Sounding the town

Urban History ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Borsay
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Urban History ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
British History ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Traditional Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City

Interdisciplinarity has proved to be one of the enduring tenets of British urban history. As Fiona Kisby points out in her contribution to this special issue of Urban History, its centrality is enunciated in the agenda set by Jim Dyos in the 1960s, as the subject emerged as a self-conscious subdiscipline of British history, and in the editorials that launched this publication as a Yearbook and subsequently as a journal. The appeal of an interdisciplinary approach is that it allows those involved to transcend the straitjacket of traditional research and explore a given issue or subject from a multiplicity of angles. However, prioritizing such a methodology, though it might allow the intellectual high ground to be occupied temporarily, provides a real hostage to fortune, raising expectations that it often proves impossible to fulfil. Interdisciplinarity simply cuts against the dominant grain of academe. Where British urban historians have crossed the disciplinary barricades, they have tended to head in the direction of the social sciences (such as sociology, economics, geography and anthropology). A rapprochement with the arts (painting, film, literature, architecture, music, and the like) is less easy to discern. Yet with the growing interest in the last decade or so in cultural history the time is ripe to redress the balance. This music issue of Urban History, like that of August 1995 on ‘Art and the City’, can be seen as an attempt to do this. Its appearance coincides with the publication of a pioneering volume of essays, edited by Fiona Kisby, on Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns, whose avowed aim is to ‘bring musicology within the sphere of urban history’. Though that collection is predominantly focused on western Europe (with six of the essays on the British Isles, six on the Continent, and one on South America) and on the years 1400 to 1650, it provides a model for how the agendas of musicologists and urban historians might be productively merged.

Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Machado
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Social ◽  
Traditional Elite ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.

“The Burdens of Urban History”: Comment

1989 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 30-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Katznelson
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social History ◽  
Urban History ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
State And Society ◽  
The City

How, if at all, can studies of the city help us understand the distinctive qualities of the American regime? In “The Burdens of Urban History,” which refines and elaborates his earlier paper “The Problem of the Political in Recent American Urban History,” Terrence McDonald, a historian who has written on urban fiscal policy and conflict, argues that students of the city have focused their work too narrowly on bosses and machines, patronage and pluralism. In so doing, they have obscured other bases of politics and conflict, and, trapped by liberal categories of analysis, they have perpetuated a self-satisfied, even celebratory, portrait of American politics and society. This unfortunate directionality to urban research in some measure has been unwitting because historians and social scientists have been unreflective about the genealogies, and mutual borrowings, of their disciplines. Even recent critical scholarship in the new social history and in the social sciences under the banner of “bringing the state back in” suffers from these defects. As a result, these treatments of state and society relationships, and of the themes that appear under the rubric of American “exceptionalism,” are characterized by an epistemological mish-mash, a contraction of analytical vision, and an unintended acquiescence in the self-satisfied cheerleading of the academy that began in the postwar years.

The Information and Communication Strategies Focused on Young People and Adolescents within the Field of Public Health

2013 ◽  
pp. 247-267
Author(s):  
Martha Sabelli ◽  
Jorge Rasner ◽  
María Cristina Pérez Giffoni ◽  
Eduardo Álvarez Pedrosian
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Target Population ◽  
Social Needs ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Electronic Information Resources ◽  
The Social ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
Communication Flow ◽  
The City

Within the framework of the implementation of the Integrated National Healthcare System (SNIS) along with national policies of information and communication at the República Oriental del Uruguay, a research is being conducted, focusing on adolescents and young people in vulnerable contexts in the city of Montevideo, taking them as both real and potential users of healthcare information. It also centers in the mediators in the flow of communication and information, especially among healthcare staff. From a multi-interdisciplinary approach, this investigation aims at identifying the behaviors and needs of the target population in relation to the information and ICTs, the availability and access to personal technological resources, its context of use (the community, their everyday lives, the institutions), the process of interaction among the different social actors in the sector, as well as in the communication flow within the organizational culture of these services. On this basis, it will provide models to design electronic information resources according to the social needs, and which may contribute to the inclusion of all citizens in the so-called Information Society.

Lifestyle

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-301
Author(s):  
Ryan Patrick Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Nuclear Family ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender Nonconformity ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Central Cities ◽  
Kinship Networks ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City

This essay offers a genealogy of lifestyle, a category widely used in the 1960s to mark dissident kinship networks and sexual practices: single parenting, bisexuality, gender nonconformity, polyamory, cohabitation, and communal living, among many others. I argue that the concept of lifestyle emerged in a desire among white mid-twentieth-century suburbanites for the social and sexual worlds that preceded rapid suburbanization, those most visible in the immigrant industrial metropolis at its peak in the decades immediately before the United States drastically restricted immigration in 1924. Even at the apex of suburbanization in the 1960s, many people refused to comply with the demand for suburban domesticity, staying in the city, joining countercultural groups, or adopting what came to be called alternative lifestyles. But in that act of dissent, urban planners, real estate developers, and marketing experts saw an opportunity and began to sell urban lifestyle landscapes that they claimed would reproduce the sexual heterogeneity of the early twentieth-century industrial metropolis. By the 1980s, as ever more people lived outside the nuclear family, a growing lifestyle market drove up prices in central cities that amplified the class and race exclusions that the social movements of the 1960s contested. This article is therefore both a critical and a recuperative reading of lifestyle, one that uses the category to show how dissident sexualities can be both the harbinger of the niche-marketed gentrified city and an incitement to new ways of living and loving that advance the pursuit of economic justice.

URBAN FOOTBALL PERFORMANCES: PLAYING FOR THE NEIGHBOURHOOD IN SENEGAL, 1950s–2000s

Africa ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susann Baller
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Urban Youth ◽  
Social Space ◽  
National Football League ◽  
Local Level ◽  
The State ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

ABSTRACTIn Senegal, neighbourhood football teams are more popular than teams in the national football league. The so-called navétanes teams were first created in the 1950s. Since the early 1970s, they have competed in local, regional and national neighbourhood championships. This article considers the history of these clubs and their championships by focusing on the city of Dakar and its fast-growing suburbs, Pikine and Guédiawaye. Research on the navétanes allows an exploration of the social and cultural history of the neighbourhoods from the actor-centred perspective of urban youth. The history of the navétanes reflects the complex interrelations between young people, the city and the state. The performative act of football – on and beyond the pitch, by players, fans and organizers – constitutes the neighbourhood as a social space in a context where the state fails to provide sufficient infrastructure and is often contested. The navétanes clubs and championships demonstrate how young people have experienced and imagined their neighbourhoods in different local-level ways, while at the same time interconnecting them with other social spaces, such as the ‘city’, the ‘nation’ and ‘the world’.

scholarly journals ‘Med 3’ rock and blues band to Trieste

1995 ◽  
Vol 19 (8) ◽  
pp. 509-510
Author(s):  
Rod Bale
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Social Service ◽  
Task Force ◽  
Service Users ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Medical Certificate ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The City

On a recent visit to the UK, Dr Guiseppe Dell Acqua, a leading exponent of the Italian psychiatric reforms, heard the ‘Med 3’ band play and extended an invitation to visit Trieste and give a concert. ‘Med 3’, the name being an allusion to the medical certificate, were formed in 1992. A Mental Health Week was held in the City of Portsmouth that year. In association with the Arts Connection, a local organisation promoting the arts to a wide audience, and the Portsmouth Care Consortium who were organising the event, artists in many fields ran workshops for mental health service users. Guy and Emma Heape, session musicians, ran a workshop at the Social Service Mental Health Day Centre and it was so successful it led to a band being formed. The band achieved recognition by winning a Mental Health Task Force award in 1993. An invitation to accompany the band to Trieste was readily accepted.

scholarly journals Description of the American Community of John Steinbeck’s Adventure in Novel Travels with Charley in Search of America 1960s

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 173
Author(s):  
Abbas Abbas
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Ethnic Discrimination ◽  
Research Data ◽  
American People ◽  
Eastern Region ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City

This article aims at describing the social life of the American people in several places that made the adventures of John Steinbeck as the author of the novel Travels with Charley in Search of America around the 1960s. American people’s lives are a part of world civilizations that literary readers need to know. This adventure was preceded by an author’s trip in New York City, then to California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, New Jersey, Saint Lawrence, Quebec, Niagara Falls, Ohio, Chicago, Illinois, Michigan, North Dakota, the Rocky Mountains, Washington, the West Coast, Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, New Orleans, Salinas, and again ended in New York. In processing research data, the writer uses one of the methods of literary research, namely the Dynamic Structural Approach which emphasizes the study of the intrinsic elements of literary work and the involvement of the author in his work. The intrinsic elements emphasized in this study are the physical and social settings. The research data were obtained from the results of a literature study which were then explained descriptively. The writer found a number of descriptions of the social life of the American people in the 1960s, namely the life of the city, the situation of the inland people, and ethnic discrimination. The people of the city are busy taking care of their profession and competing for careers, inland people living naturally without competing ambitions, and black African Americans have not enjoyed the progress achieved by the Americans. The description of American society related to the fictional story is divided by region, namely east, north, middle, west, and south. The social condition in the eastern region is dominated by beaches and mountains, and is engaged in business, commerce, industry, and agriculture. The comfortable landscape in the northern region spends the people time as breeders and farmers. The natural condition in the middle region of American is very suitable for agriculture, plantations, and animal husbandry. Many people in the western American region facing the Pacific Ocean become fishermen. The natural conditions from the plains and valleys to the hills make the southern region suitable for plantation land.

scholarly journals From Rebellion to Reform: Representations of Regional and Civic Improvement in the Aberdeen Journal, 1747–85

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-220
Author(s):  
Alex Benchimol
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Board Of Trustees ◽  
Agricultural Improvement ◽  
The Social ◽  
Democratic Rights ◽  
The City

The role of the Aberdeen Journal in facilitating the commercial modernization of Aberdeen and the northeast of Scotland in the four decades after the Battle of Culloden is an understudied aspect of the city's and region's social, economic and cultural history. This article examines the way improvement initiatives from key regional and civic stakeholders like the Board of Trustees for Fisheries, Manufactures and Improvements in Scotland, the Aberdeenshire Society for the Encouragement of Agriculture and Manufactures, the Commissioners of Supply, Aberdeen Town Council, and Marischal College were represented in the newspaper. In particular it highlights how James Chalmers 2 and James Chalmers 3—the Aberdeen Journal's proprietors during its first forty years—developed Scotland's first newspaper north of Edinburgh as an informational hub to integrate the city and region into key currents of Scottish and British capitalist modernization in the second half of the eighteenth century, from linen manufacturing and processing, to land reform and agricultural improvement. The social and economic transformation facilitated by the newspaper led to demands for political reform by those new commercial stakeholders, like John Ewen and Patrick Barron, who had profited from this regional modernization, and the article argues that the Aberdeen burgh reform movement of the early 1780s that utilized the Aberdeen Journal as a principal periodical platform was an essential consequence of this trajectory of regional and civic improvement, and a key test for translating it into a tangible expansion of democratic rights.

scholarly journals Observation, speculation, spectacle: visual culture(s) at the observation deck, 1968-2020

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Philipp Röding
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
World Trade Center ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Experience Economy ◽  
Economic Paradigm ◽  
The World ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City

The project investigates how economic paradigm shifts that occur at the beginning of the 1970s (primarily the abandonment of the gold standard and the endlessly increasing pool of capital awaiting investment that succeeded it) led to the emergence of a unique building type: the high-altitude observation deck. Part investment vehicle, part iteration of an ongoing fascination with the view from above, the project presents the observation deck as the point where three distinct paradigms intersect: observation, speculation and spectacle. Tracing the emergence of the observation deck through a series of case studies (Top of the World atop the World Trade Center (NYC), One World Observatory (NYC), The Tulip (London) the project enriches its interdisciplinary approach with archival research and fieldwork. Re-telling the complicated collaboration between architect Warren Platner and graphic designer Milton Glaser at the end of the 1960s, the project lays out how the observation deck is conceived at a time when the perceived “crisis” of New York results in a rapidly accelerating neoliberalization of urban space. An avatar of this emerging ideology the observation deck is heavily invested in making the city visually comprehensible. Incorporating a sort of neoliberalist geometry, the deck transforms the city into a product to be consumed instead of a reality to live in and thus paves the way for other ventures of what has been called the “experience economy.” Thus, it signals the ongoing shift away from an architecture that possesses any use value, towards one that, as Barthes put it with regards to Eiffel Tower, is centered only on viewing and being viewed. A speculative machine, the observation deck renders the city into a product.

scholarly journals Influências do capital social na formação do circo contemporâneo canadense: um estudo na Cidade de Montréal, Canadá

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-128
Author(s):  
Josiane Silva de Oliveira ◽  
Cristiane Marques de Mello
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Policy Formulation ◽  
Capital Social ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Professional Network ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Practices ◽  
Canadian Context ◽  
The City ◽  
Gain Access

Resumo: O objetivo com este artigo foi discutir as influências do capital social na constituição do campo organizacional do circo contemporâneo no Canadá. Para tanto, considera-se capital social como um conjunto de normas, redes e organizações por meio das quais os indivíduos obtêm acesso a poder e recursos para a tomada de decisão e formulação de políticas. Entende-se que a importância deste trabalho se encontra na relevância do estudo de organizações circenses, pela articulação entre as práticas culturais e econômicas que ocorrem em seu processo organizativo, especialmente no contexto canadense que se configura como referência mundial do campo do circo contemporâneo e ainda pouco estudado na área de Administração, especialmente no contexto canadense que se configura como referência mundial do campo do circo contemporâneo e ainda pouco estudado na área de Administração. A pesquisa foi desenvolvida na Cidade de Montréal, província de Québec, Canadá, em 2013. Foram entrevistados gestores das três organizações que atuam na regulamentação e disseminação das artes no circo canadense, e de oito das maiores companhias circenses contemporâneas. Os resultados indicam que trabalhar em grandes companhias circenses é um dos meios de constituir o capital social, possibilitando a formação, acesso a redes de profissionais e possíveis parceiros de trabalho. O capital social possibilita a articulação dos artistas em organizações para produzir vias alternativas de acesso a recursos financeiros e a participação em editais públicos de fomento. Uma das contribuições do estudo está nas evidências empíricas, quando da incorporação das práticas de gestão às práticas artísticas circenses.Palavras-chave: Capital social. Campo organizacional. Organizações circenses. Canadá. Artistas. Influences of social capital in the constitution of contemporary circus canadian: a study in Montréal City, Canada Abstract: The purpose of this article is to discuss the influences of social capital in the constitution of organizational contemporary circus field in Canada. Therefore, we consider social capital as a set of rules, networks and organizations through which individuals gain access to power and resources for decision-making and policy formulation. We understand that the importance of this work in the relevance of the study of circus organizations, by the articulation between cultural and economic practices that occur in their organizational process, especially in the Canadian context that is configured as a world reference of the field of contemporary circus and still little studied in the area of Administration. The research was conducted in the City of Montréal, province of Québec, Canada, in 2013. We interviewed managers of the three organizations operating in regulation and dissemination of the arts in Canadian circus, and of eight major contemporary circus companies. The results indicate that work on major circus companies is one way to establish the capital, enabling training, access to professional network of the area and potential working partners. The social capital enables the articulation of artists in organizations to produce alternative ways of access to financial resources and participation in public tenders for development. One of the contributions of the study is in the empirical evidences, when incorporating the practices of management to the artistic practices circenses.Keywords: Social capital. Organizational field. Circus organizations. Canada. Artists.

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