Walls: Enclosure and Ethics in the Modern Landscape

Walls: Enclosure and Ethics in the Modern Landscape
ISBN-10
022619924X
ISBN-13
9780226199245
Series
Walls
Category
Architecture
Pages
247
Language
English
Published
2015-01-08
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Author
Thomas Oles

Description

This book about walls is genuinely exciting and alive with insights, elegance, rigor, style, and thoughtful humanism. It reveals and interrogates the social, political, and historical complexities of one of our most common landscape features, demonstrating how we misconstrue or fail to appreciate the nature and possibilities of physical boundaries. Oles shows that our societies and our politics are shaped by the nature and quality of the divisions we make on and among landscapes, and he interrogates practical, theoretical, and ethical aspects of our landscapes and the boundaries between them. This leads him into stark discussions of barriers such as the US-Mexico border fence, Israel’s fortifications in the West Bank, and the kinds of residential barriers that define neighborhoods by their edges in communities worldwide, from Johannesburg to Levittown. Oles further locates counternarratives of walls, showing how people have lived in walls or used them in seemingly contradictory ways, letting permeability become a form of strength.

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