors to this volume offer studies from a range of fields including African literature, Afro-centric psychology and sociology. Importantly, in its eclectic geographical coverage of Africa, this book unashamedly presents the good, the bad and the ugly of African childhood. The resilience, creativity, pains and triumphs of African childhood are skilfully woven together to present the myriad of lived experiences and aspirations of children from across Africa. As an important contribution to African childhood studies, this book has the potential to be used by policymakers to shape, sustain or change socio-cultural, economic and education systems that accommodate African childhood dynamics and experiences at different levels.

Messy Ethnographies in Action

Edited by Alexandra Plows, Bangor University

This edited collection of chapters showcases original and interdisciplinary ethnographic fieldwork in a range of international settings; including studies of underground pub life in North East England; Finnish hotels; and bio-scientific institutions in the Amazonian rainforest. Informed by John Law’s concept of ethnographic “mess,” this book makes a unique, empirically-informed, contribution to an understanding of the social construction of knowledge and the role that ethnography can and does play (Law, 2004). It provides a range of colourful snapshots from the field, showing how different researchers from multiple research environments and disciplines are negotiating the practicalities, and epistemological and ethical implications, of “messy” ethnographic practice as a means of researching “messy” social realities. Law notes that “social…science investigations interfere with the world…things change as a result. The issue, then, is not to seek disengagement but rather with how to engage” (ibid p14). Drawing on their own situated experiences, the book’s contributors address the “messy” implications of this and also explore the (equally messy) issue of why engage. They reflect on the process of undertaking research, and their role in the research process as they negotiate their own position in the field. What is ethnography “for”? What impact should, or do, we have in the field and after we leave the research site? What about unintended consequences? When (if ever) are we “off duty?” What does “informed consent” mean in a constantly shifting, dynamic ethnographic context? Is ethnography by its very nature a form of “action research?” By providing a wide range of situated explorations of “messy ethnographies,” the book presents a unique, hands-on guide to the challenges of negotiating ethnography in practice, which will be of use to all researchers and practitioners who use ethnography as a method.

Networks of International Trade and Investment

Understanding globalisation through the lens of network analysis

Edited by Sara Gorgoni, University of Greenwich et al.

In recent decades, the international economy has witnessed fundamental changes in the way manufacturing is organised: products are no longer manufactured in their entirety in a single location. Instead, the production process is often split across a number of stages located in countries that are frequently far apart from each other. By spreading out their manufacturing and supply chain activities globally through international investment and intra-firm trade, Multinational enterprises (MNEs) play a focal role in this reorganisation of production. Our ability to understand the global economy, therefore, requires an understanding of the interdependencies between the entities involved in such fragmented production. Traditional methods and statistical approaches are insufficient to address this challenge. Instead, an approach is required that allows us to account for these interdependencies. The most promising approach so far is network analysis. ‘Networks of International Trade and Investment’ makes a case for the use of network analysis alongside existing techniques in order to investigate pressing issues in international business and economics. The authors put forward a range of well-informed studies that examine compelling topics such as the role of emerging economies in global trade and the evolution of world trade patterns. They look at how network analysis, as both an approach and a methodology, can explain international business and economics phenomena, in particular, in relation to international trade and investment. Providing a comprehensive but accessible explanation of the applications of network analysis and some of the most recent methodological advances in its field, this edited volume is an important contribution to research in international trade and investment.

Titans of the Forests

The Economic Evolution of the Human Species and that of Our Cultures

Gregory V. Short

Instead of dwelling on the biological, physiological, or even the genetic aspects of our evolution, “Titans of the Forests” takes a completely different approach, which could be referred to as the unchartered and neglected field of macroevolution. Uniquely captivating, controversial, and very readable, it is the author’s contention that we as a species were continuously forced to change our way of obtaining nourishment, or rather our various economies, in order to adapt to the ever-changing world. And as a result of this economic adaptation, our species would then and only then begin to slowly change into the modern humans of today. For much too long, the world’s scientific community has directed the discussion of our incredible evolution. As a matter of fact, our species’ biological, physiological, psychological, and cultural evolution has been instigated, propelled, and shaped by our economic adaptation to a fluctuating environment. In a very real sense, the scientists are so far into the trees that they have actually ignored the forest. Consequently, we teach human evolution as a hodgepodge of different theories within the realm of microevolution, thus failing to understand or even to recognize the economic thread that binds them altogether. By integrating the timeline of our prehistoric past with that of our earliest known economies (food gathering, scavenging, and nomadism), the author was able to synthesize a sequence of events that illustrates the economic basis of our remarkable ascension and the beginnings of our present day institutions. He not only reveals the genesis behind the cultural forces that exist within every human society, but for the first time, he has created a systematic and holistic approach in explaining the “how” and the “why” we have economically, physiologically, and then culturally evolved. For unlike the rest of the animal kingdom, we have possessed the extraordinary ability to change our economy, which has made us an extremely adaptable species.