Search results for ""Public Space""

The new urbanisation necessitates the upgrading of urban governance and spatial planning and design. Landscape Architecture Frontiers accentuates the intelligence on urban growth and physical construction for years. In this issue, LA Frontiers focuses on the topics about urban governance and spatial quality improvement under the promotion of inventory planning and governance refinement, including: 1) Urban village (micro-) renewals, waterfront revitalisation, and industrial, cultural, and historical heritage regeneration; 2) Public participation, community engagement, and other polycentric urban governance modes and inclusive design approaches; 3) The resilience of urban planning and design against sudden disasters and public health emergencies and crises; 4) Diagnoses on the working systems/mechanisms that support the upgrades of urban governance and public space construction, through lenses of Economic Sociology. By gathering cutting edge research with international outlooks and presenting latest practice examples among China and abroad, LA Frontiers might offer a new prospective that helps professionals interpret associated governance and planning policies, inform practitioners the goals and roadmaps of public empowerment, navigate planners and designers with flexible implementation and management guidelines, to eventually improve the spatial quality of public places, as well as the overall benefits in society, ecology, and economy.

Read more less

Even in well-established democratic societies, the political system currently faces a crisis of civic engagement and participation. Increasingly, this lack of engagement and the accompanying erosion of institutional legitimacy result in antidemocratic, populist currents gaining ground. It is an important challenge for both the humanities and the social sciences to analyse this crisis and discuss possible answers that may contribute to strengthening the position of the democratic public sphere in the political process, thus emphasising the crucial role of civic engagement and participation in renewing democracy. The articles in this volume seek the sources for such democratic innovations in a variety of existing, less formalised practices and experiences in public space: in citizens' forums and other concrete arenas for democratic debate and participation in the media in general, including social media and other digital platforms; in social movements; and in artistic interventions in the public sphere. The volume presents selected and edited papers and keynote lectures from the international research conference The Democratic Public Sphere - Current Challenges and Prospects, which was held at Aarhus University on November 5-7, 2015. It includes contributions by keynote speakers Mark E. Warren, Nick Couldry, Donatella della Porta, and Stephen Duncombe.

Read more less

Ever since the 1910s Zurich Kunstgewerbemuseum, or Museum of Arts & Crafts - which was founded in 1875 and is known today as the Museum fur Gestaltung Zurich - has been focussing on producing high-quality posters to promote its exhibitions. The posters serve to project the museum's visual identity into the public space while at the same time documenting the variety of themes presented there. Their high recongition factor is achieved not through rigid corporate designs but by means of graphical quality, versatile design approaches, and meticulous printing. By the 1920s, the pictorial scenes of the early days were already being supplanted by graphic and typographic solutions, following the lead of the Russian Constructivists. Formal and substantive reduction was characteristic of the Swiss Style, which - whether rigorous or more playful - dominated the Swiss cultural poster until the 1960s. From around 1970 designers began to expermient more freely, due in part to the use of computer programs as new design tools. Posters from the late 1980s impressively demonstrate how the legacy of Swiss Style lives on as a fertile resource, continually being reinterpreted in fresh new ways. Innovative approaches by young designers deliver some surprises in the contemporary posters.

Read more less

For the first time a single volume assembles a work complex from the oeuvre of Gabriela von Habsburg which has not been shown before: the sculptures, some of them made of metal or stone in different formats and some of them immovable, introduce the artist’s works in the public space that are scattered across the United States and throughout Europe. Together with lithographs, photos of the artist working on her artworks and of her studio round out this exquisite volume. Since earliest times the performing arts have always been one of the most important forms of expression for mankind. With her sculptures Gabriela von Habsburg goes new ways in the politicisation of aesthetics, uniting her work as ambassador, politician and creative artist. Her many years as an ambassador for the Republic of Georgia in Berlin are reflected in the choice of the fall of the Iron Curtain as a subject in the execution of her unusual sculpture monument at Sopron and the Rose Monument of Tbilisi, an act of homage to the bloodless revolution there. A profound and exclusive glimpse into the committed work of a sculptor.

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

Poverty remains a problem in Europe, raising the need for new solutions. In this thought-provoking book the contributors delve deeply into the everyday lives of poor households to see which practices and resources they apply to improve their situations. One of the key findings is that social resilience requires a functioning welfare state operating as a warrantor of common and public goods, on which poor households can build up resilient practices.This insightful book illustrates that in addition to sufficient welfare transfers, there is a need for low-commodified common goods, including public health services, access to housing, education infrastructures and public space. These need to be made available not only for the registered poor but all low-income households. Drawing on over 400 interviews with families and experts across Europe, the chapters demonstrate the need for social policy to become more tolerant towards various forms of small additional income generation and non-commodified values and lifestyles.Poverty, Crisis and Resilience will be a key resource for students and scholars of social policy, poverty research and sociology, while also being of value to social policy practitioners within the charity sector, welfare state administration, social work, politics and counselling.

Read more less

Throughout the 1950s, a coalition of developers, politicians, and planners bulldozed vast areas of land deemed “slums” or “blighted” to make way for freeways, public and private housing projects, cultural centers, and skyscrapers. While the program was national, New York was ground zero, and the demolition and monumental reconstruction of the city created a distinctive urban sensorium, rooted in the new segregated landscapes of prosperous white private space and poor black public space. Novel Shocks situates these landscapes at the center of the midcentury novel, arguing that James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Ayn Rand, William Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, and Warren Miller all registered these new urban spaces as traumatic “shocks” that required new aesthetic forms. Rejecting older shock-based modernisms, these novelists forged a new modernism, which reimagined shock as a therapeutic force that would create a more flexible, self-reliant, and resilient subject that would nourish neoliberalism’s roots. In offering a cultural prehistory of neoliberalism, Novel Shocks resituates the Cold War novel as a key archive for understanding neoliberalism’s emergence and offers a more materialist and historically grounded account of neoliberalism’s subjective, affective, and ideological structures.

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

This book provides the tools to maintain and rebuild the interaction between architecture and public space. Despite the best intentions of designers and planners, interactive frontages have dwindled over the past century in Europe and North America. This book demonstrates why even our best intentions for interactive frontages are currently unable to turn a swelling tide of economic and technological evolution, land consolidation, introversion, stratification, and contagious decline. It uses these lessons to offer concrete locational, programming, design, and management strategies to maximize street-level interaction and trust between street-level architecture, its inhabitants, and the city. This book demonstrates that designers, developers, planners, and managers ultimately have to create the right preconditions for inhabitants and passersby to bring frontages to life. These preconditions connect architecture to its urban, social, economical, and technological context. Only the right frontage in the right context, with the right design, the right inhabitation, and the right attitude to the city will become part of the ecosystem of trust and interaction that supports public life. This book empowers the many participants in this ecosystem to build, inhabit, and enjoy truly urbane architecture.

Read more less

France, officially, is a secular nation. Yet Catholicism is undeniably a monumental presence, defining the temporal and spatial rhythms of Paris. At the same time, it often fades into the background as nothing more than “heritage.” In a creative inversion, Elayne Oliphant asks in The Privilege of Being Banal what, exactly, is hiding in plain sight? Could the banality of Catholicism actually be a kind of hidden power? Exploring the violent histories and alternate trajectories effaced through this banal backgrounding of a crucial aspect of French history and culture, this richly textured ethnography lays bare the profound nostalgia that undergirds Catholicism’s circulation in nonreligious sites such as museums, corporate spaces, and political debates. Oliphant’s aim is to unravel the contradictions of religion and secularism and, in the process, show how aesthetics and politics come together in contemporary France to foster the kind of banality that Hannah Arendt warned against: the incapacity to take on another person’s experience of the world. A creative meditation on the power of the taken-for-granted, The Privilege of Being Banal is a landmark study of religion, aesthetics, and public space.

Read more less

In this personal and revealing book, Anthony Poon takes us on a creative journey that begins with his re-envisioning of a seaside public space as a very young architect. Poon has designed hundreds of buildings across the United States and internationally, from eco-friendly homes to public schools, from intimate retail venues and restaurants to sports arenas, from university housing to retreats and places of worship. Sticks & Stones / Steel & Glass takes us inside a purposive yet open mind always hoping to "design it all," to weave together light and material, culture and commerce, music and design, a good meal and the joy of gathering to share it. In these pages we engage the creative processes of a thoughtful and intense architect whose works--public and private--all strive to enhance his clients' stories and identities. Poon's goal in each commission is to reward those who will enjoy and inhabit the structures he designs. In every building designed by Anthony Poon art is shelter and architecture is a social good.

Read more less

"An indispensable work for any student of the Old South. The book is not merely indispensable; it is challenging and controversial."—New York TimesFor decades Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) designed parks and park systems across the United States, leaving an enduring legacy of designed public space that is enjoyed, studied, and protected today. His plans and professional correspondence offer a rich source for understanding his remarkable contribution to the quality of urban life in this country and the development of the profession of landscape architecture. Olmsted's writings also provide a unique record of society and politics in post–Civil War America. Historians, landscape architects, conservationists, city planners, students, and citizens' groups continue to turn to Olmsted for ideas about the development and conservation of green spaces in urban areas.The Olmsted Papers project is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the National Trust for the Humanities, the National Association for Olmsted Parks, as well as private foundations and individuals.

Read more less

It has often been said that information is power. This is more true in the information age than ever. The book profiles the tools used by criminal law to protect confidential information. It deals with the essence of information, the varieties of confidential information, and the basic models for its protection within the context of the Internet and social networks.Eli Lederman examines the key prohibitions against collecting protected information, and against using, disclosing, and disseminating it without authorization. The investigation cuts across a broad subject matter to discuss and analyze key topics such as trespassing and peeping, the human body as a source of information, computer trespassing, tracking and collecting personal information in the public space, surveillance, privileged communications, espionage and state secrets, trade secrets, personal information held by others, and profiling and sexting.Infocrime will appeal to graduate and undergraduate scholars and academics in the legal arena, in law schools and schools of communication, and to practicing lawyers with an interest in legal theory and a concern for the protection of the personal realm in a world of increasingly invasive technologies.

Read more less

From Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, “natural hair” has been associated with the Black freedom struggle. In New Growth Jasmine Nichole Cobb traces the history of Afro-textured coiffure, exploring it as a visual material through which to reimagine the sensual experience of Blackness. Through close readings of slave narratives, scrapbooks, travel illustrations, documentary films, and photography as well as collage, craft, and sculpture, from the nineteenth century to the present, Cobb shows how the racial distinctions ascribed to people of African descent become simultaneously visible and tactile. Whether examining Soul Train’s and Ebony’s promotion of the Afro hairstyle alongside styling products or how artists such as Alison Saar and Lorna Simpson underscore the construction of Blackness through the representation of hair, Cobb foregrounds the inseparability of Black hair’s look and feel. Demonstrating that Blackness is palpable through appearance and feeling, Cobb reveals the various ways that people of African descent forge new relationships to the body, public space, and visual culture through the embrace of Black hair.

Read more less

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Chicago witnessed a remarkable flourishing of visual arts associated with the Black Arts Movement. From the painting of murals as a way to reclaim public space and the establishment of independent community art centers to the work of the AFRICOBRA collective and Black filmmakers, artists on Chicago's South and West Sides built a vision of art as service to the people. In Art for People's Sake Rebecca Zorach traces the little-told story of the visual arts of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago, showing how artistic innovations responded to decades of racist urban planning that left Black neighborhoods sites of economic depression, infrastructural decay, and violence. Working with community leaders, children, activists, gang members, and everyday people, artists developed a way of using art to help empower and represent themselves. Showcasing the depth and sophistication of the visual arts in Chicago at this time, Zorach demonstrates the crucial role of aesthetics and artistic practice in the mobilization of Black radical politics during the Black Power era.

Read more less

Oedipus’s major handicap in life is not knowing who he is—and both parricide and incest result from his ignorance of his identity. With two questions—“Who am I?” and “Who is my father?”—on his mind (and on his lips), the obsessed Oedipus arrives at the oracle of Delphi.Unlike the majority of modern and postmodern readings of Oedipus Tyrannus, Efimia Karakantza’s text focuses on the question of identity. Identity, however, is not found only in our genealogy; it also encompasses the ways we move in the public space, command respect or fail to do so, and relate to our interlocutors in life. But overwhelmingly, in the Greek polis, one’s primary identity is as a citizen, and defining the self in the polis is the kernel of this story.Surveying a wide range of postmodern critical theories, Karakantza follows the steps of the protagonist in the four “cycles of questions” constructed by Sophocles. The quest to piece together Oedipus’s identity is the long, painful, and intricate procedure of recasting his life into a new narrative.

Read more less

This concise and accessible survey, the latest title in Thames & Hudson’s renowned World of Art series, is set to become the definitive popular guide to graffiti and street art. The traditional letter-based graffiti that appeared on the streets of Philadelphia and New York over forty years ago launched a global art movement that has evolved into two distinct disciplines. While both thrive illegally and challenge the concept of public space, the new wave of street art puts greater emphasis on figures, abstraction, symbols and formal techniques. This book explains the terms and language of graffiti and street art – from tags and throwies to culture jamming and subvertising – as well as their multiple influences and sub-genres. Organized thematically, it traces the origins and evolution of graffiti and street art, and explores the motivations and practices of the leading exponents; the relationship between these art forms and the urban environment; their interactions with (or rejection of) the market and the world of commercial galleries; and their increasingly important role in visual culture as a whole.

Read more less

A historical and contemporary study of Palestinian musicianship in exile in the Middle East, spanning half a century in disparate locationsPalestinian Music in Exile is a historical and contemporary study of Palestinian musicianship in exile in the Middle East, spanning half a century in disparate locations, including Gaza, Turkey, Kuwait, and Egypt. Grassroots musicians emerge here as powerful actors, their stories taking center stage, offering critiques of existing conditions, and new perspectives on displacement and the transmission of Palestinian narratives, and presenting alternative visions for the future.Louis Brehony argues that, under conditions of colonial relations and repeated displacement, the reclaiming of public space has gone hand in hand with aesthetic revolution, both broadening and traditionalizing the sounds of Palestine, and carrying messages of sumud (steadfastness) and resistance. Based on a decade’s research in Europe and the Middle East, this timely and inspiring collection of musical ethnographies provides a rich oral history of contemporary Palestinian musicianship and encompasses a broad range of experiences of the ghurba, or state of exile.

Read more less

Labics, based in Rome, is a leader among Italy's up-and-coming architecture firms and has gained great international acclaim for submissions to competitions and a number of realised projects. This first-ever monograph on Labic's fast growing, impressive body of work features some twenty of their designs, representing the entire range of the firm's achievements. The selection comprises housing and office buildings, museums and cultural centres, schools, public spaces, and subway stations, located in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Finland, Iran, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, and the UK. All are documented with atmospheric photographs and a wealth of plans and diagrams to illustrate the concept and many details of each project. Structure, in a variety of notions of the term, is guiding Labic's approach. Consequently, the book is arranged in five chapters exploring geometric, bearing, circulation, public space, and urban and territorial structures in topical essays. This provides the frame for the featured projects, all of which exemplify the importance of the respective type of structure for Labic's work.

Read more less

Female-to-male crossdressing became all the rage in the variety shows of nineteenth-century America and began as the domain of mature actresses who desired to extend their careers. These women engaged in the kinds of raucous comedy acts usually reserved for men. Over time, as younger women entered the specialty, the comedy became less pointed and more centered on the celebration of male leisure and fashion. Gillian M. Rodger uses the development of male impersonation from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century to illuminate the history of the variety show. Exploding notions of high- and lowbrow entertainment, Rodger looks at how both performers and forms consistently expanded upward toward respectable—and richer—audiences. At the same time, she illuminates a lost theatrical world where women made fun of middle-class restrictions even as they bumped up against rules imposed in part by audiences. Onstage, the actresses' changing performance styles reflected gender construction in the working class and shifts in class affiliation by parts of the audiences. Rodger observes how restrictive standards of femininity increasingly bound male impersonators as new gender constructions allowed women greater access to public space while tolerating less independent behavior from them.

Read more less

This is the twentieth volume in the Public Sculpture of Britain series, the ambitious collaboration between Liverpool University Press and the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association that will eventually document the outdoor sculptural heritage of the whole of the UK. Public sculpture is defined in this context as any work of three-dimensional art located in an unregulated public space, typically consisting of free-standing commemorative monuments, architectural carvings and statues attached to buildings, and contemporary site-specific interventions. A subject that was until recently overlooked as a matter of marginal relevance to the history of art, public sculpture has been shown through the Liverpool University Press series to offer a range of important insights into the built environment, enriching our understanding of architecture and city planning, and raising many challenging issues relating to the development of society as a whole. This is nowhere better illustrated than in Edinburgh, where the richness of its history as a capital city, and the dramatic power of its urban topography, have combined to create a uniquely fertile breeding ground for public sculpture of every kind. With the coverage divided between two companion volumes, the study begins appropriately with the historic Old Town, and the various suburbs extending from it to the south.

Read more less

In the nineteenth century, cities and urban societies were subject to enormous shifts of power: the founding of the nation states in Europe, industrialisation, and the increased mobility that went along with them were accompanied by tremendous social changes. New parties strove to participate in shaping society, as well as urban space. New functions not only promoted the physical expansion of the developing capitals and metropolises, but also required a new coding of existing urban structures to meet the changing requirements and expectations regarding urban life and society. Recoding the City asks about the intentions and claims of the protagonists who shaped the city of the nineteenth century. Under what conditions did they succeed in inserting themselves into, overwriting or, if necessary, even rewriting the existing urban structures? Against the background of the increasing competition between cities, public space increasingly became a medium that conveyed meaning, but also a battleground for ideas and demands. With an overview of international research initiatives, the authors examine whether and in what way this recoding of the city in the nineteenth century still has an influence on our everyday life today.

Read more less

"Building for everyone" – that is the best definition of what lies behind the unwieldy concept of "barrier-free design": the complete and total usability of buildings, including for those with disabilities, for the integration of all of society’s members can only succeed when their environment is made accessible to them. Demographic changes demand new qualities of private and public space, qualities that are also required by new legislation. The Detail Practice volume "Barrier-Free Design" provides all planners and architects, but also interested building sponsors, with basic practical information and a range of possible planning implementations in the domain of barrier freedom. It shows how corresponding requirements can be turned into aesthetically distinguished architecture. And it demonstrates that taking barrier freedom into account in the early planning stages of a project need not lead to additional costs compared to "classical" construction and design. In addition to an overview of planning fundamentals, the book also includes the associated body of rules and regulations as well as examples of how they are embodied in actual projects and perspectives on their development in the larger European context.

Read more less

What is the relationship between race and space, and how do racial politics inform the organization and development of urban locales? In Race and the Politics of Deception, Christopher Mele unpacks America’s history of dealing with racial problems through the inequitable use of public space. Mele focuses on Chester, Pennsylvania—a small city comprised of primarily low-income, black residents, roughly twenty miles south of Philadelphia. Like many cities throughout the United States, Chester is experiencing post-industrial decline. A development plan touted as a way to “save” the city, proposes to turn one section into a desirable waterfront destination, while leaving the rest of the struggling residents in fractured communities. Dividing the city into spaces of tourism and consumption versus the everyday spaces of low-income residents, Mele argues, segregates the community by creating a racialized divide. While these development plans are described as socially inclusive and economically revitalizing, Mele asserts that political leaders and real estate developers intentionally exclude certain types of people—most often, low-income people of color. Race and the Politics of Deception provides a revealing look at how our ever-changing landscape is being strategically divided along lines of class and race.

Read more less

Twentieth Anniversary Edition with a new preface and afterword From the removal of Confederate monuments in New Orleans in the spring of 2017 to the violent aftermath of the white nationalist march on the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville later that summer, debates and conflicts over the memorialization of Confederate “heroes” have stormed to the forefront of popular American political and cultural discourse. In Written in Stone Sanford Levinson considers the tangled responses to controversial monuments and commemorations while examining how those with political power configure public spaces in ways that shape public memory and politics. Paying particular attention to the American South, though drawing examples as well from elsewhere in the United States and throughout the world, Levinson shows how the social and legal arguments regarding the display, construction, modification, and destruction of public monuments mark the seemingly endless confrontation over the symbolism attached to public space. This twentieth anniversary edition of Written in Stone includes a new preface and an extensive afterword that takes account of recent events in cities, schools and universities, and public spaces throughout the United States and elsewhere. Twenty years on, Levinson's work is more timely and relevant than ever.

Read more less

A rich, long-term ethnography of women seafood traders in Mexico. The "shrimp ladies," locally known as changueras in southern Sinaloa, Mexico, sell seafood in open-air markets, forming an extralegal but key part of the economy built around this "pink gold.” Over time, they struggled to evolve from marginalized peddlers to local icons depicted in popular culture, even as they continue to work at an open-air street market. Pink Gold documents the shrimp traders' resilience and resourcefulness, from their early conflicts with the city, state, and federal authorities and forming a union, to carving out a physical space for a seafood market, and even engaging in conflicts with the Mexican military. Drawing from her two decades of fieldwork, María L. Cruz-Torres explores the inspiring narrative of this overlooked group of women involving grassroots politics, trans-border and familial networking, debt and informal economic practices, personal sacrifices, and simple courage. She argues that, amid intense economic competition, their success relies on group solidarity that creates interlocking networks of mutual trust, or confianza, that in turn enable them to cross social and political boundaries that would typically be closed to them. Ultimately, Pink Gold offers fresh insights into issues of gender and labor, urban public space, the street economy, commodities, and globalization.

Read more less

Latin American athletes have achieved iconic status in global popular culture, but what do we know about the communities of women in sport? Futbolera is the first monograph on women’s sports in Latin America. Because sports evoke such passion, they are fertile ground for understanding the formation of social classes, national and racial identities, sexuality, and gender roles. Futbolera tells the stories of women athletes and fans as they navigated the pressures and possibilities within organized sports. Futbolera charts the rise of physical education programs for girls, often driven by ideas of eugenics and proper motherhood, that laid the groundwork for women’s sports clubs, which began to thrive beyond the confines of school systems. Futbolera examines how women challenged both their exclusion from national pastimes and their lack of access to leisure, bodily integrity, and public space. This vibrant history also examines women’s sports through comparative case studies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, and others. Special attention is given to women’s sports during military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s as well as the feminist and democratic movements that followed. The book culminates by exploring recent shifts in mindset toward women’s football and dynamic social movements of players across Latin America.

Read more less

How plural, really, is pluralism today? In this book a prominent political theorist reworks the traditional pluralist imagination, rendering it more inclusive and responsive to new drives to pluralization. Traditional pluralism, William E. Connolly shows, gives too much priority to past political settlements, allotments of public space and power relations already made and fixed. It deflates the politics of pluralization. "The Ethos of Pluralization" explores the constitutive tension between pluralism and pluralization, pursuing an ethos of politics that enables new forces of pluralization to find receptive responses in public life. Connolly explores how contemporary drives to pluralize stir the reactionary forces of political fundamentalism and how fundamentalism generates the cultural fragmentation it purports to resist. The reluctance of traditional pluralists to address the tension between pluralism and pluralization plays into the hands of fundamentalist forces. "The Ethos of Pluralization" eventually ranges beyond the borders of the territorial state to explore relations between the globalization of economic life and a more adventurous pluralization of political identities. Engaging images of pluralism and nationalism advanced by Tocqueville, Schumpeter, Ricoeur, Walzer, Herz, and Kurth, Connolly draws selectively upon Nietzsche, Foucault, Butler and Deleuze to delineate an ethos of politics that makes for new identities while protecting conditions that make pluralism and governance possible.

Read more less

'Best of Austria' is edited biennially by Architekturzentrum Wien Az W to present award-winning buildings by Austrian architects and projects by foreign architects realised in Austria. Covered are all architecture prizes that have been awarded by public and private institutions or corporations in Austria. Thus each edition provides an up-to-date survey of contemporary architecture and building culture in Austria. The new 2010/11 edition presents around 160 projects, each with around 3 images and a floor plan, section or elevation as well as short introductory texts. Included are projects by such renowned Austrian firms as Baumschlager Eberle, COOP HIMMELB(L)AU, Delugan Meissl Associated Architects, Hermann & Valentiny and Associates. Also featrured are important international offices such as David Chipperfield Architects, London, or UNStudio, Amsterdam. The documented buildings are arranged in 15 sections: Living (multi-unit residential architecture), Tourism, Leisure, Culture, Single-family House, Industry, Trade, Commerce, Public Space, Infrastructure, Education, Public Buildings, Office, Administration and Actors (persons, institutions, towns or boroughs etc. that have been awarded prizes). Previous editions of 'Best of Austria' covered the periods 2006/07 (published 2008), 2008/09 (2010) and were published by Austrian publishers. The new 2010/11 edition is the first to be published by Park Books for Az W. Text in English & German.

Read more less

An alternative history of capitalist urbanization through the lens of the commons Characterized by shared, self-managed access to food, housing, and the basic conditions for a creative life, the commons are essential for communities to flourish and protect spaces of collective autonomy from capitalist encroachment. In a narrative spanning more than three centuries, Against the Commons provides a radical counterhistory of urban planning that explores how capitalism and spatial politics have evolved to address this challenge.Highlighting episodes from preindustrial England, New York City and Chicago between the 1850s and the early 1900s, Weimar-era Berlin, and neoliberal Milan, Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago shows how capitalist urbanization has eroded the egalitarian, convivial life-worlds around the commons. The book combines detailed archival research with provocative critical theory to illuminate past and ongoing struggles over land, shared resources, public space, neighborhoods, creativity, and spatial imaginaries.Against the Commons underscores the ways urbanization shapes the social fabric of places and territories, lending particular awareness to the impact of planning and design initiatives on working-class communities and popular strata. Projecting history into the future, it outlines an alternative vision for a postcapitalist urban planning, one in which the structure of collective spaces is ultimately defined by the people who inhabit them.

Read more less

An alternative history of capitalist urbanization through the lens of the commons Characterized by shared, self-managed access to food, housing, and the basic conditions for a creative life, the commons are essential for communities to flourish and protect spaces of collective autonomy from capitalist encroachment. In a narrative spanning more than three centuries, Against the Commons provides a radical counterhistory of urban planning that explores how capitalism and spatial politics have evolved to address this challenge.Highlighting episodes from preindustrial England, New York City and Chicago between the 1850s and the early 1900s, Weimar-era Berlin, and neoliberal Milan, Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago shows how capitalist urbanization has eroded the egalitarian, convivial life-worlds around the commons. The book combines detailed archival research with provocative critical theory to illuminate past and ongoing struggles over land, shared resources, public space, neighborhoods, creativity, and spatial imaginaries.Against the Commons underscores the ways urbanization shapes the social fabric of places and territories, lending particular awareness to the impact of planning and design initiatives on working-class communities and popular strata. Projecting history into the future, it outlines an alternative vision for a postcapitalist urban planning, one in which the structure of collective spaces is ultimately defined by the people who inhabit them.

Read more less

A rich, long-term ethnography of women seafood traders in Mexico. The "shrimp ladies," locally known as changueras in southern Sinaloa, Mexico, sell seafood in open-air markets, forming an extralegal but key part of the economy built around this "pink gold.” Over time, they struggled to evolve from marginalized peddlers to local icons depicted in popular culture, even as they continue to work at an open-air street market. Pink Gold documents the shrimp traders' resilience and resourcefulness, from their early conflicts with the city, state, and federal authorities and forming a union, to carving out a physical space for a seafood market, and even engaging in conflicts with the Mexican military. Drawing from her two decades of fieldwork, María L. Cruz-Torres explores the inspiring narrative of this overlooked group of women involving grassroots politics, trans-border and familial networking, debt and informal economic practices, personal sacrifices, and simple courage. She argues that, amid intense economic competition, their success relies on group solidarity that creates interlocking networks of mutual trust, or confianza, that in turn enable them to cross social and political boundaries that would typically be closed to them. Ultimately, Pink Gold offers fresh insights into issues of gender and labor, urban public space, the street economy, commodities, and globalization.

Read more less

Public space is political space. When a work of public art is put up or taken down, it is an inherently political statement, and the work’s aesthetics are inextricably entwined with its political valences. Democracy’s openness allows public art to explore its values critically and to suggest new ones. However, it also facilitates artworks that can surreptitiously or fortuitously undermine democratic values. Today, as bigotry and authoritarianism are on the rise and democratic movements seek to combat them, as Confederate monuments fall and sculptures celebrating diversity rise, the struggle over the values enshrined in the public arena has taken on a new urgency.In this book, Fred Evans develops philosophical and political criteria for assessing how public art can respond to the fragility of democracy. He calls for considering such artworks as acts of citizenship, pointing to their capacity to resist autocratic tendencies and reveal new dimensions of democratic society. Through close considerations of Chicago’s Millennium Park and New York’s National September 11 Memorial, Evans shows how a wide range of artworks participate in democratic dialogues. A nuanced consideration of contemporary art, aesthetics, and political theory, this book is a timely and rigorous elucidation of how thoughtful public art can contribute to the flourishing of a democratic way of 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

This book challenges current views that public life is in decline and that contemporary urban design trends reliant on privatisation, control, events, and thematic designs are to be blamed. Drawing on detailed and extensive analysis of a case study that illustrates well such urban design trends, it shows that informal social life and interaction occur more than its necessary in new master planned environments and new designed public settings, whether public or private owned and/or managed. Furthermore, it reveals the existence of a new category of informal public social settings which it calls fourth places because of their close relationship to Oldenburg’s third places in terms of social and behavioural characteristics – radical departure from the routines of home and work, inclusivity and social comfort – but distinct in terms of activities, locations and spatial conditions – being characterised by spatial, temporal and managerial in-betweenness, i.e. indeterminacy in form, function and times, and a great sense of publicness.The acceptance of these findings problematises well-established urban design theories about master planning, expands existing social theories about the optimal conditions for public social life by empirically and spatially elaborating on them and redefines several spatial concepts for designing public space in relation to the specific dynamics of informal social interaction. More importantly, it brings optimism to urban design practice, offering new insights into designing more lively and inclusive public spaces.

Read more less

Spatial Justice and Informal Settlements: Integral Urban Projects in the Comunas of Medellín links the discourses of informal urbanism and spatial justice in the context of public space-based governmental programmes to upgrade informal settlements in Latin America. It argues for the importance of combining measures for equity and empowerment with positive recognition, i.e. recognition which is based on valuing the social and material achievements of the settlers as a contribution to urban life and culture in its own right. It presents an inquiry into how public open spaces serve the goal of increasing spatial justice and the quality of life in informal settlements. It provides an in-depth study of the Integral Urban Project (Proyecto Urbano Integral/PUI in Spanish) in Comuna 13, a low-income settlement in Medellín, Colombia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork to understand people’s everyday spaces and socio-spatial practices, the book assesses the design, production, use, and management of some of the public open spaces established under the PUI programme. It thus also offers an account of the diversity of everyday open spaces and landscapes in this informal settlement. This book is a valuable contribution to the field of open spaces in informal settlements and spatial justice, especially for scholars, researchers, and graduate students with an interest in urban development and upgrading and related socio-spatial issues in Latin America.

Read more less

In the first half of the twentieth century, a pioneering generation of young women exited their homes and entered public space, marking a new era for women's civic participation in northern Sudan. A provocative new public presence, women's civic engagement was at its core a bodily experience. Amid the socio-political upheavals of imperial rule, female students, medical workers, and activists used a careful choreography of body movements and fashion to adapt to imperial mores, claim opportunities for political agency, and shape a new standard of modern, mobile womanhood. Khartoum at Night is the first English-language history of these women's lives, examining how their experiences of the British Empire from 1900–1956 were expressed on and through their bodies. Central to this story is the tobe: a popular, modest form of dress that wrapped around a woman's head and body. Marie Grace Brown shows how northern Sudanese women manipulated the tucks, folds, and social messages of the tobe to deftly negotiate the competing pulls of modernization and cultural authenticity that defined much of the imperial experience. Her analysis weaves together the threads of women's education and activism, medical midwifery, urban life, consumption, and new behaviors of dress and beauty to reconstruct the worlds of politics and pleasure in which early-twentieth-century Sudanese women lived.

Read more less

Vulnerability and resistance have often been seen as opposites, with the assumption that vulnerability requires protection and the strengthening of paternalistic power at the expense of collective resistance. Focusing on political movements and cultural practices in different global locations, including Turkey, Palestine, France, and the former Yugoslavia, the contributors to Vulnerability in Resistance articulate an understanding of the role of vulnerability in practices of resistance. They consider how vulnerability is constructed, invoked, and mobilized within neoliberal discourse, the politics of war, resistance to authoritarian and securitarian power, in LGBTQI struggles, and in the resistance to occupation and colonial violence. The essays offer a feminist account of political agency by exploring occupy movements and street politics, informal groups at checkpoints and barricades, practices of self-defense, hunger strikes, transgressive enactments of solidarity and mourning, infrastructural mobilizations, and aesthetic and erotic interventions into public space that mobilize memory and expose forms of power. Pointing to possible strategies for a feminist politics of transversal engagements and suggesting a politics of bodily resistance that does not disavow forms of vulnerability, the contributors develop a new conception of embodiment and sociality within fields of contemporary power.Contributors. Meltem Ahiska, Athena Athanasiou, Sarah Bracke, Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Başak Ertür, Zeynep Gambetti, Rema Hammami, Marianne Hirsch, Elena Loizidou, Leticia Sabsay, Nükhet Sirman, Elena Tzelepis

Read more less

What will be the fate of childhood in the twenty-first century? Will children increasingly be living 'media childhoods', dominated by the electronic screen? Will their growing access to adult media help to abolish the distinctions between childhood and adulthood? Or will the advent of new media technologies widen the gaps between the generations still further? In this book, David Buckingham provides a lucid and accessible overview of recent changes both in childhood and in the media environment. He refutes simplistic moral panics about the negative influence of the media, and the exaggerated optimism about the 'electronic generation'. In the process, he points to the challenges that are posed by the proliferation of new technologies, the privatization of the media and of public space, and the polarization between media-rich and media-poor. He argues that children can no longer be excluded or protected from the adult world of violence, commercialism and politics; and that new strategies and policies are needed in order to protect their rights as citizens and as consumers. Based on extensive research, After the Death of Childhood takes a fresh look at well-established concerns about the effects of the media on children. It offers a challenging and refreshing approach to the perennial concerns of researchers, parents, educators, media producers and policy-makers.

Read more less

All museums are sex museums. In Sex Museums, Jennifer Tyburczy takes a hard look at the formation of Western sexuality-particularly how categories of sexual normalcy and perversity are formed-and asks what role museums have played in using display as a technique for disciplining sexuality. Most museum exhibits, she argues, assume that white, patriarchal heterosexuality and traditional structures of intimacy, gender, and race represent national sexual culture for their visitors. Sex Museums illuminates the history of such heteronormativity at most museums and proposes alternative approaches for the future of public display projects, while also offering the reader curatorial tactics-what she calls queer curatorship-for exhibiting diverse sexualities in the twenty-first century. Tyburczy shows museums to be sites of culture-war theatrics, where dramatic civic struggles over how sex relates to public space, genealogies of taste and beauty, and performances of sexual identity are staged. Delving into the history of erotic artifacts, she analyzes how museums have historically approached the collection and display of the material culture of sex, which poses complex moral, political, and logistical dilemmas for the Western museum. Sex Museums unpacks the history of the museum and its intersections with the history of sexuality to argue that the Western museum context-from its inception to the present-marks a pivotal site in the construction of modern sexual subjectivity.

Read more less

The degree to which the late colonial era affected Europe has been for long underappreciated, and only recently have European countries started to acknowledge not having come to terms with decolonization. In Belgium, the past two decades have witnessed a growing awareness of the controversial episodes in the country's colonial past. This volume examines the long-term effects and legacies of the colonial era on Belgium after 1960, the year the Congo gained its independence, and calls into question memories of the colonial past by focusing on the meaning and place of colonial monuments in public space. The book foregrounds the enduring presence of "empire" in everyday Belgian life in the form of permanent colonial markers in bronze and stone, lieux de memoires of the country's history of overseas expansion. By means of photographs and explanations of major pro-colonial memorials, as well as several obscure ones, the book reveals the surprising degree to which Belgium became infused with a colonialist spirit during the colonial era. Another key component of the analysis is an account of the varied ways that both Dutch- and French-speaking Belgians approached the colonial past after 1960, treating memorials variously as objects of veneration, with indifference, or as symbols to be attacked or torn down. The book provides a thought-provoking reflection on culture, colonialism, and the remainders of empire in Belgium after 1960.

Read more less

Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the worldwide mass protest movements of 1968—against war, imperialism, racism, poverty, misogyny, and homophobia—the exciting anthology Architectures of Revolt explores the degree to which the real events of political revolt in the urban landscape in 1968 drove change in the attitudes and practices of filmmakers and architects alike.In and around 1968, as activists and filmmakers took to the streets, commandeering public space, buildings, and media attention, they sought to re-make the urban landscape as an expression of utopian longing or as a dystopian critique of the established order. In Architectures of Revolt, the editor and contributors chronicle city-specific case studies from Paris, Berlin, Milan, and Chicago to New York, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Tokyo. The films discussed range from avant-garde and agitprop shorts to mainstream narrative feature films. All of them share a focus on the city and, often, particular streets and buildings as places of political contestation and sometimes violence, which the medium of cinema was uniquely equipped to capture.Contributors include: Stephen Barber, Stanley Corkin, Jesse Lerner, Jon Lewis, Gaetana Marrone, Jennifer Stob, Andrew Webber, and the editor.

Read more less

Street Corner Secrets challenges widespread notions of sex work in India by examining solicitation in three spaces within the city of Mumbai that are seldom placed within the same analytic frame—brothels, streets, and public day-wage labor markets (nakas), where sexual commerce may be solicited discretely alongside other income-generating activities. Focusing on women who migrated to Mumbai from rural, economically underdeveloped areas within India, Svati P. Shah argues that selling sexual services is one of a number of ways women working as laborers may earn a living, demonstrating that sex work, like day labor, is a part of India's vast informal economy. Here, various means of earning—legitimized or stigmatized, legal or illegal—overlap or exist in close proximity to one another, shaping a narrow field of livelihood options that women navigate daily. In the course of this rich ethnography, Shah discusses policing practices, migrants' access to housing and water, the idea of public space, critiques of states and citizenship, and the discursive location of violence within debates on sexual commerce. Throughout, the book analyzes the epistemology of prostitution, and the silences and secrets that constitute the discourse of sexual commerce on Mumbai's streets.

Read more less

In a declaration of the ascendance of the American media industry, nineteenth-century press barons in New York City helped to invent the skyscraper, a quintessentially American icon of progress and aspiration. Early newspaper buildings in the country's media capital were designed to communicate both commercial and civic ideals, provide public space and prescribe discourse, and speak to class and mass in equal measure. This book illustrates how the media have continued to use the city as a space in which to inscribe and assert their power. With a unique focus on corporate headquarters as embodiments of the values of the press and as signposts for understanding media culture, Media Capital demonstrates the mutually supporting relationship between the media and urban space. Aurora Wallace considers how architecture contributed to the power of the press, the nature of the reading public, the commercialization of media, and corporate branding in the media industry. Tracing the rise and concentration of the media industry in New York City from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Wallace analyzes physical and discursive space, as well as labor, technology, and aesthetics, to understand the entwined development of the mass media and late capitalism.

Read more less

With an impressive career of over 40 years that has resulted in the installation of large-scale art projects in numerous public spaces, artist/sculptor Luk Van Soom needs no further introduction in Belgium and the Netherlands. This beautifully designed art book is a first retrospective on his life and career. In a series of discussions and interviews with the artist, author Johan Pas sheds some light on the influences, philosophy, thinking and themes that have been vital for Van Soom's artistic development: the relation between life and passion, travel and art, etc. Together, these texts present a kaleidoscopic image of Luk Van Soom's life and work that is just as multifaceted and compelling as his art. At the age of seventeen Van Soom took his first tentative steps as an artist. Now 40 years later, he has an impressive curriculum including many exhibitions, commissions and projects both in his home country and abroad. Moreover, he created more than 50 monumental works for the public space in Belgium and the Netherlands, among which some very well know sights, such as Walhalla (1993, Antwerp), The Man from Atlantis (2003, Brussels), The Wharfinger (2005, Zwolle) and Walking to Magdalena (2012, Ostend).

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

Tiergarten is Berlin's oldest park, with more than five hundred acres of woodland in the heart of the city. Before it was absorbed by the city, the area that became Tiergarten was a natural forest. Throughout its history, it was used as royal hunting grounds and as a landscaped public park, and (in the years of hardship following World War II) an area where trees were felled for firewood, before changing social and political circumstances and the growing ecological movement led to measures to restore and replant this vast public space. Thus, the Tiergarten has become not only a very popular recreation place, but also a biotope of extraordinarily high biodiversity. Generously illustrated with historical and contemporary photographs, Tiergarten, Landscape of Transgression takes readers through the history of the park, with an eye toward exploring it as a radical spatial expression - a space where humans and wild species and conflicting histories coexist in close proximity, and as a model for future environments in areas of intense urbanisation. Born of a recent symposium staged by Technische Universitat Berlin, this book brings together twelve essays with a range of archival documents, including newspaper articles, maps, reports, plans, and photographs.

Read more less

With its vibrant street life, vast media industry, and influence on the fashion world, New York has long been considered the capital of photography. Since last March, though, life in the city has been altered in unthinkable ways due to the Covid-19 health crisis and the protests in support of Black lives. Aperture’s New York issue will be released on the one-year anniversary of the city’s shut down due to the Covid-19 crisis. The issue will honor community and public space in the city and highlight the distinct ways in which this city has fostered a vital image culture. Contributions will include Jamel Shabazz’s decades-long chronicle of Black life in the city; Deana Lawson’s distinct vision of Brooklyn; Vince Aletti on the tradition of the “New York issue” in magazine publishing; a conversation between Philip Montgomery and Kathy Ryan, Director of Photography at The New York Times Magazine; as well as highlights from a range of unique photo archives in the city. Additional contributors may include An-My Le?, Farah Al Qasimi, Ari Macropolous, Ryan McGinley, Irina Rozovksy, Olivia Laing, Jim Jarmusch, among others.

Read more less