scholarly journals Extracting limestone: How to interpret the city through ammonites and belemnites

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 83-95
Author(s):  
Monika Sadowska

The paper analyzes the presence of the remains of ammonites and belemnites in the stones used to build the elevations of houses in modern Polish cities. The process of aestheticizing buildings is the reason for fossilized cephalopods being moved from the natural environment into urban space. I consider whether the use of such materials leads merely to making the buildings look more attractive or if this process provides an opportunity to interpret these buildings in an alternative way, which goes beyond aesthetic categories and is related to the fact that the fossils have been moved from the natural world into the cultural sphere. The limestone elements of architecture also allow one to look at the city as a unique museum of cultural and natural history.

Dimensions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-202
Author(s):  
Sergiy Ilchenko

Abstract This contribution elaborates upon the appropriation of urban space in spatiotemporal and procedural interventions in the example of the city of Kharkiv, as well as the impact of urban space on the process of how various groups rediscover and use various parts of the city. Being moved during collective actions - in the sense of feeling urged to move along - goes beyond routine practices by influencing the city and its perception. It seems that these general processions, celebrations, and festive activities of the residents are their contributions to the process of »urban renaissance« - the rebirth of interest in the urban way of life. Since public spaces reflect the historical inheritance of local communities, joint transformative actions such as, »appropriation «, »production«, and »governance« of urban spaces are considered. This article advocates for the practice of domestication of urban space by the local community, as well as the need for the existence of »urban lagoons« - free (unregulated) areas of the city used as resources for urban development and interaction of citizens.


2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 339-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul S. Moore

The emergence of the mass market as a concept ordering distinctions in urban space is investigated through newspaper reporting and promotion of early movie‐going in Toronto, 1907–1916. The analysis builds upon a revision of Chicago Sociology's text on The City, shifting the method and theoretical weight to rest more on Park's Natural History of the Newspaper than Burgess' Growth of the City. The metropolitan newspaper is both document and agent of urbanization, and is used here to describe how modernity was grounded in mass culture. The newspaper provides a sensible version of urban living for city dwellers, a map or menu of the city's rhythms and spaces. Specific to the movies, there is a shift from journalism to promotion, from trying to understand the audience to letting advertising for ever‐changing film titles stand in for the urban practice. In particular, the brief fad of serial films with accompanying stories in newspapers perhaps marks when a mass audience was first assumed. Serial films provided an umbrella text to explicitly show how the variety of spaces, times, prices, and classes of audiences encompassed a common practice, a mass practice.


Author(s):  
Bill Jenkins

It was long believed that evolutionary theories received an almost universally cold reception in British natural history circles in the first half of the nineteenth century. But recently serious doubt has been cast on this assumption. This book will be the first major study of what was the most important centre or pre-Darwinian evolutionary thought in the British Isles. It shows that Edinburgh in the late 1820s and early 1830s was witness to a veritable ferment of radical new ideas on the natural world, including speculation on the origin and evolution of life, at just the time when Charles Darwin was studying medicine in the city. Those who were students in Edinburgh at the time could have hardly avoided coming into contact with these new ideas, espoused as they were by many of professors, fellow students and acquaintances in Edinburgh. This book sheds new light on the genesis and development of one of the most important scientific theories in the history of western thought.


Author(s):  
Monika Wasilewicz-Pszczółkowska ◽  
Agnieszka Szczepanska

Current social requirements concerning the living environment tend to be more and more related to the natural values of the urban space. People are aware of the fact that contact with nature is extremely important for of mental and physical health. Therefore, the quality of the natural environment around the place of living influences the quality of life. The studies confirm that the presence of natural elements in the urban space may expressly affect the improvement of this quality. An example of a city with high quality of life is represented by Olsztyn, the capital of the Warmian- Masurian Province, located within the borders of the functional area of the Green Lungs of Poland, which is characterized by the particularly valuable quality of its natural environment. This is confirmed by the results of the social Diagnosis dated 2015, which put Olsztyn in 4th place among the largest Polish cities in the ranking concerning the quality of life. It is also influenced by the quality of the natural environment, which in the case of Olsztyn is manifested in a large number of green areas and standing bodies of water located within the administrative borders of the city. The aim of this paper is to compare the quality of the living environment of individual boroughs of Olsztyn conditioned by the natural elements (greenery, bodies of water, air, noise) in relation to the received public opinion polling results.


2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony G Picciano ◽  
Robert V. Steiner

Every child has a right to an education. In the United States, the issue is not necessarily about access to a school but access to a quality education. With strict compulsory education laws, more than 50 million students enrolled in primary and secondary schools, and billions of dollars spent annually on public and private education, American children surely have access to buildings and classrooms. However, because of a complex and competitive system of shared policymaking among national, state, and local governments, not all schools are created equal nor are equal education opportunities available for the poor, minorities, and underprivileged. One manifestation of this inequity is the lack of qualified teachers in many urban and rural schools to teach certain subjects such as science, mathematics, and technology. The purpose of this article is to describe a partnership model between two major institutions (The American Museum of Natural History and The City University of New York) and the program designed to improve the way teachers are trained and children are taught and introduced to the world of science. These two institutions have partnered on various projects over the years to expand educational opportunity especially in the teaching of science. One of the more successful projects is Seminars on Science (SoS), an online teacher education and professional development program, that connects teachers across the United States and around the world to cutting-edge research and provides them with powerful classroom resources. This article provides the institutional perspectives, the challenges and the strategies that fostered this partnership.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Khangelani Moyo

Drawing on field research and a survey of 150 Zimbabwean migrants in Johannesburg, this paper explores the dimensions of migrants’ transnational experiences in the urban space. I discuss the use of communication platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook as well as other means such as telephone calls in fostering the embedding of transnational migrants within both the Johannesburg and the Zimbabwean socio-economic environments. I engage this migrant-embedding using Bourdieusian concepts of “transnational habitus” and “transnational social field,” which are migration specific variations of Bourdieu’s original concepts of “habitus” and “social field.” In deploying these Bourdieusian conceptual tools, I observe that the dynamics of South–South migration as observed in the Zimbabwean migrants are different to those in the South–North migration streams and it is important to move away from using the same lens in interpreting different realities. For Johannesburg-based migrants to operate within the socio-economic networks produced in South Africa and in Zimbabwe, they need to actively acquire a transnational habitus. I argue that migrants’ cultivation of networks in Johannesburg is instrumental, purposive, and geared towards achieving specific and immediate goals, and latently leads to the development and sustenance of flexible forms of permanency in the transnational urban space.


2020 ◽  
pp. 233-248
Author(s):  
Marta Zambrzycka ◽  
Paulina Olechowska

The subject of the article is an analysis of the three aspects of depicting urban space of Eastern Ukraine, focusing specifi cally on the Donbass region and the city of Kharkov as depicted in the novels Voroshilovgrad (2010) and Mesopotamia (2014) by Serhiy Zhadan. The urban space of Eastern Ukraine overlaps with the most important values that shape a person’s personality and aff ect her or his self-identifi cation. The city space is also a “place of memory” and experiences of generations that infl uence current events. In addition to the historical and axiological dimension, the imaginative aspect of space is also important. This approach is used by the author to describe the urban space as a functioning imagination or stereotypes associated with it as opposed to its realistic depiction.


GEOgraphia ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (16) ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Ângelo Ribeiro

O objetivo que permeia a presente pesquisa é utilizar a Fortaleza de Santa Cruz, localizada no bairro de Jurujuba, em Niterói, construída em 1555, na entrada da barra da Baía de Guanabara, como foco de antílise, ressaltando a importância deste fixo social enquanto atração turística e de lazer, incluindo a cidade de Niterói no circuito destas atividades, complementares à cidade do Rio de Janeiro; além de abordar conceitos e categorias analíticas, oriundos das ciências sociais, principalmente provenientes da Geografia, pertinentes ao estudo das atividades em tela. Neste contexto, na dinâmica espacial da cidade de Niterói, o processo de mudança de função dos fixos sociais têm sido extraordinário. Residencias unifamiliares, prédios e até mesmo fortificações militares, verdadeiras monumentalidades, foram refuncionalizadas, passando por um processo de turistificação. Assim, a refuncionalização da respectiva Fortaleza em espaço cultural toma-se um importante atrativo da história, do patrimônio, da cultura, marcando no espaço urbano sua expressões e monumentalidade, criada pelo homem como símbolo de seus ideais, objetivos e atos, constituindo-se em um legado as gerações futuras, formando um elo entre passado, presente e futuro. Abstract This paper focuses on Santa Cruz Fortress, built in 1555 in Jurujuba (Niterói), to guard the entrance of Guanabara bay, and stresses its role as a towist attraction and leisure' area, as a social fix which links the city of Niterói to the complementary circuit of these activities in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The study uses important concepts and analytic categories fiom social sciences, particularly fiom Geography.In the spatial dynamic of the city of Niterói, change in functions of social fuces has been extraordinary. Single-family dwellings, buildings and even military installations have been re-functionalized, undergoing a process of touristification. In that way, the refunctionalization of the Fortress as a cultural space provides an important attraction in the domains of history, patrimony, and culture, providing the urban space with an expression of monumentality, created by man as a symbol of his ideals, aims and actions, a legacy to future generations forming a link between past, present and future.


Author(s):  
Fonna Forman ◽  
Teddy Cruz

Cities or municipalities are often the most immediate institutional facilitators of global justice. Thus, it is important for cosmopolitans and other theorists interested in global justice to consider the importance of the correspondence between global theories and local actions. In this chapter, the authors explore the role that municipalities can play in interpreting and executing principles of global justice. They offer a way of thinking about the cosmopolitan or global city not as a gentrified and commodified urban space, but as a site of local governance consistent with egalitarian cosmopolitan moral aims. They work to show some ways in which the city of Medellín, Colombia, has taken significant steps in that direction. The chapter focuses especially on how it did so and how it might serve as a model in some important ways for the transformation of other cities globally in a direction more consistent with egalitarian cosmopolitanism.


Author(s):  
Carlos Machado

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.


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