La Zone: In/habitation in the Itinerant City

Global Jurist ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Patchett
Keyword(s):  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
No Man's Land ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City ◽  
Alternative Reading

AbstractAcknowledging that urban spaces are an amalgamation of multiple normative orders, the city will be explored as a site of encounter through a spatio-legal reading of the biography of Django (Dregni 2004) about life in La Zone, a conflux of shanty towns on the ramparts of Paris. Drawing on interlegality and a Foucauldian reading of space, chaotic refractions of counter-hegemonic practices are evoked through a close reading of Django’s experiences in this peripheral ‘no-man’s land’. Such spaces demand an alternative reading whereby, rather than emphasising exclusion, they can be seen to actually infiltrate the protected city and define its ongoing lawscape.

scholarly journals A Study of Islamic and Arab Markets' Role in Revitalizing Urban Spaces

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 193
Author(s):  
Mohamed Yasser Lotfy ◽  
Abdullah Soliman ◽  
Alaa Mandour
Keyword(s):  
City Planning ◽  
Field Studies ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Modern City ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times ◽  
The One ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City

<p>Market places have occupied a major role in most cities around the world, being a site for more than just economic interactions, but rather a cultivating agent for social and cultural growth. The Arab and Islamic cities have a proud history of market places, most of the times being the main core of the city, with urban development encompassing it, and till the present day market places are in the heart of most communities. The <em>modern city </em>brought with it a devaluing of the traditional market places, making it a tourist attraction as in the case of <em>"khan el Khalil",</em>or leaving it to rust like <em>"bab el louq" </em>market. Those markets while playing a big role historically, <em>modern city planning </em>moved the services and markets into other form, thus becoming less important, abandoned, or even demolished at cases.</p><p>The issue at hand deals with how the contemporary urban planning affected market places, with emphasis on <em>closed markets</em> (Bab el-louk)which can be said to be the successor of the ancient <em>Bazaar </em>or <em>Wekala</em>.  Bal el-Louk market was once in the heart of Cairo and vital part of its community life, but now the market after more than a 100 years, is in ruins, but hope is not yet all lost, since the market can still be revived and revitalized.</p><p>To tackle this issue a combination of <em>comparative and field studies </em>must occur. On the one hand, comparative studies with <em>markets </em>in the US or closed markets in European cities such as Paris or Copenhagen would be done to find the necessary elements and goals that would make those markets vital, and the necessary steps to revitalize our own forgotten markets. The other study would have to deal with the current condition of bab el louk market in Cairo, finding out the reason behind its demise, the owners and users feedback on said market, and the opportunities for change.</p><p>With the results of the studies, general recommendations would be made for the <em>revitalization </em>of the Egyptian marketplaces, using an urban framework that would lead to those markets be available for costumers again and back to playing their major cultural and social rule.</p>

Making Fairyland Real

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julio Capó
Keyword(s):  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Wealth Status ◽  
Queer Women ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City

This chapter traces the lives of some of the queer women and men who helped tailor Miami’s fairyland image as a site of nonconformity that lacked the rigidity ascribed to larger, industrial urban spaces. It unearths the significance of the area’s artists, investors, settlers, and imperial architects in fashioning a modern fairyland that proved desirable to outsiders. It demonstrates how wealth, status, and whiteness permitted the queer elite to promote Miami as a space where gender and sexuality could be challenged, renegotiated, and subverted. As influential powerbrokers living with an “open secret” in the city, several of these queers crafted Miami’s lucrative image as a fairyland through the tentacles of U.S. imperialism, casting the city’s offering as an extension of the vice and pleasure available in the nearby Caribbean.

The mid-fourteenth century capital of Mali

1973 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. O. Hunwick
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Left Bank ◽  
The South ◽  
Proper Name ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City ◽  
River Niger

For over a century scholars have been attempting to locate the area and, if possible, the actual site of the capital of the Mali empire in its period of greatness. Since the 1920S attention has been focused on an area near the Sankararni river, a tributary entering the Niger from the south, upstream from Bamako. Over recent years a Polish-Guinean archaeological expedition has been digging a site there, but with inconclusive results so far.A close reading of the few descriptions we have of the capital of Mali, and in particular of the route taken by Ibn Battūta, who visited the capital in 1352, suggests that the city lay on the left bank of the river Niger somewhere between Segu and Bamako. This is in fact a ‘logical] site for the capital of an empire whose tributaries lay mainly in the savannah and Sahel belts, and in whose armies cavalry played a significant role. For this reason, and a number of others, the recent hypothesis of Claude Meillassoux, suggesting a location for the capital south of the R. Falémé (and perhaps also of the R. Gambia), seems doubtful. The proper name for the capital is also discussed.

Global Justice at the Municipal Scale

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fonna Forman ◽  
Teddy Cruz
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Local Governance ◽  
Global City ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City

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.

Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism

2019 ◽  
pp. 285-311
Author(s):  
Paul Niell
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
New World ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
American Architecture ◽  
Political Norms ◽  
The City

The Baroque in Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism, in parts of the Americas formerly comprising the Spanish and Portuguese empires, has been traditionally studied as a question of adherence to or deviation from a Counter-Reformation style promoted primarily by ecclesiastical institutions. This article expands upon what is meant by “Baroque” in the architecture and urbanism of the Iberian empires in the Americas. Through the analysis of urban plans, images of the city, architectural interiors and exteriors, physical urban spaces, and other forms of material culture, this article argues that Ibero-American architecture and urbanism in the age of the Baroque belonged to a phenomenon of ordering and thereby creating the “New World” as ideologically constituted colonial spaces that reified social and political norms. Furthermore, human subjects actively negotiated the spaces created by architecture and the city, making the American Baroque also part of a process of negotiating order and thereby producing American spaces.

Connectivity in the Multi-Layered City: Towards the Sustainable City

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-35
Author(s):  
Bob Brown
Keyword(s):  
Global City ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Alternative Form ◽  
Recent Experience ◽  
Sustainable City ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Financial Speculation ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City ◽  
Development Practice

A new urban paradigm, the global city, emerged in the late 20th Century finding acceptance in discussions of urban development. Tied into a global network of exchange, it exists principally as a place of financial speculation and transaction. It is marked by a parallel economy of culture, which underpins a re-conceptualisation and spatial re-formation of the city. Despite its widespread currency, criticisms have challenged its economic sustainability. Further questions have contested its tendency to impose a singular, homogenized space prioritizing consumption while marginalising other concerns. Post-independence Riga's recent experience provides a platform from which to critique the global city paradigm, which the city embraced as it sought to embed itself in the West not only politically but culturally and economically as well. In opposition to this model's intrinsic singular emphasis and exclusionary tendencies, this text will explore the concept of palimpsest; this proposition understands the city as a multiplicity of layers, within which convergences and divergences offer a site from which to generate synergies. This will be framed in reference to recent discourse on the sustainable city and development practice. Recent design-led inquiry situated in the context of Riga will then provide a lens on palimpsest as an alternative form of praxis.

THE FREEDOM OF THE AESTHETIC: MONTSERRAT ROIG’S USE OF THE CITY IN RAMONA, ADÉU

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
Caragh Wells
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Social ◽  
Catalan Literature ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The City

This article suggests that over recent decades Catalan literary criticism has paid too little attention to the aesthetic attributes of Catalan literature and emphasised the social, political and cultural at the expense of discussions of narrative poetics. Through an analysis of Montserrat Roig’s metaphorical use of the city in her first novel Ramona, adéu, I put forward the view that the aesthetic features of Catalan literature need to be re-claimed. This article provides a critical analysis of the aesthetic importance of Roig’s representation of the city in her first novel and argues that she uses Barcelona as a critical tool through which to explore questions of both female emancipation and aesthetic freedom. Following a detailed discussion of Roig’s descriptions of how her female characters interact with particular urban spaces, I examine how Roig makes subtle shifts in her semantic register during these narrative accounts when her prose moves into the realm of the poetic. I conclude that this technique enables us to read her accounts of urban space as metaphors for aesthetic freedom and are inextricably linked to her wider concerns on the importance of liberating Catalan literature from the discourse of political nationalism.

COVID-19 pandemic and the poor in the urban spaces of India with special reference to Mumbai

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sujayita Bhattacharjee ◽  
Sanjukta Sattar
Keyword(s):  
Special Reference ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
Socioeconomic Crisis ◽  
The City

PurposeThe lives of the poor in the urban spaces of India are filled with hardships. They live amidst poverty and struggle to survive within other problems such as insecure jobs, lack of proper housing, unsanitary conditions and low levels of health immunity. This vulnerable section of the population has been rendered furthermore vulnerable by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in ways that were never imagined before. Taking this into consideration, the purpose of this article is to examine the vulnerability of the poor in the urban settings of India with special reference to Mumbai in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology adopted in the study is based on the analysis of secondary data and content analysis of the existing literature. In addition to this, the study also makes use of certain narratives of the urban poor in Mumbai that have been captured by various articles, reports and blogs.FindingsThe findings of the study reveal how the urban poor of India, with special reference to Mumbai, the financial capital of India, has emerged as the worst sufferers of the socioeconomic crisis caused by the social distancing and lockdown measures imposed for combating the pandemic.Originality/valueThe study tries to explore the reality of the urban poor's right to the city in the wake of the pandemic.

The Brain as Treasury and as Aqueduct

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 542-566
Author(s):  
Jessica Wright
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
Brain Functions ◽  
Motor Nerves ◽  
Architectural Structures ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City ◽  
The Brain

In late antique theological texts, metaphors of the brain were useful tools for talking about forms of governance: cosmic, political, and domestic; failed and successful; interior discipline and social control. These metaphors were grounded in a common philosophical analogy between the body and the city, and were also supported by the ancient medical concept of the brain as the source of the sensory and motor nerves. Often the brain was imagined as a monarch or civic official, governing the body from the head as from an acropolis or royal house. This article examines two unconventional metaphors of the brain in the work of the fifth-century Greco-Syrian bishop Theodoret of Cyrrhus—the brain as a treasure within the acropolis, and the brain as a node in an urban aqueduct—both of which adapt the structural metaphor of governance to reflect the changing political and economic circumstances of imperial Christianity. Drawing upon medical theories of the brain, Theodoret expands upon the conventional governance metaphor of brain function to encompass the economic and the spiritual responsibilities of the bishop-administrator. Just as architectural structures (acropolis, aqueduct) contain and distribute valuable resources (treasure, water) within the city, so the brain accumulates and redistributes nourishing substances (marrow, blood, pneuma) within the body; and just as the brain functions as a site for the transformation of material resources (body) into spiritual goods (mind), so the bishop stands as a point of mediation between earthly wealth and the treasures of heaven.

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