They go to the city, and sometimes they come back: Conceptualising rural and urban spaces through experiences of circular migration in Paraguay

2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 383-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Finnis
Author(s):  
Carmen María López-López

El propósito de este artículo es analizar la escritura de Lara Moreno en el marco de la narrativa neorrural. Nuevas tendencias literarias como el ruralismo o el giro hacia el campo suponen una reacción contra el poder hegemónico de las ciudades que emergió en el siglo XX. La ficción española ofrece en muchos casos un camino narrativo para explorar las representaciones literarias del ruralismo en el siglo XXI. Desde esta perspectiva, se propone profundizar en Por si se va la luz, una novela escrita por Lara Moreno en la que Nadia y Martín abandonan la ciudad para ir a vivir al campo ante el ascenso de la crisis económica. Este acontecimiento supone una grieta o un corte desde una perspectiva simbólica, de acuerdo con los diferentes ejes en que la novela se estructura: la tensión entre los espacios rural y urbano, los cruces entre los instintos animales, la sexualidad y la racionalidad, así como la relación que los personajes establecen con el lenguaje y el silencio para verbalizar la distopía desde un escenario rural. The aim of this article is to analyze the writing of Lara Moreno in the frame of neorrural narrative. New literary tendencies such as ruralism or the turn to the countryside suposes a reaction against the hegemonic power of cities which rise on twenty centuries. Spanish fiction offers in many ways a narrative camine to explore literary representations of ruralism in XXI century. From this perspective, it is proposed to delve into Por si se va la luz (2013) a novel written by Lara Moreno, in which Nadia and Martín leave the city to go to live to the countryside considering the rise of economic crisis. This event suposes a crack or cut on a simbolic way, according to the different axis in which the novel is structured: the tension between rural and urban spaces, the between animal instints, sexuality and rationality, so as to the relationship which character stablish with language and silence in order to verbalize the dystopia from the rural scenery.


Author(s):  
Paul Niell

The Baroque in Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism, in parts of the Americas formerly comprising the Spanish and Portuguese empires, has been traditionally studied as a question of adherence to or deviation from a Counter-Reformation style promoted primarily by ecclesiastical institutions. This article expands upon what is meant by “Baroque” in the architecture and urbanism of the Iberian empires in the Americas. Through the analysis of urban plans, images of the city, architectural interiors and exteriors, physical urban spaces, and other forms of material culture, this article argues that Ibero-American architecture and urbanism in the age of the Baroque belonged to a phenomenon of ordering and thereby creating the “New World” as ideologically constituted colonial spaces that reified social and political norms. Furthermore, human subjects actively negotiated the spaces created by architecture and the city, making the American Baroque also part of a process of negotiating order and thereby producing American spaces.


Urban Science ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 22
Author(s):  
Valdemir Antoneli ◽  
Manuel Pulido-Fernández ◽  
João Anésio Bednarz ◽  
Leonardo Brandes ◽  
Michael Vrahnakis ◽  
...  

The catchment area of River das Antas (Irati, Paraná, Brazil) is of high importance both for human consumption and irrigation. Within Irati, this river passes through a rural area and through the city of Irati, crossing both poor and rich neighbourhoods. We selected three study areas downstream (a rural area, poor community, and rich neighbourhood) in which we measured turbidity, the concentration of sediments and pH during rainy days. Our results showed downstream trends of increasing turbidity and concentrations of sediments with decreasing pH. The values of turbidity and of concentration of sediments were significantly different in the rural area, while the pH values were significantly different between the three study areas. These findings highlight the effect of agricultural activities in the generation of sediments and turbidity. The—presumably expected—effects of organic urban waste from the poor neighbourhood were also detected in the pH values. We conclude that efforts should be made to ensure that land planning and training/education programmes on sustainable farming practices are undertaken by the authorities to reduce water pollution and its effects on water bodies during rainfall events, since paving streets is not a feasible option in the short term due to the high costs associated with this measure.


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.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sujayita Bhattacharjee ◽  
Sanjukta Sattar

PurposeThe lives of the poor in the urban spaces of India are filled with hardships. They live amidst poverty and struggle to survive within other problems such as insecure jobs, lack of proper housing, unsanitary conditions and low levels of health immunity. This vulnerable section of the population has been rendered furthermore vulnerable by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in ways that were never imagined before. Taking this into consideration, the purpose of this article is to examine the vulnerability of the poor in the urban settings of India with special reference to Mumbai in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology adopted in the study is based on the analysis of secondary data and content analysis of the existing literature. In addition to this, the study also makes use of certain narratives of the urban poor in Mumbai that have been captured by various articles, reports and blogs.FindingsThe findings of the study reveal how the urban poor of India, with special reference to Mumbai, the financial capital of India, has emerged as the worst sufferers of the socioeconomic crisis caused by the social distancing and lockdown measures imposed for combating the pandemic.Originality/valueThe study tries to explore the reality of the urban poor's right to the city in the wake of the pandemic.


Author(s):  
Sadegh Fathi ◽  
Hassan Sajadzadeh ◽  
Faezeh Mohammadi Sheshkal ◽  
Farshid Aram ◽  
Gergo Pinter ◽  
...  

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-144
Author(s):  
Anna Notaro

This article, originally delivered at the 16th international conference of the Architectural Humanities Research Association (University of Dundee, November 2019), seeks to engage with the ‘emotive’, ‘sensorial’ and ‘affective turn’, as defined by authors in the humanities, social and cultural studies in order to consider the emotional responses to the mediated experiences of place and to inquire into how individuals and collectives react to a changing sensory environment. It adopts a multi-disciplinary approach that blends historical, cultural and mediated dimensions of urban spaces and places while maintaining a focus on the kind of locative/interactive art which is less concerned with representation and more with radical construction, social engagement and communication. The purpose is to try and provide an answer to the question: what does ‘sensing the city’ exactly entail when the city’s form, as Baudelaire memorably put it, ‘changes faster than the human heart?’


2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (19) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Lina K. Suárez

Seastead is a floating city experiment for international waters based on economic studies carried out by the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to increase real estate market growth, driven by an economic incentive dedicated to medical tourism, aquaculture, technology incubators, and support platforms for offshore rigs. A new pre-conceptual model of a floating city was created, conceptualizing an analysis of the floating habitat as a means for development and expansion. is new habitat style was designed taking into account considerations of the marine habitat, current habitats, utopian projects and studies regarding the expansion of urban spaces. e city was designed on a semi-submersible offshore platform chosen through a parametric model made by the Seasteading Institute, which allowed for a final modular array comprised by 300 containers organized by a crane system, this being the organizational system of the city. 


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-303
Author(s):  
R.Y. Fedorov ◽  
◽  
O.S. Sizov ◽  
V.V. Kuklina ◽  
A.A. Lobanov ◽  
...  

On example of the city of Nadym, located in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Area, the authors consider the socio-ecological problems of the development of green, blue and white open urban spaces. The research approach presented in the article is based on the study of a multifaceted complex of urban social and natural systems in their integrated unity, not just as public places, but as biomes — highly integrated urban ecosystems. A posteriori the reserchers based on the materials of interviews conducted in 2020 with experts who in different years took part in the study or planned the development of the open urban spaces in Nadym, as well as on the analysis of available publications on this topic and publicly available data. The study found that factors such as the short summer, during which many residents leave the city, as well as the prevalence of freezing temperatures for almost eight months, in fact, transform the green and blue spaces of Nadym into white. This situation indicates the advisability of a more active appeal to the concept of a “winter city” in the development of the city urban environment. The application of the concept principles can be in demand in the process of creating more comfortable living conditions and spatial mobility of the Nadym residents, as well as for developing the recreational opportunities of the city open spaces and integrating them into the natural environment surrounding the city, which in general can be considered as one of the factors for the sustainable development of the city and the formation of post-industrial features in its socio-economic life.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Luiz Felipe Rocha Benites

Abstract This article explores the idea of movement through an analysis of the flows between rural and urban areas, more specifically between small farms (roças) and the peripheries of big cities. I turn to my own ethnographic research on rural and riverside communities in the north of Minas Gerais, as well as ethnographies produced on populations in the Cerrado Mineiro, in order to question the primacy of movement in the definitions of the city and to extend the notion through an approach that incorporates the relations between persons and things circulating in both these social spaces.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document