scholarly journals A theory of the city as object: or, how spatial laws mediate the social construction of urban space

2002 ◽  
Vol 7 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 153-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill Hillier
GeoTextos ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Veronika Deffner

Para a análise empírica do fenômeno da reprodução invisível das desigualdades sociais e espaciais nas cidades brasileiras, elaborou-se a proposta, aqui apresentada, de uma geografía da desigualdade social, a fim de embasar uma investigação das desigualdades, destacando o espaço como força poderosa no processo de reprodução social. Trata-se de uma geografía urbana hermenêutica, no sentido de entender a textura da cidade em sua construção social. O conceito foi operacionalizado a partir do exemplo idiográfico da cidade de Salvador-BA, com o intuito de disponibilizar um modelo operacional e aplicável também a outras metrópoles, tanto no Brasil como em outras formações sociais caraterizadas por mecanismos ocultos que disfarçam e perpetuam a lógica da dominação social, as sociedades da chamada “perifería da modernidade”, segundo o sociólogo brasileiro Jessé Souza (2000, 2006). O papel da Geografia nessa perspectiva é o de buscar compreender a textura urbana fragmentada e dividida pelas disposições sociais, a partir do exame do fenômeno específico das favelas. Abstract GEOGRAPHY OF SOCIAL INEQUALITY: APPROACH FOR A CRITICAL URBAN GEOGRAPHY PRESENTED BY THE SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF THE FAVELA IN SALVADOR (BAHIA) The empirical analysis of the invisible reproduction of social and spatial inequalities in Brazilian cities demands a specific approach. The following article highlights this approach while taking a critical view on a geography of social inequality. It intends to conceptually contribute to the ongoing research into the causes of perpetuating injustices and examining space as a powerful factor in the reproduction of social inequality. This approach, which is one of hermeneutical geography, aims to understand the structure of the city in its social construction. Taking the idiographic example of Salvador in Brazil background knowledge was acquired following the principles of grounded theory. The approach should be seen as a transferable concept also applicable to other metropolises and societies that are part of the so called “modern periphery” (SOUZA 2000, 2006). The “modern periphery” is characterized by hidden mechanisms perpetuating the logic of social domination and subordination. The specific geographical focus of this approach is to understand the fragmented and divided urban space, coming from different social dispositions. This shall be examined at the example of the social construction and meaning of the favelas.


Author(s):  
Carlos Machado

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.


2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
Caragh Wells

This article suggests that over recent decades Catalan literary criticism has paid too little attention to the aesthetic attributes of Catalan literature and emphasised the social, political and cultural at the expense of discussions of narrative poetics. Through an analysis of Montserrat Roig’s metaphorical use of the city in her first novel Ramona, adéu, I put forward the view that the aesthetic features of Catalan literature need to be re-claimed. This article provides a critical analysis of the aesthetic importance of Roig’s representation of the city in her first novel and argues that she uses Barcelona as a critical tool through which to explore questions of both female emancipation and aesthetic freedom. Following a detailed discussion of Roig’s descriptions of how her female characters interact with particular urban spaces, I examine how Roig makes subtle shifts in her semantic register during these narrative accounts when her prose moves into the realm of the poetic. I conclude that this technique enables us to read her accounts of urban space as metaphors for aesthetic freedom and are inextricably linked to her wider concerns on the importance of liberating Catalan literature from the discourse of political nationalism.


Author(s):  
Юрий Владимирович Преображенский

Рассмотрен вопрос о сущности социокультурного пространства и его пересечении с экономическим пространством города. Показано, что наиболее эффективная организация пространственного взаимодействия данных пространств во многом является географической задачей. Предлагается метод изучения социальных практик населения для локализации точек и линий взаимодействия социокультурной и экономической сфер. Рассмотрены практики, в ходе которых создаются социокультурные ценности, положительно влияющие на экономическое пространство города. Обсуждается проблема влияния пешеходных пространств (наиболее насыщенных практиками) на формирование имиджа города. The question of the essence of the socio-cultural space and its intersection with the economic space of the city is considered. It is shown that the most effective organization of the spatial interaction of these spaces is in many ways a geographic task. A method is proposed for studying the social practices of the population to localize points and lines of interaction between the socio-cultural and economic spheres. The practice is considered in the course of which socio-cultural values are created that have a positive effect on the economic space of the city. The problem of the influence of pedestrian spaces (the most saturated with practices) on the formation of the city's image is discussed.


Author(s):  
Jacob Kreutzfeldt

Street cries, though rarely heard in Northern European cities today, testify to ways in which audible practices shape and structure urban spaces. Paradigmatic for what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call ‘the refrain’, the ritualised and stylised practice of street cries may point at the dynamics of space-making, through which the social and territorial construction of urban space is performed. The article draws on historical material, documenting and describing street cries, particularly in Copenhagen in the years 1929 to 1935. Most notably, the composer Vang Holmboe and the architect Steen Eiler Rasmussen have investigated Danish street cries as a musical and a spatial phenomenon, respectably. Such studies – from their individual perspectives – can be said to explore the aesthetics of urban environments, since street calls are developed and heard specifically in the context of the city. Investigating the different methods employed in the two studies and presenting Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the refrain as a framework for further studies in the field, this article seeks to outline a fertile area of study for sound studies: the investigation of everyday refrains and the environmental relations they express and perform. Today changed sensibilities and technologies have rendered street crying obsolete in Northern Europe, but new urban ritornells may have taken their place.


Author(s):  
Ilaria Geddes ◽  
Nadia Charalambous

This project was developed as an attempt to assess the relationship between different morphogenetic processes, in particular, those of fringe belt formation as described by M.R.G. Conzen (1960) and Whitehand (2001), and of centrality and compactness as described by Hillier (1999; 2002). Different approaches’ focus on different elements of the city has made it difficult to establish exactly how these processes interact or whether they are simply different facets of development reflecting wider socio-economic factors. To address this issue, a visual, chronological timeline of Limassol’s development was constructed along with a narrative of the socio-economic context of its development.  The complexity of cities, however, makes static visualisations across time difficult to read and assess alongside textual narratives. We therefore took the step of developing an animation of land use and configurational analyses of Limassol, in order bring to life the diachronic analysis of the city and shed light on its generative mechanisms. The video presented here shows that the relationship between the processes mentioned above is much stronger and more complex than previously thought. The related paper explores in more detail the links between fringe belt formation as a cyclical process of peripheral development and centrality as a recurring process of minimisation of gains in distance. The project’s outcomes clearly show that composite methods of visualisations are an analytical opportunity still little exploited within urban morphology. References Conzen, M.R.G., 1960. Alnwick, Northumberland: A Study in Town-Plan Analysis, London: Institute of British Geographers. Hillier, B., 2002. A Theory of the City as Object: or how spatial laws mediate the social construction of urban space. Urban Des Int, 7(3–4), pp.153–179. Hillier, B., 1999. Centrality as a process: accounting for attraction inequalities in deformed grids. Urban Des Int, 4(3–4), pp.107–127. Whitehand, J.W.R., 2001. British urban morphology: the Conzenian tradition. Urban Morphology, 5(2), pp.103–109.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Carla de Lira Bottura

This article introduces partial discussions from a doctoral research in progress that has as object of study the tendency to paci cation and concealment of con icts veri ed in the production process of contemporary urban space - particularly in the most recent Brazil- ian cities - as well as its strategies and mechanisms of control. As a eld of study, it is proposed the city of Palmas, capital of Tocantins, last planned capital of the twentieth century, founded on May 20, 1989, a year that symbolizes the opening of the Western world to the neoliberal economic policy. Based on the observation of the absence of signi cant movements of resistance to the urban space production process at Palmas and interpreting it as a re ection of pacifying tendency of consensus and appeasement / masking of con icts as a feature of neoliberal city, we propose the hypothesis of physical and territorial con guration of the city as a laboratory of the neoliberal model of urban management, in which socio-spa- tial dynamics gradually developed in other contemporary cities through processes historically constructed, get explicit and take place, immediately or in a very short time. Through a historical ap- proach to the context of its creation and occupation, we propose an urban space production reading based on the recognition of char- acteristics relating to its conditions of New Town and neoliberal city as well as the incipient action of the social movements dedicated to the struggles for housing as social agents in this process. 


2020 ◽  
pp. 42-54
Author(s):  
Anna Cudny

Influence of social capital of inhabitants on shaping common spaces in a housing environment The last two decades of the century have brought unusually many changes in the built environment. These include not only changes directly related to the emergence of a new urban fabric, but also changes in social attitudes towards common spaces located in residential areas. The built environment has never been evaluated so strongly. This assessment translates not only into the everyday outdoor activities of residents (necessary, optional and social activities), but also to economic projects (purchase, sale and rental of real estate). At the same time, the city ceases to be, as it has been so far, mainly subjected to criticism, and the residents are gradually changing their demanding attitude concerning the development of space to participate in the process of its creation. Society wants to have a real impact on urban space, especially on the space closest to them. Thus, the right to the city is no longer a privilege or a duty, but it becomes a need. Trying to meet this need results in a phenomenon which we can increasingly observe in Poland, and which we have been witnessing abroad for many years: activities in public space are changing into activities for public space. They include the transformation of common spaces related to the place of residence—improving their aesthetic quality, functional changes, modernization of development elements. Observing numerous examples of public participation in shaping public spaces, it was noticed that the initiation, course and effects of activities largely depend on the social capital of the group undertaking said activity. Accordingly, there is a need for research on the mutual relation between the level of social capital and the issue of shaping and managing public space with the participation of local communities, which will be the main topic of the paper. To investigate the above-mentioned issue, qualitative research methods were used in relation to the relationship: site visit, non-participant observation and focus interviews. This contributed to a comparative study of three selected Warsaw case studies. They were analysed in terms of meeting the qualitative criteria selected for the study. These criteria have been indicated on the basis of the Social Capital Development Strategy 2020, which is one of the parts of the Medium-Term National Development Strategy. The result of the analyses is an indication of derived factors from within the group of space users and external factors that have a positive and negative impact on initiating, carrying out and maintaining the effects of changes in common spaces developed with the participation of local communities in Polish conditions. The conclusions can be used to improve future participation processes related to urban space - both by non-professionals participating in them, as well as experts - architects and town planners.


2014 ◽  
Vol 977 ◽  
pp. 290-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhi Qiang Yu ◽  
Qiang Gao ◽  
Wen Feng Ding

In recent years , with the acceleration of the process of China's modernization cities , soil erosion and lead to many more serious environmental problems . This paper describes the harm to the social construction of ecological civilization city soil and water loss,analyzed the causes of soil erosion,and finally illustrates the importance of soil and water conservation of the city and puts forward some suggestions for the construction of soil and water conservation.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document