The Yamanote Line as architecture: building on the ruination of urban limits

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-170
Author(s):  
François Blanciak

Infrastructure has become a relatively established field of inquiry in architectural academia over the last two decades, insofar as it builds on the rational and generative overtones of the term. However, the contrasting possibility that infrastructure might represent an obstacle for the city and its architecture has often been overlooked. Simultaneously, the idea that the city might be considered as a piece of architecture that can be comprehended, controlled, and eventually designed as a whole (whether from scratch or incrementally), has recently resurfaced, echoing Aldo Rossi's concept of ‘primary elements’. In his seminal book The Architecture of the City, Rossi described the way these elements ‘participate in the evolution of the city over time in a permanent way, often becoming identified with the major artefacts constituting the city’. But, he noted: [p]rimary elements are not only monuments, just as they are not only fixed activities; in a general sense they are those elements capable of accelerating the process of urbanization in a city, and they also characterize the processes of spatial transformation in an area larger than the city.

2008 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-17
Author(s):  
Suzanne M. Hall

This paper explores the documentation of social and spatial transformation in the Walworth area, South London. Spatial narratives are the entry point for my exploration, where official and ‘unofficial’ representations of history are aligned to capture the nature of urban change. Looking at the city from street level provides a worldly view of social encounter and spaces that are expressive of how citizens experience and shape the city. A more distanced view of the city accessed from official data reveals different constructs. In overlaying near and far views and data and experience, correlations and contestations emerge. As a method of research, the narrative is the potential palimpsest, incorporating fragments of the immediate and historic without representing a comprehensive whole. In this paper Walworth is documented as a local and Inner City context where remnants and insertions are juxtaposed, where white working class culture and diverse ethnicities experience difference and change. A primary aim is to consider the diverse experiences of groups and individuals over time, through their relationship with their street, neighbourhood and city. In relating the Walworth area to London I use three spatial narratives to articulate the contemporary and historic relationship of people to place: the other side examines the physical discrimination between north and south London, the other half looks at distinctions of class and race and other histories explores the histories displaced from official accounts.


2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 325-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanliu Lin ◽  
Bruno De Meulder ◽  
Shifu Wang

This paper examines the changes in the ways in which villagers have gained access to resources and services over time in what are now “villages in the city” within the city of Guangzhou. It compares and contrasts three periods: the clan-based traditional villages, the commune period and the period since the 1980s (which includes great economic success in many villages). It also discusses how migrants fit within this, as they have come to form a very large part of the population in these “villages in the city” but are largely excluded from state provision and from the benefits accruing to “villagership”.


2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 396-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Thiemeyer

The generic term ‘museum objects’ suggests that a uniform category is involved. But museums in various disciplines have exhibited objects according to quite different rules and have assigned values to them that depend on the standards of the field of inquiry concerned: aesthetic quality, value as a historical source, as a relic or as a representative item. Over time, various display conventions have become established, which appear to us today to be natural and that assign the objects to specific stimulus values. The aim of this essay is to achieve a better understanding of these exhibition practices and discipline-specific value standards. The study aims to discover why we have become accustomed to using objects in exhibitions in different ways, and it distinguishes between three types of object: work, specimen and witness. The hypothesis here is that each of these follows its own display conventions, forms of perception and standards of value. The present essay aims to situate these three types of object – work, specimen and witness – historically and in this way to articulate the differences in status that exist between them.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (15) ◽  
pp. 6060 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aura-Luciana Istrate ◽  
Vojtěch Bosák ◽  
Alexandr Nováček ◽  
Ondřej Slach

This research assesses the way main streets are perceived and used by pedestrians in an industrial, Central-European city—Ostrava in Czechia. The city has recently experienced shrinkage and changing patterns of socio-economic exchange, reason why this research is timely and needed in view of city center regeneration. Four main streets have been purposefully selected for this study. The research methods include questionnaires with street users (n = 297), direct observations of human activities and pedestrian counting. A link between business types and the way the street is experienced emerged. Results also indicate that vacant and unproperly managed spaces negatively affect the desire to walk on main streets. Furthermore, pedestrian volumes coupled with the amount of static activities determined several benchmark conditions for lively street segments. This research provides recommendations for policy-making and design and planning practice for regeneration of industrial city centers undergoing commercial and spatial transformation.


Crisis ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Hideki Bando ◽  
Fernando Madalena Volpe

Background: In light of the few reports from intertropical latitudes and their conflicting results, we aimed to replicate and update the investigation of seasonal patterns of suicide occurrences in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. Methods: Data relating to male and female suicides were extracted from the Mortality Information Enhancement Program (PRO-AIM), the official health statistics of the municipality of São Paulo. Seasonality was assessed by studying distribution of suicides over time using cosinor analyses. Results: There were 6,916 registered suicides (76.7% men), with an average of 39.0 ± 7.0 observed suicides per month. For the total sample and for both sexes, cosinor analysis estimated a significant seasonal pattern. For the total sample and for males suicide peaked in November (late spring) with a trough in May–June (late autumn). For females, the estimated peak occurred in January, and the trough in June–July. Conclusions: A seasonal pattern of suicides was found for both males and females, peaking in spring/summer and dipping in fall/winter. The scarcity of reports from intertropical latitudes warrants promoting more studies in this area.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 26-43
Author(s):  
Marcin Pliszka

The article analyses descriptions, memories, and notes on Dresden found in eighteenth-century accounts of Polish travellers. The overarching research objective is to capture the specificity of the way of presenting the city. The ways that Dresden is described are determined by genological diversity of texts, different ways of narration, the use of rhetorical repertoire, and the time of their creation. There are two dominant ways of presenting the city: the first one foregrounds the architectural and historical values, the second one revolves around social life and various kinds of games (redoubts, performances).


1997 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee D. Parker

Historical research in accounting and management, hitherto largely neglected as a field of inquiry by many management and accounting researchers, has experienced a resurgence of interest and activity in research conferences and journals over the past decade. The potential lessons of the past for contemporary issues have been rediscovered, but the way forward is littered with antiquarian narratives, methodologically naive analyses, ideologically driven interpretation and ignorance of the traditions, schools and philosophy of the craft by accounting and management researchers as well as traditional and critical historians themselves. This paper offers an introduction to contributions made to the philosophies and methods of history by significant historians in the past, a review of some of the influential schools of historical thought, insights into philosophies of historical knowledge and explanation and a brief introduction to oral and business history. On this basis the case is made for the philosophically and methodologically informed approach to the investigation of our past heritage in accounting and management


Author(s):  
David Konstan

This chapter examines the tension in classical thought between reciprocity and altruism as the two fundamental grounds of interpersonal relations within the city and, to a lesser extent, between citizens and foreigners. It summarizes the chapters that follow, and examines in particular the ideas of altruism and egoism and defends their application to ancient ethics. Various attempts to reconcile the two, especially in respect to Aristotle’s conception of virtue as other-regarding, are considered, and with the relationship to modern concepts of “egoism” and “altruism” is explored. The introduction concludes by noting that one of the premises of the book is that, in classical antiquity, love was deemed to play a larger role in the way people accounted for motivation in a number of domains, including friendship, loyalty, gratitude, grief, and civic harmony.


Author(s):  
Manuel Fröhlich ◽  
Abiodun Williams

The Conclusion returns to the guiding questions introduced in the Introduction, looking at the way in which the book’s chapters answered them. As such, it identifies recurring themes, experiences, structures, motives, and trends over time. By summarizing the result of the chapters’ research into the interaction between the Secretaries-General and the Security Council, some lessons are identified on the changing calculus of appointments, the conditions and relevance of the international context, the impact of different personalities in that interaction, the changes in agenda and composition of the Council as well as different formats of interaction and different challenges to be met in the realm of peace and security, administration, and reform, as well as concepts and norms. Taken together, they also illustrate the potential and limitations of UN executive action.


Author(s):  
Laura J. Shepherd

Chapter 5 outlines the ways in which civil society is largely associated with “women” and the “local,” as a spatial and conceptual domain, and how this has implications for how we understand political legitimacy and authority. The author argues that close analysis reveals a shift in the way in which the United Nations as a political entity conceives of civil society over time, from early engagement with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to the more contemporary articulation of civil society as consultant or even implementing partner. Contemporary UN peacebuilding discourse, however, constitutes civil society as a legitimating actor for UN peacebuilding practices, as civil society organizations are the bearers/owners of certain forms of (local) knowledge.


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