scholarly journals Live Art as Urban Praxis: The Political Aesthetics of the City

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 130-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cath Lambert

This article examines the political possibilities for an aesthetic disruption of urban space and time. Locating the discussion within debates about the neoliberal city, selected art-works from Fierce live art festival in Birmingham, England are used in order to examine how, in a specific and localised context, normative spatial patterns and temporal rhythms can be challenged and subverted. The analysis draws on, and contributes to, a sociological account of the centrality of aesthetics to political and social organisation.

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Teresa Schröder-Stapper

The Written City. Inscriptions as Media of Urban Knowledge of Space and Time The article investigates the function of urban inscriptions as media of knowledge about space and time at the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period in the city of Braunschweig. The article starts with the insight that inscriptions in stone or wood on buildings or monuments not only convey knowledge about space and time but at the same time play an essential role in the construction of space and time in the city by the practice of inscribing. The analysis focuses on the steadily deteriorating relationship between the city of Braunschweig and its city lord, the Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, and its material manifestation in building and monument inscriptions. The contribution shows that in the course of the escalating conflict over autonomy, a change in epigraphic habit took placed that aimed at claiming both urban space and its history exclusively on behalf of the city as an expression of its autonomy.


2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
Jeroen Klink

R e s u m o O artigo problematiza a literatura crítica sobre o Projeto Eixo Tamanduatehy (Santo André) no sentido de enraizá-la na trajetória específica da cidade de Santo André e de contribuir com a reflexão sobre o significado das “experiências reais” de planejamento estratégico urbano no cenário atual da globalização neoliberal. Argumentamos que a ausência de uma leitura de três dimensões entrelaçadas dificultou uma compreensão adequadado legado deste projeto, isto é: (I) a construção política e contestada da escala local, além de seu significado para a disputa de hegemonia sobre a gestão urbana; (II) o planejamento estratégico,a neoliberalização e a emergência de uma representação hegemônica do espaço urbano a partirdo Projeto Eixo Tamanduatehy e (III) planos, projetos estratégicos e a emergência de novos espaços de representação.Palavras-chave Empresariamento urbano; planejamento estratégico; Projeto Eixo Tamanduatehy. A b s t r a c t In this paper the critical literature on the Project Eixo Tamanduatehyis highlighted in a problematic perspective, in the sense of embedding it within the specific trajectory of the city of Santo André, and to contribute with a reflection on the significanceof the “real experiences” of strategic urban planning in the present scenario of neoliberal globalization. Our argument is that the absence of an analysis on three interlinked dimensions has made an adequate understanding of the legacy of this project more difficult, that is: (i)the political and contested nature of scale, besides its significance for the hegemonic disputesover urban management; (ii) strategic planning, neoliberalization and the emergence of ahegemonic representation of urban space on the basis of the Project Eixo Tamanduatehy; and (iii) plans, strategic projects and the emergence of new spaces of representation.Keywords Projeto Eixo Tamanduatehy; strategic planning; urban entrepreneurialism;.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 17-29
Author(s):  
Kenneth L. Grasso ◽  

Steven D. Smith’s Pagans and Christians in the City takes its place alongside James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars as one of the two truly indispensable books on today’s Culture Wars. It advances our understanding of today’s conflict by situating it historically and focusing our attention on its religious dimension. Smith argues that today’s conflict is the latest episode in a longstanding conflict between immanent forms of religiosity which locate the sacred in the world of space and time, and transcendent forms of religiosity which locate the divine beyond space and time. As compelling as it is, the volume’s argument would have been strengthened by a more sustained treatment of the nature of the political community and the essential role played within it by the truths held in common by the members concerning God, man, nature, and history.


TERRITORIO ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 149-157
Author(s):  
Ida Castelnuovo

The question of empresas recuperadas has existed in Argentina since the end of the 1990s. These are fi rms ‘recovered' by workers who, in a context of political, social and economic crisis, and faced with the risk of structural unemployment, have opposed the closure of factories and have set in motion a process of recuperación in which the space of a factory and its relationship with the city is transformed and where the workers' collective reinvents itself as a ‘new' social organisation. Experiences are generated in this fashion which transform local communities, where the political dimension is closely connected with the dimension of action and collective action. The objective of this paper is to discuss the importance of considering social selforganisation practices in terms of their capacity to generate policies and to reinvent the use of land and the community by generating public effects and by providing adequate answers to solve collective problems.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-250
Author(s):  
Deepasri Baul

The 1920s and 1930s were decades of intense religious polarization and violence in many parts of British India. These decades were also especially empowering ones for Hindu nationalist organizations in Delhi. So, it rankled Hindu leaders that Delhi’s built environment had a dearth of Hindu sacred structures to attest to their power, on account of the city’s past status as a Mughal capital. Instead, transitory spatial markers of local veneration made up its somewhat ephemeral Hindu sacred geography. The Shiv Mandir agitation of 1938 was a collective attempt by Hindu volunteers to forcibly occupy government land in a prominent arena of the city as a symbolic restitution of this historical inequality. The agitation itself had two parts—first, the occupation of a plot of land as a temple and, second, the aggregation of legal arguments supporting ownership of the plot for the Hindu public. By combining these two strategies, the Shiv Mandir agitation laid out the political and legal preconditions necessary for the production of a more conspicuous and enduring material landscape of organized Hindu religiosity in the city. Through this process, Hindu nationalist organizations consolidated themselves as the ultimate public custodians of temples and temple land. This was a powerful role that drew its prestige in good measure from control over prime urban property.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 310-326
Author(s):  
Shunyuan Zhang

Abstract This article examines transgender practices in Southwest China through the analytic lens of assemblage. Through ethnographically contextualizing transgender sex workers' daily navigation of the rapidly shifting urban space in Kunming, this article reconceptualizes transgender as constitutive to the dynamic urban assemblage instead of carving out a space and time external to it. It argues that the critical lens of assemblage in the analysis of transgender practice reveals the constitutive queerness of the norm, troubling the political and analytic tenet of antinormativity in queer studies.


Urban Studies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (11) ◽  
pp. 2472-2489 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Angel Martínez López

Squatters and migrants use the city space in a peculiar and anomalous manner. Their contributions to the social and political production of urban space are not usually considered crucial. Furthermore, their mutual relationship is under-researched. In this paper I investigate the participation of migrants in the squatting of abandoned buildings. This may entail autonomous forms of occupation but also various kinds of interactions with native squatters. By looking historically at the city of Madrid I distinguish four major forms of interactions. I collect evidence in order to show that deprivation-based squatting is not necessarily the prevailing type. The forms of ‘empowerment’ and ‘engagement’ were increasingly developed while ‘autonomy’ and ‘solidarity’ were continuously present. These variations occurred because of specific drivers within the cycles of movements’ protests and other social and political contexts which facilitated the cooperation between squatters and migrants, although language barriers, discrimination in the housing market and police harassment constrained them too. Therefore, I argue first that two key social organisations triggered the interactions in different protest cycles. Second, I show how, in spite of the over-representation of Latin American migrants, the political squatting movement in Madrid has consistently incorporated groups of migrants and their struggles in accordance with anti-fascist, anti-racist and anti-xenophobic claims and practices. The analysis also provides a nuanced understanding about the ‘political’ implications of squatting when migrants are involved.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 16-23
Author(s):  
Oleh Ivanyuk ◽  
Yana Martianova

The article reviews the infrastructure projects of the Kyiv City Duma, which were implemented during 1906–1910s. Special attention is paid to the most ambitious programs: the development of sewers, public transport, arrangement of the streets, which contributed to the transformation processes in urban space. It has been established that the principle of development of not only the downtown, but also Kyiv suburbs, declared in the election programs, ultimately failed. The infrastructure projects announced by the City Council sometimes did not take into account the financial capabilities of the city, the bureaucratic red tape inherent in the Empire, lobbying and the influence of business on decision-making. The political struggle, the low level of technical awareness of the vowels, the dishonesty and indifference of some of the elected officials to the performance of duties, which were transformed into non-attendance and frequent disruption of meetings, significantly slowed down their implementation. The most informative source, which allows to cover in detail and quite emotionally the decision-making process and the main stages of implementation of infrastructure projects are Kyiv periodicals — “Kyivlianyn”, “Hromadska Dumka”, “Rada”, in particular.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 704-714
Author(s):  
I. V Trotsuk

The article is a review-reflection on the book by D. Harvey Social Justice and the City (Moscow: New Literary Review; 2018). Despite the fact that social justice is in the title of the book as its focus, the researcher of justice would be disappointed, because justice is rather a cross-cutting idea of the political-economic analysis of the spatial organization of the city; however, the results of this analysis would inevitably make the reader think in terms of justice-injustice. Such a presentation of justice together with the eclectic text can become advantages of the book for researchers of social well-being: if the place of residence is a criterion of life satisfaction, the quality of the place of residence (including fair urban planning and the type of social differentiation of the urban space) significantly influences social well-being, which the author shows very convincingly in both liberal and socialist (in his terms) discourses, but clearly prefers the Marxist methodology supplemented by some other conceptual approaches.


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