Alternate: Jane Jacobs’ legacy

2020 ◽  
pp. 17-44
Author(s):  
Peter J. Taylor ◽  
Geoff O’Brien ◽  
Phil O’Keefe
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Critical Appraisal ◽  
City Planning ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Jane Jacobs ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter provides a description of Jane Jacobs’ legacy beyond her famous intervention into city planning. Five aspects of her work are highlighted. First and foremost she was a knowledge builder, harnessing a voracious curiosity to understand the complexity of the human condition. The most auspicious outcome has been her revision of economics identifying city economies as the loci of economic growth. She made further unusual forays into history – contesting power to eliminate complexity – and politics where her bottom-up approach had drawn admiration from both the right and left. She brought this altogether towards the end of her life as a new understanding of economics as ecology. The chapter concludes with a critical appraisal of her treatment of urban demand – crucial to the argument of this book – and links Jacob’s oeuvre to the work of multiple other radical scholars to aid the process of unthinking.

Holiness and Ethics

2018 ◽  
pp. 89-153
Author(s):  
Alan L. Mittleman
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Moral Realism ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Ethical Naturalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter explores the connection between holiness and ethics or between holiness and goodness. Drawing on a theory of holiness in Judaism, it considers how holiness relates to other values, including moral ones, and whether holiness is more primordial or primitive than ethics. The discussion is anchored on two texts: the first from the Book of Leviticus, and the second from the modern Jewish thinker, Abraham Joshua Heschel. The chapter argues that holiness and morality are equally primordial, equally original to the human condition, and goes on to propose a natural history of holiness in which the human experiences of love and awe, of goodness and holiness arise together against man's evolutionary background as a social primate. It also examines the concepts of primordial morality, natural morality, ethical naturalism, and moral realism before concluding with an analysis of intuition in relation to the good, the right, and the holy.

29. Arendt

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Lacroix
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Conception ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Political Interpretation ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter examines a number of key concepts in Hannah Arendt's work, with particular emphasis on how they have influenced contemporary thought about the meaning of human rights. It begins with a discussion of Arendt's claim that totalitarianism amounts to a destruction of the political domain and a denial of the human condition itself; this in turn had occurred only because human rights had lost all validity. It then considers Arendt's formula of the ‘right to have rights’ and how it opens the way to a ‘political’ conception of human rights founded on the defence of republican institutions and public-spiritedness. It shows that this ‘political’ interpretation of human rights is itself based on an underlying understanding of the human condition as marked by natality, liberty, plurality and action, The chapter concludes by reflecting on the so-called ‘right to humanity’.

Why Blame?

2021 ◽  
pp. 75-94
Author(s):  
John Gardner
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Bernard Williams ◽  
State Punishment ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Human Condition

Ever since her first book, State Punishment, a recurring theme of Nicola Lacey’s scholarship has been a hesitancy about blame—what it is for, how to assign it, and whether to let it take hold. In her later work, Lacey has disaggregated the problem of blame from the problem of responsibility, and explored ways in which responsibility could be assigned without blaming. Her suggestions have centred on the possibility of forgiveness. I admire Lacey’s humane instinct in urging us to do less blaming. However I do not think that this instinct is all that is at work in her recurring doubts about blame. For it is possible to embrace forgiveness while holding those one forgives to be blameworthy? Arguably, indeed, forgiveness presupposes blameworthiness. The deeper puzzle is about blameworthiness itself. What is it for? Why does it matter? What is its place in the architecture of the human condition? It is no answer to say that blameworthiness matters because responsibility matters. There is responsibility without blameworthiness, and responsibility matters for reasons that have nothing to do with blameworthiness. Nor is it an answer to say that blameworthiness matters because blaming matters. Only when one works out why it matters that someone is blameworthy does one begin to show why people should ever do any blaming. Or so I will argue. I will suggest that the importance of blameworthiness is genuinely mysterious. That position is associated with Bernard Williams. I think that some of Williams’ worries are shared by Lacey. However, I will suggest that, in light of my remarks, they are not exactly the right worries.

scholarly journals MULTICULTURALISM, NATIONALISM, AND THE POLITICS OF THE ISRAELI CITY

2009 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 307a-307a
Author(s):  
Haim Yacobi ◽  
Erez Tzfadia
Keyword(s):  
Social Inclusion ◽  
City Planning ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Homogenous Space ◽  
Modern Vision ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

This article examines the prospect of urban multiculturalism in the Israeli city of Ashdod against the intricate metrics of modernism and ethnonationalism. This prospect is sometimes endorsed by the city's leaders, but at the same time it answers the logic of ethnonationalism that not only works toward cultivating a homogenous collective and homogenous space but also endorses Western and Eurocentric biases. This logic facilitates practices of social inclusion and exclusion both materially and symbolically. Furthermore, we argue that in Ashdod, ethnonationalism is intertwined with the logic of the market, encouraging social hierarchies and stratifications that carry the stamp of “ethnoclassism” along First and Third World dichotomies. Yet, these processes do not completely foreclose the prospect of multiculturalism, because they cannot completely forestall “bottom-up” forces that promote it either intentionally or inadvertently. The assessment of Ashdod as a potential site of urban multiculturalism becomes nuanced and intriguing as we take into account city planning that considers a modern vision of the city and ethnonational logic, on the one hand, and forces of bottom-up initiatives, on the other. All in all, the city fails the multicultural challenge if by this challenge we understand the establishment of institutional arrangements that guarantee the right to the city—or equal access to all benefits that the city may offer—while allowing residents to cultivate and maintain their cultural uniqueness.

scholarly journals Third Way Interventions in Public Space and Urban Design

2020 ◽  
pp. 339-352
Author(s):  
Oscar Rodrigo Perilla
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Space ◽  
City Planning ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Third Way ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Jane Jacobs ◽  
Space Design ◽  
Public Space Design

As epitomized by the famous rivalry between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses in the '60s New York, city planning and the understanding of public space has mainly oscillated between two opposing poles: the tidy and organized city planned with a top-down approach by architects using geometry to shape it, on one hand; and the messy and disorganized city, shaped with a bottom-up spirit, lacking planning, and allowing the traces of its inhabitants to take place, on the other. This article makes an analysis of the origin and nature of that opposition, putting in context different endeavors undertaken to tear it down. Going back to its Greek origin in the opposition between technē and mousikē, passing through Kant's concepts of the beautiful and the sublime, Nietzsche's opposition between the Apollonian and the Dionysian and ending up in Wölfflin's fundamental opposition between the Renaissance and the Baroque, it maps out this oscillating trend in history that favors the organized opposite full of rules in some periods, and the romantic one full of freedom in others, to provide a framework to explore endeavors that challenge those extremes in an attempt to take advantage of the benefits of both, as in 18th century picturesque, John Habraken's approach and Stan Allen's concept of infrastructural urbanism. Within this framework, it examines projects where we explore at Pontifical Xavierian University, innovative approaches to urban and public space design that empower inhabitants to shape their own city (bottom-up), whilst maintaining a sense of order and composition through designed structures (top-down) that challenge Leon Battista Alberti's foundational criterion of architectural beauty: you can neither add nor subtract any element without destroying the harmony achieved.

scholarly journals James C. Scott. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. 445 pages. Price not given.

2000 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-78
Author(s):  
Faisal Bari
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Not Given ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Yale University ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Right ◽  
Peasant Resistance ◽  
The Human Condition

The key question addressed in the book is: Why have so many large-scale schemes to improve the human condition failed so badly? And James Scott is the right person to have asked this question. Scott is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at Yale University. He is also the author of The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (1977), Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1987), and Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1992). All of the above have given him an excellent understanding of the nature of conflict in societies and the means of survival for the poor. Often the protagonists in the conflict have been people on one side and governments on the other. This is essential background for the book under review.

The Vampire as Metaphor

2011 ◽  
pp. 69-74
Author(s):  
Anne Billson
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Religious Significance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Holy Water ◽  
The Right ◽  
Mainstream Culture ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter explains how horror stories have dabbled in parts of the human condition that more respectable mainstream culture dares not touch. It considers vampire movies and books that provide an indirect way of dealing with the sort of subjects that are still regarded in certain quarters as taboo or upsetting to discuss outside the psychiatrist's office, such as sex, death, and intimacy. It also points out how the subtext of the vampire has changed over the years according to the social and sexual mores, political situations, religious beliefs, and fashions of the day. The chapter talks about how crucifixes, holy water and wafers lost potency of their symbolism, though crucifixes are still displayed for superstitious reasons or as fashion accessories. It discusses Eli in Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In, whose name is loaded with religious significance as the name of an Old Testament prophet.

scholarly journals Ethics and Academic Integrity Elements of Ethics in Electrical Engineering

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 193-206
Author(s):  
Oana Vasilica Grosu ◽  
◽  
Eusebiu Toader ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Ethical Behavior ◽  
Academic Integrity ◽  
Electrical Engineering ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Conflict Of Interests ◽  
Theoretical Part ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Human Condition

Ethics is the science that studies the theoretical part of the human condition and its values. The individual has the responsibility to conduct ethic decisions and to have an ethical behavior. This article presents the ethics from the research and engineering perspective, its main characteristics; lack of honesty, confidentiality, conflict of interests and intellectual property. The engineering teaching is the act which includes multiple ethic subjects in order to educate the student about the importance of ethics and its repercussions. The students have the right to benefit of ethical behavior from their teachers from the staff of the school. The ethic is essential in all the educational and working fields, but we insisted specially on the electrical engineering field.

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