scholarly journals Looking Back on the Space of a Boom: (Re)developing Spatial Matrices in the City of London

1994 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
M Pryke

This paper is focused on the (re)development of the global financial space of the City of London during the mid-1980s. Although the financing of this process is the chief concern, the influence of the social space through which this funding was taking place is not ignored. Therefore, an interpretation is provided of, first, the ways in which a range of economic agents within a ‘structure of building provision’ interact with given sets of spatial practices to capitalise an established social space. And, second, the way in which these agents then realign to develop around newly emerging sociospatial relations is examined. The underlying influence of changes in the wider economic ‘setting’ of these agents is highlighted, with particular reference to how their economic calculations are mapped onto social space and the overall consequences of these processes.

Author(s):  
Elena Igartuburu García

Identity, space and emotions, although traditionally all traditionally naturalized and delinked from the construction of one another, might also be read as formed by intertwined processes that are guided and shaped by hegemonic powers. Nonetheless, as they delineating difference within and among themselves, the consideration of these three fields and the way they work together in these shaping opens up new ways to approach the split between normative categories of identity, assigned location and adequate feelings, and their subjective perception. Tessa McWatt’s novel This Body presents the reader with two Guyanese characters, Victoria and her nephew Derek, that undergo, at many different levels, this split between subjectivity and a socially and culturally given subject position. Challenging normative ideals, Victoria struggles with her categorization as Other; an endeavour marked by her trajectories and experiences as she negotiates and redeploys a physical as well as a social space of her own in the city of London. Still, her love relationship with a British man would make her drift towards assimilation inasmuch as this affair relocates Victoria within dominant gender, ethnic and class hierarchies.


1994 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 453-475 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Allen ◽  
Michael Pryke

In this paper we attempt to demonstrate the use and limitations of Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space as an approach to questions of social space. The City of London provides the service space, as it were, through which Henri Lefebvre's ideas are examined and illustrated. The paper is divided into three parts. In the first section we set out the main ideas of Lefebvre on questions of social space, in particular the notions of representations of space, representational spaces and spatial practices, and how they have been taken up in the work of Harvey, Shields, and Soja. In the second section we use the example of the abstract space of finance to show how a particular dominant coding of space has been achieved through the routine spatial practices and global networks of those who work in the City's financial markets. In particular, the modes of power and the different sets of relationships through which a dominant financial space is secured are highlighted. In the third section we draw attention to the people who disappear within the financial spaces of the City, those who clean, cater within, and secure the abstract space of finance on a subcontract basis. Focusing upon the spatial practices of this contract work force, we show the manner in which they use the dominant space and their ability to subvert or contradict the dominant coding of finance. In short, the two work forces occupy the same place, yet live their everyday lives within different spaces.


Author(s):  
Aled Davies

This book is a study of the political economy of Britain’s chief financial centre, the City of London, in the two decades prior to the election of Margaret Thatcher’s first Conservative government in 1979. The primary purpose of the book is to evaluate the relationship between the financial sector based in the City, and the economic strategy of social democracy in post-war Britain. In particular, it focuses on how the financial system related to the social democratic pursuit of national industrial development and modernization, and on how the norms of social democratic economic policy were challenged by a variety of fundamental changes to the City that took place during the period....


Author(s):  
M.S. Parvathi ◽  

Burton Pike (1981) terms the cityscapes represented in literature as word-cities whose depiction captures the spatial significance evoked by the city-image and simultaneously, articulates the social psychology of its inhabitants (pp. 243). This intertwining of the social and the spatial animates the concept of spatiality, which informs the positionality of urban subjects, (be it the verticality of the city or the horizonality of the landscape) and determines their standpoint (Keith and Pile, 1993). The spatial politics underlying cityscapes, thus, determine the modes of social production of sexed corporeality. In turn, the body as a cultural product modifies and reinscribes the urban landscape according to its changing demographic needs. The dialectic relationship between the city and the bodies embedded in them orient familial, social, and sexual relations and inform the discursive practices underlying the division of urban spaces into public and private domains. The geographical and social positioning of the bodies within the paradigm of the public/private binary regulates the process of individuation of the bodies into subjects. The distinction between the public and the private is deeply rooted in spatial practices that isolate a private sphere of domestic, embodied activity from the putatively disembodied political, public sphere. Historically, women have been treated as private and embodied and the politics of the demarcated spaces are employed to control and limit women’s mobility. This gendered politics underlying the situating practices apropos public and private spaces inform the representations of space in literary texts. Manu Joseph’s novels, Serious Men (2010) and The Illicit Happiness of Other People (2012), are situated in the word-cities of Mumbai and Chennai respectively whose urban spaces are structured by such spatial practices underlying the politics of location. The paper attempts to problematize the nature of gendered spatializations informing the location of characters in Serious Men and The Illicit Happiness of Other People.


Author(s):  
D.A. BRADING

This chapter demonstrates that while Spain had a clear vision of what the conquered Aztec city should be, the city of the conquistadors was relatively short for it was soon transformed by its Creole inhabitants who made their own identity pronounced on its building and culture. For 300 years, the city of Mexico was the capital of viceroyalty. It was the capital of New Spain and was the seat of the metropolitan archbishopric of Mexico. During the first decades of the seventeenth century, a generation of young Creoles entered the secular priesthood and the religious orders. They challenged the predominance of European Spaniards, affirmed their talents and identity, and started looking back to the glorious past the conquistadors had destroyed. However, the development of the city was constrained and limited by the city’s status as the viceregal capital of New Spain. Its status hence meant that the city depended on the political decisions and cultural influences emanating from the Spanish. Out of this tension, a creative process of change emerged in which different ethnic groups and cultures intermingled and conflicted to ensure that the social composition and character of Mexico City would be different from the other cities in Spanish America. However, these changes were not brought without due loss. Due to the conquest and the Old World diseases the Mexico population fell to the near brink of oblivion. These epidemics and natural calamities continued to afflict the city throughout the colonial period.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-199
Author(s):  
Isabel Molina Martos

Abstract This paper offers a sociolinguistic analysis of the consonants (s) and (d) in the coda position in the city of Madrid, within the framework of the Project for the Sociolinguistic Study of Spanish from Spain and America (PRESEEA). The purpose is to illustrate how varieties of southern Castilian Spanish and those from the central and northern Peninsula converge and diverge, taking into consideration the social, political, and economic parameters that affect said processes. The diversity of patterns that coexist in the Madrid speech community reflects the city’s historic social complexity, the varied geographical origins of its migrant population, the interests that motivate each community of practice, as well as other circumstances that influence the direction of change. The analysis of (s) and (d) in coda illustrates the way in which the dynamics of variation and change in Madrid fluctuate between two poles: standardization and regionalization, the same two axes around which the community’s sociolinguistic patterns revolve.


Africa ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susann Baller

ABSTRACTIn Senegal, neighbourhood football teams are more popular than teams in the national football league. The so-called navétanes teams were first created in the 1950s. Since the early 1970s, they have competed in local, regional and national neighbourhood championships. This article considers the history of these clubs and their championships by focusing on the city of Dakar and its fast-growing suburbs, Pikine and Guédiawaye. Research on the navétanes allows an exploration of the social and cultural history of the neighbourhoods from the actor-centred perspective of urban youth. The history of the navétanes reflects the complex interrelations between young people, the city and the state. The performative act of football – on and beyond the pitch, by players, fans and organizers – constitutes the neighbourhood as a social space in a context where the state fails to provide sufficient infrastructure and is often contested. The navétanes clubs and championships demonstrate how young people have experienced and imagined their neighbourhoods in different local-level ways, while at the same time interconnecting them with other social spaces, such as the ‘city’, the ‘nation’ and ‘the world’.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-139
Author(s):  
Konstantin Kharchenko

The paper presents an analysis of the capacity of target groups of the population which are considered as a social base for the implementation of strategies of socioeconomic development. The aim of the study is to define the ways of identifying and tools of activating of the capacity of various groups of the population in relation to strategy planning and implementation. The capacity of target groups is considered in a context of the concept of capacity as a managerial category with its both objective and subjective senses. The capacity of target groups is identified among the various sorts of capacity of a territory. The concepts of target groups capacity and social capacity, social and labor capacity, social and target groups are correlated. The capacity of target groups is shown on the example of two certain localities: Mostovski raion (Krasnodar krai) and the city district of Megion (Khanty-Mansiysk autonomous okrug – Ugra). As a result of reflection analysis of the process and outcomes of strategic planning there were revealed more than ten target groups typical for both localities. Specific target groups were also identified. The role of each of group under the condition of both inertial and purposeful development of the locality was highlighted. The identification of target groups had let to classify them by the criteria of typicality, localization in relation to the borders of the locality, cohesion, presence in the real world / result of intent construction. It was proposed to form a ‘thesaurus’ of target groups to apply while analyzing the social potential of the other localities.


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 143-167
Author(s):  
Karol Kurnicki

Space gains significance through processes of social differentiation and bordering, and in consequence is connected with the creation and maintenance of social divisions. The author seeks confirmation of this fact at the level of everyday practices in housing settlements, tracking the mechanisms used by people in situations of contact and confrontation with others in the social space. He sets himself several aims: (1) he attempts to analyze selected spatial practices (parking within the settlement, the creation of belonging), reflecting the internal structuring strategies of housing settlements; (2) he points to the causes of that structuring, that is, the main contexts in which these practices occur and are strengthened; (3) he highlights the important role of space in processes of bordering and differentiation. Practices connected with parking and the creation of belonging, although apparently disparate and deriving from contrary spheres of social life make it possible to hypothesize that the striving for separation and the increased importance of space determine the organization of borders, divisions, and social relations in housing settlements.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Smart

Urban metropolitan city-centers offer the most complex, socially connective environments in the built world. The social structures fundamentally embedded in city life are, however increasingly being overshadowed by an isolating system of city densification. The City of Toronto, as a territory of exploration, is one of many cities that are evolving a dense array of restrictive boundaries that increasingly challenge human connectivity, and the deep-rooted ability of these environments to establish vibrant city life. It is the role of architecture to mediate the relationships between the public and private territories and to understand how these environments are utilized and engaged by the surrounding context. This thesis has extracted critical environmental components exemplified in city, community, and building territories, and has re-integrated these defining characteristics into an alternative design strategy that establishes a balanced symbiotic relationship between the private and public realms of Toronto’s future City Core.


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