scholarly journals Theorizing urban social spaces and their interrelations: New perspectives on urban sociology, politics, and planning

2020 ◽  
pp. 147309522097694
Author(s):  
Yosef Jabareen ◽  
Efrat Eizenberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Urban Sociology ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Urban System ◽  
Planning Theory ◽  
Social Spaces ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology ◽  
The City

This paper proposes a new theoretical perspective for understanding urban social spaces and their interrelations. In an effort to understand these multifaceted, complex relations, an inquiry committed to a flat ontology was deployed. Accordingly, we draw our theorization on the Lacanian ontological lack, Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and Laclau and Mouffe’s discursivity of social reality. Thus, we propose that urban social spaces are discursive and real entities with real and sensual qualities and constituted through specific relations. They are located within discursive social relations, where each urban social space has a “differential position” in an urban system of relations. Each urban social space has an “identity,” defined by its specific mixture of social groups and its specific real and sensual qualities. These qualities construct a sensual object with a specific sensual identity within the web of different urban social spaces. Therefore, urban social spaces are being made through multiple interrelations and are constituted through their location in a nexus of positions. The proposed framework that captures the interrelations among urban social spaces is based on three interrelated logics: the logic of difference, the logic of equivalence, and the fantasmatic logic. Understanding the relations of urban social spaces through these logics offers multifaceted social, political, psychological, and spatial illumination, details, and a more nuanced and flexible investigation of the formation and change of these spaces. Hereby, the city is conceived as comprised of spatiotemporal configurations where social spaces have social and political relations ranging from harshly antagonistic to inclusive and equivalent. This proposed framework informs both sociological and political realms of planning theory. It provides planning theory with new perspectives for understanding the city as a web of interrelated social spaces. Furthermore, it allows a more critical understanding of urban reality by illuminating inequality, injustice, antagonism, and the formulation of “otherness.”

scholarly journals Online Social Space Identification. A Computational Tool for Optimizing Social Recommendations

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 3024
Author(s):  
Italo Zoppis ◽  
Andrea Trentini ◽  
Sara Manzoni ◽  
Daniela Micucci ◽  
Giancarlo Mauri ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Space ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Synthetic Data ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Daily Routine ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
Social Spaces ◽  
Heuristic Solution ◽  
Senior Project

Conscious and functional use of online social spaces can support the elderly with mind cognitive impairment (MCI) in their daily routine, not only for systematic monitoring, but to achieve effective targeted engagement. In this sense, although social involvement can be obtained when elder’s experiences, interests, and goals are shared and accepted by the community, an important subsistence for aging depends on the compelling information, users’ co-operation, and resource reliability. Unfortunately, applications aimed at optimizing the information content and the reliability of online users are still missing. Within the SystEm of Nudge theory-based ICT applications for OldeR citizens (SENIOR) project, an advanced social platform will be created in which the elderly with MCI will be involved in “optimized” social communities, where suggestions for general well-being will be recognized as useful by users and shared by care providers. We report the results of our study addressing this issue from a theoretical perspective: we propose a computational problem and a heuristic solution where “expert users” can engage and support the elderly by suggesting available services and facilities for their conditions. The numerical experiments on synthetic data are of interest when considering large communities, which is the most natural situation for online social spaces.

Topographies of the Possible

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laila Huber
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Political Field ◽  
Symbolic Space ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Spatial Dimensions ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The City

This article explores the creation of new structures of participation and counter imaginaries within the city between the poles of arts and politics. On the basis of two case studies, one situated in the non-institutionalised artistic field and one in the non-institutionalised political field, I will explore narratives of a 'topography of the possible' in the city of Salzburg. Aiming to outline collage pieces of a topography of the possible and of counter-narrative in and of the city – the city is looked at in terms of collage, understood as overlapping layers of the three spatial dimensions materiality (physical space), sociability (social space) and the imaginary (symbolic space). These are understood as differing but interrelated spatial dimensions, each one unfolding forms of collective appropriation of a city. The focus lies on the creation of social relations and collective imaginaries on the micro-level of cultural and political self-organised initiatives, looked at under terms of narration and storytelling. My ethnographic project asks for the creative potentiality of a city and for the creative power of social relations and collective imaginaries.

scholarly journals Convicts and exiled in Yekaterinburg in 1723 – late 1730s: to the question on formation of social space of the city

2020 ◽  
pp. 14-26
Author(s):  
Elena Vasil'evna Borodina
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Metallurgical Industry ◽  
Ural Region ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Penal Labor ◽  
The Government ◽  
The City

This article is dedicated to the history of the Institution of penal servitude and exile in Ural Region in the 1720s – 1730s. The subject of this research is the convicts and exiled who arrived to Yekaterinburg during the period from 1723 to the late 1730s. Analysis is conducted on the legislation dedicated to regulation of penal labor and exile in Russia. Differences in the government policy with regards to exiled in the XVII and XVIII centuries are revealed. The author also examines the reasons of the emergence of exiled and convicts in Ural Region, dynamics of their arrival from Tobolsk and the capital regions, as well as the stance of the mining and metallurgical authorities on this social category. Historians alongside legal historians turned attention to studying penal labor and exile in Siberia, practically not comparing the situation of exiled and convicts in other Russian regions. The novelty of this work consists in studying life of the representatives of this social group in the Ural Region in the early XVIII century, which was noted for transit location, connecting  European and Asian parts of the country, and was the center of mining and metallurgical industry. Leaning on the analysis of documental sources and records, the author concludes that convicts and exiled played a role in the formation of social space of Yekaterinburg. They were well integrated into the social relations: they were allowed to own homesteads and marry, but were under permanent control of the mining and metallurgical administration.

Development as Urban Imaginary: Post-colonial Planning and Heteroglossic Cities of India

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-254
Author(s):  
Jyotirmaya Tripathy
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Institutional Planning ◽  
Power And Resistance ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City

Contemporary India’s tryst with development continues to revolve around cities, and the latter remain the locus of India’s development narrative. But instead of seeing the city as already constituted or as a backdrop for economic activities, the present article proposes to implicate the city as a producer and product of social relations as well as a site of resistance and conformity. While doing so, it moves away from conventional modernist paradigms of imagining the city as the highest rung of development geography or the Marxist/subaltern studies formula of reading the city as a space of unredeemable inequality leading to the insurgency of the marginalised. What is proposed here is that the idea of city is emergent which expresses itself neither through its official representations nor through the radicalism of dissent but through multiple unstructured articulations of everyday life as well as the contingency of power and resistance. This is corroborated by drawing upon the experience of Thyagaraya Nagar (T. Nagar) which provides a representative Indian urban experience and where social and political relations spill out of institutional planning templates.

scholarly journals Social Behavior of the City Government and Citizens of the Metropolis during a Pandemic (for Example St Petersburg)

Discourse ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 65-74
Author(s):  
S. M. Eliseev ◽  
V. A. Glukhikh
Keyword(s):  
Social Behavior ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Urban Sociology ◽  
City Government ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Government ◽  
The City ◽  
Available Resources

Introduction. The coronavirus has become a serious test for national and regional power and management systems. Many systems have demonstrated their effectiveness and flexibility, competence and coherence. But there were also cases when erroneous decisions were made at the regional and even national levels. The purpose of this article is to determine the main trends in changes in the social behavior of the city government and citizens of St Petersburg in the context of the coronavirus pandemic.Methodology and sources. The article is based on classical and modern theories of urban sociology, sociology of the formation and functioning of public spaces and public life in a modern city, data from urban statistics on COVID incidence and empirical observations.Results and discussion. From the very beginning, the city government of Saint Petersburg became the center of coordination and mobilization of all city resources to overcome the pandemic. However, it is not always possible to manage the available resources correctly and effectively. One of the reasons for the inefficient use of available resources was that the government did not define a strategy to combat the coronavirus pandemic from the very beginning. Decisions were made situationally, sometimes inconsistently. It is worth noting that, despite the restrictions imposed, the social behavior patterns of a significant part of citizens have not changed significantly, but have only been transformed into hybrid social practices.Conclusion. The study described the existing normative and hybrid models of social behavior of the government and citizens in the public space of the city in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, identified the most affected types of social relations (local-local) and local spaces (trade, entertainment, etc.) in which new social norms are most often violated.

scholarly journals Rural development: a new microdistrict between the city and the village. Part 1. Theoretical analysis of social and territorial spaces of cities and villages

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 8-26
Author(s):  
Vladimir A. Davydenko ◽  
Elena V. Andrianova ◽  
Tatyana M. Filippova
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Modern World ◽  
General Context ◽  
Theoretical Point ◽  
General Hypothesis ◽  
The World ◽  
The Village ◽  
The City

The first part of the work is devoted to the analysis of socio-territorial transforming one of the desolate rural lands from the perspective of an approach to phenomenological sociology. The goal is, from a theoretical point of view, to deepen the social construction scientific approach of locality, based on the study of the topological perspective between the city and the village according to such space properties as orientability, compactness and connectivity, when they remain invariant during construction changes in the working site of the territory. The methodology of structural and genetic operationalization of social space is used in terms of P. Bourdieu, rethinking the production of space by A. Lefebvre’s paradigm, its verification in terms of the phenomenology of A. Appadurai, the production of place as a center of meaning created by experience from interpretations of humanistic geography. The used combination of several paradigms provides a theoretically powerful basis for understanding how interlocal social relations, lifeworlds, and the found out identities of the territory inhabitants between the city and the village are interconnected. The theoretical object of research is local communities in rural and suburban areas. General hypothesis of the research: at present, a new modification of the concept of “rural” has emerged, especially to the extent that it is typical for any country in the world, while global trends in the suburbanization (isolation) of individual rural areas as various forms of peripheral urban development acquire a special (priority) value, challenging A. Lefebvre’s “urban revolution” paradigm in the sense that the space of the modern world is becoming totally urbanized. This article confirms the hypothesis about the spread of the global suburbanization of Roger Cale’s theory, which is becoming more widespread and more significant phenomenon in different countries and regions of the world. This is also evidenced by the ever-expanding geography of suburban research in post-socialist countries, as well as criticism of the derived meaning concept of suburbs in relation to urban centers. The empirical evidence of this article confirms the growing importance of peripheral urban development in various forms and, in a more general context, leads to an understanding of the need to revise urban social theory in the spread context of global suburbanization. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the author’s rethinking of the reproduction concept of space both at the symbolic level of local subjectivity and in specific ties to the life worlds of the new territories inhabitants of spatial development, with the author’s empirical confirmation of the proposed approaches, conclusions and presented databases.

Shopping streets as social space: leisure, consumerism and improvement in an eighteenth-century county town

Urban History ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Stobart
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Physical Structure ◽  
Social Spaces ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
The City ◽  
County Town

ABSTRACTThe eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of ‘leisure towns’ as the chief resorts of wealthy consumers of a new range of goods and services. Their prosperity related closely to the growth of consumerism, but little attention has been given to the ways in which shopping and shops linked into the changing social, economic and physical structure of such towns. This paper explores these processes in the context of Chester – a classic, but largely neglected leisure town – and concludes that shopping streets became central to the economy of the city and amongst the most important of its social spaces.

scholarly journals PRACTICES AND MODES OF MODERN URBAN SPACEVISION

2019 ◽  
pp. 52-60
Author(s):  
R. D. Fanagey
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Social Geography ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Main Role ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
Space Architecture ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
The City

The article is devoted to the cultural analysis of the influence of the theory of postfordism, which considers post-Fordist production with post-industrial technology as the basis of industrial reproduction at the global level and the reproduction of capitalist social relations after the crisis of the Fordist mode of production and consumption. The abstract social space of the city is studied, which is formed by abstraction of labor and fetishization of things at the level of practice and the formation of a visually geometric representation of space with sign power re- pressive in relation to reality. The basis of the concept of sociality as the basis of a unified theory of space was developed by the French philosopher and sociologist A. Lefebvre and further developed by American social geography and urban studies, in particular in the works of D. Harvey, E. Soggy, D. Gottdiener and others. The followers of Lefebvre (apart from those important are F. Jameson's influence) refer in particular to the interdisciplinary trend of post-Fordism, within which postmodernism is considered in connection with the post-Fordist regime of accumulation (a concept developed by the Marxist regulatory school). S. Lesch focuses on the cultural mode of signaling. Likewise, D. Hartmann considers the influence of postmodernism on the post-Fordist regime of capitalism. Paolo True and Pascal Gillen consider within the limits of post-Fordism the existence in modern conditions of the plural. V. Martyanov examines the links between post-Fordism and the post-industrial / information society conceptualized by D. Bell, E. Toffler, M. Castels and others. The article deals with the reconstruction of the theory of social space and post-Fordism and outlines the social transformations of the twentieth century. In essence, it was a search for confirmation that the accumulation mode produces and reproduces social space. Architecture and urban space have become an important structural link through which to consider this connection and justify the invariance of the basic mode of accumu- lation through the reproduction of abstract social space and vice versa. The analysis of the discourse around the urban abstract space associated with the identity of the bourgeois class and the need for the for- mation of a hierarchized homogeneous spatial texture of production is carried out. As well as post-Fordist globalization and post-industrialization, which led to a change in the function and structure of the city with the main role of the post-modernist regime of signification as the logic of late capitalism in the context of programmed consumption.

The Social Specificity of Societal Nature Relations in a Flexible Capitalist Society

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Eversberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Capitalist Society ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Mutual Dependency ◽  
The Social ◽  
People’S Perceptions

Based on analyses of a 2016 German survey, this article contributes to debates on ‘societal nature relations’ by investigating the systematic differences between socially specific types of social relations with nature in a flexible capitalist society. It presents a typology of ten different ‘syndromes’ of attitudes toward social and environmental issues, which are then grouped to distinguish between four ideal types of social relationships with nature: dominance, conscious mutual dependency, alienation and contradiction. These are located in Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) social space to illustrate how social relationships with nature correspond to people’s positions within the totality of social relations. Understanding how people’s perceptions of and actions pertaining to nature are shaped by their positions in these intersecting relations of domination – both within social space and between society and nature – is an important precondition for developing transformative strategies that will be capable of gaining majority support in flexible capitalist societies.

How a Lingua Franca Spreads

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Mc Laughlin
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Atlantic Coast ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Everyday Language ◽  
Dominant Language ◽  
Speakers Of Other Languages ◽  
Realistic View ◽  
Atlantic Language ◽  
The City

This chapter considers how Wolof, an Atlantic language spoken in Senegal, has become an important lingua franca, and how French has contributed to the ascent of Wolof. The nature of social relations between Africans and French in cities along the Atlantic coast in the 18th and 19th centuries were such that a prestigious urban way of speaking Wolof that made liberal use of French borrowings became the language of the city. As an index of urban belonging, opportunity, and modernity, Wolof was viewed as a useful language, a trend that has continued up to the present. Four case studies illustrate how the use of Wolof facilitates mobility for speakers of other languages in Senegal. By drawing a distinction between the formal and informal language sectors, this chapter offers a more realistic view of everyday language practices in Senegal, where Wolof is the dominant language.

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