scholarly journals Introduction: Narrating the City and Spaces of Contestation

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Ragnhild Claesson ◽  
Pål Brunnström
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Spatial Dimension ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Urban Futures ◽  
Heritage Discourse ◽  
The City

While nation states have a disputed status in a globalised world, cities are often regarded as sovereign and global actors. Along with de-nationalising processes of increased privatisation, supranational governing and networks of transnational corporations, city administrations have developed new capabilities of orientation and governing in a global context (Sassen 2006). Inequality, poverty and segregation are some of the pressing issues that city administrations are grappling with – issues of local challenge with global relevance and repercussions, and vice versa. We wonder, if city administrations also address cultural issues that traditionally were of national concern, as fostering and narrating a sense of identity and belonging? If so, we think this shift needs to be further inquired, as we know that narrating and uses of history are not innocent practices. Rather, these are activities which consciously and unconsciously can push developments and futures in specific directions (Sandercock 2003). Further, narrating and history-writing have a spatial dimension and a performative force which may manifest in the physical environment, making changes, or sustaining status quo (De Certeau 1988, Hayden 1997 and Massey 2005). A critical engagement in the making and use of history in urban space is needed to disclose power relations and constructions of categories, such as gender identities (Scott 2011), and to problematize bias perspectives on cultural heritage and an “authorised heritage discourse” (Smith 2006). Processes of narrating the city in urban development and regeneration are often processes where not only urban history, but also urban futures, are negotiated in a very concrete and physical sense.

scholarly journals Exploring Successful Small Urban Spaces’ Criteria with Emphasis on Cultural Context

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-482
Author(s):  
Parvin Partovi ◽  
Kebria Sedaghat Rostami ◽  
Amir Shakibamanesh
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Model ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Human Needs ◽  
Short Time ◽  
The City

In the crowded cities of the present age, public spaces can provide a quiet area away from the hustle and bustle of the city that citizens can interact with by incorporating utility features and meeting human needs and Relax there. Small urban spaces are among the most important and effective urban spaces to achieve this goal. Because these spaces due to their small size and lower costs (compared to larger spaces) for construction can be created in large numbers and distributed throughout the city. In this way, citizens will be able to reach a public urban space on foot in a short time. If these spaces are well designed, they can encourage people to stay in and interact with each other. It is not difficult to identify and experience high-quality successful places, but identifying the reasons for their success is difficult and even more difficult, understanding if similar spaces in other places can be considered successful. This question is important because public space with deep social content is considered a cultural product. Public space is the product of the historical and socio-cultural forces of society. Therefore, one of the most important issues that should be considered in the study of public spaces and the reasons for their success is the cultural context. In Iranian cities that have been influenced by the values and principles of Islam,recognizing Islamic principles and their role in shaping public spaces can lead us to desirable results. The purpose of this article is to develop a conceptual model of successful small urban spaces with an emphasis on cultural issues, especially in Iranian-Islamic cities. In this regard, the effective criteria for the success of urban spaces in general and small urban spaces in particular in the two categories of Western countries and Iranian Islamic cities were examined and then, taking into account the criteria derived from cultural theorists, the conceptual model of research with 38 subcriteria is provided.

scholarly journals DP 0257 - International City’s Networks and Diplomacy

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-60
Author(s):  
Renato Balbim
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
World Order ◽  
Small Cities ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Database Research ◽  
City Network ◽  
The City

The internationalization of cities and the constitution of a new international space of power involves a much more expressive number of cities than the usual global cities. Nowadays, dozens of international organizations are composed of regional capitals, medium, and even small cities. With diverse agendas and their own strategies of action, those organizations seek to interfere in global processes and negotiate with large corporations, multilateral organizations, and nation-states. Historically, the internationalization of cities carries strategic values such as peace, culture, and sustainability, among others discussed in this paper. More recently, the notion of the city as merchandise explains this process. Urban requalification and urban space commoditization are treated here under the conception of rugosities (Ribeiro, 2012), local and global rationality (Santos, 1995), and creative destruction (Brenner and Theodore, 2002). By hypothesis, I affirm that city internationalization is directly related to the democratic environment, degree of social participation, and local government’s autonomy. The magnitude of this process is measured confronting original database research to secondary sources and illustrated using the Brazilian scenario. Additionally, a theoretical discussion proposes an innovative classification of those networks according to their constitution, composition, agendas, and spatialization. The characteristics, agents, and means of city diplomacy are debated, and the adequacy of other terms (paradiplomacy, federative diplomacy, and metrodiplomacy). In conclusion, it summarizes notes and indications of further research aiming to deepen the knowledge about this new and important agent of the world order, the city network.

scholarly journals HANOI

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Valentin
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Everyday Activities ◽  
National Symbols ◽  
The Social ◽  
City History ◽  
Human Use ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

The article discusses the role that cities play in constructing and mediating particular historical accounts. Drawing on fieldwork experiences from Hanoi and Kathmandu it adopts a comparative perspective and explores how history is mediated, experienced and interpreted through the physical organisation of the city. History is conceptualised both chronologically as sequences of events that can be traced in the physical environment of the city and as a temporally specific narrative about the city and the wider society of which it is part. The article throws light on the impact different political regimes have had on the built environment and how this has informed the social organisation and human use of urban space in Hanoi. Comparing this with the social and physical organisation of Kathmandu two particular issues become salient, firstly the way in which the influence of foreign powers is physically manifest in the city; secondly how specific places, as national symbols of unity, frame everyday activities in the city.  

scholarly journals The city as a mediating device and as a symbol in Finnish poetry of the 1960s

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 514-528
Author(s):  
Harri Veivo
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City

In Finnish poetry of the 1960s, the city, and above all the capital Helsinki, is the scene where the metamorphosis of Finland from an agrarian into an urban society is staged, analysed and commented. It is also a symbol that serves to situate the country in the global context, with all the contradictions that were characteristic of the position of Finland in the cold war system. Writing about the city was a means to reflect on the transformations of social and political reality and of the physical environment, a means to represent the confusion these transformations produced or to work towards understanding them. The article analyses the city in texts belonging to the "new poetry" of the 1960s, as well as in texts representing the modernist poetics of the 1950s, arguing that the very co-existence of two contrasting poetic discourses was crucial for the semiotic development of Finnish culture in the period of time in question.

scholarly journals THE MAIN APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF THE CITY PHENOMENON AS A SOCIAL SYSTEM

Skhid ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-30
Author(s):  
Oleksandr Horban ◽  
Anton Nesterovskyi
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Spatial Dimension ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
Economic Dimension ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The City

The article considers issues relevant to contemporary social philosophy regarding theoretical approaches to the study of the urban space phenomenon. The authors show how the social phenomenology of the city is studied within the socio-economic, socio-cultural, socio-ecological and urbanistic approaches. An analysis of the works of representatives of these approaches has made it possible to distinguish several dimensions of the city as a social phenomenon and the trend issues of relevant scientific research. Thus, within the framework of the spatial dimension, the city should be studied as the interaction of physical and social space, giving various configurations of the cultural and spiritual standard of living; the political and administrative dimension focuses the researcher on the study of the activity and interaction of formal organizations and administrative structures in terms of meeting a wide range of human needs. The economic dimension of the city allows considering it as a place of concentration of constantly operating markets, leading to an increase in consumption and the development of a consumer culture of social communities and groups; communication dimension shows it as a synergistic system of intersecting flows of information, under the influence and on the basis of which, complex interaction of social individuals, social institutions and groups is conducted with the aim of producing, using and distributing material and spiritual benefits. From the socio-cultural perspective, the city appears as a symbolic level of the existence of collective ideas, values, social, cultural codes; the so-called “urban myth” is of particular importance here.  

scholarly journals Speculative fiction and African urban futures: Reading Imagine Africa 500

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-106
Author(s):  
Doseline Kiguru
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
African City ◽  
City Space ◽  
Physical Setting ◽  
The Future ◽  
Urban Futures ◽  
The City

This article explores the place of the future African city as presented in contemporary African speculative fiction. It focuses on the short stories in the collection Imagine Africa 500 to look at how the urban space is conceptualized in these narrations of an imagined future Africa, 500 years from now. While the discussion looks at the urban space and imagined technological development, it also takes note of ecological narratives and the contrast drawn between the city and the rural, the local and the foreign, as imagined for the future. The article aims to provoke a debate on the imaginations of what a future African city may look like as presented through literary works and the significance of these imaginings today within developmental and environmental lenses. The aim is to look not only at the creative text but the literary production mechanisms that produce these texts, taking note of the significance of the city space as a physical setting for literary organizations that produce such texts as well as a central theme in the narratives told through these platforms. It reads the future city through use of language, space, form and style to look at how the modern short story is theorizing on African futures.

scholarly journals STREET SPACE FROM THE VIEW OF HUMAN INTERACTION

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristián Čulík ◽  
Alica Kalašová ◽  
Zuzana Otahálová
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Spatial Dimension ◽  
Basic Element ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Street Space ◽  
Public Areas ◽  
And Function ◽  
The City

The dramatic increase in automobile transport over the last few decades has often led to the degradation of a basic element of the urban space – streets, the essential part of every urban area – to simple transport corridors. Life in the street is a dramatic stage on which we all are participating actors. The meaning of streets goes beyond the fact that they lead somewhere else and thus hold the city together, but the streetscape has a meaning in and of itself – we are out in the street because we want to be there. Like other components of the urban space, streets have a spatial dimension but, perhaps uniquely, also have their temporal element. In my contribution I would like to characterize a street in a town and its role in the modern way of life. Streets and public spaces are important elements that make up a city. The rapid increase of number of vehicles brought changes in the character and function of the street space. The streets were perceived primarily as a space reserved for transport, to the detriment of its residential, social and aesthetic function. Vehicles in motion and mainly parked cars gradually occupied a larger part of public areas and they do not allow other activities.

scholarly journals Heightened intensity: Reflecting on player experiences in Wayfinder Live

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Troy Innocent ◽  
Dale Leorke
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The People ◽  
Physical Spaces ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City ◽  
Player Experiences ◽  
Augmented Reality Game

Location-based games use smartphones and other location-aware devices to incorporate their players’ actions in everyday, physical spaces – the streets and public spaces of the city – into the virtual world of the game. Scholars and designers of these games often claim that they reconfigure their players’ relationship with the people and environment around them. They argue these games either engage and immerse players more deeply in the spaces of the game or distance and detach them from the physical environment through the screen interface. To date, however, relatively few detailed empirical studies of these games have been undertaken to test out and critique these claims. This article presents a study of the 2017 iteration of the location-based augmented reality game Wayfinder Live, in which players use their phones to search for and scan urban codes hidden across Melbourne’s laneways, alleys, and public spaces. Players of the game were interviewed and invited to reflect on their experience. This article relates these experiences to the design and development of the game, particularly to five play design principles that characterize its approach to haptic play in urban space. We begin by outlining these principles and the motivations behind them. Then, drawing on an analysis of the player interviews, we evaluate the impact of the game on their perception of the city.

Transnational Habitus and Sociability in the City: Zimbabwean Migrants’ Experiences in Johannesburg, South Africa

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Khangelani Moyo
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Field Research ◽  
The South ◽  
Economic Networks ◽  
Social Field ◽  
Transnational Migrants ◽  
Telephone Calls ◽  
The City

Drawing on field research and a survey of 150 Zimbabwean migrants in Johannesburg, this paper explores the dimensions of migrants’ transnational experiences in the urban space. I discuss the use of communication platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook as well as other means such as telephone calls in fostering the embedding of transnational migrants within both the Johannesburg and the Zimbabwean socio-economic environments. I engage this migrant-embedding using Bourdieusian concepts of “transnational habitus” and “transnational social field,” which are migration specific variations of Bourdieu’s original concepts of “habitus” and “social field.” In deploying these Bourdieusian conceptual tools, I observe that the dynamics of South–South migration as observed in the Zimbabwean migrants are different to those in the South–North migration streams and it is important to move away from using the same lens in interpreting different realities. For Johannesburg-based migrants to operate within the socio-economic networks produced in South Africa and in Zimbabwe, they need to actively acquire a transnational habitus. I argue that migrants’ cultivation of networks in Johannesburg is instrumental, purposive, and geared towards achieving specific and immediate goals, and latently leads to the development and sustenance of flexible forms of permanency in the transnational urban space.

Ukraina Wschodnia jako przestrzeń symboliczna w prozie Serhija Żadana – na podstawie powieści Woroszyłowgrad i Mezopotamia

2020 ◽  
pp. 233-248
Author(s):  
Marta Zambrzycka ◽  
Paulina Olechowska
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
City Space ◽  
Current Events ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The City

The subject of the article is an analysis of the three aspects of depicting urban space of Eastern Ukraine, focusing specifi cally on the Donbass region and the city of Kharkov as depicted in the novels Voroshilovgrad (2010) and Mesopotamia (2014) by Serhiy Zhadan. The urban space of Eastern Ukraine overlaps with the most important values that shape a person’s personality and aff ect her or his self-identifi cation. The city space is also a “place of memory” and experiences of generations that infl uence current events. In addition to the historical and axiological dimension, the imaginative aspect of space is also important. This approach is used by the author to describe the urban space as a functioning imagination or stereotypes associated with it as opposed to its realistic depiction.

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