Unlearning the City

Unlearning the City PDF Author: Swati Chattopadhyay
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780816679317
Category : ARCHITECTURE
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Cities are more than concrete and steel infrastructure. But modern urban theory does not have the language to describe and debate the vital component of urban life that is lived on the streets of cities and towns. Swati Chattopadhyay has written a nuanced argument for a new vocabulary of the city in Unlearning the City, proposing a way of analyzing the materiality of the urban that captures the ever-changing element of human experience. Urban life is intrinsically messy and usually refuses to conform to the rigid views laid down in much of urban studies theory. Chattopadhyay looks at urban life in India with a fresh perspective that incorporates the everyday and the unstructured. As the first to apply the theories of subalternity for an understanding of urban history, Chattopadhyay provides an in-depth study of vehicular art, street cricket, political wall writing, and religious festivities that link the visual and spatial attributes of these popular cultural forms with the imagination and practices of urban life. She contends that these practices have a direct impact on the configuration and knowledge of public space, and the political potential of the people inhabiting cities. Unlearning the City uses the popular culture of Indian cities to question the dominant conception of urban infrastructure and encourage a conceptual realignment in how the city is seen, discussed, and even experienced.

Unlearning the City

Unlearning the City PDF Author: Swati Chattopadhyay
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780816679317
Category : ARCHITECTURE
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cities are more than concrete and steel infrastructure. But modern urban theory does not have the language to describe and debate the vital component of urban life that is lived on the streets of cities and towns. Swati Chattopadhyay has written a nuanced argument for a new vocabulary of the city in Unlearning the City, proposing a way of analyzing the materiality of the urban that captures the ever-changing element of human experience. Urban life is intrinsically messy and usually refuses to conform to the rigid views laid down in much of urban studies theory. Chattopadhyay looks at urban life in India with a fresh perspective that incorporates the everyday and the unstructured. As the first to apply the theories of subalternity for an understanding of urban history, Chattopadhyay provides an in-depth study of vehicular art, street cricket, political wall writing, and religious festivities that link the visual and spatial attributes of these popular cultural forms with the imagination and practices of urban life. She contends that these practices have a direct impact on the configuration and knowledge of public space, and the political potential of the people inhabiting cities. Unlearning the City uses the popular culture of Indian cities to question the dominant conception of urban infrastructure and encourage a conceptual realignment in how the city is seen, discussed, and even experienced.

Fragments of the City

Fragments of the City PDF Author: Colin McFarlane
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520382234
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Pursuing fragments -- Pulling together, falling apart -- Knowing fragments -- Writing in fragments -- Political framings -- Walking cities -- In completion.

Making Urban Theory

Making Urban Theory PDF Author: Mary Lawhon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000767957
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
This book facilitates more careful engagement with the production, politics and geography of knowledge as scholars create space for the inclusion of southern cities in urban theory. Making Urban Theory addresses debates of the past fifty years regarding whether and why scholars should conceptualize southern cities as different and argues for the continued importance of unlearning existing theory. With examples from the urban question to environmental justice, urban infrastructure to basic income, this volume highlights the limitations of existing explanations as well as how thinking from the south entails more than collecting data in new places. Throughout the book, instances of juxtapositions, unease, unlearning and learning anew emphasize how theory-making from southern cases can open avenues to more creative possibilities. The book pulls theories apart, examining distinct components to better understand the universality and provinciality of empirical phenomena, causality and norms, including questions of what a city is and ought to be. This book delivers a clearer articulation of ongoing debates and future possibilities for southern urban scholarship, and it will thus be relevant for both scholars and students of Urban Studies, Urban Theory, Urban Geography, Research Methods in Geography, Postcolonial/Southern Cities and Global Cities at graduate and post-graduate levels.

The Cambridge Companion to the City in World Literature

The Cambridge Companion to the City in World Literature PDF Author: Ato Quayson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316517888
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
This book addresses the way cities have given rise to key aesthetic dispositions that are central to debates in World Literature.

Learning the City

Learning the City PDF Author: Hari Sacré
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331946230X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 103

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Book Description
This book explores a cultural understanding of cities and processes of civic learning by scrutinizing urban educational topics from a cultural studies perspective. This book approaches the city as a cultural fabric that consists of social, material and symbolic dimensions, and describes how civic learning is not an accidental outcome of cities but an essential component through which citizens coproduce the city. Through a combination of theoretical development and methodological reflection the chapters in the book explore three interrelated questions addressing the relationships between culture, learning and the city: How does civic learning appear in urban spaces? How does civic learning take place through urban spaces? How are urban spaces created as a result of civic learning?

Unseen City

Unseen City PDF Author: Ankhi Mukherjee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316517586
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Reconfiguring the lines between literature and psychoanalysis, this book argues that to alleviate poverty we engage with its psychic life.

City Halls and Civic Materialism

City Halls and Civic Materialism PDF Author: Swati Chattopadhyay
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317802284
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
The town hall or city hall as a place of local governance is historically related to the founding of cities in medieval Europe. As the space of representative civic authority it aimed to set the terms of public space and engagement with the citizenry. In subsequent centuries, as the idea and built form travelled beyond Europe to become an established institution across the globe, the parameters of civic representation changed and the town hall was forced to negotiate new notions of urbanism and public space. City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space utilizes the town hall in its global historical incarnations as bases to probe these changing ideas of urban public space. The essays in this volume provide an analysis of the architecture, iconography, and spatial relations that constitute the town hall to explore its historical ability to accommodate the "public" in different political and social contexts, in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and the Americas, as the relation between citizens and civic authority had to be revisited with the universal franchise, under fascism, after the devastation of the world wars, decolonization, and most recently, with the neo-liberal restructuring of cities. As a global phenomenon, the town hall challenges the idea that nationalism, imperialism, democracy, the idea of citizenship – concepts that frame the relation between the individual and the body politic -- travel the globe in modular forms, or in predictable trajectories from the West to East, North to South. Collectively the essays argue that if the town hall has historically been connected with the articulation of bourgeois civil society, then the town hall as a global spatial type -- architectural space, urban monument, and space of governance -- holds a mirror to the promise and limits of civil society.

Ways of Knowing Cities

Ways of Knowing Cities PDF Author: Laura Kurgan
Publisher: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
ISBN: 9781941332580
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Ways of Knowing Cities considers the role of technology in generating, materializing, and contesting urban epistemologies--from ubiquitous sites of "smart" urbanism to discrete struggles over infrastructural governance to forgotten histories of segregation now naturalized in urban algorithms to exceptional territories of border policing.

The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City

The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City PDF Author: Suzanne Hall
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1473987865
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1025

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Book Description
The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City focuses on the dynamics and disruptions of the contemporary city in relation to capricious processes of global urbanisation, mutation and resistance. An international range of scholars engage with emerging urban conditions and inequalities in experimental ways, speaking to new ideas of what constitutes the urban, highlighting empirical explorations and expanding on contributions to policy and design. The handbook is organised around nine key themes, through which familiar analytic categories of race, gender and class, as well as binaries such as the urban/rural, are readdressed. These thematic sections together capture the volatile processes and intricacies of urbanisation that reveal the turbulent nature of our early twenty-first century: Hierarchy: Elites and Evictions Productivity: Over-investment and Abandonment Authority: Governance and Mobilisations Volatility: Disruption and Adaptation Conflict: Vulnerability and Insurgency Provisionality: Infrastructure and Incrementalism Mobility: Re-bordering and De-bordering Civility: Contestation and Encounter Design: Speculation and Imagination This is a provocative, inter-disciplinary handbook for all academics and researchers interested in contemporary urban studies.

Seeing Like a City

Seeing Like a City PDF Author: Ash Amin
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509515623
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
Seeing like a city means recognizing that cities are living things made up of a tangle of networks, built up from the agency of countless actors. Cities must not be considered as expressions of larger paradigms or sites of human effort and organization alone. Within their density, size and sprawl can be found a world of symbols, bodies, buildings, technologies and infrastructures. It is the machine-like combination, interaction and confrontation of these different elements that make a city. Such a view locates urban outcomes and influences in the character of these networks, which together power urban life, allocating resources, shaping social opportunities, maintaining order and simply enabling life. More than the silent stage on which other powers perform, such networks represent the essence of the city. They also form an important political project, a politics of small interventions with large effects. The increasing evidence for an Anthropocene bears out the way in which humanity has stamped its footprint on the planet by constructing urban forms that act as systems for directing life in ways that create both immense power and immense constraint.