New Urban Spaces

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Brenner
Keyword(s):  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Urban Restructuring ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Intensive Research ◽  
Spatial Strategies ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
The City

The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. How can these transformations be deciphered? In this book, critical urban theorist Neil Brenner argues that confronting this challenge requires not only intensive research on urban restructuring but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit—the city or the metropolis—and explores the multiscalar constitution, political mediation, and ongoing rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric, from the local and the regional to the national and the planetary. New Urban Spaces offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban life, the role of multiscalar state spatial strategies in animating them, and their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as radically revisable: key urban concepts, methods, and cartographies must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate.

The constitution of the city and the critique of critical urban theory

Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110110
Author(s):  
Allen J. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Structure ◽  
Special Reference ◽  
Spatial Dynamics ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
Developmental Phases ◽  
The City

A theoretical account of the genesis and internal spatial structure of cities is given. The essence of the urbanisation process is described in terms of the following main developmental phases: (a) the emergence of relationships based on specialisation and interdependence in society; (b) the pre-eminent role of the division of labour within these relationships and its recomposition in dense spatial nodes of human activity; and (c) the concomitant formation of the networked intra-urban spaces of the city. These phases are then contextualised within three intertwined dimensions of urban materiality, namely, an internal dimension (the internal organisation and spatial dynamics of the city), a socially ambient dimension (the relational structure of society at large) and an exogenous dimension (the geographic outside of the city). In light of this account, an evaluative review of what I designate ‘the new critical urban theory’ is carried out, with special reference to planetary urbanisation, postcolonial urban theory and comparativist methodologies. I argue that while every individual city represents a uniquely complex combination of social conjunctures, there are nonetheless definite senses in which urban phenomena are susceptible to investigation at the highest levels of theoretical generality.

Openings: The Urban Question as a Scale Question?

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-45
Author(s):  
Neil Brenner
Keyword(s):  
Urban Studies ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Urban Restructuring ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
The Core ◽  
Spatial Restructuring ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
The City ◽  
Intense Debate ◽  
Geopolitical Context

For over a century, the urban question has generated intense debate on matters of conceptualization, method, and interpretation. Since the 1990s, in the context of debates on post-Fordism, globalization, and urban restructuring, the urban question has been redefined as a question of scale. Why has this scalar redefinition of the urban occurred, and what does this mean for urban theory and research? What are its analytical possibilities and dangers? In what ways does such an approach reframe the long-standing emphasis on the “city” as the core focal point for urban studies? This opening chapter elaborates these questions in intellectual and geopolitical context, thus setting the stage for the explorations of urbanization, state spatial restructuring, and rescaling processes that follow in the rest of the book. This chapter also situates the book’s argument in relation to contemporary debates on abstraction, generalization, comparison, and contextual particularity in critical urban theory.

The City-Logic of Resistance: Subverting Urbicide in the Middle East City

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 10-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Civil Resistance ◽  
Extreme Variant ◽  
Urban Terrain ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

Most armed conflict today takes place within urban terrain or within an urbanised context. An extreme variant of such armed conflict is violence perpetrated by external state and non-state forces within the city, known as urbicide. Urbicidal violence deliberately strives to kill, discipline or deny the city to its inhabitants by targeting and then reordering the sociomaterial urban assemblage. Civil resistance within urbicidal violence seeks to subvert the emerging alternative sovereign order sought by such forces. It does so by using the inherent logic of the city in order to maintain/restore the community's social cohesion, mitigate the violence, affirm humanity, and claim the right to the city. This paper investigates the city-logic of civil resistance through examples drawn from the recent urbicidal experiences of Middle East cities such as Gaza, Aleppo, Mosul, and Sana'a. Theoretical insights from the conflict resolution literature, critical urban theory, and assemblage thinking inform the argument.

Queering Bratislava: On Borders, Otherness and Public Space

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myrto Tsilimpounidi
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Academic Discourse ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Visual Sociology ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Visual Material ◽  
The City

This paper follows the multiple layers of an urban fabric that is stereotypically characterised as ‘post-socialist’, yet in essence, it is subject to ongoing transitions – much like the notion of being queer. What can we learn from queer theory in relation to post-socialist urban theory? What are the methodological advancements that derive from a queer approach to research? In this light, the presentation breaks the usually logocentric academic discourse as it engages with the premises of visual sociology. Using visual material from Bratislava focusing on urban inscriptions (street art, urban interventions), it opens up a discussion about the changes in the city and the struggles of different groups.

scholarly journals The Role of Urban Morphology Design on Enhancing Physical Activity and Public Health

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (7) ◽  
pp. 2359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sadegh Fathi ◽  
Hassan Sajadzadeh ◽  
Faezeh Mohammadi Sheshkal ◽  
Farshid Aram ◽  
Gergo Pinter ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Physical Activity ◽  
Space Syntax ◽  
Urban Morphology ◽  
Physical Activities ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Equation Modeling ◽  
The City

Along with environmental pollution, urban planning has been connected to public health. The research indicates that the quality of built environments plays an important role in reducing mental disorders and overall health. The structure and shape of the city are considered as one of the factors influencing happiness and health in urban communities and the type of the daily activities of citizens. The aim of this study was to promote physical activity in the main structure of the city via urban design in a way that the main form and morphology of the city can encourage citizens to move around and have physical activity within the city. Functional, physical, cultural-social, and perceptual-visual features are regarded as the most important and effective criteria in increasing physical activities in urban spaces, based on literature review. The environmental quality of urban spaces and their role in the physical activities of citizens in urban spaces were assessed by using the questionnaire tool and analytical network process (ANP) of structural equation modeling. Further, the space syntax method was utilized to evaluate the role of the spatial integration of urban spaces on improving physical activities. Based on the results, consideration of functional diversity, spatial flexibility and integration, security, and the aesthetic and visual quality of urban spaces plays an important role in improving the physical health of citizens in urban spaces. Further, more physical activities, including motivation for walking and the sense of public health and happiness, were observed in the streets having higher linkage and space syntax indexes with their surrounding texture.

scholarly journals Gay Subculture and the Cities in India: A Critical Reading of Select Works of R Raj Rao

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sriya Das ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Research Method ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Ultimate Objective ◽  
The City ◽  
Indian Penal Code

In delineating the painful experiences of LGBTQ individuals after the introduction of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code R Raj Rao’s works look into the struggle of these people to survive the onslaught of normative sexual discourses. Given the fact that Queer sexuality has been continuously questioned, suspected and tormented prior to its legitimate recognition in 2018, Rao draws attention to the nuances of gay urban life in India. The paper critically analyses the representation of gay subculture in the cities of India as reflected in select works of Rao. It demystifies how gay people share the urban space, manage to make room for their pleasure in the cities, and pose a threat to the dominant understanding of sexuality. The ultimate objective of this paper is to understand the role of the city in the (un)making of a subcultural identity. Textual analysis, with reference to certain theoretical frameworks, would be used as a qualitative research method.

Spatial Agency, Territory, and the Right to the City

2021 ◽  
pp. 257-286
Author(s):  
Quill R Kukla
Keyword(s):  
Public Spaces ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Henri Lefebvre ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

This chapter argues that inclusion in a city or neighborhood requires more than the right to physically reside in it; it requires what Henri LeFebvre, Don Mitchell, and others have called the “right to the city.” The right to the city is not just a formal right to be inside a city without being thrown out; it should be conceived, according to this chapter, as a right to inhabit the city. This requires that we have voice and authority within a city; that we be able to participate in tinkering with it and remaking it; and that we belong in it rather than just perching in it. The chapter explores the complex relationships between public spaces, inclusive spaces, and the right to the city. It examines what sorts of spaces city dwellers need in order to have a flourishing urban life and exercise their spatial agency. It explores some of the barriers that different kinds of bodies face to being included in urban spaces and speculates about what it would take to build a more just and inclusive city.

Introduction to David Harvey

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Swyngedouw ◽  
David Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Urban Life ◽  
Original Writings ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Academic Mission ◽  
Historical Materialist ◽  
Johns Hopkins University ◽  
Racial Exclusion ◽  
Intellectual Influence ◽  
The City ◽  
Us Cities

David Harvey is one of the few global public intellectuals whose lifelong political and academic mission is the search for a more genuinely humanizing geography of everyday urban life. His relentless and thought-provoking engagement with the realities and contradictions of contemporary capitalist urbanization has long inspired those seeking to fight for an urban life free from the practices of social, political, and racial exclusion and the divisions that have been the hallmark of modern urbanization throughout the world. Harvey is one of the urban geographers whose intellectual influence has reached most widely across disciplines. With a Ph.D. in Geography from Cambridge University, he embarked on a lifelong intellectual and political trajectory that has transformed the ways in which urban theorists approach the capitalist city and in which activists seek urban, social, and political change. Already noted for the landmark publication in 1969 of Explanation in Geography, his epistemological and political attention soon turned to a more radical and Marxist understanding of the urban. This epistemological shift coincided with his transatlantic migration to the Johns Hopkins University, where he taught Marxist urban theory for the next fifteen years or so. The deep injustices that had just come to the boil in rioting US cities, combined with a rediscovery of the power of historical materialist Marxist analysis, resulted in the publication of Social Justice and the City (1973). Harvey’s theorization of the city, deeply embedded in the original writings of Marx, also draws on the radical urban theories and politics pioneered by Henri Lefebvre. For Harvey, cities are—and have always been—highly differentiated spaces of activity, excitement, and pleasure. They are arenas for the pursuit of unoppressed activities and desires, but also ones replete with systematic power, danger, oppression, domination, and exclusion. Exploring the tensions between this dialectical twin of emancipation and disempowerment has been at the centre of Harvey’s theoretical and political concerns. Questions of justice cannot be seen independently from the urban condition, not only because most of the world’s population now lives in cities, but above all because the city condenses the manifold tensions and contradictions that infuse modern life.

Place Management/Making

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hoe Su Fern
Keyword(s):  
Urban Spaces ◽  
City Centre ◽  
Governance Structures ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Place Management ◽  
Policy Documents ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The City

This chapter examines the role of the arts and artists in rejuvenating urban spaces in Singapore, where place management ideas are currently being used to rejuvenate parts of the city centre. Coexisting alongside state-driven initiatives are artist-led strategies where local art practitioners and organizations activate latent and/or under-utilized spaces. Through an analysis of policy documents and qualitative ethnographic fieldwork, this study explores the interplay between top-down aspirations and formal place management efforts, and the organic ways artists have activated and engaged with spaces. Ultimately, I argue that there is a need to balance formal governance structures with more support for artists engaging in organic, ground-up initiatives.

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