scholarly journals What’s in a Street? Exploring Suspended Cosmopolitanism in Trikoupi, Nicosia

Author(s):  
Karen Akoka ◽  
Olivier Clochard ◽  
Iris Polyzou ◽  
Camille Schmoll

AbstractSituated at the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea, the island of Cyprus has always been a bridge as well as a border between the Middle East and Europe. It has also been an important place of both emigration and immigration. The situation in Nicosia, the capital city, is marked by decline following the 1974 conflict and partition. At the same time, however, the city has become an important settling place for international migrants, whose presence has grown during the last 20 years. Today Nicosia’s situation lies between a typical south European city (in which migrants find room in the interstices) and a post-war city. Following the growing effort within migration studies to use the street as a laboratory of diversity and cosmopolitanism (Susan Hall), this paper focuses on a single street. Formerly an important business street, Trikoupi Street is now well known as one of the most cosmopolitan streets in Nicosia, in which south Asians, Arabs, Sub-Saharan Africans as well as Eastern Europeans converge. These different populations correspond to different migratory waves as well as different modes of incorporation into local society. In this chapter, we aim to see how the street level may help us to reflect upon important topics in Cyprus such as contested citizenship, urban change, local/global connections, as well as new forms of cohabitation and patterns of subaltern cosmopolitanism. We also aim to reflect upon the multiple temporalities of the neighborhood, in order to show how the history of the street (and the history of the neighborhood) impacts on current ways of life in Trikoupi. We define the current situation as “suspended cosmopolitanism.”

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 15-27
Author(s):  
Karolina Wróbel-Bardzik

The paper attempts to answer the question about the place of plants and urban greenery in Warsaw during the occupation and post-war period. The theoretical framework is determined by the environmental history of the war. The author describes ruralization of Warsaw during the occupation, and the fate of trees in urban forests and gardens and parks, which became depleted or destroyed as a result of the war and overexploitation. These spaces are called by Chris Pearson as “scarred landscapes”. An important point of reference is the pre-war and post-war vision of modernizing the city, in which plants occupy an important place in the spatial planning sphere. Moreover, the paper discusses the phenomenon of “urbanization of nature”, determining in this period of what belongs to the accepted sphere of “nature” in urban space.


Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110005
Author(s):  
Rebekah Plueckhahn

This article explores the experience of living among diverse infrastructural configurations in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and forms of stigmatisation that arise as a result. In this capital city that experiences extremely cold winters, the provision of heat is a seasonal necessity. Following a history of socialist-era, centrally provided heating, Ulaanbaatar is now made up of a core area of apartments and other buildings undergoing increased expansion, surrounded by vast areas of fenced land plots ( ger districts) not connected to centrally provided heating. In these areas, residents have historically heated their homes through burning coal, a technique that has resulted in seasonal air pollution. Expanding out from Wacquant’s definition of territorial stigmatisation, this article discusses the links between heat generation, air pollution and environmental stigmatisation arising from residents’ association with or proximity to the effects of heat generation and/or infrastructural lack. This type of stigma complexifies the normative divide between the city’s two main built areas. Residents’ attempts to mitigate forms of building and infrastructural ‘quality’ or chanar (in Mongolian) form ways of negotiating their position as they seek different kinds of property. Here, not only are bodies vulnerable to forms of pollution (both air and otherwise), but also buildings and infrastructure are vulnerable to disrepair. Residents’ assessments of infrastructural and building quality move beyond any categorisation of them being a clear ‘resistance’ to deteriorating infrastructural conditions. Instead, an ethnographic lens that positions the viewpoint of the city through these residential experiences reveals a reconceptualisation of the city that challenges infrastructurally determined normative assumptions.


1938 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 152-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick H. Wilson

The first of these Studies was concerned chiefly with the history of Ostia during the period when the city was still growing and its prosperity increasing. Even so, during the period already considered, the prosperity of Ostia, though real, was to this extent artificial, in that it depended upon factors over which the citizens themselves had no control. Ostia was the port of Rome, and nothing else, and in consequence any lowering of the standard of living in, or reduction of imports into the capital city must have had immediate and marked repercussions upon her prosperity. She even lacked to a great extent those reserves of wealth which in other cities might be drawn upon to tide over bad times. The typical citizen of Ostia came to the city in the hope of making his fortune there; but when he had made it, he usually preferred to retire to some more pleasant town, such as Tibur, Tusculum, Velitrae, or Rome itself, where he could enjoy his leisure. Few families seem to have remained in the city for more than two, or, at the most, three generations. Whilst therefore fortunes were made in Ostia, wealth was not accumulated there.


2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (9) ◽  
pp. 2031-2041 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theofilos Toulkeridis ◽  
Fabián Rodríguez ◽  
Nelson Arias Jiménez ◽  
Débora Simón Baile ◽  
Rodolfo Salazar Martínez ◽  
...  

Abstract. The so-called El Trébol is a critical road interchange in Quito connecting the north and south regions of the city. In addition, it connects Quito with the highly populated Los Chillos Valley, one of the most traveled zones in the Ecuadorian capital. El Trébol was constructed in the late 1960s in order to resolve the traffic jams of the capital city and for that purpose the Machángara River was rerouted through an underground concrete box tunnel. In March 2008, the tunnel contained a high amount of discarded furniture that had been impacting the top portion of the tunnel, compromising the structural integrity. On 31 March 2008 after a heavy rainfall a sinkhole of great proportions formed in the Trébol traffic hub. In the first few minutes, the sinkhole reached an initial diameter of 30 m. The collapse continued to grow in the following days until the final dimensions of 120 m in diameter and some 40 m of depth, revealing the Machángara River at the base of the sinkhole.A state of emergency was declared. The cause of the sinkhole was a result of the lack of monitoring of the older subterranean infrastructure where trash had accumulated and damaged the concrete tunnel that channelized the Machángara River until it was worn away for a length of some 20 m, leaving behind the sinkhole and the fear of recurrence in populated areas.With the intent to understand the causes and consequences of this sinkhole event, rainfall data are shown together with hydrogeological characteristics and a view back to the recent history of sinkhole lineation or arrangement of the city of Quito. The economic impact is also emphasized, where the direct costs of the damage and the reconstruction are presented and compared to indirect costs associated with this socio-natural disaster. These analyses suggest that the costs of indirect financial damage, like time loss or delay, and subsequent higher expenses for different types of vehicles, are equivalent to many times the costs of the reconstruction of El Trébol.


Author(s):  
Mary T. Boatwright

This book explores the constraints and opportunities of the women in the Roman emperor’s family from 35 BCE, when Octavia and Livia received unprecedented privileges from the state, to 235 CE, when Julia Mamaea was assassinated with her son Severus Alexander. Historical vignettes feature Agrippina the Younger, Domitia Longina, and some others as the book analyzes the history of Rome’s most eminent women in legal, religious, military, and other key settings of the principate. It also examines the women’s exemplarity through imaging as well as their presence in the city of Rome and in the empire. Evidence comes from coins, inscriptions, papyri, sculpture, and law codes as well as ancient authors. Numerous illustrations, maps, genealogical trees, and detailed tables and appendices complement the text. The whole reveals imperial women’s fluctuating but persistent marginalization and lack of agency despite their potential, even as it elucidates Rome’s imperial power, legal system, family ideology, religion and imperial cult, court, capital city, and military customs.


2011 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 347-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fair

When it opened in March 1958, the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, was the first new professional theatre to be constructed in Britain for nearly two decades and the country’s first all-new civic theatre (Figs 1 and 2). Financially supported by Coventry City Council and designed in the City Architect’s office, it included a 910-seat auditorium with associated backstage facilities. Two features of the building were especially innovative, namely its extensive public foyers and the provision of a number of small flats for actors. The theatre, whose name commemorated a major gift of timber to the city of Coventry from the Yugoslav authorities, was regarded as the herald of a new age and indeed marked the beginning of a boom in British theatre construction which lasted until the late 1970s. Yet its architecture has hitherto been little considered by historians of theatre, while accounts of post-war Coventry have instead focused on other topics: the city’s politics; its replanning after severe wartime bombing; and the architecture of its new cathedral, designed by Basil Spence in 1950 and executed amidst international interest as a symbol of the city’s post-war recovery. However, the Belgrade also attracted considerable attention when it opened. The Observer’s drama critic, Kenneth Tynan, was especially effusive, asking ‘in what tranced moment did the City Council decided to spend £220,000 on a bauble as superfluous as a civic playhouse?’ For him, it was ‘one of the great decisions in the history of local government’. This article considers the architectural implications of that ‘great decision’. The main design moves are charted and related to the local context, in which the Belgrade was intended to function as a civic and community focus. In this respect, the Labour Party councillors’ wish to become involved in housing the arts reflected prevailing local and national party philosophy but was possibly amplified by knowledge of eastern European authorities’ involvement in accommodating and subsidizing theatre. In addition, close examination of the Belgrade’s external design, foyers and auditorium illuminates a number of broader debates in the architectural history of the period. The auditorium, for example, reveals something of the extent to which Modern architecture could be informed by precedent. Furthermore, the terms in which the building was received are also significant. Tynan commented: ‘enter most theatres, and you enter the gilded cupidacious past. Enter this one, and you are surrounded by the future’. Although it was perhaps inevitable that the Belgrade was thought to be unlike older theatres, given that there had been a two-decade hiatus in theatre-building, the resulting contrast was nonetheless rather appropriate, allowing the building to connote new ideas whilst also permitting us to read the Belgrade in terms of contemporary debates about the nature of the ‘modern monument’.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-23
Author(s):  
Rahmia Nurwulandari ◽  
Kemas Ridwan Kurniawan

Bandung experienced a rapid urban development after 1918, when the city was prepared to be the new Dutch East Indies’ capital city, replacing Batavia. In the era of economic liberalization, Bandung also became one of the tourist destinations that has promoted by the businessmen. This paper is a study on how mass tourism as the new urban culture in the beginning of 20th century had a contribution to urban planning in Bandung. The timeline was after the establishment of train as a modern transportation in Bandung (1884) until the end of the Dutch Colonialism in Dutch East Indies (1942). Through the Georg Simmel's theory of sociology and the city, I tried to analyze the the tourism activity and its relations to the 20th century urban architecture in Bandung, West Java. I use the method that was introduced by Iain Borden and friends in The Unknown City to understand tourism and urban history of Bandung through the spatial practice, city representation and experiences. 


Author(s):  
Adam Nadolny

This article focuses on the inter-dependencies between the film image and architecture. The author has attempted to define what sort of historical background preconditions the film image to gain the status of a source for research on the history of Polish urban planning and post-war architecture, with particular emphasis placed on the 1960s.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 148-155
Author(s):  
Vasily D. FILIPPOV

Two projects of the Linear City, which appeared at the beginning of the 20th century, in the United States, regardless of the project implemented earlier in Spain by Arturo Soria, are described. The technical and town-planning features of the Roadtown project by Edgar Chembless and the social ideas underlying it are given. The reasons for the failure of this project, as well as similar projects that appeared later, are analyzed. The history of the project of Milo Hastings and his idea of a linear concentration of dwellings in the city are given. Although this project was also not implemented, the reasons why its town-planning ideas found application in the post-war construction of the American suburb and social ideas in the New Deal of President Franklin Roosevelt are shown.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego F Cisneros-Heredia ◽  
Eliana Montenegro

The diversity and ecology of urban bird communities have been extensively studied in Neartic and Paleartic areas, however, little is known about urban Neotropical areas. Quito, capital city of Ecuador, is located on a highland valley in the megadiverse tropical Andes. Founded in 1534, Quito did not increase significantly its urban area until the late 19th century, growing at an accelerated and unplanned rate during the 20th century. More than 100 species were known to inhabit in Quito at the end of the 19th century. Currently, most authors estimated that no more than 40 species occur in Quito, although no systematic bird studies have been conducted. Our research is a first approach to the avifauna of Quito, surveying the diversity living in green urban areas within the city borders. We used two field methodologies, i.e. line transects and point counts, to survey 16 green urban areas over 12 months. We recorded 65 species of birds, belonging to 20 families and 9 orders. Three species were the most common and frequent: Eared Dove Zenaida auriculata, Rufous-collared Sparrow Zonotrichia capensis, and Great Thrush Turdus fuscater, being omnivores and granivores adapted to anthropic habitats with low ecological complexity. Six species were equally common but not as frequent: American Kestrel Falco sparverius, Sparkling Violetear Colibri coruscans, Black-tailed Trainbearer Lesbia victoriae, Brown-bellied Swallow Oreochelidon murina, Black Flowerpiercer Diglossa humeralis, and Cinereous Conebill Conirostrum cinereum, being nectarivores or small predators. All other species were either uncommon or rare, mainly insectivores and frugivores that prefer wildlife habitats with mid/high ecological complexity, and restricted to large urban parks with patches of native vegetation. We found a negative correlation between human impact and bird richness in all studied areas. These data provide important information to encourage better urban practices and to promote conservation and recovery of Quito’s native wildlife.


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