The Margins of Late Medieval London, 1430-1540

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Berry
Keyword(s):  
Urban Fringe ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
City Life ◽  
Migrant Communities ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Qualitative Methodologies ◽  
The City

The Margins of Late Medieval London is a powerful study of medieval London’s urban fringe. Seeking to unpack the complexity of urban life in the medieval age, this volume offers a detailed and novel approach to understanding London beyond its institutional structures. Using a combination of experimental digital, quantitative and qualitative methodologies, the volume casts new light on urban life at the level of the neighbourhood and considers the differences in economy, society and sociability which existed in different areas of a vibrant premodern city. It focuses on the dynamism and mobility that shaped city life, integrating the experiences of London’s poor and migrant communities and how they found their place within urban life. It describes how people found themselves marginalized in the city, and the strategies they would employ to mitigate that precarious position.

Jerome and the Sham Christians of Rome

1997 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Curran
Keyword(s):  
Social Background ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Rhetorical Question ◽  
City Life ◽  
Good Family ◽  
The Social ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The City

This rhetorical question was poseu by Jerome in AD 411 to challenge a young man of good family from Toulouse who was contemplating the responsibilities of monastic life. The old man of Bethlehem wrote on city life with some authority; he had achieved fame and notoriety simultaneously at the court of Pope Damasus in Rome in the 380s.2 And yet, as both men knew well, the moral and physical dangers of the city, the latter resoundingly demonstrated by the Gothic capture of Rome in the previous year, had not prompted the rejection of urban life by western Christians, save by a small and eccentric group of extreme ascetics. Jerome's praise for this group is well known, and his criticism of less committed Christians in Rome is legendary. But when one examines the uniquely vivid testimony of Jerome's letters, one can detect beneath the praise and polemic a vigorous struggle for the support of the city's elite. The social background to the struggle as revealed in Jerome's writings is the subject of this article. What emerges is a complex, contradictory and divided Christian community which Jerome unsuccessfully attempted to influence, a failure that brought final and ignominious exile from Rome.

scholarly journals Reflections on Rails and the City

Transfers ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-130
Author(s):  
George Revill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Personal Mobility ◽  
City Life ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
The City ◽  
Rail Travel

As the articles in this special section show, railways mark out urban experience in very distinctive ways. In the introduction, Steven D. Spalding makes plain there is no clear relationship between railway development and the shape and size of cities. For many cities, suburban rail travel has been either substantially insignificant or a relative latecomer as a factor in urban growth and suburbanization. Walking, tramways and the omnibus may indeed have had a much greater impact on built form, yet the cultural impact of railways on the city life should not be minimized. Iconic city stations are both objects of civic pride and socially heterogeneous gateways to the promise of a better urban life. The physical presence of substantial tracts of infrastructure, viaducts, freight yards and warehousing, divide and segregate residential districts encouraging and reinforcing status differentials between communities. Subways, metros, and suburban railways open on to the often grubby quotidian underbelly of city life whilst marking out a psychic divide between work and domesticity, city and suburb. Railways not only produced new forms of personal mobility but by defining the contours, parameters, and possibilities of this experience, they have come to help shape how we think about ourselves as urbanized individuals and societies. The chapters in this special section mark out some of this territory in terms of, for example: suburbanization, landscape, and nationhood (Joyce); the abstractions of urban form implicit in the metro map (Schwetman); the underground as a metaphor for the topologically enfolded interconnections of urban process (Masterson-Algar); and the competing lay and professional interests freighting urban railway development (Soppelsa). In the introduction Spalding is right to stress both the multiple ways that railways shape urban experience and the complex processes that continuously shape and re-shape urban cultures as sites of contest and sometimes conflict. As Richter suggests, in the nineteenth century only rail travel demanded the constant and simultaneous negotiation of both urban social disorder and the systematic ordering associated with large technological systems and corporate business. Thus “the railroad stood squarely at the crossroad of the major social, business, cultural and technological changes remaking national life during the second half of the nineteenth century.”

scholarly journals Ocean As Place For Urban Life:  Building on Water to Combat Urban Congestion & Climate Change

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Piers Brereton Bowman
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
City Life ◽  
Coastal City ◽  
Unique Character ◽  
Coastal Cities ◽  
Job Opportunities ◽  
Flexible Framework ◽  
Architectural Development ◽  
The City

<p>Coastal cities form some of the largest and most important cities in the world. The unique character of these cities has been shaped and moulded by the coastal environment. As powerful as these cities seem they have became vulnerable. Coastal cities face the need to expand with rapidly growing populations, also, sea level rise has been increased by climate change, which threatens this expansion and the city itself. This thesis explores how the effects of climate change and urban congestion can be mitigated through architectural development, incorporating a flexible framework for housing and the adaption of the urban fabric to living on water. It seeks to change the perception of buildable space and adapt to the changing face of the coastal city and its environment. The research finds that responses to the coastal city problem exist only as separate projects independent of one another. A unified solution is needed to mitigate these issues between all coastal cities. This can be resolved by combining strategies within further inner city developments. The project responds to coastal city issues as well as adapting to current city inhabitation. Modern city life is one of change and movement. Travel between cities is frequent due to changing lifestyles and job opportunities. Developing on this lifestyle, the project successfully investigates a solution to help protect and improve the life of the coastal city, addressing the problems of tomorrow, today.</p>

scholarly journals Participatory Infrastructures: The Politics of Mobility Platforms

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 335-346
Author(s):  
Peter T. Dunn
Keyword(s):  
User Interfaces ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Mobility ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Digital Architecture ◽  
City Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Policy Deliberation ◽  
The City

Much of everyday life in cities is now mediated by digital platforms, a mode of organization in which control is both distributed widely among participants and sharply delimited by the platform’s constraints. This article uses examples of smartphone-based platforms for urban mobility to argue that platforms create new political arrangements of the city, intermediating the social processes of management and movement that characterize urban life. Its empirical basis is a study of user interfaces, data specifications, and algorithms used in the operation and regulation of ride-hailing services and bike-share systems. I focus on three aspects of urban politics affected by platforms: its location, its participants, and the types of conflict it addresses. First, the programming forums in which decisions are encoded in and distributed through platforms’ core digital architecture are new sites of policy deliberation outside the more familiar arenas of city politics. Second, travelers have new opportunities to use platforms for travel on their own terms, but this expanded participation is circumscribed by interfaces that presuppose individual, transactional engagement rather than a participation attentive to a broader social and environmental context. Finally, digital systems show themselves to be well suited to enforcing quantifiable distributional goals, but struggle to resolve the more nuanced relational matters that constitute the politics of everyday city life. These illustrations suggest that digital tools for managing transportation are not only political products, but also reset the stage on which urban encounters play out.

scholarly journals FROM NATIVE TO OUTLANDER: EXPLORING INFORMAL COMMUNITY IN CHENGZHONGCUN OF CHINA

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xue Ni PENG ◽  
Jin BAEK
Keyword(s):  
Urban Life ◽  
Survival Strategies ◽  
Migrant Communities ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Urban Migrants ◽  
Chinese Migration ◽  
Collective Housing ◽  
The City ◽  
Destination City

In the existing research on Chinese migration, rural domestic Chinese migrants are often portrayed as a community of intruders with a detached culture who invade a host destination city. Usually, as a first step, they settle down in a so-called “Chengzhongcun” (literally a village encircled by the city boundaries, hereafter CZC), which is a kind of “urban village”, or an undeveloped part of a city that is overshadowed by the more developed areas. The present paper tries to give an image of the rural-to-urban migrants as a more vigorous mediator that forms their migration destination. The aims are the following: first, to achieve a detailed written analysis of an existing CZC community and its functioning as a mirror of the discriminating division between the rural and urban life in China. Secondly, by taking into account the experiences of migrant communities in their host cities, this paper seeks to highlight the migrants' emotional conflict and increasing loss of values that occurs in the migration process from the rural to the urban. Thirdly, the migrants' household survival strategies shall be explored. Finally, weaving these strands together, this paper presents a case study of a Tulou collective housing project in Guangzhou Province, China.

Mobile bodies of meaning: city life and the horizons of possibility

2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel E. Agbiboa
Keyword(s):  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
City Life ◽  
Interpretative Analysis ◽  
Actual Material ◽  
The City

ABSTRACTDespite their centrality to the rhythm and practice of everyday urban life, there are, surprisingly, few studies on commercial minibus-taxis as a microcosm of city life in Africa, especially its precarious materiality. Using the trademark yellow minibus-taxis (danfos) in Lagos as a frame of reference, this paper explores what an interpretative analysis of the slogans thatdanfoworkers paint on their vehicles can tell us about the city in which they weave their routine existence, especially the hopes, fears and actual material circumstances which informed their unique choice of slogans. Foregrounding thedanfosas mobile bodies of meaning, the article finds that slogans not only reflect the lived realities ofdanfoworkers, but are themselves vital means through which these workers get by, define their identity and expand their horizons of possibility.

Guilds, Immigration, and Immigrant Economic Organization: Alien Goldsmiths in London, 1480–1540

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Charlotte Berry
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Economic Organization ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Migrant Communities ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The City ◽  
High Skill

Abstract Immigration was essential to trades reliant on fashion and high skill in London around the turn of the sixteenth century. This article explores the patterns of migration to the city by continental goldsmiths between 1480 and 1540 and the structure of the communities they formed. It argues that attitudes to migration within the London Goldsmiths’ Company, which governed the trade, were complex and shifted in response to evolving national legislation. A social network analysis of the relationships between alien masters and servants indicates how the alien community changed and adapted. Taking a view across the traditional late medieval and early modern period boundary allows for a deeper understanding of how attitudes to migration and to migrant communities changed as London's population began to grow.

scholarly journals Assessment of Public Space Efficiency in Relation to Spatial Development in Amman: Exploring Indicators to Sustainable Models of Future City Life

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 104
Author(s):  
Maram Falah Tawil ◽  
Christa Reicher ◽  
Mais Jafari ◽  
Katrin Baeumer
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Success Factors ◽  
Strategic Thinking ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
City Life ◽  
Space Efficiency ◽  
Anchor Nodes ◽  
Key Dimensions ◽  
The City

<p>In the scene of the urban transformation processes taking place in the world nowadays, it is crucial to verify the need for sustainable change in public space in Amman. The paper aims at capturing the demands of public space in regards to the socio economic urban life in Amman. It also investigates the role of public space from the perception of the local communities and tries to find the relation between public space and the other vital layers that constitute the urban public life whether social, economic or urban regeneration. Key dimensions and success factors of best practices in Dortmund, Germany are investigated in order to shed the light on potential strategic thinking in dealing with problems in Amman. As a result, defined characters of magnets and anchor nodes in Amman were specified to make the city more readable and accessible.</p>

Archeology and the City,

1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua J. Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Roman Period ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
City Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Late Roman Period ◽  
The City ◽  
Actual Life

The complexities of city life in the Roman period and the rich varieties of urban existence during that time have not always been revealed by the spade of the archeologist. Much mentioned in the literary sources of the time has not been uncovered in archeological excavations and even when perchance it has been, it has not always been correctly identified. In any case, the limitations of present-day research often make such identification all but impossible. For example, literary sources, both Jewish and non-Jewish, mention buildings or monuments in Late Roman period Caesarea. We know, however, very little about what this city or the buildings in it looked like. Moreover, there are dozens of unidentified “public buildings” that have been uncovered in the course of archeological excavations that await some shred of additional information or keen analysis to determine or to corroborate their purpose or function. Thus, it would be the lucky archeologist who would discover and excavate a tavern (kapelia) or a prison, for instance, in one of the Roman-period cities of the Land of Israel. And even if by chance he did discover a structure that fulfilled one of these functions, it is doubtful that he would ever really be able to prove it. Moreover, Roman-period cities were built to accentuate the public aspects of city life, and this type of building did not always tell the full story of urban life. Interurban competition and the occasional economic windfall often resulted in spurts of public building activity of a monumental and elaborate nature. There was often more form than substance behind this type of building, and occasionally this form was more vain, sterile, and ostentatious than the actual life of the city. The archeologist by nature, however, gravitates toward excavation of the grand. It is the public life of cities that archeologists try to reveal, and even this might be more fleeting than they are willing to admit. The more private aspects of urban existence often remain hidden or within the realm of the historian, not the archeologist.

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