Contesting Public Spaces

Contesting Public Spaces PDF Author: Ed Wall
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000596354
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
This book explores concerns for spatial justice as streets, squares, and neighbourhoods are continuously made and remade through planning processes, political ambitions and everyday activities. By investigating three sites in London that have been the focus of masterplanning, Ed Wall exposes conflicts between planning offices and private developers who direct large urban change and community groups, market traders and residents whose public lives are inseparable from their neighbourhoods being reconfigured. The book uniquely brings sociological approaches to what are often considered architectural concerns, revealing challenges as London's public spaces are designed, regulated and lived. Through in-depth research, Ed Wall identifies how uncertainty caused by large-scale urban strategies, the realisation of visual priorities, and uneven relations between private interests, public organisations and daily lives determine the public realm of global cities. This work is intended for readers interested in how the urban spaces of their cities are continually produced in competing ways—from architecture and urban studies scholars to planners and politicians.

Contesting Public Spaces

Contesting Public Spaces PDF Author: Ed Wall
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000596354
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 165

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores concerns for spatial justice as streets, squares, and neighbourhoods are continuously made and remade through planning processes, political ambitions and everyday activities. By investigating three sites in London that have been the focus of masterplanning, Ed Wall exposes conflicts between planning offices and private developers who direct large urban change and community groups, market traders and residents whose public lives are inseparable from their neighbourhoods being reconfigured. The book uniquely brings sociological approaches to what are often considered architectural concerns, revealing challenges as London's public spaces are designed, regulated and lived. Through in-depth research, Ed Wall identifies how uncertainty caused by large-scale urban strategies, the realisation of visual priorities, and uneven relations between private interests, public organisations and daily lives determine the public realm of global cities. This work is intended for readers interested in how the urban spaces of their cities are continually produced in competing ways—from architecture and urban studies scholars to planners and politicians.

Contested Histories in Public Space

Contested Histories in Public Space PDF Author: Daniel J. Walkowitz
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822391422
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Contested Histories in Public Space brings multiple perspectives to bear on historical narratives presented to the public in museums, monuments, texts, and festivals around the world, from Paris to Kathmandu, from the Mexican state of Oaxaca to the waterfront of Wellington, New Zealand. Paying particular attention to how race and empire are implicated in the creation and display of national narratives, the contributing historians, anthropologists, and other scholars delve into representations of contested histories at such “sites” as a British Library exhibition on the East India Company, a Rio de Janeiro shantytown known as “the cradle of samba,” the Ellis Island immigration museum, and high-school history textbooks in Ecuador. Several contributors examine how the experiences of indigenous groups and the imperial past are incorporated into public histories in British Commonwealth nations: in Te Papa, New Zealand’s national museum; in the First Peoples’ Hall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization; and, more broadly, in late-twentieth-century Australian culture. Still others focus on the role of governments in mediating contested racialized histories: for example, the post-apartheid history of South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument, originally designed as a tribute to the Voortrekkers who colonized the country’s interior. Among several essays describing how national narratives have been challenged are pieces on a dispute over how to represent Nepali history and identity, on representations of Afrocuban religions in contemporary Cuba, and on the installation in the French Pantheon in Paris of a plaque honoring Louis Delgrès, a leader of Guadeloupean resistance to French colonialism. Contributors. Paul Amar, Paul Ashton, O. Hugo Benavides, Laurent Dubois, Richard Flores, Durba Ghosh, Albert Grundlingh, Paula Hamilton, Lisa Maya Knauer, Charlotte Macdonald, Mark Salber Phillips, Ruth B. Phillips, Deborah Poole, Anne M. Rademacher, Daniel J. Walkowitz

The Beach Beneath the Streets

The Beach Beneath the Streets PDF Author: Benjamin Shepard
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438436211
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Focusing on the liberating promise of public space, The Beach Beneath the Streets examines the activist struggles of communities in New York City—queer youth of color, gardeners, cyclists, and anti-gentrification activists—as they transform streets, piers, and vacant lots into everyday sites for autonomy, imagination, identity formation, creativity, problem solving, and even democratic renewal. Through ethnographic accounts of contests over New York City's public spaces that highlight the tension between resistance and repression, Shepard and Smithsimon identify how changes in the control of public spaces—parks, street corners, and plazas—have reliably foreshadowed elites' shifting designs on the city at large. With an innovative taxonomy of public space, the authors frame the ways spaces as diverse as gated enclaves, luxury shopping malls, collapsing piers and street protests can be understood in relation to one another. Synthesizing the fifty-year history of New York's neoliberal transformation and the social movements which have opposed the process, The Beach Beneath the Streets captures the dynamics at work in the ongoing shaping of urban spaces into places of repression, expression, control, and creativity.

Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore

Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore PDF Author: Brenda S. A. Yeoh
Publisher: NUS Press
ISBN: 9789971692681
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
In the British colonial city of Singapore, municipal authorities and Asian communities faced off over numerous issues. As the city expanded, various disputes concerning issues such as sanitation, housing and street names arose. This volume details these conflicts and how they shaped the city.

Naturally Challenged: Contested Perceptions and Practices in Urban Green Spaces

Naturally Challenged: Contested Perceptions and Practices in Urban Green Spaces PDF Author: Nicola Dempsey
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030444805
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This book aims to understand how the wellbeing benefits of urban green space (UGS) are analysed and valued and why they are interpreted and translated into action or inaction, into ‘success’ and/or ‘failure’. The provision, care and use of natural landscapes in urban settings (e.g. parks, woodland, nature reserves, riverbanks) are under-researched in academia and under-resourced in practice. Our growing knowledge of the benefits of natural urban spaces for wellbeing contrasts with asset management approaches in practice that view public green spaces as liabilities. Why is there a mismatch between what we know about urban green space and what we do in practice? What makes some UGS more ‘successful’ than others? And who decides on this measure of ‘success’ and how is this constituted? This book sets out to answer these and related questions by exploring a range of approaches to designing, planning and managing different natural landscapes in urban settings.

City Unsilenced

City Unsilenced PDF Author: Jeffrey Hou
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317297431
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
What do the recent urban resistance tactics around the world have in common? What are the roles of public space in these movements? What are the implications of urban resistance for the remaking of public space in the "age of shrinking democracy"? To what extent do these resistances move from anti- to alter-politics? City Unsilenced brings together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars and scholar-activists to examine the spaces, conditions, and processes in which neoliberal practices have profoundly impacted the everyday social, economic, and political life of citizens and communities around the globe. They explore the commonalities and specificities of urban resistance movements that respond to those impacts. They focus on how such movements make use of and transform the meanings and capacity of public space. They investigate their ramifications in the continued practices of renewing democracies. A broad collection of cases is presented and analyzed, including Movimento Passe Livre (Brazil), Google Bus Blockades San Francisco (USA), the Platform for Mortgage Affected People (PAH) (Spain), the Piqueteros Movement (Argentina), Umbrella Movement (Hong Kong), post-Occupy Gezi Park (Turkey), Sunflower Movement (Taiwan), Occupy Oakland (USA), Syntagma Square (Greece), Researchers for Fair Policing (New York), Urban Movement Congress (Poland), urban activism (Berlin), 1DMX (Mexico), Miyashita Park Tokyo (Japan), 15M Movement (Spain), and Train of Hope and protests against Academic Ball in Vienna (Austria). By better understanding the processes and implications of the recent urban resistances, City Unsilenced contributes to the ongoing debates concerning the role and significance of public space in the practice of lived democracy.

Producing and Contesting Urban Marginality

Producing and Contesting Urban Marginality PDF Author: Julie Cupples
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786606429
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
In Mexico City, as in many other large cities worldwide, contemporary modes of urban governance have overwhelmingly benefited affluent populations and widened social inequalities. Disinvestment from social housing and rent-seeking developments by real estate companies and land speculators have resulted in the displacement of low-income populations to the urban periphery. Public social spaces have been eliminated to make way for luxury apartments and business interests. Low-income neighbourhoods are often stigmatized by dominant social forces to justify their demolition. The urban poor have however negotiated and resisted these developments in a range of ways. This text explores these urban dynamics in Mexico City and beyond, looking at the material and symbolic mechanisms through which urban marginality is produced and contested. It seeks to understand how things might be otherwise, how the city might be geared towards more inclusive forms of belonging and citizenship.

Contesting 'Good' Governance

Contesting 'Good' Governance PDF Author: Eva Poluha
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136125388
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Research in localities in India, Cuba, Ethiopia, Taiwan and Lebanon is used to develop a broader understanding of global political phenomena such as democracy, representation and accountability. To contextualise aspects of 'good' governance the articles in the volume deal with people's perceptions of and interactions with the state; how they interpret government laws and regulations; how they interact with officials and how they comment on acts and speeches made by local bureaucrats and national power holders. Through a discussion of the much debated distinction between private and public, the articles show how the notions of public and private are interconnected in many ways, how they are contested and reformulated by people based on their experiences, and how they can be used as a tool in questioning dominant ideas and ways of executing 'good' governance.

Urban Commons

Urban Commons PDF Author: Mary Dellenbaugh
Publisher: Birkhäuser
ISBN: 3038214957
Category : Architecture
Languages : de
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Urban space is a commons: simultaneously a sphere of human cooperation and negotiation and its product. Understanding urban space as a commons means that the much sought-after productivity of the city precedes rather than results from strategies of the state and capital. This approach challenges assumptions of urbanization as capital-driven, an idea which resonates with a range of recent urban social movements, from the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement to the “Right to the City” alliance. However commons exist in a tense relationship with state and market, both of which continually seek to exploit and control them. Initiatives to create “commons” are welcomed and even facilitated by governments in order to (re-)valorize urban space and lessen the impacts of economic restructuring, while, at the same time, the creative and reproductive potential of the urban commons is undermined by continuing attempts to commodify them. This volume examines these topics theoretically and empirically through a wide spectrum of international case studies providing perspectives from a variety of cities as diverse as Berlin, Hyderabad and Seoul. A wider discussion of commons in current scientific and activist literature from housing, public space, to urban infrastructure, is explored through the lens of the urban condition.

The Politics of Public Space

The Politics of Public Space PDF Author: Setha Low
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136081224
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
Why is public space disappearing? Why is this disappearance important to democratic politics and how has it become an international phenomenon? Public spaces are no longer democratic spaces, but instead centres of private commerce and consumption, and even surveillance and police control. "The Politics of Public Space" extends the focus of current work on public space to include a consideration of the transnational - in the sense of moving people and transformations in the nation or state - to expand our definition of the 'public' and public space. Ultimately, public spaces are one of the last democratic forums for public dissent in a civil society. Without these significant central public spaces, individuals cannot directly participate in conflict resolution. "The Politics of Public Space" assembles a superb list of contributors to explore the important political dimensions of public space as a place where conflicts over cultural and political objectives become concrete.