Manchukuo voices: re-interpreting a monumental space in Northeast China (1932–1945)

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Yuting Dong 董钰婷
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Northeast China ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Totalitarian Regime ◽  
Empire Building ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
A Site ◽  
Diversity Dynamics ◽  
Monumental Space

Abstract This article revisits Japan's empire-building in Northeast China through the construction of and reactions to the Daidō hiroba 大同広場 (Plaza of Great Unity) in Shinkyō, showing how Chinese and Japanese challenged the top-down attempt for building a totalitarian empire. These re-interpretations and definitions of Hiroba unveiled the diversity, dynamics, and complexity of Manchukuo society that cannot be fully grasped in a nation-state framework. Moreover, their voices challenged the previous depiction of such imperial monumental space as the physical materialization of imperial governmentality but a contested site where individuals challenged the official vision of Manchukuo. This article examines documents ranging from governmental documents to works of literature in both Chinese and Japanese. Compared to Japanese planners' vision of the Hiroba as a site of governmentality, visitors and local residents held differing interpretations of this space: some Japanese disapproved the attempt to reframe the urban space by a totalitarian regime, and many Chinese redefined the meaning of this “utopian” urban space to accord with their own tradition and everyday life.

scholarly journals Nomads, warriors and bureaucrats: nation-building and film in post-Soviet Kazakhstan

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rico Isaacs
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Political Condition ◽  
Building Process ◽  
A Site ◽  
Modern Perspective

Nation-building is a process which is often contested, not just among different ethnicities within a nation-state, but also among the titular ethnic majority. This article explores the contested nature of the nation-building process in post-Soviet Kazakhstan through examining cinematic works. Utilizing a post-modern perspective which views nations and national identity as invented, imagined and ambivalent it identifies four discursive strands within recent post-Soviet Kazakh cinema pertaining to nationhood and national identity (ethno-centric, civic, religious and socioeconomic). Rather than viewing government-sponsored efforts of identity formation in cinema as a top-down process in which the regime transmits its version of nationhood and identity, the discursive strands revealed in this article illustrate there are varying understandings of what constitutes the nation and national identity in Kazakh cinematic works. Furthermore, the strand which focuses on the socioeconomic tensions of modern nation-building in Kazakhstan uncovers how film is used as a site for dissent and social critique of Kazakhstan's modern political condition. What the article illuminates is how discourses related to nation-building can be both competing and complementary and that nation-building is a fluid and transgressive process in which among the titular majority there is no fixed unambiguous understanding of nationhood and national identity.

Encounters Across Borders. Modernist Ideas and Professional Practices in the 1970s Romania

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-420
Author(s):  
Mara Mărginean
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Third World ◽  
Professional Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Flows ◽  
Professional Practices ◽  
Totalitarian Regime ◽  
Urban Policies ◽  
European Culture

Building on several international professional meetings of architects organized in Romania or abroad, this article details how various modernist principles, traditionally subsumed to Western European culture, were gradually reinterpreted as an object of policy and professional knowledge on urban space in the second and third world countries. The article analyses the dialogue between Romanian architects and their foreign colleagues. It highlights how these conversations adjusted the hierarchies and power relations between states and hegemonic centres of knowledge production. In this sense, it contributes to the recent research on the means by which the "trans- nationalization of expertise" "transformed various (semi)peripheral states into new centres of knowledge and thus outlines a new analytical space where domestic actions of the Romanian state in the area of urban policies are to be analysed not as isolated practices of a totalitarian regime, but as expressions of the entanglements between industrialization models, knowledge flows and models of territoriality that were not only globally relevant, but they also often received specific regional, national and local forms.

Global Justice at the Municipal Scale

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fonna Forman ◽  
Teddy Cruz
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Local Governance ◽  
Global City ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City

Cities or municipalities are often the most immediate institutional facilitators of global justice. Thus, it is important for cosmopolitans and other theorists interested in global justice to consider the importance of the correspondence between global theories and local actions. In this chapter, the authors explore the role that municipalities can play in interpreting and executing principles of global justice. They offer a way of thinking about the cosmopolitan or global city not as a gentrified and commodified urban space, but as a site of local governance consistent with egalitarian cosmopolitan moral aims. They work to show some ways in which the city of Medellín, Colombia, has taken significant steps in that direction. The chapter focuses especially on how it did so and how it might serve as a model in some important ways for the transformation of other cities globally in a direction more consistent with egalitarian cosmopolitanism.

scholarly journals Branding Stratford: Social Representation and the Re-making of Place

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Desiderio
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Regeneration ◽  
Social Representation ◽  
London 2012 ◽  
Dialectical Process ◽  
The Media ◽  
The One ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Way

As part of the societal world, architecture and urban space do not have any ‘objective’ quality. They are representations. Their meaning is produced through the negotiation and interaction of individuals, groups and classes. Yet, such ‘subjective’ meanings do have a ‘material’ relevance, as they reflect a dialectical process between the functions, forms, ownership and practices of space. They reveal construal and construction: the way in which architectural spaces are represented on the one hand, and the way in which they are physically constructed and used on the other. Nowhere does this become more evident in our current society than in the arguments around urban renewal and regeneration. The Westfield Stratford City is a typical example. Part of the vast process of the urban regeneration of East London prompted by London 2012 Olympic Games, Westfield is a massive complex of luxury shops, restaurants, bars and five star hotels. It is seen by investors and local and national political authorities as capable of transforming Stratford into a site for shopping, tourism and leisure. It does this in numerous ways, one of which involves reconfiguring the image of the region through the press and media - through visual imagery and linguistic manipulations that promote a neoliberal agenda of gentrification that simultaneously devalue the existent societal structures and communities in the area. This paper offers a Critical Discourse Analysis of the manipulation of Stratford’s image by government, business and the media and suggests that the purely financially motivated misrepresentation it reveals, is typical of the urban regeneration ethos at work across the developed world today.

Il turismo responsabile e il rapporto coi residenti

2014 ◽  
pp. 83-102
Author(s):  
Sergio Fadini
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Economic Activity ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
The South ◽  
Tourism Impact ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
Tourism Destinations ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Responsible Tourism

The relationship between tourism and local residents is one of the most important problems of the tourist governance in a site; both in mature tourism destinations like European cultural towns, or in other sites, and where tourism is a novelty, so problems can be more. The concept of responsible tourism was born for helping local communities that bear tourism impact, using the values of sustainable development. So, inside it, this theme is very important, for who think that local communites must be more active in tourism; and for who think that it’s enough if they gain money from tourist activities. This paper analyzes the situation in Matera, a little town in the south of Italy, where tourism is becoming an important economic activity. Here there are daily problems between who plan and citizens. A planning concerning not only tourism, as the restricted traffic zone.

Cold War, Bottom-up: The 1956 Catholicos Election

2020 ◽  
pp. 126-166
Author(s):  
Tsolin Nalbantian
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Top Down ◽  
War Powers ◽  
Internal Politics ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

Chapter 3 examines the 1956 Catholicos election in Lebanon.While the excitement and success of the repatriation movement was a public relations victory for the USSR supported by local Armenian institutions and assisted by Lebanese and Syrian governments, this election became a site of contestation by Cold War powers and by their state and non-state allies and proxies in the Middle East. This analysis allows us to look at the Cold War in the Middle East not from the top down, through the eyes of Washington or Moscow (or Lebanon’s or Egypt’s state authorities, for that matter) during flash points like the 1958 U.S. intervention in Lebanon or the U.S. and Soviet reactions to the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt in 1956. Rather, in that election, Armenians made use of Cold War tensions to designate a leader of the Armenian Church who was seen to suit the community’s interests. That story also expands our understanding of Lebanon’s Armenians: from refugees and outsiders in national politics to true participants, whose own internal politics, moreover, were of interest to Lebanon’s authorities and who by now felt free to invade and use public spaces beyond their own neighborhoods to make political statements.

“Happy at Last”

2019 ◽  
pp. 124-136
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Q. McCune
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Global Market ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
Nation State ◽  
National Image ◽  
Nation States ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Sexual Economies

“Branded Beautiful” examines the relationship between individual pop celebrity, the promotion of a national identity, and the use of sexuality while branding each. Barbados promotes itself as a site of controlled abandon straddling performances of modernity while cashing in on imaginaries of “primitive” exoticism. Robyn “Rihanna” Fenty’s pop stardom is built on an ever-changing boldness that often includes in your face sexuality. The relationship between Rihanna and representations of Barbados is fraught with ambiguity. Using Rihanna’s August 2011 LOUD tour concert in Barbados, “Branded Beautiful” argues that the events surrounding the show shed light on the differing sexual economies of pop stardom and national tourism; that such divergences highlight the insecurities of nation-states seeking to make a name for themselves within a global market; and that despite the distinctions it is quite hard for a nation-state to divorce celebrity focused attention from an ideal national image.

Competing Discourses

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kátia da Costa Bezerra
Keyword(s):  
Social Policies ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Urban Identity ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
Inside Out ◽  
The Way

The chapter focuses on the way museums, historical areas, and iconic architecture become a key asset in the promotion of an urban identity and branding. The chapter examines the various facets of the Wonder Port project and its consequence for local residents. It studies more specifically the key role played by art in the production of conflicting and sometimes contradictory spatial imaginaries. The chapter shows the tensions between Rio Art Museum’s architecture and exhibits and community-based social and cultural projects such as Morrinho (Little Hill) and the Inside Out Morro da Providência project. It illustrates how top-down market-oriented social policies of displacement of long-time residents are put into question by favela-based cultural producers.

Simple Discussion on Creating a Historical and Cultural Concept on City Square Design — Exemplified by Hundred Miles of the Yellow River in Lanzhou

2011 ◽  
Vol 368-373 ◽  
pp. 3435-3439
Author(s):  
Ming Hui Ye ◽  
Xiang Wu Meng ◽  
Han Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Urban Culture ◽  
Yellow River ◽  
The Yellow River ◽  
Lanzhou City ◽  
Spiritual Civilization ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
Line Design ◽  
The City

City square, as a major public urban space. By a sense of spiritual civilization, it should be a window of the city and essential building space to daily life of local residents; it also bears an important heritage city in cultural context responsibility. Based on the Yellow River in Lanzhou City, Barry style line design concept of the study, analyzed and summarized, presented the concept of square designs to create a historical and cultural context of urban culture, the importance of heritage and modern artistic expression should be on urban history and culture diversity to interpretation, to make people re-establish the cultural identity for the city to gain ownership of the spirit.

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