Echoing memories: Migration, the senses, and the city in Metro Vancouver, Canada

2021 ◽  
pp. 263497952110284
Author(s):  
Cristina Moretti

Using images, video, and text, I weave together two walks and several conversations on the senses, migration, and memory. I focus on echoes or resonances as a method to attend to the relation between remembering, sensory emplacement and urban materialities. Using comments from my interlocutors who migrated to Metro Vancouver from outside Canada, as well as autobiographical reflections on sensate memories in urban landscapes, I investigate how forgetting and memory are co-implicated, and I propose that echoes can help us think of spatial and social displacements. I include digital meaning making practices like videos, photographs, and montage, as well as hand-written notes, stories, lists, and drawings. These in turn accompany the kinesthetic inhabiting of the city through walking, standing, and sensing in place.

2021 ◽  
pp. 002198942199245
Author(s):  
Kavithaa Rajamony ◽  
Jyotirmaya Tripathy

Fictional narratives on Chennai, after its official conversion from Madras in 1996, offer an intriguing register for exploring ways of belonging. Using a postcolonial framework, the paper closely scrutinizes T. S. Tirumurti’s Clive Avenue and Chennaivaasi (and some other authors invested in Chennai’s contemporary culture) and subjects them to critique as sites of meaning making. An effort is made to explore how these narratives respond to the new reality of Chennai, to what extent they see the city producing a standardized experience, and how the fictional characters corroborate or contest institutional change. In the process, the texts are brought to converse with the postcolonial desire for cultural autonomy, its mediation by a nativist agenda, as well as the ambivalence and contradictions inherent in such a desire. The texts betray the inadequacies of the new name as a stable container of cultural meanings and propose an idea of the city that is internally incoherent and multi-experiential.


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 219-230
Author(s):  
Raluca-Daniela Duinea

"The City of Oslo in Jan Erik Vold’s Poems. The aim of this paper is to examine, from a cultural and social perspective, the Norwegian urban areas and everyday situations in Jan Erik Vold’s (b. 1939) poems. Our close-reading technique reveals important social aspects, different places and streets, located in the capital city of Norway, Oslo. These urban poems written by the contemporary Norwegian poet Jan Erik Vold contribute to the reconstruction of a new Norwegian cultural identity as it is reflected in a selection of poems taken from Mor Godhjertas glade versjon. Ja (Mother Goodhearted’s Happy Version. Yes, 1968), followed by the poet’s wanderings in the city of Oslo in En som het Abel Ek (One Named Abel Ek, 1988), and concluding with his bitter social criticism in Elg (Moose, 1989) and IKKE. Skillingstrykk fra nittitallet (Not: Broadsides from the Nineties, 1993). Vold’s urban poems emphasise the transition from nyenkle (new simple), friendly and descriptive poems which present closely the city of Oslo on foot, to short, political and social critical poems from the 90s. Thus, it is of great importance to traverse various urban ‘landscapes’ in different periods of time, beginning with the 1960s, followed by the 80s and the 90s. Keywords: Jan Erik Vold, urban poems, social criticism, Norwegian urban areas, the city of Oslo "


2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-70
Author(s):  
James Lamb ◽  
Michael Sean Gallagher ◽  
Jeremy Knox

In this article we describe and critique a methodological exercise that brings together multimodality, ethnography and walking in order to investigate the city. Drawing on the experience of enacting our methodology in central London, we describe how an openness to the full range of meaning-making phenomena encountered during an unscripted excursion through the city provided ways of thinking critically about our relationship with the city. This research is undertaken against a backdrop of a growing critical interest in the complex and shifting nature of the urban environment, reflected in the range of approaches that investigate how we understand and experience our surroundings. Central to this methodological approach is the intersection of ethnography and multimodality which, when brought together within the device of an unscripted walk, provides valuable opportunities for thinking critically about our surroundings.


2008 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 1111
Author(s):  
Lisa H. Cooper ◽  
Alexander Cowan ◽  
Jill Steward
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Vicente Collado Capilla ◽  
Sonia Gómez-Pardo Gabaldón

URBAN LANDSCAPE ASSESSMENT Vicente Collado Capilla1 and Sonia Gómez-Pardo Gabaldón21Servicio de Infraestructura Verde y Paisaje. Generalitat Valenciana. Ciutat Administrativa 9 D'Octubre-Torre 1, C/ Castán Tobeñas 77, 46018 Valencia; 2Servicio Territorial de Urbanismo. Provincia de Valencia. Generalitat Valenciana. Prop I, C/ Gregorio Gea, nº 27, 46009 Valencia. E-mail: [email protected] [email protected]  Key words: urban_landscape, streetcape, landscape_value, andscape_assessment, landscape_preferences. The urban landscape assesment as an important element in the quality of life and the sustainable development of the city constitutes an incipient field of investigation from a new perspective that adds meanings and values. An analysis of the different methodological developments and national and international experiences in the assessment of these landscapes will highlight its importance as a strategic element to improve the quality of the city. It starts from the concept of assessment as a system where tangible and intangible values ​​are considered by the population and the experts. These include among other formal, economic, environmental, social, cultural issues (…) and the relationships between them. Consideration of the opinions of experts from different points of view such as urbanism and architecture but also environment, economy, geography, history, archeology, sociology, social assistance, etc. Together with the preferences expressed by the population regarding the spaces they inhabit on a daily basis and their aspirations, strengthen the sense of belonging and the identity of the place as key elements in the perception of the urban landscapes that allows to contribute new qualities, integration criteria and ​​contemporary values to any type of intervention. These are strategies and intervention procedures that start from the complexity of the city as a system and incorporate the perception that citizens have or will have of their immediate environment.  References: Czynska Klara and Pawel Rubinowicz (2015). ´Visual protection Surface method: Cityscape values in context of tall buildings´. SSS10 Proceedings of the 10 th International Space Syntax Symposium. Paquette Sylvain (2008). Guide de gestion des paysages au Québec. Université de Montréal Pallasmaa, Juhani (2005). The Eyes of the Skin. Architecture and the Senses. New York: John Wiley. Ministry of Environment and Energy The National Forest and Nature Agency (1997). International Survey of Architectural Values in the Environment. Denmark . The Landscape Institute and Institute of Environmental Management & Assessment (2013). Guidelines for Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment. Third Edition, London: Routledge.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 69
Author(s):  
Ana Clara Fabaron

<p>El propósito de este artículo es reflexionar críticamente en torno a la noción de paisaje y sus vinculaciones con modos -diferenciados y desiguales- de imaginar y habitar la ciudad. El análisis se sustenta en un estudio de caso en La Boca, un barrio de la zona sur de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, donde confluyen procesos de reconversión urbana y déficit habitacional. Desde un abordaje etnográfico junto al uso de fuentes secundarias, el trabajo explora las principales características y transformaciones socioespaciales del barrio en relación con el resto de la ciudad. El artículo focaliza en prácticas de habitantes y usuarios, en diálogo con distintas aproximaciones al concepto de paisaje, y con estudios que destacan la relación entre una estetización de las ciudades contemporáneas y un modelo exclusivo de ciudad. Desde una perspectiva del habitar -centrada en las prácticas urbanas- el enfoque propuesto procura tomar en cuenta las tensiones e imbricaciones entre los paisajes urbanos cotidianos de sus habitantes y los paisajes culturales orientados a un consumo visual, incorporando en el análisis las relaciones desiguales de poder.</p><p><br /><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p><br />This article aims to critically reflect upon the notion of landscape and its links with -differentiated and unequal- ways of imagining and inhabiting the city. The analysis is based on a case study in La Boca, a neighborhood in the southern area of the city of Buenos Aires, where urban reconversion processes coexists with housing insufficiency. Through an ethnographic approach supplemented with secondary sources, the paper explores the main characteristics and socio-spatial transformations of the neighborhood in relation with the rest of the city. The article focuses in dwellers and passersby practices, in dialogue with different approaches to the concept of landscape, and with studies that emphasize the relation between the aestheticisation of the contemporary cities and an exclusive city model. From a dwelling perspective -centered in urban practices- the proposed approach seeks take into account the tensions and interweaving between the daily urban landscapes of La Boca’ s dwellers and the cultural landscapes oriented toward visual consumption, incorporating in the analysis the unequal power relations.</p>


Author(s):  
Meriem Chaggar ◽  
Mohsen Boubaker

This research proposes to identify the factors of the urban landscapes degradation in Hergla’s city (Tunisia) according on the citizen participation. It is based on the survey method which is developed around two axes: the citizen perception of urban landscapes and the factors of their degradation. According to the responses obtained, "the sea" represents the particular value of the landscapes identified as "quality" in Hergla. Citizens don’t appreciate landscapes of urban sprawl which makes the city lose its identity. Moreover, the lack of citizen participation in the urban actions and the non-observance of the urban regulations are the most cited factors of the landscape degradation. These results highlight the importance of involving the citizens in the planning process for a sustainable territory.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-23
Author(s):  
Rachel E. Silverman

Since 2016, the city of Orlando, FL, has remembered the Pulse nightclub massacre through memorial projects honoring the victims and survivors. The process of remembering and memorializing trauma is contentious; debates over how, where, who, and what to remember are about emotions, economics, and politics. Knowing that meaning making and memory are ongoing processes, I use the circuit of culture model to navigate my city’s processes and places of memorializing by visiting and interpreting different sites of memory. I argue for the power of the vernacular memorial, rather than the state-sanctioned, as a more inclusive, living form of memory.


Author(s):  
Anastasiia Hovorun ◽  
Olga Myslyuk

The characteristics of the soil cover of the city Cherkassy and the sources of anthropogenic changes of its acidbase properties are presented. The results of the research of soils from different functional zones of the city Cherkassy showed that its reaction is mainly alkaline. The cartographic model of experimental data was made with the program SURFER showing acid-base regime characteristics of soils in different functional zones of the city. This mapping allowed to identify the following soils: fertile (рН = 6.5–7.0) and potentially fertile (рН = 7.0–7.5), hardly suitable (рН = 7.5–8.0), moderately (рН = 8.0–8.5) and highly (рН = 8.0–8.5) toxic. It is concluded that only 60% of urban soils can be identified as fertile or potentially fertile in terms of characteristics of acid-base regime. The results of the evaluation of acid-base regime of urban soilsare correlated with the results of the previous studies of pollution of snow cover in the areas of permanent emissions and the anionic composition of soils. The analysis of the cause-effect relationships in the impact of adverse environmental factors on urban landscapes showed that the formation of acid-base regime of soils is influenced both by the natural landscape, i.e. geochemical, and anthropogenic factors.


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