scholarly journals General Henning’s Yekaterinburg: An Attempt at Reading the “Urban Text”

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dmitry Redin

The author of this article attempts a semiotic interpretation of the features of the architectural and planning system of early Yekaterinburg (1723–1734). The method is based on an improvisation on Michel de Certeau’s ideas about the city as a complex text, which results from the simultaneous and inconsistent creativity of its founders and administrators on the one hand and ordinary people on the other. Another source for the author’s improvisation is the ideas of some representatives of the French school of genetic criticism, more particularly, the concepts of avant-text and text. From these positions, the author considers the activity of V. I. Henning (Rus. transcription: Gennin), the founder and first head of Yekaterinburg and a general in Russian service. The main milestones of his career, the accumulation of experience as an engineer and administrator, and the formation of a worldview before his Ural period are evaluated as work on the avant-text, while Yekaterinburg becomes the actual text. The author proves that Yekaterinburg was created by Henning not just as a large mining and metallurgical enterprise. General Henning’s Yekaterinburg appears as a manifesto city, a material text that embodies the aesthetics of the Baroque and the postulates of cameralism in its layout and execution. The city became a symbol of Petrine empire building on the border with Russia’s Asian possessions.

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-294
Author(s):  
Ina Schabert

In this period the city of Rouen is known for commercial activity and for certain literary connections, but its status as a centre of sorts for English-French translation has gone unrecognized. This paper explores the writers involved (some well known, some less familiar), the rationales for their translations (particularly from the poetry of Alexander Pope), and their relation on the one hand to the commercial life of Rouen, on the other to its Académie Royale, founded in 1744.


Author(s):  
Fátima Valenzuela ◽  
Fernando Pozzaglio

En este artículo nos proponemos explorar el fondo judicial del Archivo General de la Provincia de Corrientes. Por un lado, desarrollaremos un catálogo de las causas judicializadas entre 1612 y 1680, es decir, un instrumento descriptivo que puede ser utilizado por historiadores y/usuarios del archivo. Por otro lado, caracterizaremos los pleitos que corresponden a los albores de la configuración de la ciudad de San Juan de Vera. En ese contexto, presentaremos  una primera lectura en torno al funcionamiento de la justicia ordinaria y el accionar de otros funcionarios reales en el espacio colonial. De ese modo, lograremos una aproximación a los discursos y experiencias por medio de las causas judiciales. In this article we propose to explore the judicial fund of the General Archive of the Province of Corrientes. On the one hand, we will develop a catalog of judicial cases between 1612 and 1680, that is, a descriptive instrument that can be used by other historians and users of the archive. On the other hand, we characterize the lawsuits that took place at the dawn of the configuration of the city of San Juan de Vera. In this context, we will develop a first reading about the operation of ordinary justice and the action of other royal officials in the colonial space. In this way, we get an approximation to discourses and experiences through judicial cases.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis Lopes

<p>The city of Évora, a World Heritage Site recognized by UNESCO in 1986, also owes this recognition to the stones that built its monuments and preserve them until today.</p><p>This work brings together the contributions that we have gathered over the past three decades and allow us to have a very complete idea, not only about the materials used in the hundreds of monuments and historic buildings but also about their provenance. If some materials are so emblematic that they allow an immediate identification with the naked eye, others needed more sophisticated and precise techniques so that there was no doubt about their origin.</p><p>The igneous rocks and gneisses of granite composition are part of the “Massif of Évora” on which the city is built. Thus, and quite naturally they are by far the most represented group in monuments from all historical periods. Its function is essentially structural, but there are also functional, ornamental and decorative objects. For example, the oldest megalithic structures found in the vicinity of the city are made up of large granite blocks that often had to be transported to their locations.</p><p>On the other hand, many gargoyles and statues that decorate the churches are also made up of these granite rocks. On these, the natural erosion of centuries of exposure to the environment has led to a state of alteration, sometimes very accentuated, which would justify its replacement by replicas sculpted in similar rocks. Provenance studies have made it possible to identify old quarries in the vicinity of the city where, on the one hand, the ancient rock extraction techniques can be observed and on the other hand, they allow the obtaining of the raw material necessary for these restoration and conservation works. In any case, they are places that need to be inventoried and protected, with the municipality already aware of their existence.</p><p>As well as the monuments of the Roman Period, also the structures of the Medieval Period, such as the city walls, the Cathedral (started to be built in 1186 AD) and all the great churches, were also built with these granitoids.</p><p>In addition to these rocks, many others of multiple varieties and origins are present. The marbles, especially the Estremoz Marbles (Global Heritage Stone Resource), are ubiquitous in the city, but there are also emblematic marbles from other places, some easily identifiable (ie Viana do Alentejo, Escoural, Trigaches, Serpa and Vila Verde de Ficalho, for presenting mineralogy, textures, colors and patterns which, together with more recent analytical techniques, have confirmed its provenance.</p><p>Sedimentary rocks, with emphasis on Portuguese Mesozoic limestones, ie Lioz - GHSR and Brecha da Arrábida - GHSR candidate, among others more rare and with very specific use in ornamental details, are also present and contribute to enrich a heritage in stone that makes this city so special and very popular with tourists of all nationalities.</p><p>Acknowledgments: the authors thank to FCT for funding the ICT (UID/GEO/04683/2019), as well as COMPETE POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007690.</p>


2006 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 663
Author(s):  
Martha De Alba

En el presente artículo se estudia el imaginario urbano de la Ciudad de México valiéndose de la comparación de la perspectiva de una muestra de residentes del Distrito Federal con otra muestra de funcionarios encargados de la gestión de la metrópoli. Se parte del supuesto de que las imágenes que esta gran ciudad suscita corresponden a dos registros distintos: por un lado la experiencia urbana captada a través del discurso sobre la ciudad y por el otro las imágenes cartográficas que se materializan en mapas cognitivos del espacio. Se presentan aquí los resultados de estas dos perspectivas complementarias de análisis de las representaciones de la ciudad y se propone una metodología para su estudio. Asimismo se analiza si la vivencia y la representación de la ciudad corresponden a las propuestas teóricas que plantean que la metrópoli contemporánea ya no es más un lugar de convivencia, sociabilidad e identidad, sino que se ha convertido en un espacio únicamente funcional. AbstractThis article studies the urban imagination in Mexico City, using the comparison of the perspective of a sample of residents from the Federal District with another sample of functionaries in charge of managing the metropolis. It begins with the assumption that the images this great city evokes correspond to two different registers: on the one hand, the urban experience recorded through the discourse on the city and on the other, the cartographic images materialized in cognitive maps of space. This article presents the results of these two complementary methods of analyzing the representations of the city and proposes a methodology for studying them. It also analyzes whether the experience and the representation of the city correspond to the theoretical proposals suggesting that the contemporary metropolis is no longer a place of coexistence, sociability and identity but has become a purely functional space.


Author(s):  
Stephan F. De Beer

This article reflects on the unfinished task of liberation – as expressed in issues of land – and drawing from the work of Franz Fanon and the Durban-based social movement Abahlali baseMjondolo. It locates its reflections in four specific sites of struggle in the City of Tshwane, and against the backdrop of the mission statement of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Pretoria, as well as the Capital Cities Research Project based in the same university. Reflecting on the ‘living death’ of millions of landless people on the one hand, and the privatisation of liberation on the other, it argues that a liberating praxis of engagement remains a necessity in order to break the violent silences that perpetuate exclusion.


Africa ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 88 (S1) ◽  
pp. S51-S71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexis Malefakis

AbstractFor a group of Wayao street vendors in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, kinship relations were simultaneously an advantage and a hindrance. Their migration to the city and entry into the urban economy had occurred along ethnic and kinship lines. But, as they perceived the socially heterogeneous environment of the city that potentially offered them opportunities to cooperate with people from different social or ethnic backgrounds, they experienced their continuing dependency on their relatives as a form of confinement. Against the backdrop of the city, the Wayao perceived their social relations as being burdened with an inescapable sameness that made it impossible to trust one another. Mistrust, contempt and mutual suspicion were the flip side of close social relations and culminated in accusations ofuchawi(Swahili: witchcraft). However, these accusations did not have a disintegrative effect; paradoxically, their impact on social relations among the vendors was integrative. On the one hand,uchawiallegations expressed the claustrophobic feeling of stifling relations; on the other, they compelled the accused to adhere to a shared morality of egalitarian relations and exposed the feeling that the accused individual was worthy of scrutiny, indicating that relationships with him were of particular importance to others.


2009 ◽  
pp. 67-84
Author(s):  
Marco Solimene

- The present contribution examines the rootedness of a community of xoraxané romá in the city of Rome; rather than simply the continuity of presence in a specific territory, under consideration is the development and maintenance of social networks with the Roman population, specifically in the territories romá reside and/or work in. Further on, the paper describes how rootedness may be conjugated with some forms of mobility: on the one hand, the continuity in specific areas (of work and in some cases of residence), can be maintained through practices of urban circulation; on the other hand, especially when mobility turns on national and transnational scale, the presence - although mobile and changing - of romá who belong to the same social network, spread among different territories, enables singular domestic units to maintain, despite mobility, a continuity with several non-rom realities.


Author(s):  
Rodolphe De Koninck

To better understand, on the one hand, the remarkable and largely commendable transformation that Singapore has undergone over the last century and, on the other hand, its vulnerability, answers should be sought to the following two questions. Does not the relentless overhaul of Singaporean living space, nearly always considered as a fait accompli, yet always subject to being revised by the state, lead to territorial alienation among the city state’s citizens and permanent residents? Just as classical Athens and even classical Rome came to depend on a constant and everincreasing supply of foreign labour, Singapore has reached a point where its dependence on a modern and imported form of lumpenproletariat has become apparently irreversible. Is this sustainable?


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-94
Author(s):  
Massimo Leone

Abstract The Casa da Nostalgia, or “Nostalgic house,” in the Taipa area of the special administrative region of Macau, is a museum devoted to temporary exhibitions reconstructing everyday life in the city, especially in the epoch of Portuguese ruling. Just opposite the museum, on the other side of a large pond, a giant casino, the Venetian Macau, reproduces Venice both with its external architecture and its interior design. The article analyzes these two urban settings in order to develop a semiotic understanding of as many ways of symbolically reconstructing cities. On the one hand, cities can be reconstructed in a nostalgic form; the essay inquires on the origin and the consequences of urban nostalgia; on the other hand, cities can be reconstructed as ersatz. The article further investigates the dialectics between predominantly temporal or prevailingly spatial urban reconstructions, with reference to the socio-cultural dynamics that have changed Macau in the last decades. The article concludes with the methodological suggestion that the study of urban re-constructions requires the combined efforts of several disciplines, jointly investigating why, how, but also to what effect cities are re-built.


Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (10) ◽  
pp. 2031-2046
Author(s):  
Salla Jokela

There have been two types of scholarly discussion on city branding. On the one hand, city branding has been conceptualised as a differentiation strategy of entrepreneurial cities involved in interspatial competition. On the other hand, researchers have recently emphasised the need to pay attention to increasingly pervasive and transformative forms of city branding, including branding as an urban policy and a form of planning. Drawing on a case study carried out in Helsinki, Finland, this article connects these two approaches by analysing Helsinki’s recent city branding endeavour in the context of the qualitative transformation of the entrepreneurial city. The article shows how city branding highlights and constitutes the city as an entrepreneurial platform and enabler bound up by the extended entrepreneurialisation of society.


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