Up Close and Impersonal: Ashcan Art, City Life, and Democratic Politics - Rebecca Zurier. Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. x + 407 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-22018-8.

From a disability perspective, what might a vision for the "good city" look like at the start of the twenty-first century? What does the idea of "inclusive city life" mean? This paper argues that the city is under-theorized by Disability Studies, and therefore suggests the field needs to reflect more about city life; examine the interconnections between urban settlement and disablement; and imagine the possibilities, within specific social contexts, for enhanced inclusion and citizenship in city spaces. I use Michael Ignatieff's work on the solidarity of strangers and Iris Marion Young's conception of city life as "a being together of strangers in openness to group differences" to examine ideas about social differences, democratic politics, and inclusion in the public realms of urban Canada.

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Reclaiming the City as Commons. Learning from Latin American Housing Movements

Built Environment ◽

10.2148/benv.46.1.139 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 46 (1) ◽

pp. 139-153

Author(s):

Stavros Stavrides

Keyword(s):

Latin American ◽

Housing Conditions ◽

Urban Living ◽

City Life ◽

Urban Condition ◽

Collective Creativity ◽

Urban Movements ◽

The City

This paper explores a renewed problematization of contemporary metropolises' dynamics in the light of speci fic efforts to reclaim the city as commons. Building on Lefebvre's theorizations of the city's virtuality and comparing it to contemporary approaches to the urban condition that emphasize the potentialities of contemporary city-life, it suggests that urban commoning is unleashing the power of collective creativity and collaboration. Struggles to appropriate the city as a crucial milieu for sharing transforms parts of city and produces new patterns of urban living. Examples from Latin American urban movements focused on establishing emancipatory housing conditions are used to illustrate the transformative capabilities of urban commoning.

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HOW’S LIFE IN THE CITY? LIFE SATISFACTION ACROSS URBAN CENTERS AND ECONOMIC REGIONS IN CANADA

Psychosociological Issues in Human Resource Management ◽

10.22381/pihrm4220162 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 4 (2) ◽

pp. 34 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Keyword(s):

Life Satisfaction ◽

Urban Centers ◽

City Life ◽

Economic Regions ◽

The City

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‘Seeing like a city’, or ‘seeing like a state’ in a city? Paris, capital of femonationalism

Environment and Planning C Politics and Space ◽

10.1177/23996544211002524 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 239965442110025

Author(s):

Claire Hancock

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Urban Politics ◽

Policy Making ◽

Common Factor ◽

Local Democracy ◽

Municipal Policy ◽

City Life ◽

Women In Decision Making ◽

The City

This paper questions the ‘seeing like a city’ vs. ‘seeing like a state’ opposition through a detailed discussion of urban politics in the city of Paris, France, a prime example of the ways in which the national remains a driving dimension of city life. This claim is examined by a consideration of the shortcomings of Paris’s recent and timid commitment local democracy, lacking recognition of the diversity of its citizens, and the ways in which the inclusion of more women in decision-making arenas has failed to advance the ‘feminization of politics’. A common factor in these defining features of the Hidalgo administration seems to be the prevalence of ‘femonationalism’ and its influence over municipal policy-making.

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A Proposed Framework for Identification of Indicators to Model High-Frequency Cities

ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information ◽

10.3390/ijgi10050317 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (5) ◽

pp. 317

Author(s):

Ahmad M. Senousi ◽

Junwei Zhang ◽

Wenzhong Shi ◽

Xintao Liu

Keyword(s):

Urban Studies ◽

Traffic Congestion ◽

High Frequency ◽

Urban Policy ◽

Low Frequency ◽

Highway Design ◽

City Life ◽

Cultural Affiliation ◽

Internal Mobility ◽

The City

A city is a complex system that never sleeps; it constantly changes, and its internal mobility (people, vehicles, goods, information, etc.) continues to accelerate and intensify. These changes and mobility vary in terms of the attributes of the city, such as space, time and cultural affiliation, which characterise to some extent how the city functions. Traditional urban studies have successfully modelled the ‘low-frequency city’ and have provided solutions such as urban planning and highway design for long-term urban development. Nevertheless, the existing urban studies and theories are insufficient to model the dynamics of a city’s intense mobility and rapid changes, so they cannot tackle short-term urban problems such as traffic congestion, real-time transport scheduling and resource management. The advent of information and communication technology and big data presents opportunities to model cities with unprecedented resolution. Since 2018, a paradigm shift from modelling the ‘low-frequency city’ to the so-called ‘high-frequency city’ has been introduced, but hardly any research investigated methods to estimate a city’s frequency. This work aims to propose a framework for the identification and analysis of indicators to model and better understand the concept of a high-frequency city in a systematic manner. The methodology for this work was based on a content analysis-based review, taking into account specific criteria to ensure the selection of indicator sets that are consistent with the concept of the frequency of cities. Twenty-two indicators in five groups were selected as indicators for a high-frequency city, and a framework was proposed to assess frequency at both the intra-city and inter-city levels. This work would serve as a pilot study to further illuminate the ways that urban policy and operations can be adjusted to improve the quality of city life in the context of a smart city.

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Neither Tramp Nor Hobo: Images of Unemployment in the Art of the Ashcan School

Prospects ◽

10.1017/s0361233300002118 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 30 ◽

pp. 433-450

Author(s):

Alexis L. Boylan

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

New York City ◽

South Carolina ◽

York City ◽

New York Times ◽

Visual Image ◽

City Life ◽

Ashcan School ◽

Mind And Body ◽

National Reputation

This short notice, entitled “When a ‘Hobo’ Works,” which appeared in the New York Times, July 13, 1912, might seem overwrought to contemporary readers in its definitive nature. The need to delineate work and nonwork, however, was quite serious business for Americans in the first decades of the 20th century. During this period, as evidenced in newspaper and journal articles, legislation, and popular culture, there was growing apprehension about the perceived differences and slippage among the ideas of the tramp, the hobo, the vagrant, the unemployed worker, and the worker. Most of this conversation was directed toward defining work and nonwork for men — specifically for white men. Tramping came to be viewed as an affliction of both mind and body, with writers, politicians, and reformers seeking to define the tramp and then theorizing how to put these newly codified bodies to work.Some of the most complex images of joblessness from this period were produced by the Ashcan school of artists, who frequently portrayed jobless men in their paintings and drawings. The Ashcan school, a group of six realist painters who lived and worked in New York City from 1900 to the First World War, established a national reputation as radicals rebelling against what they argued was a conservative artistic community woefully out of touch with modern American life. Ashcan artists depicted what they claimed to be the realities of the city around them — busy streets, shopgirls, ethnic communities, construction workers, and prostitutes, as well as tramps. John Sloan's The Coffee Line, 1905 (Figure 1), is typical of the kinds of images that Ashcan artists produced. The scene is a snowy winter's night in New York with a band of men in line to get a free cup of coffee. Jobless men are the stars here; unwitting leads in Sloan's slice of New York City life. The painting did much to communicate nationally a visual image of the tramp in New York City; it won honorable mention in 1905 at the Carnegie Institute International Exposition and was then exhibited in Chicago; Spartanburg, South Carolina; Dallas; and Seattle.

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Streets, scum and people: Discourses of (in)civility in postwar Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Anthropological Theory ◽

10.1177/1463499618757896 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 18 (2-3) ◽

pp. 326-356 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Azra Hromadžić

Keyword(s):

Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽

Urban Space ◽

Public Spaces ◽

Democratic Politics ◽

Ethnographic Research ◽

Careful Attention ◽

Political Inclusion ◽

Material Things ◽

Post War ◽

The City

Building on more than ten years of ethnographic research in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, this article documents discourses and practices of civility as mutuality with limits. This mode of civility operates to regulate the field of socio-political inclusion in Bosnia-Herzegovina; it stretches to include self-described “urbanites” while, at the same time, it excludes “rural others” and “rural others within.” In order to illustrate the workings of civility as mutuality with limits, the focus is on interconnections and messy relationships between different aspects of civility: moral, political/civil, and socio-cultural. Furthermore, by using ethnography in the manner of theory, three assumptions present in theories of civility are challenged. First, there is an overwhelming association of civility with bourgeois urban space where civility is located in the city. However, the focus here is on how civility works in the context of Balkan and Bosnian semi-periphery, suspended between urbanity and rurality. Second, much literature on civility implies that people enter public spaces in ways that are unmarked. As is shown here, however, people’s bodies always carry traces of histories of inequality. Third, scholarship on civility mainly takes the materiality of urban space for granted. By paying careful attention to what crumbling urban space looks and feels like, it is demonstrated how civility is often entangled with, experienced through and articulated via material things, such as ruins. These converging, historically shaped logics, geographies and materialities of (in)civility illustrate how civility works as an “incomplete horizon” of political entanglement, recognition and mutuality, thus producing layers of distinction and hierarchies of value, which place a limit on the prospects of democratic politics in Bosnia-Herzegovina and beyond.

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