scholarly journals Colaj de povești. De la Orient...la metropolă

Author(s):  
Corina Lazăr ◽  

The article calls into question the problem of Bucharest as a city viewed from two perspectives. The first is related to the issue of dwelling and people; the second perspective relates to its evolution in time focused both on the urban structure and the political outlook. In fact, all human needs as well as all political ideals have contributed to the repeated change in the image of our city, resulting, in some extreme cases, in loss of authenticity (for example, the communist regime period). Later, I wanted to address these problems in the design workshop themes, in the form of some manifests, which refined around three keywords: “passages”, “people”, “house”. The article calls into question the problem of Bucharest as a city viewed from two perspectives. The first is related to the issue of dwelling and people; the second perspective relates to its evolution in time focused both on the urban structure and the political outlook. In fact, all human needs as well as all political ideals have contributed to the repeated change in the image of our city, resulting, in some extreme cases, in loss of authenticity (for example, the communist regime period). Later, I wanted to address these problems in the design workshop themes, in the form of some manifests, which refined around three keywords: “passages”, “people”, “house”. The article calls into question the problem of Bucharest as a city viewed from two perspectives. The first is related to the issue of dwelling and people; the second perspective relates to its evolution in time focused both on the urban structure and the political outlook. In fact, all human needs as well as all political ideals have contributed to the repeated change in the image of our city, resulting, in some extreme cases, in loss of authenticity (for example, the communist regime period). Later, I wanted to address these problems in the design workshop themes, in the form of some manifests, which refined around three keywords: “passages”, “people”, “house”. I think I have found this picturesque feature through repeated walks through the city that each and every time presented the capital not only in the perspective of a city that wants to gain the metropolis status, but also as a misunderstood city with the human needs the state ignores. Such walks that help you perceive the place by yourself, feel some significant moments amidst the urban life colours. Bucharest, viewed as the centre of Oriental Romanity, sees both the Orient and the Occident world. Political and economic relations maintained internationally with different peoples/countries, would find the Capital in an attempt to assimilate cultural elements that come to introduce us the city as a collage, an overlap of heterogeneous elements. Various accounts of foreigners visiting our country apprised of a city bustling with activity, an echo of the things that made a mark on the way in which the life of some Bucharest’s houses appear to us, which are real works of architecture (Nanu Muscel House, Melic House, Eden House, Monteoru House). Nowadays there is a shift towards a more pragmatic way of life, a different approach that most often ends by removing the tradition of the place, whereas the urban silhouette of the city grows in heterogeneous expressions.

Ethnography ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maziyar Ghiabi

The article provides an ethnographic study of the lives of the ‘dangerous class’ of drug users based on fieldwork carried out among different drug using ‘communities’ in Tehran between 2012 and 2016. The primary objective is to articulate the presence of this category within modern Iran, its uses and its abuses in relation to the political. What drives the narration is not only the account of this lumpen, plebeian group vis à vis the state, but also the way power has affected their agency, their capacity to be present in the city, and how capital/power and the dangerous/lumpen life come to terms, to conflict, and to the production of new situations which affect urban life.


Author(s):  
Matija Krizman

This article discusses my trip to Mongolian capital Ulaanbataar and its surroundings. The first part is mainly about Ulaanbataar and its blend of communist regime remnants and new influences of globalization, clash of traditions and trends, and about the offer of food and drinks in the city. This section also touches the Mongolian way of life, prevalently tied to the city conditions. The second part deals with hiking to Bogd Khaan Mountain. This environment without too many people brought an opportunity to get to know some of them on a personal level and to learn more about Mongolian customs and traditions. This is emphasized in the third part where the main weekend getaways for people of Ulaanbataar are described along with the first-handed experience of the people, food and traditional way of life in the steppes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9s11 ◽  
pp. 41-65
Author(s):  
Maarten Hendriks

Empirically focusing on the so-called anti-gang, a civilian policing group in the city of Goma (DRC), this article examines the nexus between the workings of the imagination and the politics of everyday policing. Four forms of political imaginations through which the anti-gang imagine themselves as everyday policing actors are identified: political imaginations around the state, citizenship, the father, and martial arts and action movies. The article makes two main arguments. First, political imaginations are not merely fantasies. Instead, the anti-gang harness them to do political work and impose themselves as street authorities. In doing so, they in turn contribute to giving form to these political imaginations, by making them tangible and experienced as real in everyday urban life. Second, the article asserts that the political imaginations that shape and are shaped by anti-gang practices show that they do not so much propose a new political order. Instead, they seek to be included in it, escape marginalisation and become politically significant.


Terr Plural ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Alessandra Severino da Silva Manchinery ◽  
Suzanna Dourado Silva ◽  
Adnilson de Almeida Silva

It is proposed to discuss territorial mobility, the policies of indigenous leaders in the state of Acre, especially the Manchineri, their survival strategies in the world of non-indigenous people so that we can reflect on two changes that we testify in recent decades: mobility for the urban centers that include the indigenous people who were born in the city and those who arrived in the city, as well as its growing support in the country’s indigenous and non-indigenous political discussions in Brazil. The methodological path had as its own perspective of the leaders, for this will be reported their way of life and their involvement in the policies of different spheres of decision. The paper consists of three discussion sections that go from mobility to the political role played by leaders.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Joey Moh

<p>Transportation, an essential component of modern life, is responsible for one of the biggest growth  areas of our greenhouse gas emissions which causes problem for our environment and the economy. New  Zealand cities face the same issues as many other cities in the globalised world. This thesis  analyses the integration of all the public transport systems to encourage people to get out of the  car and reduce the traffic volume within the city centre to develop with the aim of developing a  sustainable city towards the future. Drivers in New Zealand believe commuter stress could be  significantly reduced by improving public transport. The design calls for a new central transport  interchange for all the public transport systems within Christchurch city to form a spectacular  gateway to the city. The aim of the design is to create a unified urban structure in which diverse  infrastructural and public elements merge together to form one building. The outcome of this research identifies a strong future for a public transport interchange, but  states that its physical and organisational form needs to be re-established. It finds that  technology and architecture offer new opportunities useful for reinterpreting the typology. The  thesis concludes that future public transport interchanges will become hybrids of activity, and  places where the threads of urban life are joined together. The interchanges can become a major  catalyst of urban regeneration - a focus for commerce and the flow of ideas as well as the movement of people.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (94) ◽  
pp. 124-141
Author(s):  
Yumna Siddiqi

In his novels Cockroach and Carnival, Rawi Hage explores the varied experiences of postcolonial migrants to the northern city. His protagonists are antiheroes, hustlers who reject the demands of good immigrant citizenship. Theorists of urban life applaud the city as a space that is hospitable to encounters with difference; they fail to consider the ways in which processes of bordering and differentiation are part of economies that exploit migrants. This article focuses on Hage’s portrayal of migrant mobility in the city. By bringing together a critique of these theorists of urban experience with Sandro Mezzadra’s arguments about the autonomy of postcolonial migrants, who are subjects and agents despite and because of the determinations of the political field, this article probes the subjection of postcolonial migrants in the city. The “politics of mobility” also determines migrants’ modes of conviviality and labor. Hage’s protagonists survive by maneuvering underground, in the interstices of the city, or in a cab, their space of work and mobility in the city, and using a rich verbal medley to tell its myriad stories. Thus Hage presents counterhegemonic narratives and visions of postcolonial migrants in the city.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 560-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Savchenko ◽  
Tatiana Borodina

Abstract Inclusion of specific rural architectural and planning forms in the urban structure of Moscow is analysed. As a theoretical background, theories of Garden-Cities (Howard, 1902), Rural-urban continuum (Sorokin, Zimmerman, 1929), Slow city (Mayer, Knox, 2009) are considered. Inclusion of rural architectural and planning forms is analysed for different structural elements of Moscow’s urban environment – public spaces, industrial areas, residential areas, street and road network. Authors argue that once included into the structure of the city, rural planning and architectural forms do not disappear, but after the termination of the implementation of their parent species and ways of life, which are really related to agriculture and other “non-urban” activities, they are transformed for integration into urban life and the environment, contributing to an increase in their diversity. This pattern can be traced consistently, at least, from the XVIII century.


2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 775-790 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haydar Darıcı

AbstractThis article explores the political subjectivity of Kurdish children in urban Turkey. Often referred to as “stone-throwing children,” since the early 2000s Kurdish children have entered Turkish public discourse as central political actors of the urban Kurdish movement. I suggest that the politicization of children can be understood in the context of transformations in age and kinship systems within the Kurdish community that were shaped by the forced migration of Kurds in the early 1990s. Focusing on the experiences of Kurdish children in the city of Adana, I argue that memories of violence transmitted by displaced parents, combined with the children's experiences of urban life, including exclusion, discrimination, poverty, and state violence, necessitate a reevaluation of how childhood is conceived and experienced within the Kurdish community. In a context where Kurdish adults often have trouble integrating into the urban context, their children frequently challenge conventional power relations within their families as well as within the Kurdish movement. In contrast to a dominant Turkish public discourse positing that these children are being abused by politicized adults, I contend that Kurdish children are active agents who subvert the agendas and norms of not only Turkish but also Kurdish politics. The article analyzes the ways Kurdish children are represented in the public discourse, how they narrate and make sense of their own politicization, and the relationship between the memory and the postmemory of violence in the context of their mobilization.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Robinson Yang

<p>Amongst Taipei’s contemporary urban skyline of skyscrapers sits a secondary layer of prolific informal structures latching onto the existing modernist infrastructures of Taiwan, most prominently multistorey residential buildings. These structures resolve the spatial issue of the urban environment on the surface level and communicate a certain expression of Taiwan’s way of life, but just as importantly, they serve as a critique of modernist standards and homogeneous space.  This phenomenon is the result of the absence of planning and declaration of martial law under the KMT’s rule of Taiwan from 1949-1987. During this time, all top-down plans were reduced to one objective—to take over from China and return to the mainland (Illegal Taipei). During this time the government was negligent about these unrestrained developments in the city. In a 2011 exhibition titled “Illegal Architecture” Taiwanese architect, Ying-Chun Hsieh expressed a distinct view of this period. He wrote:  Fortunately, while the government was concentrating itself on regaining the possession of mainland China and on promoting populism, which made it weak, people were given a chance to breathe. Their creativity was released, and fabulous urban life finally arose in Taipei… (Ching-Yueh)  In recent years, the government has had a change of agenda; the demolitions of illegal extensions are now enforced and with it what has come to symbolise a Taiwanese’s way of life informed by decades of creative informal expansions and certain freedoms. Although government regulations emerge from safety concerns, this thesis argues that there is a superior procedure to overcome these issues without altering the culture: to create an architecture that references but does not imitate the context, therefore creating a new architectural language that retains the spirit of context and history of the everyday in Taiwan.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Robinson Yang

<p>Amongst Taipei’s contemporary urban skyline of skyscrapers sits a secondary layer of prolific informal structures latching onto the existing modernist infrastructures of Taiwan, most prominently multistorey residential buildings. These structures resolve the spatial issue of the urban environment on the surface level and communicate a certain expression of Taiwan’s way of life, but just as importantly, they serve as a critique of modernist standards and homogeneous space.  This phenomenon is the result of the absence of planning and declaration of martial law under the KMT’s rule of Taiwan from 1949-1987. During this time, all top-down plans were reduced to one objective—to take over from China and return to the mainland (Illegal Taipei). During this time the government was negligent about these unrestrained developments in the city. In a 2011 exhibition titled “Illegal Architecture” Taiwanese architect, Ying-Chun Hsieh expressed a distinct view of this period. He wrote:  Fortunately, while the government was concentrating itself on regaining the possession of mainland China and on promoting populism, which made it weak, people were given a chance to breathe. Their creativity was released, and fabulous urban life finally arose in Taipei… (Ching-Yueh)  In recent years, the government has had a change of agenda; the demolitions of illegal extensions are now enforced and with it what has come to symbolise a Taiwanese’s way of life informed by decades of creative informal expansions and certain freedoms. Although government regulations emerge from safety concerns, this thesis argues that there is a superior procedure to overcome these issues without altering the culture: to create an architecture that references but does not imitate the context, therefore creating a new architectural language that retains the spirit of context and history of the everyday in Taiwan.</p>


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