Urban Constellations PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Urban Constellations PDF full book. Access full book title Urban Constellations by Zoë Thompson. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Zoë Thompson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317003942
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book investigates the iconic architectural cultural spaces of the contemporary cityscape as engines of regeneration. Promising much to their fading locales, these spaces locate culture in the space where production once ruled in order to revitalise post-industrial urban provinces. With close attention to four sites across the UK, Urban Constellations engages with the work of Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard, to read these spaces and in so doing, offer a critical intervention into the theory and experience of contemporary cityscapes. Developing the notion of surface ethnography as a methodological approach to examining the form of cultural experience produced by urban cultural spaces, the author sheds light on the manner in which they transform cultural spectatorship, express wider political and ecological concerns and offer differing views to the ’native’ and the ’tourist’ in the construction of local history. The book also examines the decline of the idea that iconic projects can drive regeneration, in the failures and delays that can beset such undertakings. Offering a rich examination of the legacy of urban change in its most recent formulation - that of cultural regeneration - this book reveals the fragile potential of the spaces produced by contemporary ’dream houses’ and as such, will be of interest to scholars of cultural studies, sociology and social theory, urban studies, cultural geography and architecture.
Author: Zoë Thompson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317003942
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book investigates the iconic architectural cultural spaces of the contemporary cityscape as engines of regeneration. Promising much to their fading locales, these spaces locate culture in the space where production once ruled in order to revitalise post-industrial urban provinces. With close attention to four sites across the UK, Urban Constellations engages with the work of Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard, to read these spaces and in so doing, offer a critical intervention into the theory and experience of contemporary cityscapes. Developing the notion of surface ethnography as a methodological approach to examining the form of cultural experience produced by urban cultural spaces, the author sheds light on the manner in which they transform cultural spectatorship, express wider political and ecological concerns and offer differing views to the ’native’ and the ’tourist’ in the construction of local history. The book also examines the decline of the idea that iconic projects can drive regeneration, in the failures and delays that can beset such undertakings. Offering a rich examination of the legacy of urban change in its most recent formulation - that of cultural regeneration - this book reveals the fragile potential of the spaces produced by contemporary ’dream houses’ and as such, will be of interest to scholars of cultural studies, sociology and social theory, urban studies, cultural geography and architecture.
Author: Matthew Gandy
Publisher: Jovis Verlag
ISBN: 9783868591187
Category : Cities and towns
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
Cities are an unprecedented focus of attention: over half the world now lives in them, culture and politics are shaped by them, and they are also focal points for new relationships between nature, technology and the human body. This essay collection brings together a range of cutting-edge international scholarship on cities, urbanisation and urban culture. The format of the collection is a series of small essays in the spirit of Benjamin, Kracauer and other innovative forms of writing and observation. The collection explores themes such as new forms of political mobilisation, the effects of economic instability, the political ecology of urban nature and the presence of collective memory. Cultural aspects of urban change are also considered including the work of artists, film makers and others, who have sought to critically engage with processes of urban change. The global scope of the collection includes essays in Berlin, Chicago and London, as well as less extensivily studied citites such as Chennai, Jakarta and Lagos.
Author: Matthew Gandy
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262046288
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 432
Get Book Here
Book Description
A study of urban nature that draws together different strands of urban ecology as well as insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought. Postindustrial transitions and changing cultures of nature have produced an unprecedented degree of fascination with urban biodiversity. The “other nature” that flourishes in marginal urban spaces, at one remove from the controlled contours of metropolitan nature, is not the poor relation of rural flora and fauna. Indeed, these islands of biodiversity underline the porosity of the distinction between urban and rural. In Natura Urbana, Matthew Gandy explores urban nature as a multilayered material and symbolic entity, through the lens of urban ecology and the parallel study of diverse cultures of nature at a global scale. Gandy examines the articulation of alternative, and in some cases, counterhegemonic, sources of knowledge about urban nature produced by artists, writers, scientists, as well as curious citizens, including voices seldom heard in environmental discourse. The book is driven by Gandy’s fascination with spontaneous forms of urban nature ranging from postindustrial wastelands brimming with life to the return of such predators as wolves and leopards on the urban fringe. Gandy develops a critical synthesis between different strands of urban ecology and considers whether "urban political ecology," broadly defined, might be imaginatively extended to take fuller account of both the historiography of the ecological sciences,and recent insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought.
Author: Patricia McKee
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199333904
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 197
Get Book Here
Book Description
The changes wrought by industrialization in the nineteenth century were heralded by many as the inevitable march of progress. Yet a fair share of critics opposed the encroachment of modernity into everyday life. Wedding Walter Benjamin's critique of urban modernity with several canonical works of fiction, Patricia McKee's study challenges the traditional ways we look at Victorian literature and culture. In Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, Jude the Obscure, and "In the Cage," characters struggle to find a place for the parts of the self that do not fit the conventional image of middle-class Victorian success in the rapidly expanding world of metropolitan London. Reading Constellations focuses on this tension, exploring how characters attempt to fit in or adapt to urban society. Throughout, Patricia McKee draws on Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history to examine the aforementioned works of fiction by Dickens, Hardy, and James. The dialectical notion of the "constellation" is deployed in each chapter to read moments in which past and present collide and the ways these writers "open out" the representation of the city to new modes of articulation and-through narrative perception-the reader's perception of the phenomena of the city, its place as the exemplar of modernity, and the ways in which it determines subjectivity. Benjamin's concept of "colportage" is also used as a tool to demonstrate how Victorian fiction distributes and alters various possibilities in time and space. Ultimately, Reading Constellations demonstrates how Victorian fiction imagines a version of urban modernity that compensates for capitalist development, reassembling parts of experience that capitalism typically disintegrates.
Author: Dianne Chisholm
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452906963
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Queer Constellations investigates the dreams and catastrophes of recent urban history viewed through new queer narratives of inner-city life. The "gay village," "gay mecca," ""gai Paris," the "lesbian flaneur," the "lesbian boheme"--these and other urban phantasmagoria feature paradoxically in this volume as figures of revolutionary utopia and commodity spectacle, as fossilized archetypes of social transformation and ruins of haunting cultural potential. Dianne Chisholm introduces readers to new practices of walking, seeing, citing, and remembering the city in works by Neil Bartlett, Samuel Delany, Robert Gluck, Alan Hollinghurst, Gary Indiana, Eileen Myles, Sarah Schulman, Edmund White, and David Wojnarowicz. Reading these authors with reference to the history, sociology, geography, and philosophy of space, particularly to the everyday avant-garde production and practice of urban space, Chisholm reveals how--and how effectively--queer narrative documentary resembles and reassembles Walter Benjamin's constellations of Paris, "capital of the nineteenth century." Considering experimental queer writing in critical conjunction with Benjamin's city writing, the book shows how a queer perspective on inner-city reality exposes contradictions otherwise obscured by mythic narratives of progress. If Benjamin regards the Paris arcade as a microcosm of high capitalism, wherein the (un)making of industrial society is perceived retrospectively, in contemporary queer narrative we see the sexually charged and commodity-entranced space of the gay bathhouse as a microcosm of late capitalism and as an exemplary site for excavating the contradictions of mass sex. In Chisholm's book we discover how,looking back on the ruins of queer mecca, queer authors return to Benjamin to advance his "dialectics of seeing"; how they cruise the paradoxes of market capital, blasting a queer era out of the homogeneous course of history.
Author: Andrea Kahn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429514433
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 391
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the era of the Anthropocene, site matters are more pressing than ever. Building on the concepts, theories, and multi-disciplinary approaches raised in the first edition, this publication strives to address the changes that have taken place over the last 15 years with new material to complement and re-position the initial volume. Reaching across design disciplines, this highly illustrated anthology assembles essays from architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners, historians, and artists to explore ways to physically and conceptually engage site. Thoughtful discourse and empirically grounded pieces combine to provide the language and theory to contextualize the meanings of site in the built environment. The increasingly complex hybridity of constructed environments today demands new tools for thinking about and working with site. Drawing contributions from outside and within the traditional design disciplines, this edition will trace important developments in site thinking with new essays on topics such as climate change, landscape as infrastructure, shifts from global to planetary urbanization debates, and the proliferation of participatory site transformation practices. Edited by two leading practitioners and academics, Site Matters juxtaposes timeless contributions from individuals including Elizabeth Meyer, Robert Beauregard, and Robin Dripps with original new writings from Peter Marcuse, Jane Wolff, Neil Brenner, and Thaisa Way, amongst others, to recontextualize and reignite the debate around site. An ideal text for students, academics, and researchers interested in site and design theory.
Author: Florian Steinberg
Publisher: Asian Development Bank
ISBN: 9292549847
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303
Get Book Here
Book Description
This publication about the urban agenda in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) is timely as the world economy embraces the region with accelerated growth. An important element of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Economic Community, the GMS is expected to catch up with the rest of Asia by 2050. With urbanization levels still averaging about 30%, gross domestic product contributions of towns and cities have moved ahead to 50%–60%. By 2050, when urban areas in the GMS reach 64%–74%, urban gross domestic product will grow to an estimated 70%–80%. The challenge lies in consolidating and deepening development along the existing corridors and improving the environmental conditions to prepare for future green growth developments.
Author: Carol Burns
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135931151
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 380
Get Book Here
Book Description
One of the trends in twentieth century architecture and planning has been to denigrate and ignore the site, or larger context (both physical and social), surrounding a building or set of buildings. Focussing on Le Corbusier's designs, Site Matters presents that first considered theory and vocabulary for the inevitable reaction against Modernism in planning, beginning in the 1960s and swelling through the 1980s as architects and planners alike developed a new appreciation of site, reincorporating the wider context into their plans. Theoretical essays and empirically grounded pieces combine to provide the language and theory of this re-emergence of site, looking at Le Corbusier's designs, contemporary suburbs, and the planning agendas involved at the World Trade Center site. Groundbreaking and innovative, Site Matters provides valuable theory and vocabulary for planners and architects.
Author: Joseph D. Lewandowski
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803229396
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Get Book Here
Book Description
Scholars have conducted the study of culture in two general ways: as an observer science, where behavior and world-views are measurable, rational, and subject to impartial examination; and as an interpretive art, where a scholar actually participates in the understanding of cultures. In view of increasingly manifest problems with both stances, Joseph D. Lewandowski proposes an alternative, one that capitalizes on the strengths of both schools of interpretation and in fact underpins the work of major social theorists of the modern era, including Adorno, Foucault, and Bourdieu. Gathering insights from a wide array of anthropologists, archaeologists, and philosophers and applying them to case studies in the United States, Lewandowski develops a practical model of culture and method of interpretation that are built around the concept of "constructing constellations." According to this concept?drawn from the work of Simmel, Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno?cultures are made up of social fields, embedded social practices that are continually created and patterned in certain ways, akin to constellations. The constellations of embedded actions and beliefs in different settings, such as ghetto life in New York or the world of boxing in Chicago, are, Lewandowski argues, observable, measurable, and ultimately comparable.
Author: Neil Brenner
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190627182
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481
Get Book Here
Book Description
The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. In New Urban Spaces, Neil Brenner argues that understanding these mutations of urban life requires not only concrete research, but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit-the city or the metropolis-and explores the multiscalar constitution and periodic rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric. Drawing on critical geopolitical economy and spatialized approaches to state theory, Brenner offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban space and their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as radically revisable: key urban concepts must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate.
