scholarly journals “Discourses of Displacement” in the Ethnography of Léon-Gontran Damas and Poetry of Charles Baudelaire

2020 ◽  
pp. 43-56
Author(s):  
Michael Reyes Salas
Keyword(s):  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
Field Work ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Prose Poems ◽  
Penal Colony ◽  
Penal Colonies ◽  
Spleen De Paris ◽  
The City

It is not far-fetched to imagine that the French underclass that occupied the city streets Charles Baudelaire roamed as a flâneur could have turned up in the bagne, or penal colony, described by the Negritude poet Léon Damas in his ethnographic field work in Guyane. Through a literary analysis of Damas’ ethnography, Retour de Guyane (1938), in tandem with a selection of prose-poems by Baudelaire from Le Spleen de Paris (1869) and Les Fleurs du mal (1857), this article calls attention to the parallels between the observational methods of urban spectatorship they use to collect case studies for their writing. The interpretive approach I use acknowledges the crossover between literary creativity and sociological analysis and is informed by a theoretical framework that couples Negritude’s anticolonialism with carceral studies. My analysis of these texts is situated in the context of the French Third Republic’s laws against recidivism and vagrancy in the late nineteenth century, which carried the penalty of forced deportation to distant penal colonies, a punitive practice that continued into the early twentieth century. In Baudelaire’s case, changing sociopolitical circumstances in light of Hausmannisation necessitated new modes of how writers dealt with the capital city’s exclusionary development. In the case of Damas, his critique of mise en valeur culture and exploitative colonial scholarship prompted his departure from the conventional practice of salvage ethnography that feigned inclusive objectivity. The article focuses on passages that highlight overlapping colonial and carceral attributes within both the colony and metropole. In conclusion, I argue that Damas’ condemnation of the mission civilisatrice, alongside Baudelaire’s contestation of degraded urban environments, point towards a poetics of colonial society’s intoxication with power.

Minimetrò in Perugia as leverage for urban regeneration

TERRITORIO ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 148-163
Author(s):  
Luca Fondacci
Keyword(s):  
Urban Regeneration ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Low Carbon ◽  
Sustainable Mobility ◽  
Field Surveys ◽  
Peripheral Area ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
Considerable Impact ◽  
The City ◽  
Historical Centre

In the 1970s, the fragile historical centre of the city of Perugia was a key area where the binomial of sustainable mobility and urban regeneration was developed and applied. At the turn of the xxi century, the low carbon automatic people-mover Minimetrò broadened that application from the city's historical centre to the outskirts, promoting the enhancement of several urban environments. This paper is the outcome of an investigation of original sources, field surveys and direct interviews, which addresses the Minimetrò as the backbone of a wide regeneration process which has had a considerable impact on the economic development of a peripheral area of the city which was previously devoid of any clear urban sense. The conclusion proposes some solutions to improve the nature of the Minimetrò as an experimental alternative means of transport.

scholarly journals Temperature, Disease, and Death in London: Analyzing Weekly Data for the Century from 1866 to 1965

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
W. Walker Hanlon ◽  
Casper Worm Hansen ◽  
Jake Kantor
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
High Temperature ◽  
Mortality Data ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Infant Deaths ◽  
Digestive Diseases ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

Using novel weekly mortality data for London spanning 1866-1965, we analyze the changing relationship between temperature and mortality as the city developed. Our main results show that warm weeks led to elevated mortality in the late nineteenth century, mainly due to infant deaths from digestive diseases. However, this pattern largely disappeared after WWI as infant digestive diseases became less prevalent. The resulting change in the temperature-mortality relationship meant that thousands of heat-related deaths—equal to 0.9-1.4 percent of all deaths— were averted. These findings show that improving the disease environment can dramatically alter the impact of high temperature on mortality.

scholarly journals Facilitating fine-grained intra-urban dengue forecasting by integrating urban environments measured from street-view images

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kang Liu ◽  
Ling Yin ◽  
Meng Zhang ◽  
Min Kang ◽  
Ai-Ping Deng ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
High Risk ◽  
Feature Vector ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Environmental Feature ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Environmental Features ◽  
Street View ◽  
The City ◽  
Dengue Epidemic

Abstract Background Dengue fever (DF) is a mosquito-borne infectious disease that has threatened tropical and subtropical regions in recent decades. An early and targeted warning of a dengue epidemic is important for vector control. Current studies have primarily determined weather conditions to be the main factor for dengue forecasting, thereby neglecting that environmental suitability for mosquito breeding is also an important factor, especially in fine-grained intra-urban settings. Considering that street-view images are promising for depicting physical environments, this study proposes a framework for facilitating fine-grained intra-urban dengue forecasting by integrating the urban environments measured from street-view images. Methods The dengue epidemic that occurred in 167 townships of Guangzhou City, China, between 2015 and 2019 was taken as a study case. First, feature vectors of street-view images acquired inside each township were extracted by a pre-trained convolutional neural network, and then aggregated as an environmental feature vector of the township. Thus, townships with similar physical settings would exhibit similar environmental features. Second, the environmental feature vector is combined with commonly used features (e.g., temperature, rainfall, and past case count) as inputs to machine-learning models for weekly dengue forecasting. Results The performance of machine-learning forecasting models (i.e., MLP and SVM) integrated with and without environmental features were compared. This indicates that models integrating environmental features can identify high-risk urban units across the city more precisely than those using common features alone. In addition, the top 30% of high-risk townships predicted by our proposed methods can capture approximately 50–60% of dengue cases across the city. Conclusions Incorporating local environments measured from street view images is effective in facilitating fine-grained intra-urban dengue forecasting, which is beneficial for conducting spatially precise dengue prevention and control.

scholarly journals Prediction limits of mobile phone activity modelling

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 160900 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dániel Kondor ◽  
Sebastian Grauwin ◽  
Zsófia Kallus ◽  
István Gódor ◽  
Stanislav Sobolevsky ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Phone ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Full Spectrum ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Social Events ◽  
Prediction Limits ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
City Structure ◽  
The City

Thanks to their widespread usage, mobile devices have become one of the main sensors of human behaviour and digital traces left behind can be used as a proxy to study urban environments. Exploring the nature of the spatio-temporal patterns of mobile phone activity could thus be a crucial step towards understanding the full spectrum of human activities. Using 10 months of mobile phone records from Greater London resolved in both space and time, we investigate the regularity of human telecommunication activity on urban scales. We evaluate several options for decomposing activity timelines into typical and residual patterns, accounting for the strong periodic and seasonal components. We carry out our analysis on various spatial scales, showing that regularity increases as we look at aggregated activity in larger spatial units with more activity in them. We examine the statistical properties of the residuals and show that it can be explained by noise and specific outliers. Also, we look at sources of deviations from the general trends, which we find to be explainable based on knowledge of the city structure and places of attractions. We show examples how some of the outliers can be related to external factors such as specific social events.

The City, the Countryside and the Social Gospel in Late Victorian Nonconformity

1979 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 415-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. W. Bebbington
Keyword(s):  
Church Attendance ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Adult Population ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The People ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church

The late nineteenth-century city posed problems for English nonconformists. The country was rapidly being urbanised. By 1881 over one third of the people lived in cities with a population of more than one hundred thousand. The most urbanised areas gave rise to the greatest worry of all the churches: large numbers there were failing to attend services. The religious census of 1851 had already shown that the largest towns were the places where there were the fewest worshippers, although nonconformists gained some crumbs of comfort from the knowledge that nonconformist attendances were greater than those of the church of England. Unofficial surveys in the 1880S revealed no improvement. Instead, although few were immediately conscious of it, in that decade the membership of all the main evangelical nonconformist denominations began to fall relative to population. And it was always the same social group that was most conspicuously unreached: the lower working classes, the bottom of the social pyramid. In poor neighbourhoods church attendance was lowest. In Bethnal Green at the turn of the twentieth century, for instance, only 6.8% of the adult population attended chapel, and only 13.3% went to any place of worship. Consequently nonconformists, like Anglicans, were troubled by the weakness of their appeal.

A case study of noise pollution levels during the restrictions period due to COVID-19.

2021 ◽  
Vol 263 (6) ◽  
pp. 206-214
Author(s):  
David Montes-González ◽  
Juan Miguel Barrigón-Morillas ◽  
Ana Cristina Bejarano-Quintas ◽  
Manuel Parejo-Pizarro ◽  
Guillermo Rey-Gozalo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Noise Pollution ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Control Measures ◽  
Acoustic Measurements ◽  
Pollution Levels ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

The pandemic of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) led to the need for drastic control measures around the world to reduce the impact on the health of the population. The confinement of people in their homes resulted in a significant reduction in human activity at every level (economic, social, industrial, etc.), which was reflected in a decrease in environmental pollution levels. Studying the evolution of parameters, such as the level of environmental noise caused by vehicle traffic in urban environments, makes it possible to assess the impact of this type of measure. This paper presents a case study of the acoustic situation in Cáceres (Spain) during the restriction period by means of long-term acoustic measurements at various points of the city.

Creative Confinement and Narratives of Violence: Charles Baudelaire, Shumona Sinha and Assommons les pauvres!

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-75
Author(s):  
SONYA STEPHENS
Keyword(s):  
Political Power ◽  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Social Challenges ◽  
The Social ◽  
Spleen De Paris ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines the relationship between Baudelaire’s prose poem, “Assommons les pauvres!” (Le Spleen de Paris, 1869) and Shumona Sinha’s 2011 novel of the same title. Focusing on questions of reading and intertextuality, from Baudelaire’s reference to Proudhon to Sinha’s engagement with the prose poem and Le Spleen de Paris more broadly, it explores forms of confinement and creativity, the connections between narrative and freedom and the ways in which lyrical subjectivity and literary form reflect the social challenges of each period. In expressing socio-cultural and linguistic alienation, these texts centre the textual in an exploration of the marginal, thereby demonstrating that the connection between them goes beyond a critical act of violence and the presumed equality or dignity it confers, to represent a shared interrogation of universalism, multiculturalism, and authorial and political power.

Walking through the city soundscape: an audio-visual analysis of sensory experience for people with psychosis

2022 ◽  
pp. 147035722110526
Author(s):  
Sara Merlino ◽  
Lorenza Mondada ◽  
Ola Söderström
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Noisy Environments ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Video Recordings ◽  
The City ◽  
The Way

This article discusses how an aspect of urban environments – sound and noise – is experienced by people walking in the city; it particularly focuses on atypical populations such as people diagnosed with psychosis, who are reported to be particularly sensitive to noisy environments. Through an analysis of video-recordings of naturalistic activities in an urban context and of video-elicitations based on these recordings, the study details the way participants orient to sound and noise in naturalistic settings, and how sound and noise are reported and reexperienced during interviews. By bringing together urban context, psychosis and social interaction, this study shows that, thanks to video recordings and conversation analysis, it is possible to analyse in detail the multimodal organization of action (talk, gesture, gaze, walking bodies) and of the sensory experience(s) of aural factors, as well as the way this organization is affected by the ecology of the situation.

scholarly journals Impacts of urbanisation level and distance from potential natural mosquito breeding habitats on the abundance of canine dirofilariosis

2016 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 340-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Attila Trájer ◽  
Antal Rengei ◽  
Kinga Farkas-Iványi ◽  
Ákos Bede-Fazekas
Keyword(s):  
Medical Problem ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Breeding Habitats ◽  
Mosquito Breeding ◽  
Fluvial Habitat ◽  
Occurrence Patterns ◽  
The City ◽  
Knott’S Test ◽  
Natural Water Bodies

Dirofilariosis is an emerging mosquito-borne veterinary and medical problem in the Northern hemisphere. The ecological investigation of 56 canine dirofilariosis cases in new endemic locations was performed in Szeged, Hungary. The aim was to analyse the influence of the spatial patterns of dog abundance and the potential mosquito breeding habitats on the spatial occurrence patterns of dirofilariosis in the city of Szeged. The limnoecological characterisation was based on the fluvial habitat classification of Amoros of natural water bodies; the built environment was evaluated using the UrbanisationScore urbanisation intensity measuring software. Dirofilaria immitis accounted for 51% and D. repens for 34.3% of the dirofilariosis cases, and in 20% of the cases only the Knott’s test was positive. It was concluded that most of the cases were related to locations with a medium to high urbanisation index, although the proximity of mosquito-bearing waters also played an important role in the observed spatial infection patterns. We found that the distance from potential mosquito habitats and the urbanisation intensity determine the abundance of dirofilariosis in urban environments.

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