Urbanism and Urbanization

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 23-29
Author(s):  
Yohannis Abate

Africa is now the least urbanized of the continents but is becoming more so at one of the fastest rates in the world. The history of urbanization in Africa predates the birth of Christ; it may have developed as early as 3500 B.C. in the flood plain of the lower Nile for control and administration of the Nile Valley by the Pharaohs, though most of the ancient and pre-colonial African urban centers are now insignificant towns and some have become extinct. Between 1500 B.C. and 500 A.D., the Mediterranean coast of North Africa saw the creation of many cities, which flourished because of trade between the Phoenicians and Carthaginians.

1974 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Barnes ◽  
Giacomo Sani

Both the classical Romans and the classical Fascists of Mussolini referred to the Mediterranean as Mare Nostrum, ‘our sea’. The rugged peninsula of Italy cuts the sea in half, making Italy, at least by geography, a Mediterranean country. At the same time, it is a European country, a central actor in the long history of both the Mediterranean and Europe. When the center of Europe gravitated toward that sea, the peninsula was near the center of the world and Italy was a major link between Europe and the Middle East, North Africa, and the Moslem world. As the focus of Europe moved north and west, Italy became more marginal; but as a Catholic country it remained oriented largely to Europe. The Christian and Moslem sides of the Mediterranean developed in different directions.


1994 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-106
Author(s):  
Hans Henningsen

The View of Nature and History in Grundtvig and LøgstrupBy Hans HenningsenGrundtvig’s and K.E. Løgstrup’s thoughts move in two different dimensions, but with the same intention of demonstrating that it was not the capacity of man to create culture that first gave significance to the world. But where Grundtvig speaks about history, Løgstrup speaks about »phenomena«, »nature«, and »universe«.While Grundtvig was largely unaffected by Kant, the latter - with his concepts of the selfexistent subject and the idea of the faculty of cognition as productive - became a challenge to Løgstrup. Kant heralds an era whose relationship with the universe is characterized as a »marginal existence«. Our culture became an emancipatory culture which was all to the good, but the era lost its sense of the .pre-cultural. structures in which life is »encased«.The era has also emancipated itself from Grundtvig’s historical view. But a history on the premisses of relativism is no history. Or, in Løgstrup’s words, there is no other history than the history of what is essential in life. Therefore, in reality, Løgstrup’s phenomenological and philosophical endeavours become a defence of history. Grundtvig’s view of nature was determined by his radical prioritization of history. He prefers to view nature as part of the historical life of man, which again determines his use of nature images. In Grundtvig there is no religious interpretation of any experience or perception of nature in spite of the fact that everything in the Creation is to be understood as images of the eternal.In Løgstrup there is no such cautions attitude towards nature. Here nature and sense perception are liberating, but as is the case with Grundtvig, nature is seen as the foundation of man’s life, as immediate experience.Grundtvig’s radical prioritization of history colours his view of art. The Creation itself is the greatest work of art; part of it is the upbringing through which all history must be the object of the individual’s own experience. Among the art forms, poetry ranks highest, with the song above all other forms, while Grundtvig only uses disparaging words about painting and sculpture because these art forms are wordless and preclude changes. Løgstrup, however, attaches much greater importance to sense perception and self-recognition through art.These contrasts may be regarded as what Løgstrup calls uniting opposites; it must be remembered, however, that such disparities cannot be harmonized so as to disappear, but are uniting precisely by virtue of the tension that exists between them. The actual existence of the contrasts does not preclude the possibility that in a wider sense the two views may be contained within the same framework and express a common intention.


2007 ◽  
pp. 27-37
Author(s):  
Dmytro V. Tsolin

Every reader of the Old Testament, both experienced researcher and newcomer, cannot fail to pay attention to one peculiarity in the presentation of the idea of ​​God: it is a harmonious (and, at times, amazing) combination of transcendence and immanence. The History of the Creation of the World (Genesis 1: 1 - 2: 3), which begins the first book of the Strictly Testament - Genesis - is an example of an exquisite prose genre with elements of epic poetry. In it, the Creator of the Universe appears to the Almighty, the Wise, and the All-Powerful, standing above the created world: Only one word of it evokes the material world from nothingness. This is emphasized by the repeated use of the formulas אלהים וימר / wa-yyo'mer 'ělohîm ("And Elohim said ...") and ויהי־כן / wa-yəhî khēn ("And so it became"). This use of two narrative constructs at the beginning and at the end of messages about the creative activities of God clearly emphasizes the idea of ​​reconciling the divine Word and being. God is shown here to be transcendental.


Author(s):  
Jules-Antoine Vaucel ◽  
Sébastien Larréché ◽  
Camille Paradis ◽  
Magali Labadie ◽  
Arnaud Courtois ◽  
...  

Abstract In the world, the impact of environmental conditions on the number of scorpion events was evaluated in North Africa,Middle East, and the Amazonian region but not in Europe. In mainland France, scorpion species described are Buthus occitanus (Amoreux, 1789), Belisarius xambeui (Simon, 1879) and 4 Euscorpiidae: Euscorpius concinnus (Koch, 1837), Euscorpius italicus (Herbst, 1800), Euscorpius tergestinus (Koch, 1837), and Tetratrichobothrius flavicaudis (De Geer, 1778). We aimed to describe the impact of environmental conduction on the number of scorpion events. For this, a retrospective multi-center study was conducted with data from the French poison control centers files about scorpion events between 1 January 2011 and 31 December 2020. During the study period, 975 incoming calls for scorpion events were recorded and 574 were related to scorpions native to mainland France and Corsica: B. occitanus (n = 86), Euscorpiidae species (n = 222), B. xambeui (n = 1), and undetermined species (n = 265). Cases were mostly reported along the Mediterranean coast, along rivers, and in cities with a trading port. The number of scorpion events was linked to the rivers' water level, rivers' flow, temperature, sunshine, and pluviometry (P < 0.05 for all variables). B. occitanus need warmest and driest environment than Euscorpiidae spp. A link between the severity of the envenoming and climatic condition or seasonality was not demonstrated.


2022 ◽  
pp. 930-944
Author(s):  
Anthony J. Gephardt ◽  
Elizabeth Baoying Wang

This chapter explores the world of autonomous vehicles. Starting from the beginning, it covers the history of the automobile dating back to 1769. It explains how the first production automobile came about in 1885. The chapter dives into the history of auto safety, ranging from seatbelts to full-on autonomous features. One of the main focuses is the creation and implementation of artificial intelligent (AI), neural networks, intelligent agents, and deep Learning Processes. Combining the hardware on the vehicle with the intelligence of AI creates what we know as autonomous vehicles today.


Author(s):  
David Abulafia

Ottoman sultans and Spanish kings, along with their tax officials, took a strong interest in the religious identity of those who crossed the areas of the Mediterranean under their control. Sometimes, in an era marked by the clash of Christian and Muslim empires, the Mediterranean seems to be sharply divided between the two faiths. Yet the Ottomans had long accepted the existence of Christian majorities in many of the lands they ruled, while other groups navigated (metaphorically) between religious identities. The Sephardic Jews have already been encountered, with their astonishing ability to mutate into notionally Christian ‘Portuguese’ when they entered the ports of Mediterranean Spain. This existence suspended between worlds set off its own tensions in the seventeenth century, when many Sephardim acclaimed a deluded Jew of Smyrna as the Messiah. Similar tensions could also be found among the remnants of the Muslim population of Spain. The tragic history of the Moriscos was played out largely away from the Mediterranean Sea between the conversion of the last openly practising Muslims, in 1525, and the final act of their expulsion in 1609; it was their very isolation from the Islamic world that gave these people their distinctive identity, once again suspended between religions. The world inhabited by these Moriscos differed in important respects from that inhabited by the other group of conversos, those of Jewish descent. Although some Moriscos were hauled before the Inquisition, the Spanish authorities at first turned a blind eye to the continued practice of Islam; it was sometimes possible to pay the Crown a ‘service’ that bought exemption from interference by the Inquisition, which was mortified to discover that it could not boost its income by seizing the property of exempt suspects. Many Morisco communities lacked a Christian priest, so the continued practice of the old religion is no great surprise; even in areas where christianization took place, what sometimes emerged was an islamized Christianity, evinced in the remarkable lead tablets of Sacromonte, outside Granada, with their prophecies that ‘the Arabs will be those who aid religion in the last days’ and their mysterious references to a Christian caliph, or successor (to Jesus, not Muhammad).


Oryx ◽  
1956 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 192-194
Author(s):  
Norman Lewis

Fish inhabiting shallow coastal waters in all accessible parts of the world are at this moment in the process of being exterminated, through the mass invasion of these waters by spear-fishermen. On the Mediterranean shores of France and Spain, and all round the coastline of Italy the process is almost complete, so far as several species of fish are concerned, and we learn from the magazines of spear-fishing enthusiasts, of new centres of their sport being continually established on the more remote coasts of the Adriatic, of Greece and of North Africa.


Focaal ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 (63) ◽  
pp. 8-19
Author(s):  
Blai Guarné

It is well accepted that the discussion about intellectual centers and peripheries has a reductionist character that conceals the complexity of a globalizing world. Despite this, we cannot ignore that in the academic history of anthropology central traditions and hegemonic discourses were established, while others were rendered as peripheral or marginal. This historical context has set a disciplinary framework of inequalities and imbalances that created the conditions of possibility for the global production and dissemination of anthropological knowledge. By re-examining the controversy surrounding the anthropology of the Mediterranean and its relation with debates about native anthropology, this article points out the challenge of revising this disciplinary framework in the project of developing a truly global anthropology.


2006 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
WIM BLOCKMANS

The process of European integration, the complexity of the problems involved and even the resistance it raises, astonishes observers in other parts of the world, especially in large states that have a long history of centralized government behind them. Is there really so little unity in Europe? If so, how can this be explained? Has European diversity generated only problems or has it, in fact, created new and unique opportunities? Is there a chance that growing concerns at EU-level about the cultural dimensions of European citizenship could, in fact, consolidate a sense of community? And, finally, how can historians contribute to the creation of a common European identity, if this is so weakly developed?


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