The Metonymic Urbanism of Twenty-first-century Mumbai

Urban Studies ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (13) ◽  
pp. 2955-2973 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Harris
Keyword(s):  
Policy Formation ◽  
First Century ◽  
Urban Research ◽  
European Cities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Urban Analysis ◽  
The City ◽  
Geographical Imaginations ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Research And Policy

Over the past decade, Mumbai has increasingly been understood as representative of new forms, trajectories and processes of 21st-century urbanism. This has been a welcome rejoinder to a continued predominance of North American and European cities within international urban research and debate. Yet it is important to query what theory cultures and geographical imaginations have been mapped onto Mumbai in this recent emphasis on the city. This paper argues that, unless Mumbai’s specificities and grounded realities are used to disrupt and reframe existing urban analysis, there is a risk of replicating the comparative perspectives and visions of élite policy-making. This does not mean conferring paradigmatic status on Mumbai or isolating Mumbai as an exceptional form of contemporary urbanism, but instead generating new theoretical dialogue and opening up new channels of urban research and policy formation within a wider world of cities.

scholarly journals Drones over Pompeii: cinematic perspectives on antiquity in the digital era

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 274-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Paul
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Digital Cinema ◽  
Digital Mapping ◽  
The Past ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Ancient City ◽  
Aerial View ◽  
Cinematic City ◽  
The City ◽  
Modern Perspective

Abstract Cityscapes have always been an important part of films set in antiquity, but little attention has yet been paid to the way in which digital cinema uses the ancient city to offer different kinds of access to the past. This article explores how twenty-first century cinema sees the city and apprehends history in new ways in films including Pompeii (2014), Agora (2009), and Gladiator (2000). It focuses on how digital cinema affords the opportunity to ‘see’ the past from above, a quintessentially modern perspective which prompts a range of important questions about the viewer’s relationship to history. The aerial view of the cinematic city encourages reflection on our familiarity with an ancient city, by utilizing the imagery and techniques of digital mapping and virtual reality reconstructions; and it explores our ability to gain mastery over the past, privileging godlike omniscience over the immersiveness that usually characterizes contemporary film. Finally, adopting the perspective of the drone, it suggests a more disturbing, dehumanized version of the past – and future. The discourse around these cinematic cities prompts important and timely consideration of whether digital technology necessarily improves our access to the past, or rather compromises it.

scholarly journals Building Transversal Solidarities in European Cities: Open Harbours, Safe Communities, Home

2021 ◽  
pp. 089692052098052
Author(s):  
Ilker Ataç ◽  
Kim Rygiel ◽  
Maurice Stierl
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
The Other ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Civil Society Organisation ◽  
European Cities ◽  
The Past ◽  
The One ◽  
Diverse Groups ◽  
The City

Over the past years, we have seen a rise in political mobilisations in EUrope and elsewhere, by and in solidarity with migrant newcomers. This article focuses on specific examples of what we conceptualise as transversal solidarities by and with migrants, and rooted in the city, the focus of this special issue. The examples we explore in this article include: Trampoline House, a civil society organisation which provides a home to migrant newcomers in Copenhagen; Queer Base, an activist organisation in Vienna providing support for LGBTIQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer) migrants; and finally, the Palermo Charter Process, a coalition of diverse groups seeking to create open harbours and ‘corridors of solidarity’, from the Mediterranean to cities throughout EUrope. While these examples are situated in and across different urban spaces, they share a common grounding in building solidarity through spaces of encounters related to ideas of home, community, and harbour. By exploring these distinct solidarity initiatives in tandem, we examine, on the one hand, how the production of spaces of encounters is linked to building transversal solidarities and, on the other, how transversal solidarities also connect different spaces of solidarity across different political scales.

scholarly journals Vilnius archipelago: Performative walks around this performative city

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Kasner
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
Recent History ◽  
Central European ◽  
European Cities ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Totalitarian Regimes ◽  
The City ◽  
Cultural Hybrid

Vilnius archipelago: Performative walks around this performative cityThe present study deals with the performative memory of a city, namely modern Vilnius, the capital of the Republic of Lithuania. The difficult past of Vilnius that is shared by other eastern and central European cities and is marked by the bitter legacy of the “city of changed blood” (Pl. “miasto o wymienionej krwi”, a notion introduced by M. Lewicka) has been subjected to a number of changes effected by modernity and dynamic Europeanization at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The confrontation between the past and modernity has resulted in serious social and national problems (e.g. Polish–Lithuanian relations) dating to the early as well as the most recent history of Lithuania and its capital. Having experienced various totalitarian regimes, Vilnius is an interesting example of the redefining of the memory of the space of a city at a time of a changing political system; it is also an example of the establishing of a hierarchy of new values and symbols. Vilnius is also a cultural hybrid resulting from long-lasting transgressions. However, a comprehensive account of its history still remains utopian. Drawing on the #skaitomevilniu (‘We read Vilnius’) project that was carried out in Vilnius in 2016–2017 and which adopted a performative perspective, the author of the present study attempts to describe a city that is constantly becoming. Archipelag Wilno. O performatywnym chodzeniu po performatywnym mieścieNiniejszy artykuł został poświęcony problematyce performatywnej pamięci miasta na przykładzie współczesnego Wilna, stolicy Republiki Litewskiej. Skomplikowana, choć tak charakterystyczna dla miast Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej, przeszłość Wilna, naznaczona bolesnym dziedzictwem „miasta o wymienionej krwi” (pojęcie M. Lewickiej), zderzyła się na przełomie XX i XXI wieku z pełną zmian nowoczesnością i pośpieszną europeizacją. Ta konfrontacja stała się źródłem poważnych problemów społecznych i narodowych (w tym relacji polsko-litewskich), których korzenie sięgają zarówno najodleglejszych, jak i nowszych dziejów Litwy i jej stolicy. Wilno jako miasto silnie nacechowane doświadczeniem totalitaryzmów jest ciekawym przykładem ilustrującym proces redefiniowania pamięci przestrzeni miasta w okresie transformacji ustrojowej oraz ustanawiania nowej hierarchii wartości i symboli. Jest także kulturową hybrydą będącą efektem wielowiekowych transgresji, której całościowy opis pozostaje ciągle badawczą utopią. Autorka artykułu podejmuje próbę opisu miasta, które „ciągle się staje”, na przykładzie realizowanego w Wilnie w latach 2016–2017 projektu #skaitomevilniu (pol. Czytamy Wilno) z zastosowaniem perspektywy performatywnej.

Aesthetic uses of the past and limits in the reconstruction of historical spaces inside a videogame

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 004
Author(s):  
Alberto Venegas Ramos
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Culture Medium ◽  
Final Section ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The City ◽  
Digital Spaces

Along the last years we have assisted to the release of a great number of videogames set in the past as, for example, Assassin’s Creed: Origins (Ubisoft, 2017). This game offered the player the possibility to tour the city of Alexandria during the first century before Christ. My intention in this text is to develop the use of the past in the reconstruction of urban digital spaces through three video-game sagas, BioShock (Irrational Games y 2K Marin, 2007 – 2013), Uncharted (Naughty Dog, 2006 – 2017) and Assassin’s Creed (Ubisoft, 2007 – 2017). Each one of them will serve us to develop and examine the aesthetic uses of the past in the reconstruction of urban digital spaces through the proposed concepts: design, consumption and production. Irrational Games’ saga will help us to understand the first concept, the Naughty Dog one the second and the Ubisoft one the third. After these three sections we will elaborate a final section where we will build the video-game as a mass culture medium with other media of same scope and shared features.

The Invention of the Favela

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Licia do Prado Valladares
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
First Century ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Past ◽  
Anthropological Study ◽  
First Time ◽  
Research And Policy

For the first time available in English, Licia do Prado Valladares’s classic anthropological study of Brazil’s vast, densely populated urban living environments reveals how the idea of the favela became an internationally established—and even attractive and exotic—representation of poverty. The study traces how the term “favela” emerged as an analytic category beginning in the mid-1960s, showing how it became the object of immense popular debate and sustained social science research. But the concept of the favela so favored by social scientists is not, Valladares argues, a straightforward reflection of its social reality, and it often obscures more than it reveals. The established representation of favelas undercuts more complex, accurate, and historicized explanations of Brazilian development. It marks and perpetuates favelas as zones of exception rather than as integral to Brazil’s modernization over the past century. And it has had important repercussions for the direction of research and policy affecting the lives of millions of Brazilians. Valladares’s foundational book will be welcomed by all who seek to understand Brazil’s evolution into the twenty-first century.

The space of the city in reconstruction: the lawscapes of Barcelona and Berlin

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 229-242
Author(s):  
Chiara Mazzoleni
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Italian School ◽  
European Cities ◽  
Strong Focus ◽  
Gradual Loss ◽  
Urban Analysis ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Constituent Elements ◽  
The City ◽  
Rapid Shift

AbstractThe momentous changes that have affected European cities over the last two centuries have had profound consequences for the configuration of urban space. Urban planning and architecture, torn between the dialectically opposed forces of permanence and change, particularly in building practices and the use of urban space, have had an important influence on the material construction of cities. The outcome was a strong focus on the individual architectural artefact and, at the same time, the spread of a process of atopical fragmentation of urban space and the gradual loss of status of contact space. The latter suffered a process of deterioration due to disaffection and abandonment of the practice and a rapid shift of interest towards space decontextualised and standardised by the networks. The recent experiences of Barcelona and Berlin have been a reaction to this impoverishment of the meaning of the city, drawing on the heuristic contribution of the Italian school of urban analysis to recover the constituent elements of urban space and the conventions that have determined the appearance of European cities and are part of the tacit understanding of their inhabitants.

scholarly journals The spatialization of time and history in the skyscrapers of the twenty-first century in Shanghai

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Antonio Roche Cárcel
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
General Concept ◽  
First Century ◽  
Chinese Modernity ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The City

AbstractThis article aims to find out to what extent the skyscrapers erected in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in Shanghai, follow the modern program promoted by the State and the city and how they play an essential role in the construction of the temporary discourse that this modernization entails. In this sense, it describes how the city seeks modernization and in what concrete way it designs a modern temporal discourse. The work finds out what type of temporal narrative expresses the concentration of these skyscrapers on the two banks of the Huangpu, that of the Bund and that of the Pudong, and finally, it analyzes the seven most representative and significant skyscrapers built in the city in recent years, in order to reveal whether they opt for tradition or modernity, globalization or the local. The work concludes that the past, present and future of Shanghai have been minimized, that its history has been shortened, that it is a liminal site, as its most outstanding skyscrapers, built on the edge of the river and on the border between past and future. For this reason, the author defends that Shanghai, by defining globalization, by being among the most active cities in the construction of skyscrapers, by building more than New York and by building increasingly technologically advanced tall towers, has the possibility to devise a peculiar Chinese modernity, or even deconstruct or give a substantial boost to the general concept of Western modernity.

Byzantine Aphrodisias: changing the symbolic map of a city

1990 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 26-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Cormack
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Urban History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The City ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity

The excavation of Aphrodisias in Caria has now uncovered so substantial an area of the city that the site must now feature in studies of both the Ancient and Byzantine city. Aphrodisias offers an example of a city whose history runs from the second half of the first century BC (when the settlement first prospered as a Free City in the fertile plain around the shrine of Aphrodite) until the late Middle Ages. But the chronological range of the surviving material also sets a familiar problem of urban history. How can such studies interpret buildings and settings which existed and functioned over many centuries, maintaining a presence in the city as its history passed from one historical ‘period’ to another? Can their permanence be recognised as a ‘continuity’; or should one look for clues of change and discontinuity? Is indeed the dichotomy of continuity and discontinuity an inevitable part of the vocabulary of urban history? The words have certainly dominated discussion of ‘capital’ cities like Rome and Constantinople in which much stress has been laid on identifying ‘continuities’, the strength of ‘tradition’, and significant ‘renewals’ of the past.

scholarly journals The urban geographical imagination in the age of Big Data

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 205395171666512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor Shelton
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Technical Expertise ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Urban Research ◽  
Geographical Imagination ◽  
Urban Science ◽  
The City ◽  
Opening Up

This paper explores the variety of ways that emerging sources of (big) data are being used to re-conceptualize the city, and how these understandings of what the urban is shapes the design of interventions into it. Drawing on work on the performativity of economics, this paper uses two vignettes of the ‘new urban science’ and municipal vacant property mapping in order to argue that the mobilization of Big Data in the urban context doesn’t necessarily produce a single, greater understanding of the city as it actually is, but rather a highly variegated series of essentialized understandings of the city that render it knowable, governable and intervene-able. Through the construction of new, data-driven urban geographical imaginaries, these projects have opened up the space for urban interventions that work to depoliticize urban injustices and valorize new kinds of technical expertise as the means of going about solving these problems, opening up new possibilities for a remaking of urban space in the image of these sociotechnical paradigms. Ultimately, this paper argues that despite the importance of Big Data, as both a discourse and practice, to emerging forms of urban research and management, there is no singular or universal understanding of the urban that is promoted or developed through the application of these new sources of data, which in turn opens up meaningful possibilities for developing alternative uses of Big Data for understanding and intervening in the city in more emancipatory ways.

scholarly journals Notícias de jornal como procedimento metodológico para análise episódica (1985, 1995 e 2009) de enchentes do rio Poti em Teresina – Piauí

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 507
Author(s):  
Maria Suzete Sousa Feitosa ◽  
Jonas Alves Da Silva Neto ◽  
Hikaro Kayo De Brito Nunes
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Information ◽  
Daily Rainfall ◽  
Intense Rainfall ◽  
Rainfall Events ◽  
The Past ◽  
Local Media ◽  
Urban Analysis ◽  
Social Environmental ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

R E S U M OO presente estudo tem como objetivo analisar, sob a utilização de notícias de jornal como procedimento metodológico, as enchentes do rio Poti na cidade de Teresina/Piauí, durante os episódios de 1985, 1995 e 2009. Metodologicamente, adotou-se: conhecimentos teóricos do Sistema Socioambiental Urbano; análise dos dados diários de chuva no período de 30 anos (1981 a 2010) manipulados pelo balanço hídrico climatológico; utilização de notícias de jornal (jornal O Dia e TV Cidade Verde); e, por fim, análise interpretativa. Dessa forma, em 1985 registrou-se o maior volume de precipitação naqueles últimos vinte anos, como expressa a capa do O Dia sobre a maior enchente dos últimos dez anos. No episódio de 1995, o Jornal O Dia destacou que após 20 dias consecutivos de chuvas o rio Poti ultrapassou em 6 metros a cota normal, em decorrência principalmente dos temporais à montante. Já no episódio de 2009, a imprensa local destacou que as chuvas são as maiores desde 2001 resultando no decreto de emergência na capital associado aos eventos pluviométricos intensos no período de janeiro a abril correspondendo a 87,7% do esperado para todo o ano. Destarte, o cruzamento de informações técnico-científicas e aquelas de notícias de jornal possibilitou compreender o processo de adensamento urbano, as dinâmicas das chuvas e como tal relação se comportou ao longo da faixa temporal, o que legitima uma série de construções e ressignificações da memória relacionando chuva, dinâmica do rio Poti e população ribeirinha.Palavras-chave: Chuva, Rio, Jornal, Episódio, Desastre, Teresina.                                                                                                                                 Newspaper stories as a methodological procedure for episodic analysis (1985, 1995 and 2009) of the Poti river floods in Teresina – Piauí A B S T R A C TThis study aims to analyze, in the use of newspaper reports as a methodological procedure, the flooding of the river Poti in the city of Teresina / Piauí, during episodes of 1985, 1995 and 2009. In terms of methodology was adopted: theoretical knowledge System Social-Environmental Urban; analysis of daily rainfall data in the 30-year period (1981-2010) handled by the climatic water balance; use of newspaper reports (newspaper O Dia and TV Cidade Verde); and finally, interpretative analysis. Thus, in 1985 it was the one that registered the highest volume of rainfall in those last twenty years, as expressed the cover of O Dia of the greatest flood of the past ten years. In episode 1995 Jornal O Dia pointed out that, after 20 consecutive days of rain the Poti river exceeded 6 meters in the normal quota, mainly due to the time upstream. Already in the episode, 2009 local media pointed out that rainfall is the highest since 2001 resulting in the emergency decree in the capital associated with intense rainfall events in the period from January to April corresponding to 87.7% of the expected full-year. Thus, the intersection of technical and scientific information and those of newspaper news possible to understand the urban densification process, the dynamics of rainfall and how this relationship behaved along the temporal range, which legitimizes a number of buildings and reinterpretation of memory relating rain, dynamics and Poti river local population.Keywords: Rain, River, Newspaper, Episode, Disaster, Teresina.

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