Producing space, the confrontation between abstract space and everyday life: ‘I wunder if heaven got a ghetto”

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tonia Carless
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Uneven Development ◽  
Abstract Space ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Urban Restructuring ◽  
The Social ◽  
Macro Scale ◽  
Local Space ◽  
Cardiff Bay

This paper is intended as a contribution to current debates about the changing conditions of urban space and uneven development. It will analyse the functions of the architectural professions in this process and how their productions prefigure the social and economic arrangement of space. It will examine these notions through analysis of Cardiff Bay and will analyse the changes occurring under late capitalism in the shift to Post-Fordist modes of accumulation. While the paper will examine the local space of Cardiff Bay, the analytical ground will be extended to the ongoing restructuring of space under the new global economies at a macro scale.Urban restructuring is most evident in the decentred metropolis of the post-modern city, the new cities for consumption. The growth or collapse of multinational capital needs to be seen as framing the occupation of space, its investment and disinvestment, and as an ongoing process, part of a systematic reprogramming of space that can and should be examined at every stage of its operations.Relocating the economic, political and social into considerations of space means that the paper will also incorporate historical analysis of modes of production and social formations. To consider space as ideological means that transfigured space must also be considered. The paper will therefore raise ideas that are directed towards the transformation of social and political space, and will examine that which identifies Lefebvre's distinction between appropriated and dominated space.

The Prevailing Disease: Foucault on the Institutional Meaning of Epidemics and Compact Models of Power Relations

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-104
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Compact Models ◽  
Complex Relationships

The article focuses on Michel Foucault’s work with the social history of medicine and evaluates its potential for analyzing the political impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Foucault reveals the bond between quarantine measures in European cities and the gradual perfection of techniques of power. He uses organized anti-epidemic activities applied to leprosy and plague as examples of “compact models” of power relations that he discusses in terms of exclusion and discipline. He reveals complex relationships between the physical body of an individual and what he calls the “social body” of a state. Foucault describes how “health policy” was formed during the second half of 18th century when it drastically changed urban space and became one of the key techniques of government. In Foucault’s lectures published as Security, Territory, Population, he turns to the concept of a “prevailing” or literally “reigning” disease. The countermeasures against the disease enable the development of special techniques applicable to the population in a given historical period. He uses the statistical description of patients suffering from smallpox as an example of how a regime of power and government of the population develops by invoking security and risk assessment. In the concluding section, the author estimates the potential of Foucauldian historical analysis as a tool for anticipating the tendencies inherent in the techniques of power mobilized to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

Social aspects of fair in the urban culture space

Neophilology ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 176-182
Author(s):  
Natalia N. Lavrinova
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Information Exchange ◽  
Urban Culture ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Communicative Space ◽  
Creative Life

We consider the necessity of the fair activities development in the urban culture space. A fair has the beneficial influence on social and cultural and economic changes in the urban environment. The research is based on the relevance of studying the fair potential as a social and cultural phenomenon, which is both economic and cultural as it contains functions of a social and cultural nature. To determine the fair social aspects in the urban culture space we consider fair as a social institution, examine its social and organizational activities. We consider the historical aspects of the fair appearance and functioning in the urban culture space. The social aspects of the fair are determined in many ways by the material world peculiarities which fill the fair space. Social, cultural senses and meanings are enclosed in the fair things and the fair itself is some kind of a language of culture. Communicative function of the fair is significant, it manifests itself in the creation of a communicative space, which includes communication, information exchange, self-realization, self-representation. A cultural and historical analysis of the fair social aspects led to several conclusions. Firstly, modern fairs are aimed at the preservation and reproduction of traditional culture. Secondly, such events contribute to the formation of new economic and social and cultural communication platforms. Such events as the fair fill the urban space with art, creative life, and allow urban culture to develop. The fair contributes to the renewal and dynamics of urban space. It preserves and complements the traditional sphere of cultural heritage.

White Writers, Race Matters

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory S. Jay
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
The Social ◽  
White Writers ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Taking Action

White liberal race fiction has been an enduringly popular genre in American literary history. It includes widely read and taught works such as Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird along with period bestsellers now sometimes forgotten. Hollywood regularly adapted them into blockbusters, reinforcing their cultural influence. These novels and films protest slavery, confront stereotypes, dramatize social and legal injustices, engage the political controversies of their time, and try to move readers emotionally toward taking action. The literary forms and arguments of these books derive from the cultural work they intend to do in educating the minds and hearts, and propelling the actions, of those who think they are white—indeed, in making the social construction of that whiteness readable and thus more susceptible of reform. The white writers of these fictions struggle with their own place in systems of oppression and privilege while asking their readers to do the same. The predominance of women among this tradition’s authors leads to exploring how their critiques of gender and race norms often reinforced each other. Each chapter provides a case study combining biography, historical analysis, close reading, and literary theory to map the significance of this genre and its ongoing relevance. This tradition remains vital because every generation must relearn the lessons of antiracism and formulate effective cultural narratives for passing on the intellectual and emotional tools useful in fighting injustice.

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.

Coerced Human Mobility and Elite Social Networks in Early Dynastic Iraq and Iran

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-57
Author(s):  
Vitali Bartash
Keyword(s):  
Human Mobility ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Spatial Mobility ◽  
Male Adult ◽  
Early Dynastic ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
The Persian Gulf ◽  
City State ◽  
Social Profiles

AbstractThe article provides a historical analysis of cuneiform records concerning the circulation of unfree humans among the political-cultic elite in southern Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf during the Early Dynastic IIIb period, ca. 2475–2300 BCE. The analysis of the written data from the Adab city-state demonstrates that the royal house used the unfree as gifts to maintain a sociopolitical network on three spatial levels – the internal, local, and (inter)regional. The gift-givers and gift-receivers were mostly male adult members of the local and foreign elite, whereas the dislocated unfree humans were heterogeneous in terms of age, gender, and the ways they lost their freedom. The author relates the social profiles of both groups to the logistics of human traffic to reveal the link between social status and forms and nature of spatial mobility in the politically and socially unstable Early Dynastic Near East.

scholarly journals “His Soul Is Weeping inside That He Cannot Bury the Dead as before.” Plague and Rebellion in Debrecen (Hungary), 1739–1742

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 687
Author(s):  
Ildikó Sz. Kristóf
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Medical Science ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Criminal Proceedings ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Anthropological Study ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Religious Piety ◽  
The City

This is a historical anthropological study of a period of social and religious tensions in a Calvinist city in the Kingdom of Hungary in the first half of the 18th century. The last and greatest plague epidemic to devastate Hungary and Transylvania between cca. 1738 and 1743 led to a clash of different opinions and beliefs on the origin of the plague and ways of fighting it. Situated on the Great Hungarian Plain, the city of Debrecen saw not only frequent violations of the imposed lockdown measures among its inhabitants but also a major uprising in 1739. The author examines the historical sources (handwritten city records, written and printed regulations, criminal proceedings, and other documents) to be found in the Debrecen city archives, as well as the writings of the local Calvinist pastors published in the same town. The purpose of the study is to outline the main directions of interpretation concerning the plague and manifest in the urban uprising. According to the findings of the author, there was a stricter and chronologically earlier direction, more in keeping with local Puritanism in the second half of the 17th century, and there was also a more moderate and later one, more in line with the assumptions and expectations of late 18th-century medical science. While the former set of interpretations seems to have been founded especially on a so-called “internal” cure (i.e., religious piety and repentance), the latter proposed mostly “external” means (i.e., quarantine measures and herbal medicine) to avoid the plague and be rid of it. There seems to have existed, however, a third set of interpretations: that of folk beliefs and practices, i.e., sorcery and magic. According to the files, a number of so-called “wise women” also attempted to cure the plague-stricken by magical means. The third set of interpretations and their implied practices were not tolerated by either of the other two. The author provides a detailed micro-historical analysis of local events and the social and religious discourses into which they were embedded.

Manufacturing Distress: Race, Redevelopment, and the EB-5 Program in Central Brooklyn

2021 ◽  
pp. 089692052098661
Author(s):  
Amanda T. Boston
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Foreign Investment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Neighborhoods ◽  
Uneven Development ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Racial Inequalities ◽  
Development Policies ◽  
Job Growth

Gentrification’s racial consequences are garnering increased attention as the process advances into majority–minority urban neighborhoods. This study examines the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program’s implementation in Brooklyn, New York to ground these trends in policies through which gentrification is promoted, histories of racism and uneven development against which they are unfolding, and their disparate impacts on Black communities. While the program purports to use foreign investment to promote job growth in high unemployment areas, its financing of multimillion and billion-dollar development projects facilitates the displacement of longtime residents of the very places the initiative was designed to improve. Central Brooklyn and its outlying areas, home to one of the largest contiguous Black communities in the United States, are host to numerous EB-5 projects that have failed to produce sustainable job growth for existing residents and heightened the growing crisis of unaffordability. My analysis shows how EB-5 projects have enabled investors to use distressed areas disproportionately inhabited by poor and working-class Black communities to qualify for funding, while redistributing benefits upward to wealthy developers and affluent residents and consumers. Ultimately, the EB-5 program and other neoliberal, colorblind urban development policies exacerbate existing racial inequalities in the organization and operation of urban space.

scholarly journals Social origin and educational attainment in China: a historical analysis of 70 birth cohorts

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Changchun Fang ◽  
Xiaotian Feng
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Educational Attainment ◽  
Educational Inequality ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Social Origin ◽  
Birth Cohorts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Impact

Abstract The impact of social origin on educational attainment is conditioned on the social context in which people live. In recent decades, with changes in the Chinese society, how has the impact of social origin on educational inequality changed? Based on an analysis of 70 birth cohorts, this study details the effect of social origin on educational inequality and its trends over the past 70 years. The results of this study also indicate that the historical stages hypothesis (HSH) and model-shift hypothesis (MSH) emphasized in previous studies cannot fully describe the historical changes in educational inequality. In addition to macrosocial processes, there may exist other structural factors that also affect educational inequality but are neglected. The social context and its transformation, which shaped the relationship between social origin and educational inequality, need to be examined in more detail.

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