Search results for ""a public space""

Long-time expert on the social and political movements of Hungary, Andras Gero turns his keen eye to the motivations, desires, and actions behind the design and decoration of Kossuth Square, a public space that faces Hungary's Building of Parliament.

Read more less

Street theatre invades a public space, shakes it up and disappears, but the memory of the disruption haunts the site for audiences who experience it. This book looks at how the dynamic interrelationship of performance, participant and place creates a politicized aesthetic of public space that enables the public to rehearse democratic practices.

Read more less

The term "market" originally portrayed a public space for economic transactions but the term has since evolved into an abstract and disputed idea. Despite modern markets seemingly omnipresent nature, their specific geographies have undergone relatively little analysis. This collection of new essays rediscovers the physical space that markets inhabit and explore how the impact of political, social and economic factors determine the shape of a particular market space. The essays present new research from the fields of geography, economics, political economy and planning and provide valuable case study material to show how markets are contested, constructed and placed. Rather than separate markets from the surrounding society and state, these essays connect markets to their wider context and showcase how economic geography can combine with other disciplines to throw new light on spaces of exchange.

Read more less

What should a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment. Through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities are built into our cities, homes, and neighbourhoods. She maps the city from new vantage points, laying out a feminist intersectional approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and care-full cities together.

Read more less

A bench for breastfeeding in a public space, a hijab for competitive sports, a bicycle saddle that is easy on the prostate. Boys prefer blue and girls love pink? What does gender have to do with design? And what is design 'for all'? In the search for answers to these questions, this publication takes a look at various aspects of our everyday life: public space, playing and education, medicine and health, cosmetics and household. The juxtaposition of contemporary and historical design stances, of critical, playful, innovative and provocative solutions of applied design research and results from extensive cooperations afford insights into a multilayered topic. Text in English and German. Published to accompany an exhibition in Berlin in May 2020.

Read more less

This book analyzes the changes and tendencies expressed in the relation between army and society in Israel.Since its inception, Israel has been defined as a nation in arms, a public space in which the security needs became central and, to a great extent, dictated the agenda and functioning of all the public arenas operating in it. The theoretical investigation is accompanied by case study illustrations of special instances related to the nexus between: security and society security and politics the army and the media the army and public relations security and culture bereavement and commemoration social motivation to serve in the army the army and foreign policy. Lebel explores the connection between the military and culture in Israel against the backdrop of globalization, individualism, liberalism, and social burn-out in the face of survival and change.

Read more less

Since the earliest days of civilization, streets have played an important role in shaping society – but what is a street? Is it a living ecosystem, a public space, a social space, an economic space or a combination of these? The focus on automotive travel over the past century has changed the role of streets in cities. This has degraded the quality of urban life and contributed to public health issues. This book offers a unique look at streets as locations that can evolve to support the economic, social, cultural and natural aspects of cities. Using modern urban design examples, it challenges readers to focus not only on the livability and travel benefits of roads, but on how the power of streets can be harnessed. In so doing, it shapes more dynamic spaces for walking, biking and living, and aims to stimulate urban vitality and community regeneration, encouraging policymakers and individuals to make changes in their own communities.

Read more less

Since the earliest days of civilization, streets have played an important role in shaping society – but what is a street? Is it a living ecosystem, a public space, a social space, an economic space or a combination of these? The focus on automotive travel over the past century has changed the role of streets in cities. This has degraded the quality of urban life and contributed to public health issues. This book offers a unique look at streets as locations that can evolve to support the economic, social, cultural and natural aspects of cities. Using modern urban design examples, it challenges readers to focus not only on the livability and travel benefits of roads, but on how the power of streets can be harnessed. In so doing, it shapes more dynamic spaces for walking, biking and living, and aims to stimulate urban vitality and community regeneration, encouraging policymakers and individuals to make changes in their own communities.

Read more less

Twentieth anniversary edition of a landmark book that cataloged a vibrant but disappearing neighborhood in New York City In the two decades that preceded the original publication of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Forty-second Street, then the most infamous street in America, was being remade into a sanitized tourist haven. In the forced disappearance of porn theaters, peep shows, and street hustlers to make room for a Disney store, a children’s theater, and large, neon-lit cafes, Samuel R. Delany saw a disappearance, not only of the old Times Square, but of the complex social relationships that developed there. Samuel R. Delany bore witness to the dismantling of the institutions that promoted points of contact between people of different classes and races in a public space, and in this hybrid text, argues for the necessity of public restrooms and tree-filled parks to a city's physical and psychological landscape. This twentieth anniversary edition includes a new foreword by Robert Reid-Pharr that traces the importance and continued resonances of Samuel R. Delany’s groundbreaking Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.

Read more less

As publishers in private printing presses, as writers of dissident texts and as political campaigners against censorship and for intellectual freedom, a radical group of twentieth-century Irish women formed a female-only coterie to foster women’s writing and maintain a public space for professional writers. This book documents the activities of the Women Writers’ Club (1933–1958), exploring its ethos, social and political struggles, and the body of works created and celebrated by its members. Examining the period through a history of the book approach, it covers social events, reading committees, literary prizes, publishing histories, modernist printing presses, book fairs, reading practices, and the various political philosophies shared by members of the Club. It reveals how professional women writers deployed their networks and influence to carve out a space for their writing in the cultural marketplace, collaborating with other artistic groups to fight for creative freedoms and the right to earn a living by the pen. The book paints a vivid portrait of the Women Writers’ Club, showcasing their achievements and challenging existing orthodoxy on the role of women in Irish literary life.

Read more less

Jules Spinatsch ranks among the foremost contemporary Swiss photographic artists. Many of his projects, although controversial are thought-provoking and internationallly recognised. Since 2003, he has been working on his Surveillance Panorama Projects; shot with network cameras, these works create awareness for social habits and show the sometimes striking discrepancy between illusion and reality. In Vienna MMIX, he focused on the famous Vienna Opera Ball; from the opening of the doors at 20:32hrs, until the end of the dance at 05:17hrs, using 2 cameras to complete duel rotations, capturing an image every few seconds, an incredible 17,352 in total. Jules Spinatsch. Vienna MMIX-10008/7000 presents this fascinating social study in two volumes. Volume 1 shows 10,008 images, combined into a single chronological sequence; panoramic views that recreat the entire space, yet show only fragments of events. Volume 2 presents a selection of 70 images, documenting single moments of great intensity or intimacy, in fascinating close-up detail. It is a striking collection, documenting a range of human behaviour in a public space, over a relatively short period of time, in a very specific arena.

Read more less

As publishers in private printing presses, as writers of dissident texts and as political campaigners against censorship and for intellectual freedom, a radical group of twentieth-century Irish women formed a female-only coterie to foster women’s writing and maintain a public space for professional writers. This book documents the activities of the Women Writers’ Club (1933–1958), exploring its ethos, social and political struggles, and the body of works created and celebrated by its members. Examining the period through a history of the book approach, it covers social events, reading committees, literary prizes, publishing histories, modernist printing presses, book fairs, reading practices, and the various political philosophies shared by members of the Club. It reveals how professional women writers deployed their networks and influence to carve out a space for their writing in the cultural marketplace, collaborating with other artistic groups to fight for creative freedoms and the right to earn a living by the pen. The book paints a vivid portrait of the Women Writers’ Club, showcasing their achievements and challenging existing orthodoxy on the role of women in Irish literary life.

Read more less

The Best Books of 2022, The New Yorker Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Among the many things expectant parents are told to buy, none is a more visible symbol of status and parenting philosophy than a stroller. Although its association with wealth dates back to the invention of the first pram in the 1700s, in recent decades, four-figure strollers have become not just status symbols but cultural identifiers. There are sleek jogging strollers for serious athletes, impossibly compact strollers for parents determined to travel internationally with pre-ambulatory children, and those featuring a ride-on kick board or second, less “babyish” seat, designed with older siblings in mind. Despite the many models available, we are all familiar with the image of a harried mother struggling to use a stroller of any kind in a public space that does not accommodate it. There are anti-stroller evangelists, fervently preaching the gospel of baby wearing and attachment parenting. All of these attitudes, seemingly about an object, are also revealing of how we believe parents and children ought to move through the world. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Read more less

For more than 20 years, Swiss architect Martino Pedrozzi has been working on the partial reconstruction of derelict dwellings on alpine pastures in the mountains of southern Switzerland. His interventions in Valle di Blenio and Val Malvaglia, at altitudes around 6,500 ft in the canton of Ticino, are part of a scheme to protect and preserve the cultivated landscape shaped by generations of local farmers grazing their cattle. Pedrozzi collected and put in place again stones that had been used as building materials for the ancient dry-stone walled structures, which have been abandoned in recent decades. This recomposition is meant to reconstruct a public space and to retain landmarks in the barren alpine landscape, and to form a monument for the civilisation that has been sustained by it for centuries. This book documents Pedrozzi's work and highlights the problem of rural exodus: a constant phenomenon in the history of human life, caused by conflict, economic change, natural disasters, and climate change. Here it is about mountain dwellings no longer used because alpine agriculture has been given up in favour of better opportunities and more comfortable ways of life. Text in English and Italian.

Read more less

Feminist City is an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly in an urban world. We live in the city of men. Our public spaces are not designed for female bodies. There is little consideration for woman as mothers, workers or carers. The urban streets often are a place of threats rather than community. Gentrification has made the everyday lives of women even more difficult. What would a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment. In The Feminist City, through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities are built into our cities, homes, and neighbourhoods. And offers an alternative vision of the feminist city.Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out a feminist intersectional approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and care-full cities together.

Read more less

A celebration of outdoor swimming – looking at the history, design and social aspect of pools. The 1930s architecture of the pools is often sleek and elegant, evoking speed and efficiency. And the pools themselves are great social levellers – a public space where everyone is stripped down to a bathing suit. The book begins with a history of the pools – their grand beginnings after the buttoned-up Victorian era, their falling popularity in the 20th century, and the newfound appreciation for the outdoor pool, or lido, and outdoor swimming in the 21st century. Journalist and architectural historian Christopher Beanland picks the very best of the outdoor pools around the world, including the Icebergs Pool on Bondi Beach, Australia; the 137m seawater pool in Vancouver, Canada; Siza's concrete sea pools in Porto, Portugal; the restored art deco pool in Saltdean, UK, and the pool at the Zollverein Coal Mines in Essen, Germany. The book will also feature the lost lidos and the fascinating history behind the architecture of the pools, and essays on swimming pools in art, and the importance of pools in Australia. In addition there are interviews with pool users around the globe about why it is they swim. The book is illustrated throughout with beautiful colour photography, as well as archive photography and advertising and a map with the pool locations.

Read more less

St. Petersburg's Winter Palace was once the supreme architectural symbol of Russia's autocratic government. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it became the architectural symbol of St. Petersburg itself. The story of the palace illuminates the changing relationship between monarchs and their capital city during the last century and a half of Russian monarchy. In The Winter Palace and the People, Susan McCaffray examines interactions among those who helped to stage the ceremonial drama of monarchy, those who consumed the spectacle, and the monarchs themselves. In the face of a changing social landscape in their rapidly growing nineteenth-century capital, Russian monarchs reoriented their display of imperial and national representation away from courtiers and toward the urban public. When attacked at mid-century, monarchs retreated from the palace. As they receded, the public claimed the square and the artistic treasures in the Imperial Hermitage before claiming the palace itself. By 1917, the Winter Palace had come to be the essential stage for representing not just monarchy, but the civic life of the empire-nation. What was cataclysmic for the monarchy presented to those who staffed the palace and Hermitage not a disaster, but a new mission, as a public space created jointly by monarch and city passed from the one to the other. This insightful study will appeal to scholars of Russia and general readers interested in Russian history.

Read more less

Are we not all criminals eating our take-out, foraging for mushrooms, lapping at puddles? What happens when sleep becomes commodified? What if all the people at your local cafe were piloting drone strikes? What is the hidden cost and darkness of the society we must all engage with? Mr. Colostomy opens up cans of worms faster than they can restock the Goya on your bodega shelves. Who is Mr. Colostomy? Why, he s a manifestation of a searching consciousness, a marginally employable horse detective who sleeps outside, standing up. As he attempts to unravel a ridiculous plot that follows the disappearance of a couple of brats who turn into atomic particles after sundown, Mr. Colostomy remains always alien, a mutant mustang, an eccentric equus who might just be trying to make a buck in Babytown, the Babylon built by babes or, is a more sinister plot a-hoof? The surreal comedy of Mr. Colostomy is enhanced by Thurber s process of creating the comic through parapraxis, meaning with no forethought or pencilling. This comic honours the mistake as the desired or hidden expression of the unconscious. All that matters is that the comic is funny or real or neither! All comics were created in a public space in order to swim in or feel the audience.

Read more less

"The Attempt is historical fiction at its best. Through its narrator's archival approach to his material, the book explores the intimate lives of a pair of fervent idealists, as well as a robber baron and his family. The result is a vivid, poignant narrative about political upheaval, both in the past and the present." --SIRI HUSTVEDT, author of The Blazing World When a Czech historian becomes convinced he's the illegitimate great-grandson of an infamous anarchist who attempted an assassination while living in the United States, he travels to New York to investigate. Arriving in Manhattan during the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement, his research takes him further back into the past--from the Pittsburgh home of a nineteenth-century US industrialist to 1920s Europe, where a celebrated anarchist couple is on the run from the law. Based on the lives of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, The Attempt is a novel about the legacy of radical politics and relationships--one that traverses centuries and continents to deliver a moving, powerful story of personal and political transformation. Magdalena Platzova is the author of six books, including two novels published in English: Aaron's Leap, a Lidove Noviny Book of the Year Award finalist, and The Attempt, a Czech Book Award finalist. Her fiction has also appeared in A Public Space and Words Without Borders. Platzova grew up in the Czech Republic, studied in Washington, DC, and England, received her MA in Philosophy at Charles University in Prague, and has taught at New York University's Gallatin School. She is now a freelance journalist based in Lyon, France.

Read more less

Special 2018 EditionFrom the new Introduction by Michelle Fine, Graduate Center, CUNY :"Why now, you may ask, should I return to a book written in 1988? Because, in Maxine's words: 'When freedom is the question, it is always time to begin.'"In The Dialectic of Freedom, Maxine Greene argues that freedom must be achieved through continuing resistance to the forces that limit, condition, determine, and—too frequently—oppress.Examining the interrelationship between freedom, possibility, and imagination in American education, Greene taps the fields of philosophy, history, educational theory, and literature in order to discuss the many struggles that have characterized Americans’ quests for freedom in the midst of what is conceived to be a free society. Accounts of the lives of women, immigrants, and minority groups highlight the ways in which Americans have gone in search of openings in their lived situations, learned to look at things as if they could be otherwise, and taken action on what they found.Greene presents a unique overview of American concepts and images of freedom from Jefferson’s time to the present. She examines the ways in which the disenfranchised have historically understood and acted on their freedom—or lack of it—in dealing with perceived and real obstacles to expression and empowerment. Strong emphasis is placed on the focal role of the arts and art experience in releasing human imagination and enabling the young to reach toward their vision of the possible.The author concludes with suggestions for approaches to teaching and learning that can provoke both educators and students to take initiatives, to transcend limits, and to pursue freedom—not in solitude, but in reciprocity with others, not in privacy, but in a public space

Read more less

As the most successful and influential film society in American history, Cinema 16 was a crucial organization for the creation of a public space for the full range of cinema achievement in the years following World War II. A precursor of the New York Film Festival, Cinema 16 screenings became a gathering place for New Yorkers interested not only in cinema, but in the use of media in the development of a more complete, effective democracy. For seventeen years, many of the leading intellectuals and artists of the time came together as part of a membership society of thousands to experience the creative programming of Cinema 16 director, Amos Vogel. What audiences saw at Cinema 16 changed their lives and had an enduring impact not only on the New York City cultural scene, but nationwide. Vogel's distribution of landmark documentary and avant-garde films helped make a place for many films that could never have had commercial release, given the pressures of commercialism and censorship during the postwar era. Vogel's commitment to the broadest range of cinema practice led him to develop a programming strategy, inherited from the European cine-club movement, that involved confronting audiences with such a wide range of cinematic forms that viewers left the theater considering not only the often remarkable films Vogel showed, but the place of Cinema itself in modern life. Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society is the first book on Cinema 16. Scott MacDonald provides a sense of the life and work of the society, using the complete Cinema 16 program announcements, selected letters between Vogel and the filmmakers whose films he showed; selections from the program notes that accompanied Cinema 16 screenings, theoretical essays by Vogel on curating independent cinema; conversations between MacDonald and Cinema 16 members; photographs and stills; and a variety of other documents.

Read more less