Bøker av Ben Highmore

A history of post-war playgrounds and their enduring legacy. After World War II, a new kind of playground emerged in Northern Europe and North America. Rather than slides, swings, and roundabouts, these new playgrounds encouraged children to build shacks and invent their own entertainment. Playgrounds tells the story of how waste grounds and bombsites were transformed into hives of activity by children and progressive educators. It shows how a belief in the imaginative capacity of children shaped a new kind of playground and how designers reimagined what playgrounds could be. Ben Highmore tells a compelling story about pioneers, designers, and charities--and above all--about the value of play.

In the second half of the twentieth century, a revolution happened in Britain. Consumer items such as TVs and washing machines went from rare to commonplace, while record numbers of people became homeowners. Many predicted the British class system would not survive this transformation. The reality proved to be more complicated.In Lifestyle revolution, Ben Highmore reveals how consumer culture and new ideas about 'tasteful' living changed British society. Far from being abolished, class was reshaped from the 1950s onwards through colour supplements, flat-pack furniture and Mediterranean cooking. Tastes initially regarded as bohemian and trendy ultimately became mainstream. Taking to the high street, Highmore retraces this process by following the rise - and sometimes fall - of chains such as Habitat and PizzaExpress, alongside the appearance of exciting, must-have products: pine kitchen tables, chicken bricks, duvets and more.Drawing on everything from the Adrian Mole novels to Len Deighton's Action Cook Book, Highmore reveals how ideas of social class became more complex over time, as the British embraced a world of 'controlled casualness'. He also reaches a new understanding of what taste is: the promise of a different way of living.

Impressively accessible and packed with key theory and concepts, this book is a vivid introduction to cultural studies. Each chapter takes engaging examples from everyday life and uses them to explore core issues, from migration to mass media. This book encourages all students of culture and media to become passionate about cultural studies.

Ben Highmore traces the development of conceptions of everyday life, from Georg Simmel's cultural sociology, through the Mass-Observation project of the thirties to theorists such as Michel Curteau.

Using a range of cultural forms Cityscapes spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, finding vivid examples of urban movements in Edgar Allan Poe's London, in Parisian departments stores, in colonial and anti-colonial Algiers, in the North American cities of recent detective fiction, and in the virtual city of The Matrix.