Search results for ""Public Space""

The 1970s was one of the most culturally vibrant periods in American history. This book discusses the dominant cultural forms of the 1970s - fiction and poetry; television and drama; film and visual culture; popular music and style; public space and spectacle - and the decade's most influential practitioners and texts: from Toni Morrison to All in the Family, from Diane Arbus to Bruce Springsteen, from M.A.S.H. to Taxi Driver and from disco divas to Vietnam protesters. In response to those who consider the seventies the time of disco, polyester and narcissism, this book rewrites the critical engagement with one of America's most misunderstood decades. Key Features *Focused case studies featuring key texts and influential writers, artists, directors and musicians *Chronology of 1970s American Culture *Bibliographies for each chapter and a general bibliography on 1970s Culture *14 black-and-white illustrations

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This book is a manifesto for real urban change. Today, our urban areas are held back by corporate greed, loss of public space and rising inequality. This book highlights how cities are locked into unsustainable and damaging practices, and how exciting new routes can be unlocked for real change. Across the world, city innovators are putting real sustainability into practice - from transforming abandoned public spaces and setting up community co-operatives, to rewilding urban nature and powering up civic energy. Paul Chatterton explores the power of these city experiments that harness the creative power of the collective, focusing on five themes: compassion, imagination, experimentation, co-production and transformation; and four city systems: mobility, energy, community and nature. Imagining radical alternatives, such as car-free, post-carbon, common and 'bio-cities', this is a toolkit for unlocking real urban change.

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This book features the work of Innsbruck-based architecture studio LAAC. Since 2012, this leading Austrian firm has been developing and exploring innovative architectural responses to contemporary urban and landscape challenges. This is done in collaboration with a network of other architects, artists, graphic designers, and experts from other disciplines. In addition to public buildings for culture, education, and sports, commercial buildings, and industrial structures, LAAC has a particular focus on landscape and public space designs. Information & Formation is the first monograph on LAAC and documents 10 realised designs and projects in Innsbruck and other parts of the Austrian federal state of Tyrol, Vienna, and Venice in much detail through photographs, plans, visualisations, and texts. Essays by international authors and a complete catalogue of LAAC’s work to date round out this volume. Text in English and German.

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This trailblazing book outlines a tested interdisciplinary "process model" for urban design. Its goal is not to explain how to design a specific city precinct or public space, but to describe useful steps to approach the transformation of urban spaces. "Urban Ecological Design" illustrates the different stages in which the process is organized, using theories, techniques, images, and case studies. The authors believe that environmental concerns demand that ecological and sustainability issues are addressed in urban design. It is, after all, the urban designer who helps to orchestrate human relationships with other living organisms in the built environment. The overall objective of the book is to reinforce the role of the urban designer as an honest broker and promoter of design processes and as an active agent of social creativity in the production of the public realm.

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This unique collection of 12 research projects carried out by experienced practitioners in the play sector in the UK and USA puts forward a range of perspectives on children's play and adults' relationships with it. Drawing on a diverse range of research methodologies, the studies consider adults' memories of play; the co-production of spaces where children can play (in adventure playgrounds, out of school clubs, children’s zoos, children's museums and public space); therapeutic approaches to playwork; playwork and wellbeing; supporting the play of severely disabled children and young people; play and contemporary art practice; and children's use of technology in a playground. Offering a fresh look beyond the dominant singular voice of developmental psychology, this book is essential reading for anyone studying or working with children at play.

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Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. When the Sony Walkman debuted in 1979, people were enthralled by the novel experience it offered: immersion in the music of their choice, anytime, anywhere. But the Walkman was also denounced as self-indulgent and antisocial—the quintessential accessory for the “me” generation. In Personal Stereo, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow takes us back to the birth of the device, exploring legal battles over credit for its invention, its ambivalent reception in 1980s America, and its lasting effects on social norms and public space. Ranging from postwar Japan to the present, Tuhus-Dubrow tells an illuminating story about our emotional responses to technological change. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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Why are there so few women in politics? Why is public space, whether it’s the street or social media, still so inhospitable to women? What does Carrie Fisher have to do with Mary Wollstonecraft? And why is a wedding ceremony Satan’s playground?These are some of the questions that bestselling author and acclaimed journalist Elizabeth Renzetti examines in her new collection of original essays. Drawing upon her decades of reporting on feminist issues, Shrewed is a book about feminism’s crossroads. From Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign to the quest for equal pay, from the lessons we can learn from old ladies to the future of feminism in a turbulent world, Renzetti takes a pointed, witty look at how far we’ve come — and how far we have to go. If Nellie McClung and Erma Bombeck had an IVF baby, this book would be the result. If they’d lived at the same time. And in the same country. And if IVF had been invented. Well, you get the point.

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This book reveals how the Aga Khan Development Network and its Historic Cities Programme transformed an area of Cairo's urban blight into a dynamic public space. Once a city of verdant gardens and parks, Cairo in the 1980s was severely overcrowded, economically struggling, and many of its inhabitants lived in unsanitary conditions. Historic Cairo, a World Heritage Site centered on the original Fatimid settlement of Cairo, has presented a challenge to conservationists and urban planners over the years as they have sought to protect the city's heritage while it remains a living city. Understanding how the process of decline could be reversed by restoring monuments and building a new park, the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) set about revitalizing the Darb al Ahmar area and creating Al Azhar Park. This book features numerous scholarly contributors and authors who participated in the program, and shows how the conservation effort paid off in countless ways.

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In nineteenth-century Toronto, people took to the streets to express their jubilation on special occasions, such as the 1860 visit of the Prince of Wales and the return in 1885 of the local Volunteers who helped to suppress the Riel resistance in the North-West. In a contrasting mood, people also took to the streets in anger to object to government measures, such as the Rebellion Losses bill, to heckle rival candidates in provincial election campaigns, to assert their ethno-religious differences, and to support striking workers. Expressive Acts examines instances of both celebration and protest when Torontonians publicly displayed their allegiances, politics, and values. The book illustrates not just the Victorian city’s vibrant public life but also the intense social tensions and cultural differences within the city. Drawing from journalists’ accounts in newspapers, Expressive Acts illuminates what drove Torontonians to claim public space, where their passions lay, and how they gave expression to them.

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This book is a fresh and engaging analysis of the city as a central concept in contemporary social thought. It probes the contested and negotiated ways in which cities are built, understood, lived and imagined. Taking a thematic approach and drawing on a range of theoretical, methodological and empirical points of reference, it examines such subjects as urban inequality, public space, creative cities, globalization, the night-time economy, suburbia, and memory and emotion. In The City Deborah Stevenson argues that, as theories and concepts shape what is known about cities and urban life, it is necessary to build conceptual frameworks that engage with the intersections and tensions between urban processes and trends, as well as with the complexities of everyday urban life. This book’s combination of original insight and critical synthesis will make it an invaluable contribution for an international, interdisciplinary readership of students and scholars in sociology, geography, urban studies and wider social science and the humanities.

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This fascinating book - part ethnography, part memoir - traces Japan's vibrant cafe society over one hundred and thirty years. Merry White traces Japan's coffee craze from the turn of the twentieth century, when Japan helped to launch the Brazilian coffee industry, to the present day, as uniquely Japanese ways with coffee surface in Europe and America. White's book takes up themes as diverse as gender, privacy, perfectionism, and urbanism. She shows how coffee and coffee spaces have been central to the formation of Japanese notions about the uses of public space, social change, modernity, and pleasure. White describes how the cafe in Japan, from its start in 1888, has been a place to encounter new ideas and experiments in thought, behavior, sexuality, dress, and taste. It is where a person can be socially, artistically, or philosophically engaged or politically vocal. It is also, importantly, an urban oasis, where one can be private in public.

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How, and to what extent, can religion be included within commitments to multiculturalism? Multiculturalism and Religious Identity addresses this question by examining the political recognition and management of religious identity in Canada and India. In multicultural policy, practice, and literature, religion has until recently not been included within broader discussions of multiculturalism, perhaps due to worries of potential for conflict with secularism. This collection undertakes a contemporary analysis of how the Canadian and Indian states each approach religious diversity through social and political policies, as well as how religion and secularism meet both philosophically and politically in contested public space. Although Canada and India have differing political and religious histories - leading to different articulations of multiculturalism, religious diversity, and secularism - both countries share a commitment to ensuring fair treatment for the different religious communities they include. Combining broader theoretical and normative reflections with close case studies, Multiculturalism and Religious Identity leads the way to addressing these timely issues in the Canadian and Indian contexts.

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Berlin has proved to be an active stage for all the most important social transformations since the 20th century, marking a blurred boundary between Baroque and contemporary, within which fervent cultural and intellectual seasons, plans for massive industrialisation, World Wars, the establishment of schools of architecture and modern thought destined to make history have taken hold. A veritable laboratory of urban planning and architecture in continuous evolution, which still today constitutes a composite landscape of experiments in social urban planning, of mending the urban fabric between east and west, of places of representation of ministries, embassies and parliament between the Tiergarten and the Spree, of redesigning public space according to the model of critical reconstruction as can be seen at Bundeshauptsadt, Postdamer Platz and Friedrichstadt to which the major exponents of international modern architecture have contributed, and of building a cultural planning whose highest expression is the Museum Island, the most famous museum complex in the world.

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In this work of interdisciplinary scholarship, Stephen A. Germic reveals how America's first parks, both urban and "wilderness," were created and organized to mitigate the most threatening social and economic crises in the nineteenth century outside of the Civil War. Germic analyzes the intentionally disguised relationship between the constructed "nature" of Central Park, Yosemite, and Yellowstone and the expanding but crisis-prone capitalist state. American Green demonstrates how the fundamental function of these parks was economic and political—in the service of maintaining a consensus regarding national identity. The organization and control of "natural" space, Germic argues, is inseparable from its function as a capitalist instrument. This instrumentalism served not only to define, constitute, and segregate social groups, but also to promote racial and ethnic identifications above those based on class interest. Providing a fresh insight into United States labor, cultural and environmental history, this book is an important contribution to our understanding of American parks and the complex meaning of American public space.

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Alfred Haberpointner (*1966 in Salzburg) is a sculptor of international repute. He became famous with his wooden sculptures, and he has subsequently expanded his work to include the use of materials like steel, lead and paper. This volume documents Haberpointner’s artistic development through all phases up to and including his large - scale works in the public space. Alfred Haberpointner’s deep - seated association with wood as a material has its roots in his biography. He grew up in the region around Salzburg and began at an early age to collect wood and to examine and shape it. After abandoning his originally naturalistic approach, in the 1990s he began to produce studies and first works series on the subjects of proportion and weight. His textural approach increasingly began to assume priority in his technique. The result was large spatial objects and wall sculptures with expressive surface structures and colours. In a major exclusive interview the artist speaks about all aspects and the background of his work.

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The Emscherkunstweg (Emscher Art Trail) currently comprises 24 works of public art on the banks of the Emscher River in the heart of the Ruhr region in western Germany. Once the most polluted river in Europe, the Emscher has been dramatically transformed from a drainage system into a natural river landscape. Between 2010 and 2016, three Emscher art exhibitions accompanied this ecological tour de force. Since 2019, the permanent works of art resulting from these exhibitions have formed the starting point for the expansion into the Emscher Art Trail. This volume is the first to offer an overview of all the works, in particular the new works by Julius von Bismarck/Marta Dyachenko, David Jablonowski, Markus Jeschaunig, Sofía Táboas and Nicole Wermers. It also addresses questions surrounding the preservation and potential of art in public space and its relationship to the region’s industrial culture. The book is an ideal travel companion and reference work for discovering art on over 100 kilometers of cycle paths.

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Urban pilot projects from the informal city! Urban-Think Tank (UTT), an interdisciplinary design practice emerging from the turbulent political environment of Chávez-era Caracas, has pursued projects in Latin America, Europe, and Africa for almost twenty years. Their diverse work positioned the firm at the forefront of a social turn in architecture in the late 1990's, with concrete urban interventions encouraging social cohesion in the megacities of the Global South and Europe’s evolving metropoles. U-TT has also produced numerous media projects that harness film, theatre, exhibitions, and print to create new discursive spaces and question how our cities are shaped, and for whom. Most notable is its work on the squatted skyscraper for which the firm shared the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2012. This book looks forward as well as back, imagining new spaces for a hyper-urbanized world and gaining insight from informal settlements, spatial play, and artistic interventions in public space.

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The authors collected here address youth street cultures in different cities from the Ibero-American world, bringing together contributions on Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Portugal, Spain, and beyond. This overseas approach bridging the European and American contexts is justified by the range of (complex) social, cultural and economic relationships that have shaped this transnational geographical space since the beginning of the colonial period. The chapters collected here focus on three key concepts—creativity, resistance and transgression—that form a threefold dispositive to locally and globally confront, contest and even fight against the hegemonic, punitive and oppressive powers (re)produced by (white, male) dominant classes of the city. The book ensures a high diversity of geographical and social/cultural research contexts by focusing on one, two or multiple spatial contexts (the public space, the street, the city) and, at the same time, by emphasizing the different economic, social, cultural, symbolic specificities of youth cultures (including gender, sexuality and race) in their particular urban contexts.

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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.

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In nineteenth-century Toronto, people took to the streets to express their jubilation on special occasions, such as the 1860 visit of the Prince of Wales and the return in 1885 of the local Volunteers who helped to suppress the Riel resistance in the North-West. In a contrasting mood, people also took to the streets in anger to object to government measures, such as the Rebellion Losses bill, to heckle rival candidates in provincial election campaigns, to assert their ethno-religious differences, and to support striking workers. Expressive Acts examines instances of both celebration and protest when Torontonians publicly displayed their allegiances, politics, and values. The book illustrates not just the Victorian city’s vibrant public life but also the intense social tensions and cultural differences within the city. Drawing from journalists’ accounts in newspapers, Expressive Acts illuminates what drove Torontonians to claim public space, where their passions lay, and how they gave expression to them.

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Since independence in 1956, large numbers of Moroccans have been forcibly disappeared, tortured, and imprisoned. Morocco's uncovering and acknowledging of these past human rights abuses are complicated and revealing processes. A community of human rights activists, many of them survivors of human rights violations, are attempting to reconstruct the past and explain what truly happened. What are the difficulties in presenting any event whose central content is individual pain when any corroborating police or governmental documentation is denied or absent? Susan Slyomovics argues that funerals, eulogies, mock trials, vigils and sit-ins, public testimony and witnessing, storytelling and poetry recitals are performances of human rights and strategies for opening public space in Morocco. The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco is a unique distillation of politics, anthropology, and performance studies, offering both a clear picture of the present state of human rights and a vision of a possible future for public protest and dissidence in Morocco.

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Memory of historical trauma has a unique power to generate works of art. This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York—three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas. Berlin experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and the city’s reemergence as the German capital; Buenos Aires lived through the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and their legacy of state terror and disappearances; and New York City faces a set of public memory issues concerning the symbolic value of Times Square as threatened public space and the daunting task of commemorating and rebuilding after the attack on the World Trade Center. Focusing on the issue of monumentalization in divergent artistic and media practices, the book demonstrates that the transformation of spatial and temporal experience by memory politics is a major cultural effect of globalization.

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EUROPAN is an initiative that puts on competitions for young architects. Founded in 1989 and supported by 13 countries in the EU, it runs a competition every two years for innovative and experimental models in urban development. The 2017 and 2019 EUROPAN competitions focused on the topic Productive Cities. The 2019 edition involved more than 900 planning teams from all over Europe, who prepared proposals for 47 towns. This book features the 12 winning submissions to the 2019 Productive Cities 2 competition for the Austrian cities Graz, Innsbruck, Villach, Weiz, and Vienna. They are presented in great detail through photos, drawings and visualisations, along with commenting texts. The projects focus on architectural and urban-planning interventions and processes. They offer innovative concepts for the use of public space as well as holistic solutions for sustainable construction and models for cross-functional use of space. The book is a rich source for trend-setting ideas about our future cities and the development of a new urban lifestyle.

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This is an updated look at the advantages and possibilities of urban agriculture in public spaces. Why plant trees that only provide shade when they could yield fruit as well? Why not take advantage of sunny patches at the outskirts of car parks to grow carrots and strawberries, free for the harvesting? The idea that public land could be used creatively to grow fresh food for local people was beginning to gain traction when Public Produce was first published in 2009, but there were few concrete examples of action. Today, things are different: fruits and vegetables are thriving in parks, along our streets, and around our civic buildings. This revised edition profiles numerous communities and community officials that are rethinking the role of public space in cities, and how our most revered urban gathering spots might nourish both body and soul. Taking readers from inspiration to implementation, Public Produce is chock full of tantalising images and hearty lessons for bringing agriculture back into our cities.

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In Waste Works, Brenda Chalfin examines Ghana’s planned city of Tema, theorizing about the formative role of waste infrastructure in urban politics and public life. Chalfin argues that at Tema’s midcentury founding, a prime objective of governing authorities was to cultivate self-contained citizens by means of tightly orchestrated domestic infrastructure and centralized control of bodily excrement to both develop and depoliticize the new nation. Comparing infrastructural innovations across the city, Chalfin excavates how Tema residents pursue novel approaches to urban waste and sanitation built on the ruins of the inherited order, profoundly altering the urban public sphere. Once decreed a private matter to be guaranteed by state authorities, excrement becomes a public issue, collectively managed by private persons. Pushing self-care into public space and extending domestic responsibility for public well-being and bodily outputs, popularly devised waste infrastructures are a decisive arena to make claims, build coalitions, and cultivate status. Confounding high-modernist ideals, excremental infrastructures unlock bodily waste’s diverse political potentials.

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This atlas of contemporary landscape architecture in London offers a comprehensive overview of new projects within public space. Over the past years, major investments in the infrastructure and housing market of London have driven the need for high-quality public spaces. In the course of this development, new public areas have been created, brownfields have been revitalised, and already existing gardens and parklands have been upgraded.Landscape Observer: London illustrates these spaces and their design elements with numerous photographs. Details of the hard and soft landscape elements are labelled to provide essential information on key materials and plants used in each individual project. The book therefore serves as a reference guide and source of inspiration for landscape architects and urban planners, as well as for garden designers and political activists in the field of infrastructure and urban planning. It invites readers to discover the environmental quality and the design diversity of the external public spaces in the metropolis.

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The preservation enterprise helps fashion the physical contours of memory in public space, and thus has the power to curate a multidimensional and inclusive representation of societal values and narratives. Increasingly, the field of preservation is being challenged to consider questions of social inclusion, of how multiple publics are—or are not—represented in heritage decision-making, geographies, and governance structures. Community engagement is increasingly being integrated into project-based preservation practice, but the policy toolbox has been slower to evolve. Recognizing how preservation and other land use decisions can both empower and marginalize publics compels greater reflection on preservation’s past and future and collective action beyond the project level. This requires professionals and institutions to consider systemic policy change with integrity, sensitivity, and intentionality. Bringing together a broad range of academics, historians, and practitioners, this second volume in the Issues in Preservation Policy series documents historic preservation’s progress toward inclusivity and explores further steps to be taken.

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The integration and use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in African countries is increasingly observable in various sectors of activity (banking, education, trade, etc.) despite a digital divide still relevant. ICT has become a major sector of the recent growth of a new informal economy in African cities (Chéneau-Loquay, 2008). This question has been at the heart of various international meetings. An overall positive and even utopian momentum is generally heard about the contribution of digital technologies to the development of African states. The adoption or appropriation of digital technologies by Africans is presented in many speeches by politicians or institutions involved in the field of cooperation and international development as an important issue for the development of this continent. These different considerations give rise to reflections on the following themes. - Social Media and Public Space in Africa - Challenges of the digital economy in Africa - ICT and modernization of higher education in Africa

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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

In Waste Works, Brenda Chalfin examines Ghana’s planned city of Tema, theorizing about the formative role of waste infrastructure in urban politics and public life. Chalfin argues that at Tema’s midcentury founding, a prime objective of governing authorities was to cultivate self-contained citizens by means of tightly orchestrated domestic infrastructure and centralized control of bodily excrement to both develop and depoliticize the new nation. Comparing infrastructural innovations across the city, Chalfin excavates how Tema residents pursue novel approaches to urban waste and sanitation built on the ruins of the inherited order, profoundly altering the urban public sphere. Once decreed a private matter to be guaranteed by state authorities, excrement becomes a public issue, collectively managed by private persons. Pushing self-care into public space and extending domestic responsibility for public well-being and bodily outputs, popularly devised waste infrastructures are a decisive arena to make claims, build coalitions, and cultivate status. Confounding high-modernist ideals, excremental infrastructures unlock bodily waste’s diverse political potentials.

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Significantly advancing our notion of what constitutes a network, Philip Armstrong proposes a rethinking of political public space that specifically separates networks from the current popular discussion of globalization and information technology.Analyzing a wide range of Jean-Luc Nancy’s works, Reticulations shows how his project of articulating the political in terms of singularities, pluralities, and multiplicities can deepen our understanding of networks and how they influence community and politics. Even more striking is the way Armstrong associates this general complex in Nancy’s writing with his concern for what Nancy calls the retreat of the political. Armstrong highlights what Nancy’s perspective on networks reveals about movement politics as seen in the 1999 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization, the impact of technology on citizenship, and finally how this perspective critiques the model of networked communism constructed by Hardt and Negri. Contesting the exclusive link between technology and networks, Reticulations ultimately demonstrates how network society creates an entirely new politics, one surprisingly rooted in community.

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From the 1950s to the 1970s, downtown North America was reconfigured for the suburban age. Municipal officials planned renewal schemes, merchant groups lobbied for street improvements, developers built bigger and taller. Everywhere, attention turned to the problems and possibilities at the commercial and civic heart of cities.The Heart of Toronto follows one such example of reinvention: downtown Yonge Street. Efforts to keep pace with, or even lead, urban change included the street’s conversion into a car-free public space, a clean-up campaign targeting the sex industry, and the construction of North America’s largest urban shopping mall. These revitalization projects were all connected to wider trends of postwar decentralization, economic restructuring, and cultural transformation.Interweaving histories of development, civic activism, and corporate clout, The Heart of Toronto widens our understanding of the actors and power dynamics involved in remaking downtown in Canada’s largest city – a process that is far from over.

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Urban space is an important part of the political environment-a place where people congregate to discuss, deliberate, and interact with each other. In times of great public discontent, people often turn to urban spaces to make their opinions heard and to demand change, with varying degrees of success. How are mass protests affected by the urban public space in which they occur? This book provides a theoretical model to analyse city spaces, based on the use of theories from political science, urban planning, and sociology. Hansen's approach consists of a mapping of the causal mechanisms between spatial elements, the political environment, and their combined effects on protests. This mapping is applied to three case studies-Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow. In addition to the spatial perspective model, Urban Protest provides new insights as to how the interactions in space occur, and demonstrates how geography can create limitations and opportunities in a large variety of ways.

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Kristin Ross's new work on the thought and culture of the Communard uprising of 1871 resonates with the motivations and actions of contemporary protest, which has found its most powerful expression in the reclamation of public space. Today's concerns-internationalism, education, the future of labor, the status of art, and ecological theory and practice-frame and inform her carefully researched restaging of the words and actions of individual Communards. This original analysis of an event and its centrifugal effects brings to life the workers in Paris who became revolutionaries, the significance they attributed to their struggle, and the elaboration and continuation of their thought in the encounters that transpired between the insurrection's survivors and supporters like Marx, Kropotkin, and William Morris.The Paris Commune was a laboratory of political invention, important simply and above all for, as Marx reminds us, its own 'working existence.' Communal Luxury allows readers to revisit the intricate workings of an extraordinary experiment.

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Beauty, terror, majesty, awe: mountain worlds have fascinated humankind since time immemorial. Stephan Huber ascends the snow-covered peaks "en miniature". In his sculptures he imitates the relief of the mountains and creates theatrical-looking, object-like works. This comprehensive volume reflects in powerful images the Alpine cosmos which Huber has been investigating for more than four decades. Stephan Huber’s “Mountains” can be found everywhere: in museums like the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Bonner Kunstmuseum and the Messner Mountain Museum, and also as large-scale installations in the public space. His monumental contribution to the Venice Biennale in 1999 received international acclaim. In addition to the famous snow-white sculptures of mountain peaks, the publication also assembles early book objects, fictional expeditions, multiples and exhibition views. Essays and an extensive conversation with Reinhold Messner about the interior and exterior mountain worlds round out the volume.

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The font is perhaps the most important part of any church. For centuries, no infant in the parish was thought to be saved from damnation until christened and fonts, as the vessels for this crucial rite of passage, were a pre-eminent tool in the Church’s fight against the Devil. Standing within the public space of the church – as with pews, rood screens and chantry chapels – fonts would have been paid for by the parishioners, and so the richness of their decoration was determined by the funds available and the prevailing architectural fashions of the time. Some of the more extravagant have elaborate multi-tiered covers, raised for use via ropes or chains and pulleys. In this fascinating introduction, Matthew Byrne explores the history of fonts in churches all over the nation, highlighting some of the most notable examples and explaining their evolution across the centuries.

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Why did British industrial cities build art museums? By exploring the histories of the municipal art museums in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester, Transformative Beauty examines the underlying logic of the Victorian art museum movement. These museums attempted to create a space free from the moral and physical ugliness of industrial capitalism. Deeply engaged with the social criticism of John Ruskin, reformers created a new, prominent urban institution, a domesticated public space that not only aimed to provide refuge from the corrosive effects of industrial society but also provided a remarkably unified secular alternative to traditional religion. Woodson-Boulton raises provocative questions about the meaning and use of art in relation to artistic practice, urban development, social justice, education, and class. In today's context of global austerity and shrinking government support of public cultural institutions, this book is a timely consideration of arts policy and purposes in modern society.

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Will new information technologies, especially the Internet, bring freedom and democracy to authoritarian China? This study argues that the Internet has brought about new dynamics of socio-political changes in China, and that state power and social forces are transforming in Internet-mediated public space. Its findings are fourfold. First, the Internet empowers both the state and society. The Internet has played an important role in facilitating political liberalization, and made government more open, transparent, and accountable. Second, the Internet produces enormous effects which are highly decentralized and beyond the reach of state power. Third, the Internet has created a new infrastructure for the state and society in their engagement with (and disengagement from) each other. Fourth, the Internet produces a recursive relationship between state and society. The interactions between the state and society over the Internet end up reshaping both the state and society.

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This title traces the dynamic relationship between film and the city. How do film and urban space work together to challenge and forge our changing ideas of modern urban life? How does film intervene with what is erased or retained from the existing urban fabric? What are the possibilities and limits of contemporary utopic visions built into urban form? How does film itself work as a utopic space? How has the space of the cinema created a vibrant public space over the course of last century, and what is its future? These are some of the questions tackled in this book. Drawing on films as diverse as Man with a Movie Camera, Bicycle Thieves, Dogville, Safe, Los Angeles Plays Itself, Chungking Express and The Circle, the book identifies and analyses the major debates about the crucial historical relationship between film and the city to consider existing and future possibilities.

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A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In Hindu Pluralism, Elaine M. Fisher complicates the traditional scholarly narrative of the unification of Hinduism. By calling into question the colonial categories implicit in the term "sectarianism," Fisher's work excavates the pluralistic textures of precolonial Hinduism in the centuries prior to British intervention. Drawing on previously unpublished sources in Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu, Fisher argues that the performance of plural religious identities in public space in Indian early modernity paved the way for the emergence of a distinctively non-Western form of religious pluralism. This work provides a critical resource for understanding how Hinduism developed in the early modern period, a crucial era that set the tenor for religion's role in public life in India through the present day.

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A Companion to Contemporary Art is a major survey covering the major works and movements, the most important theoretical developments, and the historical, social, political, and aesthetic issues in contemporary art since 1945, primarily in the Euro-American context. Collects 27 original essays by expert scholars describing the current state of scholarship in art history and visual studies, and pointing to future directions in the field. Contains dual chronological and thematic coverage of the major themes in the art of our time: politics, culture wars, public space, diaspora, the artist, identity politics, the body, and visual culture. Offers synthetic analysis, as well as new approaches to, debates central to the visual arts since 1945 such as those addressing formalism, the avant-garde, the role of the artist, technology and art, and the society of the spectacle.

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This book is a manifesto for real urban change. Today, our urban areas are held back by corporate greed, loss of public space and rising inequality. This book highlights how cities are locked into unsustainable and damaging practices, and how exciting new routes can be unlocked for real change. Across the world, city innovators are putting real sustainability into practice - from transforming abandoned public spaces and setting up community co-operatives, to rewilding urban nature and powering up civic energy. Paul Chatterton explores the power of these city experiments that harness the creative power of the collective, focusing on five themes: compassion, imagination, experimentation, co-production and transformation; and four city systems: mobility, energy, community and nature. Imagining radical alternatives, such as car-free, post-carbon, common and 'bio-cities', this is a toolkit for unlocking real urban change.

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In 1972, artist Garth Evans welcomed the opportunity to create a public sculpture in Cardiff, Wales, as part of the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation's City Sculpture Project. Concerned that the increasing demand for his work served only to reinforce the political, social, and economic status quos, Evans hoped to unsettle this dynamic by making a sculpture that would connect with an audience outside of the art world. The morning after the installation of his sculpture, Evans recorded the responses of passersby. The Beckettian transcript of the Cardiff interviews is presented here, framed by Evans's introduction and reflection. Art historian Jon Wood contextualizes The Cardiff Tapes within contemporaneous debates about sculpture and public space. These writings explore ideas about the social responsibilities of art and artists, and make a cogent argument for the value of "difficulty" in sculpture.

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We are on the verge of sharing our cities with autonomous vehicles. Recent developments in driverless technologies are having an impact on our urban environment, raising questions about how self-driving vehicles could be integrated into our daily lives. Automotive and technological industries are not only developing the vehicles but also envisioning the future of our cities, a future where streets have seamlessly integrated driverless technologies and humans wander about, unconcerned by the presence of new automated machines circulating at high speeds through public space. These visions skip to a distant time and ignore the issues that these vehicles raise in the immediate future. In response to such an oversight, this essay and the accompanying meditations explore the conflicts soon to be unleashed by this new technology and the transformation of our streets it will trigger. The current implementations of driverless technology, which are fast and disruptive, do not suggest an eventual

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Rapunzel, the famous fairy - tale character of the Brothers Grimm, comes from the world of magic. She is the girl, lover, woman and mother who escapes from imprisonment. Elke Härtel awakens Rapunzel to new life, modelled in clay and then cast in plaster and bronze. The publication documents the fascinating process of creation with lavish illustrations. Elke Härtel draws on inner pictorial worlds as well as on fairy tales, myths and religious concepts. She takes her strong, usually female figures from the depths of dreams and from literary references. Born in 1978, she studied at the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Her sculptures and large - format drawings have already been shown in the Lenbachhaus München and in the Diocesan Museum in Freising, amongst other places. Thanks to her numerous projects in the public space she occupies an influential position in contemporary sculpture, as this evocative pictorial volume impressively demonstrates .

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Henry Moore has influenced the history of twentieth - century sculpture more decisively than anyone else. He was one of the first contemporary sculptors to realise his ideas in the public space throughout the world. His oeuvre was a lasting source of inspiration for an entire generation of artists – from Hans Arp, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso to the younger generation of German sculptors. Henry Moore (1898 – 1 986), known as the “Picasso of Sculpture”, is regarded as one of the most important sculptors of the twentieth century and the epitome of the modern artist. Typical of his work is the interrelationship between nature and abstraction. He discovered the “voi ds“, so - called openings and holes which heighten the sculptural, three - dimensional effect of his works. With this new approach Moore exercised a strong influence on younger sculptors, who gained decisive impulses from his sculptures. This volume presents M oore as the dominant personality of modern sculpture in collaboration with the members of the younger generation of artists.

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High-quality residential structures are much more than merely a series ofdifferent floor plans. First and foremost, the urban apartment house mediatesbetween the private refuge and the public space of the city. In theprocess, boundaries between inside and outside are negotiated on a widevariety of scales. Housing + focuses on investigating spatial and architecturalas well as social and communicative interfaces in residential construction.The publication is divided into four chapters – “Urban Planning,” “TheGround Floor,” “Building Structure,” and “Facade” – to which sixty-seveninternational projects are assigned. These four thematic focuses are discussedcomprehensively in the essays that introduce the chapters; the individualprojects are analyzed in brief texts in the catalog under these sameaspects. Comparable plans drawn especially for this book supplement thetypological descriptions. The spectrum of projects selected covers urbanapartment block construction from towers, block structures, row houses,and gaps between buildings to housing complexes in outlying urban areas.

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A History of Interior Design tells the story of 6,000 years of domestic and public space. It's an essential resource for students, professionals and anyone interested in interior design, the decorative arts, architecture and art history. It explores a broad range of styles and movements, weaving together a fascinating narrative from cave dwellings and temple architecture, through Gothic cathedrals and Islamic palaces, to modern skyscrapers and the retail spaces of the 21st-century.This fully updated fifth edition includes more on the contributions of women designers and architects, additional coverage of furniture, product design and decoration, as well as numerous examples of diverse modern styles from around the world. An extra final chapter focuses on the influence of the latest technology and current thinking on the importance of conservation and ethical sourcing.This new edition includes 730 images, over 300 of which are new or colour replacements for black and white photos.

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