Architecture, Time, and Cultural Politics

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-79
Author(s):  
Paul Jones
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Architectural Design ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Architectural Production ◽  
Crystal Palace ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Cultural Orientations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ways Of Being

Architecture is inextricably entangled with time. Illustrating this point, the article explores two moments of architectural production centred on London in the mid-19th century: the ‘Battle of the Styles’, a struggle over the social meaning of historicist architectural design and its suitability for state-funded public buildings; and the proto-modernist Crystal Palace, which housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. While ostensibly involving different cultural orientations to pasts-presents-futures, both cases reflect how political claims can involve the mobilisation of temporalised architectural forms. The general contention is that architecture is a culturally experimental space through which nation-states and architects seek to orientate otherwise abstracted notions of temporality. While there is no straightforward or singular correspondence between temporality and architectural sites, the built environment is pushed and pulled by states’ politicised claims regarding time and temporality. Architecture always involves the materialisation of particular and partial visions of the world as is, as was, and as could be; temporal registers in the built environment involve the stabilisation of some ways of being and the displacement of others. The political basis of these processes can be illuminated sociologically.

HERITAGE IN THE LIVED ENVIRONMENT OF THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES AND THE GULF REGION

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph John Hobbs
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
United Arab Emirates ◽  
Architectural Design ◽  
Social Sustainability ◽  
Gulf Region ◽  
Planning And Design ◽  
Spatial Features ◽  
Gulf Countries ◽  
The Social ◽  
Islamic Values

This paper examines how the architectural, social, and cultural heritage of the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf countries may contribute to better development of this region’s lived environment. Modern urbanism has largely neglected heritage in architectural design and in social and private spaces, creating inauthentic places that foster a hunger for belongingness in the UAE’s built environment. The paper reviews recent urban developments in the UAE and the Gulf Region, and identifies elements of local heritage that can be incorporated into contemporary planning and design. It proposes that adapting vernacular architectural heritage to the modern built environment should not be the principal goal for heritage-informed design. Instead we may examine the social processes underlying the traditional lived environment, and aim for social sustainability based on the lifeways and preferences of local peoples, especially in kinship and Islamic values. Among the most promising precedents for modern social sustainability are social and spatial features at the scale of the neighborhood in traditional Islamic settlements. Interviews with local Emiratis will also recommend elements of traditional knowledge to modern settings. 

Hong Kong

Tracing China ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen F. Siu
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Political History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Center

Physical symbols are not to be changed arbitrarily, but empires have related to subject populations with political notions quite different from and rather differently than those of modern nation-states. Sovereignty often means something different at the political center than in the margins, and the cultural kaleidoscope we call Hong Kong is a result of numerous historical landmarks on these notions. We are all too familiar with these events and how their political history is told today. Therefore, I would rather explore the social and cultural meanings of people’s lives on the ground; we may find interesting stories there that do not fit into any standard political categories.

Colonizing the Sacred: Allahabad and the Company State, 1797–1857

2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faridah Zaman
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Political ◽  
Institutional Form ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Buildings ◽  
Built Heritage ◽  
The Social

This article rethinks the complicated encounter between the East India Company and the built heritage of India in the early nineteenth century. Through an extended case study of the imperial mosque in Allahabad, which was periodically subject to British intervention over some sixty years, it traces vicissitudes in attitudes towards history, religion, and the social existence of Muslims in India generally and Allahabad in particular. The article argues for the need to look beyond the narrative of Britain's relationship with architecture as artefact or heritage—a relationship that took on institutional form in the 1860s—to the comparatively less familiar story of the Company State's prolonged and serious interest in the built environment, and specifically religious buildings, as part of the political economy of its rule. It demonstrates that such an interest was simultaneously a logical outcome of and a tension within the legitimating discourses that the Company State fashioned during the last half-century of its rule in India.

The Social Production of Building form: Theory and Research

1984 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
A D King
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Production ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Form Theory ◽  
Building Form ◽  
The Relationship

In this paper, the relation of theory to empirical research in the broad area indicated by the title is examined. The relevance, and, in cases, the adequacy, is discussed of existing theory for ‘making sense’ of specific empirical data on one item, or segment, of the built environment, namely, the specialised dwelling form of the bungalow, which, in both name and single-storey form, as vacation house or suburban dwelling, has been introduced to many market economies around the world. After a brief consideration of the historical and cross-cultural approaches to the study of the built environment and its neglect in the new urban studies, a series of questions generated by the data and contextualised within specific theoretical spheres are addressed. These include: the relation of building form to economy, society, and culture; culture and the political economy of building form; the social production of specialised dwelling forms; the relationship between per capita income, tenure, and dwelling form, and between dwelling and settlement forms; urban and building form and the world system; counterurbanisation and the world economy; and the political economy of global urbanisation. It is concluded that, for the adequate conceptualisation of the built environment, the use of theory must be eclectic and prepared to draw on different disciplines.

Ways of Being: Identity and Hollywood Animation

2021 ◽  
pp. 109-143
Author(s):  
Noel Brown
Keyword(s):  
Social Desirability ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Group Identity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Capital ◽  
The Social ◽  
Animated Films ◽  
Ways Of Being

This chapter examines how contemporary animated films have negotiated changes in attitudes towards individual and group identity, particularly (though not exclusively) in relation to gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. One of the central projects of post-1990s Hollywood animation is that of accommodating difference. This is partly a matter of commercial pragmatism: films must address a pluralistic, global audience to remain profitable, and therefore must be able to reconcile a multitude of different interests, backgrounds and perspectives. However, it also responds to current debates regarding the social desirability, and the political capital, of diversity in its many forms. This chapter is concerned not only with how different kinds of identity are represented in contemporary animation, but also how valorisations of difference are reconciled with the utopianism traditionally embodied by the Hollywood family film.

The Space of Sex

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
GerShun Avilez
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Minority ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Realm ◽  
Experimental Novel

This chapter shows how artists recognize the political reading of sex and use it to examine the social realm and the intimate realm simultaneously, ultimately illustrating a disintegration of the distinction between the two. Cecil Brown's Black Arts novel The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger (1969) provides an extended look at hypersexual masculinity in hopes of exhibiting its flaws. On the other hand, Jayne Cortez's Black Arts poetry collections Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man's Wares (1969) and Festivals and Funerals (1971) turn their attention to limiting constructions of Black femininity and sexual minority existence that impede self-definition. The chapter also highlights Darieck Scott's experimental novel Traitor to the Race (1995) because it presents queer desire specifically as having the potential to disrupt social meaning.

Same difference: post-Troubles contexts and contradictions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Declan Long
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
The Political ◽  
Adequate Account ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
The Social ◽  
Good Friday Agreement

Chapter one concentrates on the social and political developments pertinent to a study of post-Troubles art — asking what it means to talk in ‘post’ Troubles terms at all — and examines relevant contemporary art examples that offer distinctive, ambivalent perspectives on post-Troubles realities. Fundamental background details on the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement are combined with questions regarding the political and theoretical framing of this process of negotiation — keeping in mind the broader international contexts of a notional ‘post-Troubles’ situation. This widening of the frame (acknowledged globalisation as a factor in the peace process) is also vital in developing an adequate account of the art of this era, but diverse local outcomes of the Agreement are nonetheless acknowledged: from ongoing political problems caused by the ambiguities and inconsistencies of the Agreement itself, to material manifestations of ‘peace’ in architecture and the wider built environment of Belfast.

Epilogue

In the Street ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 189-194
Author(s):  
Çiğdem Çidam
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ways Of Being

The Epilogue concludes the book by emphasizing the importance of keeping a record of the political actors’ hopes and desires in the new ways of being that they staged in democratic moments, without tidying up the tensions and disorderly aspects of those events. While such alternative ways of being do not provide future actors with a blueprint, they call into question the inevitability of the social order as it exists. For this reason, it is politically significant to stand up against the current trivialization of these events, which, perhaps inadvertently, plays into the hands of the powers that be who seek to obliterate the memory of democratic moments. For, remembering the experiences of political actors, who created democratic events against all odds may be the only means to keep alive the emancipatory potential of the past, making it possible for it to become a citable source and an inspiration for future struggles.

scholarly journals The Diplomatic Burden of Pandemics: The Case of Malaria

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Bagozzi ◽  
Ore Koren
Keyword(s):  
Policy Implications ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Ties ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Foreign Countries ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Impact ◽  
Foreign Governments ◽  
The Many

The social and economic burdens of pandemics are becoming increasingly well-known. This paper seeks to gain a better understanding of this phenomena by assessing one highly prevalent global pandemic: malaria. It does so by evaluating malaria's burden on the political ties of nation-states, and on international relations more generally. We posit that malaria dissuades foreign countries from locating their envoys in malaria-affected states. As a consequence, a protracted pandemic has the potential to undermine the political ties of nation-states, as well as the many benefits of these connections. This argument is tested empirically using both directed-dyadic and monadic data. We find that malaria not only serves to discourage foreign governments from establishing diplomatic outposts, but also decreases the total diplomatic missions that a country receives. These findings thus have important policy implications, especially for developing states that seek to increase their global political impact while simultaneously combating persistent pandemics.

scholarly journals The didactic planning in the performance of pedagogues from the Service of Coexistence and Strengthening of Bonds in João Pessoa-PB

2020 ◽  
pp. 133-149
Author(s):  
Luciana Silva DIAS ◽  
José Leonardo Rolim de Lima SEVERO
Keyword(s):  
Planning Process ◽  
Qualitative Approach ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
The Social ◽  
Data Content ◽  
The City ◽  
Didactic Planning

This article aims to discuss the meanings attributed by the pedagogues from the Service of Coexistence and Strengthening of Bonds, in the city of João Pessoa, Paraíba, about the didactic planning process that they develop in their socio-educational routine. The article is based on research that had a qualitative approach inspired by the focus on symbolic interactionism. For data collection, structured questionnaires were answered by 15 educators who are part of the service in João Pessoa. To analyze the data, content analysis was used. It was possible to realize that planning is part of the daily life of the professionals surveyed, with an emphasis on the technical-operational framework of the Service of Coexistence and Strengthening of Bonds and on interests highlighted by the students. The political dimension related to the social meaning of the action they plan is not very evident, which can lead to the loss of transformative power of Social Education practices in the Service of Coexistence and Strengthening of Bonds.

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