scholarly journals The bones beneath the streets: drifting through London’s Quaternary

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 453-475
Author(s):  
David Overend ◽  
Jamie Lorimer ◽  
Danielle Schreve
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Quaternary History

This article reflects on a Situationist dérive in Central London, which mobilised a creative engagement with the city’s Quaternary history (the last 2.6 million years). The aim was to animate paleoecological knowledge in the resistant, opaque and frenetic environment of a dense urban centre. This brief excursion into an alternative London is offered as a model for contemporary drifting that stretches out beyond our immediate situation to connect to successive geological and biological strata, reframing experiences of the urban environment through shifting scales and chronologies. The Situationists had declared ‘sous les pavés, la plage!’ (under the paving stones, there is a beach!), evoking the playful space of possibility behind the veneer of the city’s systems and structures. This drift aimed to search even deeper, encountering spectral inhabitations revealed by the bones beneath the streets. The article argues that uncovering these hidden ecologies has the potential to counter the urban prevalence of spectacular representations of wildlife and develop an eco-politics of co-existence.

The Spaces of Containment: Valérie Jouve's Urban Portraits

2014 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-168
Author(s):  
Olga Smith
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Architectural Structures ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This article analyses the complex dynamics between the human body and the urban environment in the work of French photographer Valérie Jouve. Focussing on a number of works drawn from the series Les Personnages and Les Façades, I propose the notion of containment to be crucial to the study of Jouve's urban portraits. I first approach it as a matter of containment of the human body by the civic and architectural structures of the city, arguing that Jouve renders visible the usually hidden mechanisms of such containment. This leads me to consider the question of boundaries and the relationship of the urban centre to its periphery, which, in the context of France, is bound up with narratives of social stratification. In the final part of the article I consider Jouve's photography as the space of representation, contained by the photographic frame, with theoretical discourse on the tableau providing the main analytical framework.

scholarly journals Research institutes in the 21st century: opportunities for architects

2021 ◽  
Vol 274 ◽  
pp. 01007
Author(s):  
Anna Guseva ◽  
Ilnar Akhtiamov ◽  
Rezeda Akhtiamova
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Information Exchange ◽  
Life Quality ◽  
Economic Potential ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Research Institutes ◽  
New Research ◽  
The City ◽  
Research Institute

Regarding the accelerated innovation in the 21st century, the article suggests modifying the spatial principles of Research Institutes as isolated institutions. The 21st century Research Institute should reflect the increasing levels of openness and security in modern information exchange methods. Thus, the Institute reveals invisible information processes in the physical urban environment, becoming the urban centre of innovation, a new workplace and leisure centre, as well as a catalyst for enhancing the city’s sustainability. The article analyses the historical paradigm of effective methods for introducing innovation to the urban environment, as well as modern socio-economic needs of innovative research institutes in the city. As a result, a unique organizational structure and functional programme of a new Research Institute are suggested. The Institute directly participates in enhancing the urban environment and forming a new lifestyle of the city dwellers. New spatial principles of such buildings are also proposed, updating the architectural typology of Research Institutes in the 21st century. Due to the increased interaction with the urban environment, the Research Institute and the city are mutually transformed. This contributes both to increasing the Institute’s efficiency and raising the city’s economic potential and life quality.

Concerning the Concept of Light-Colour Arrangement of the Urban Environment in the Central Part of Tyumen

2020 ◽  
pp. 34-42
Author(s):  
Nikolay I. Shchepetkov ◽  
Svetlana B. Kapeleva ◽  
Denis V. Bugaev ◽  
Gregory S. Matovnikov ◽  
Anna S. Kostareva
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Comprehensive Analysis ◽  
Assessment Criteria ◽  
Field Observations ◽  
General Plan ◽  
Design Solutions ◽  
Methodological Principles ◽  
The City

The article provides a comprehensive analysis of outdoor lighting in the central part of Tyumen (with consideration of conducted field observations) and prospects of its development on the basis of the general plan of illumination of the central part of the city being under design. Main provisions of this general plan as well as methodological principles and assessment criteria of design solutions illustrat-ed by photographs, schemes and visualisations of the illuminated objects are described.

‘Otherwise in London’ or, the ‘Essence of Things’: Modernity and Estrangement in the Nineteenth-Century Cityscape

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Representation ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.

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