Urban Film and Everyday Practice

Urban Film and Everyday Practice PDF Author: Alexandra Parker
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137550120
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
While urban films often reinforce spatial stereotypes, they can also produce a resistant reading that helps transgress spatial boundaries, especially in in urban contexts where spatial inequalities and urban divisions are stark. This book reveals the nature of urban film's influence through the lens and space of Johannesburg.

Urban Film and Everyday Practice

Urban Film and Everyday Practice PDF Author: Alexandra Parker
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137550120
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
While urban films often reinforce spatial stereotypes, they can also produce a resistant reading that helps transgress spatial boundaries, especially in in urban contexts where spatial inequalities and urban divisions are stark. This book reveals the nature of urban film's influence through the lens and space of Johannesburg.

Where do we draw the line?

Where do we draw the line? PDF Author: Alexandra Parker
Publisher: Gauteng City Region Observatory (GCRO)
ISBN: 063993644X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description
Graffiti is a controversial subject and fraught with ambiguities and contradictions. However, the recent global success of artists such as Banksy, Melbourne’s booming graffiti tourism, and the rise of the ‘creative city’ discourse, have blurred the lines between what some regard as vandalism and some as public art. As such, graffiti has increasingly become part of mainstream culture and in some countries has been promoted as a contributor to the urban environment. Thus, as practices and perceptions of graffiti shift, so does our need to better understand the role of graffiti in our urban environments. Through a case study of the Maboneng precinct, this GCRO Occasional Paper investigates the contribution made by graffiti to tourism and public and private investment in the inner-city of Johannesburg. The paper uses visual and spatial analyses of graffiti in Maboneng’s development. The research shows the extent to which the Maboneng precinct is branded through urban aesthetics, including graffiti, and demonstrates that graffiti contributes to placemaking by creating meaningful or identifiable spaces. The analysis reveals graffiti’s aesthetic value in the urban environment: it signifies the redevelopment of Maboneng, distinguishes the area at a local level from surrounding spaces, and also projects a global aesthetic. Using this case study of Maboneng we hope to show how graffiti is leveraged in nurturing urban development, creative economies and tourism in the inner-city. The Occasional Paper is comprised of two parts. The first half of the paper aims to understand the role of graffiti in its urban context. A first section examines the history of graffiti, considering centuries-old traditions of markings on walls, the intersection of graffiti with the birth of hip hop culture and, in the South African context, the role of graffiti in anti-apartheid protest politics. A further section explores the spectrum of graffiti aesthetics, from text-based expressions to the murals of street art. A third section traces graffiti’s complicated relationship to the urban environment, with changing perceptions of graffiti: as vandalism, or a mode of urban dialogue, or a form of outdoor gallery. The sections in this first half of the paper explore the transitions graffiti has made over time and highlight the fluid nature of graffiti, both in space and in the way that it is conceived. They illustrate how graffiti, once perceived as synonymous with urban blight and decay, vandalism and crime, has over time gained a more legitimate social status, for example through commissioned murals or the work of famed international artists, in the process raising the question of who decides the aesthetic of the urban environment and who has a right to participate in the production of urban space. In the second half of the paper, we focus on a case study of Maboneng, in the City of Johannesburg. Maboneng is an area of redevelopment in Johannesburg’s inner city, established in 2009. The neighbourhood has transformed through investment in the public environment and the upgrading of dozens of buildings with a focus on the creative economy. Graffiti and street art are prevalent in the area and have contributed to the branding of the area as a creative space. Through a photographic essay and mapping, we analyse the spatial and visual elements of graffiti in Maboneng, exploring its various contradictions, themes, surfaces, and the media used to create it. The detailed mapping examines different types of graffiti, and their locality, density, scale and visibility. The case study shows, in detail, the relationship between graffiti and the local urban environment, but also how graffiti relates to larger processes of urban and economic development in the city.

Participatory Theatre and the Urban Everyday in South Africa

Participatory Theatre and the Urban Everyday in South Africa PDF Author: Alexandra Halligey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000769739
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This book explores theatre and performance as participatory research practices for exploring the everyday of the city. Taking an inner-city suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa as its central case study, the book considers how theatre and performance might be both useful practical tools in considering the everyday city, as well as conceptual lenses for understanding it. The author establishes an understanding of space as ever evolving and formed through the ongoing relationship between things, human and non-human, and considers how theatre and performance offer useful paradigms for learning about and working with city spaces. As ephemeral, embodied, material artistic practices, theatre and performance mirror the nature of everyday life. The book discusses theatre and performance games and placemaking processes as offering valuable ways of discovering daily acts of place-making and providing insights that more conventional research methods may not allow. Yet the book also considers how seeing daily city life as a kind of performance, a kind of theatre in its own right, helps to further understandings of city spaces as ever evolving through complex webs of relationships. This book will be of interest to academics, academic practitioners and post-graduate students in the fields of theatre and performance studies, urban studies and cultural geography.

Geographies of Rhythm

Geographies of Rhythm PDF Author: Tim Edensor
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317129040
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
In Rhythmanalysis, Henri Lefebvre put forward his ideas on the relationship between time and space, particularly how rhythms characterize space. Here, leading geographers advance and expand on Lefebvre's theories, examining how they intersect with current theoretical and political concerns within the social sciences. In terms of geography, rhythmanalysis highlights tensions between repetition and innovation, between the need for consistency and the need for disruption. These tensions reveal the ways in which social time is managed to ensure a measure of stability through the instantiation of temporal norms, whilst at the same time showing how this is often challenged. In looking at the rhythms of geographies, and drawing upon a wide range of geographical contexts, this book explores the ordering of different rhythms according to four main themes: rhythms of nature, rhythms of everyday life, rhythms of mobility, and the official and routine rhythms which superimpose themselves on the multiple rhythms of the body.

New York in Cinematic Imagination

New York in Cinematic Imagination PDF Author: Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000090493
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
New York in Cinematic Imagination is an interdisciplinary study into urbanism and cinematic representations of the American metropolis in the twentieth century. It contextualizes spatial transformations and discourse about New York during the Great Depression and the Second World War, examining both imaginary narratives and documentary images of the city in film. The book argues that alternating endorsements and critiques of the 1920s machine age city are replaced in films of the 1930s and 1940s by a new critical theory of "agitated urban modernity" articulated against the backdrop of turbulent economic and social settings and the initial practices of urban renewal in the post-war period. Written for postgraduates and researchers in the fields of film, history and urban studies, with 40 black and white illustrations to work alongside the text, this book is an engaging study into cinematic representations of New York City.

The Melodramatic Public

The Melodramatic Public PDF Author: R. Vasudevan
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230118127
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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Book Description
What does it mean to say Indian movies are melodramatic? How do film audiences engage with socio-political issues? What role has cinema played in the emergence of new economic forms, consumer cultures and digital technologies in a globalizing India? Ravi Vasudevan addresses these questions in a wide-ranging analysis of Indian cinema.

Film and Urban Space

Film and Urban Space PDF Author: Geraldine Pratt
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748630201
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Film and Urban Space: Critical Possibilities traces recurring debates about what constitutes film's political potential and argues that the relation between film and urban space has been crucial to these debates and their historical transformations. The book demonstrates that in the attempt to follow certain prescriptions shooting on location, disrupting normalizing time, experimenting with memory, interlinking the spaces of screen and cinema films invariably use the relation between film and urban space as a kind of laboratory, testing anew received prescriptions but invariably encountering new opportunities and new limits. A wide range of key films, from Dziga Vertov's 1928 Man with a Movie Camera to Jia Zhangke's 2008 24 City, are discussed in depth, each offering an argument for how the encounter between specific manifestations of modern urban space and politically engaged film strategies has served to challenge the status quo and stimulate critical thinking.

Cut-Pieces

Cut-Pieces PDF Author: Lotte Hoek
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231162898
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
This title explores the shadowy world of the short, pornographic cut-piece clips that appear in some films in Bangladesh and examines their place in South Asian film culture. It provides a portrait of the production, consumption and cinematic pleasures of stray celluloid and shines a light on Bangladesh's state-owned film industry and popular practices of the obscene. The book also reframes conceptual approaches to South Asian cinema and film culture, drawing on media anthropology to decode the cultural contradictions of Bangladesh since the 1990s.

Urban Design, Chaos, and Colonial Power in Zanzibar

Urban Design, Chaos, and Colonial Power in Zanzibar PDF Author: William Cunningham Bissell
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253222559
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
At once an engaging portrait of a cosmopolitan African city and an exploration of colonial irrationality, Urban Design, Chaos, and Colonial Power in Zanzibar opens up new perspectives on the making of modernity and the metropolis.

Companion to Urban Design

Companion to Urban Design PDF Author: Tridib Banerjee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136920080
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 1056

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Book Description
Today the practice of urban design has forged a distinctive identity with applications at many different scales – ranging from the block or street scale to the scale of metropolitan and regional landscapes. Urban design interfaces many aspects of contemporary public policy – multiculturalism, healthy cities, environmental justice, economic development, climate change, energy conservations, protection of natural environments, sustainable development, community liveability, and the like. The field now comprises a core body of knowledge that enfolds a right history of ideas, paradigms, principles, tools, research and applications, enriched by electric influences from the humanities, and social and natural sciences. Companion to Urban Design includes more than fifty original contributions from internationally recognized authorities in the field. These contributions address the following questions: What are the important ideas that have shaped the field and the current practice of urban design? What are the major methods and processes that have influenced the practice of urban design at various scales? What are the current innovations relevant to the pedagogy of urban design? What are the lingering debates, conflicts ad contradictions in the theory and practice of urban design? How could urban design respond to the contemporary challenges of climate change, sustainability, active living initiatives, globalization, and the like? What are the significant disciplinary influences on the theory, research and practice of urban design in recent times? There has never before been a more authoritative and comprehensive companion that includes core, foundational and pioneering ideas and concepts of urban design. This book serves as an invaluable guide for undergraduate and postgraduate students, future professionals, and practitioners interested in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning, but also in urban studies, urban affairs, geography, and related fields.