scholarly journals Methodological Proposal to Study the Uses and Appropriations of Unfinished Estates: A View from Vizela, Portugal

Heritage ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-183
Author(s):  
Rui Pereira ◽  
João Sarmento

Contemporary urbanity is marked by the presence of abandonment, ruins, and voids. Over the last decades, the model of urban development in Portugal allowed a discontinuous city expansion that has left many plots and spaces empty. Due to interrupted urbanization processes, urban developments suspended in time and space have progressively degraded, constituting nowadays new forms of non-historical ruins and a significant part of the urban landscape. However, these semi constructed buildings, are not only structures made of brick and mortar, but commonly the object of several and distinct appropriations and social uses. In order to explore the socio-cultural meanings of these ruinous constructions, their social life and their material and symbolic transformation, this paper puts forward a methodology, based on systematic ethnographic observation and detailed field work. Furthermore, it applies this methodology to a case study—an unfinished project in the city of Vizela, Portugal, for which fieldwork was carried out during 2017 and 2018. The paper ends up highlighting a political challenge in planning the contemporary city, towards the need to overcome a conventional dichotomy between the usage rights of the public and private domain.

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Scarborough ◽  
Ray Sin ◽  
Barbara Risman

Empirical studies show that though there is more room for improvement, much progress has been made toward gender equality since the second wave of feminism. Evidence also suggests that women’s advancements have been more dramatic in the public sphere of work and politics than in the private sphere of family life. We argue that this lopsided gender progress may be traced to uneven changes in gender attitudes. Using data from more than 27,000 respondents who participated in the General Social Survey from 1977 through 2016, we show that gender attitudes have more than one underlying dimension and that these dimensions have changed at different rates over time. Using latent class analysis, we find that the distribution of respondents’ attitudes toward gender equality has changed over the past 40 years. There has been an increase in the number of egalitarians who support equality in public and private spheres, while the traditionals who historically opposed equality in both domains have been replaced by ambivalents who feel differently about gender equality in the public and private spheres. Meanwhile, successive birth cohorts are becoming more egalitarian, with Generation-Xers and Millennials being the most likely to hold strong egalitarian views. The feminist revolution has succeeded in promoting egalitarian views and decreasing the influence of gender traditionalism, but has yet to convince a substantial minority that gender equality should extend to both public and private spheres of social life


2019 ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Antonio Díaz Sotelo

ResumenEl objeto de este texto es la exposición y análisis de los procedimientos de intervención pública en el paisaje urbano de la ciudad de Madrid. El objetivo último de ese análisis es identificar el modelo público para el paisaje urbano en Madrid.  Este texto se centra en la exposición analítica de documentos oficiales antes que en sus conclusiones definitivas, por lo que le corresponde la denominación de Informe.  Este informe se organiza en dos partes: una exposición teórica que enmarca el posterior análisis de instrumentos administrativos de intervención en el paisaje.  Se concibe como parte de la investigación de Tesis Doctoral titulada “Transformación Reciente del Paisaje Comercial en el Centro Histórico”, acotada en un marco temporal de apenas diez años, marcado por la crisis y la desregulación económica, y en un marco territorial limitado al centro histórico de Madrid. Esa investigación se enmarca en una reflexión general sobre la relación entre actividad económica y paisaje urbano. El interés de este informe para la investigación es sobre la utilidad de ese modelo público para el paisaje urbano en Madrid como parámetro para valorar la rentabilidad de los esfuerzos públicos y privados en la mejora de la calidad del paisaje urbano.AbstractThe purpose of this text is the exhibition and analysis of public intervention procedures in the urban landscape of the city of Madrid. The ultimate goal of this analysis is to identify the public model for the urban landscape in Madrid. This text focuses on the analytical exposition of official documents rather than on their final conclusions, for which reason the denomination of Report corresponds. This report is organized in two parts: a theoretical exposition that frames the subsequent analysis of administrative instruments of intervention in the landscape. It is conceived as part of the Doctoral Thesis research titled "Recent Transformation of the Commercial Landscape in the Historic Center", bounded within a period of just ten years, marked by the crisis and economic deregulation, and in a territorial framework limited to the historic center of Madrid. This research is part of a general reflexion on the relationship between economic activity and urban landscape. The interest of this report for the investigation is about the utility of that public model for the urban landscape in Madrid as a parameter to assess the profitability of public and private efforts in improving the quality of the urban landscape.


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):  
Jari Vuori ◽  
Marika Kylänen

Since the late 1990s, the literature of public-private management and publicness have increased, but the genealogy of public-private in a frame of pluralistic definitions has not been studied. This study focuses on ascertaining how the nature and operations of public-private relations influence discursive practices in public-private management, organization, and policy studies. The literature review produced thousands of abstracts (N=2242), but only few articles (N=39) from 22 highly ranked journals (2000-2010). Despite the research of public-private management, it seems that a surprisingly small number of researchers have recognized that the public/private sphere provides a particularly useful approach to evolve organization, management, and policy studies. The only exceptions seem to be anchored by citizenship and especially individualism, “personalized public services.” The authors also found that researchers did not integrate disciplinary traditions in their approaches and link them to different public/private arenas: public in organizations, private in organizations, public in social life, and private in social life. They conclude that the new trends in public-private organizing and management will remain an enigma unless the following is asked: how can the arenas of public/private counteract the effects of themselves?


2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Thornton ◽  
Heather Roberts

Throughout the Western intellectual tradition, the separation of public and private life has been ubiquitous.[footnote* See, eg, Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar (eds), Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy (University of Chicago Press, 1997); Margaret Thornton (ed), Public and Private: Feminist Legal Debates (Oxford University Press, 1995); Ruth Gavison, ‘Feminism and the Public/Private Distinction’ (1992) 45 Stanford Law Review 1; S I Benn and G F Gaus (eds), Public and Private in Social Life (Croom Helm, 1983); Frances E Olsen, ‘The Family and the Market: A Study of Ideology and Legal Reform’ (1983) 96 Harvard Law Review 1497.] Although the line of demarcation changes according to time and circumstance, the conjunction of the public sphere with the masculine and the private sphere with the feminine has remained a constant in political thought.


2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Obaidul Hamid ◽  
Richard B. Baldauf

While macro-level language policy and planning (LPP) that is done mainly by governments still dominates thinking in the field, limitations of this focus have been demonstrated by recent broader and more focused conceptualizations of LPP. For instance, global LPP, particularly for languages of wider communication such as English, has received considerable attention. Similarly, studies of meso- and micro-level planning has shown that many LPP decisions have to be taken at sub-national institutional, communal and familial levels, particularly in contexts where macro-level policies do not exist, where non-interventionist policies of benign neglect are deemed appropriate from a political point of view, or where a problem is too small to attract national attention. These recent developments have led to additions to the macro-level LPP framework, providing more appropriate and contextually relevant tools to understand LPP efforts carried out by LPP “actors” both within and beyond individual polities. However, this diversification of LPP frames and contexts can also be seen as going through a process of simultaneous unification and taking a macro-like character, as illustrated by the distinctions being drawn between the public and the private sector LPP. Taking Bangladesh as a case and drawing on LPP issues pertaining to public and private universities as well as pre-tertiary educational institutions with a particular focus on medium of instruction and the private tutoring industry, we argue for the relevance of this macro-like distinction for a better understanding of complex LPP issues in the country. We maintain that the public-private domain distinction may complement existing variables by adding a dimension that is increasingly becoming important in a globalized world dominated by neoliberalism.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chetan Sinha

The article draws from critical psychology to discuss the rising debate on brain determinism and free will in the legal domain. As free will also corresponds to the context and culture, it can have both the public and private space of expressions. The rise of neuroscience and its influence in the legal domain offers a holistic and sociocultural meaning of responsibility. Even one becomes entitled to take free will as a ‘necessary illusion’ in order to be in the zone of ‘moral as well as legal-social life forming activities’. In the criminal justice system free will is not taken as any kind of necessary illusion but the conscious will and action of the person. This further throw light on how self-regulation directs oneself to the wilful control of illegitimate acts and the role of brain.


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