scholarly journals PRACTICES AND MODES OF MODERN URBAN SPACEVISION

2019 ◽  
pp. 52-60
Author(s):  
R. D. Fanagey

The article is devoted to the cultural analysis of the influence of the theory of postfordism, which considers post-Fordist production with post-industrial technology as the basis of industrial reproduction at the global level and the reproduction of capitalist social relations after the crisis of the Fordist mode of production and consumption. The abstract social space of the city is studied, which is formed by abstraction of labor and fetishization of things at the level of practice and the formation of a visually geometric representation of space with sign power re- pressive in relation to reality. The basis of the concept of sociality as the basis of a unified theory of space was developed by the French philosopher and sociologist A. Lefebvre and further developed by American social geography and urban studies, in particular in the works of D. Harvey, E. Soggy, D. Gottdiener and others. The followers of Lefebvre (apart from those important are F. Jameson's influence) refer in particular to the interdisciplinary trend of post-Fordism, within which postmodernism is considered in connection with the post-Fordist regime of accumulation (a concept developed by the Marxist regulatory school). S. Lesch focuses on the cultural mode of signaling. Likewise, D. Hartmann considers the influence of postmodernism on the post-Fordist regime of capitalism. Paolo True and Pascal Gillen consider within the limits of post-Fordism the existence in modern conditions of the plural. V. Martyanov examines the links between post-Fordism and the post-industrial / information society conceptualized by D. Bell, E. Toffler, M. Castels and others. The article deals with the reconstruction of the theory of social space and post-Fordism and outlines the social transformations of the twentieth century. In essence, it was a search for confirmation that the accumulation mode produces and reproduces social space. Architecture and urban space have become an important structural link through which to consider this connection and justify the invariance of the basic mode of accumu- lation through the reproduction of abstract social space and vice versa. The analysis of the discourse around the urban abstract space associated with the identity of the bourgeois class and the need for the for- mation of a hierarchized homogeneous spatial texture of production is carried out. As well as post-Fordist globalization and post-industrialization, which led to a change in the function and structure of the city with the main role of the post-modernist regime of signification as the logic of late capitalism in the context of programmed consumption.

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gianluca Gaias

The social transformations and the spatializing practices that individuals and groups put in place on the contemporary urban territory, especially for what concerns different human groups in the same urban context, have long been the subject of much research in social geography. How to place oneself, as a researcher, in a hybrid and complex space such as that of the intercultural and cosmopolitan city? Starting from a field research conducted in the City of Cagliari, this contribution aims to discuss the methodologies used, the postures adopted and the critical issues that emerged in conducting an analysis centered on those emerging territorialities attributable to the presence of foreign individuals and communities recently settled in the urban space.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Elisabeth Goidanich ◽  
Carmen Rial

Abstract: The objective of this study is to interpret supermarket stores as privileged spaces for the observation of social relations. The article is based on an ethnography of shopping conducted in the city of Florianópolis, Brazil, by observing middle class housewives during their daily shopping in supermarkets. These stores are seen as places, in opposition to that proposed by Augè (1995), who affirms that supermarkets are non-places produced by supermodernity. The article discusses the history of supermarkets, their role in the cultural and social transformations of the twentieth century, as well as ethnographic data, and shows that it is possible to identify many social interactions inside Brazilian supermarkets.


Author(s):  
Annie Crane

The purpose of this study was to analyze guerrilla gardening’s relationship to urban space and contemporary notions of sustainability. To achieve this two case studies of urban agriculture, one of guerrilla gardening and one of community gardening were developed. Through this comparison, guerrilla gardening was framed as a method of spatial intervention, drawing in notions of spatial justice and the right to the city as initially theorized by Henri Lefebvre. The guerrilla gardening case study focuses on Dig Kingston, a project started by the researcher in June of 2010, and the community gardening case study will use the Oak Street Garden, the longest standing community garden in Kingston. The community gardening case study used content analysis and semi-structured long format interviews with relevant actors. The guerrilla gardening case study consisted primarily of action based research as well as content analysis and semi-structured long format interviews. By contributing to the small, but growing, number of accounts and research on guerrilla gardening this study can be used as a starting point to look into other forms of spatial intervention and how they relate to urban space and social relations. Furthermore, through the discussion of guerrilla gardening in an academic manner more legitimacy and weight will be given to it as a method of urban agriculture and interventionist tactic. On a wider scale, perhaps it could even contribute to answering the question of how we (as a society) can transform our cities and reengage in urban space.


PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (2) ◽  
pp. 496-504
Author(s):  
Anjali Prabhu

In his fascinating study of accra, ato quays0n quickly alerts his reader to the idea that one must not separate ways of knowing shakespeare from ways of knowing Accra. “Reading” the city as a literary critic, but much more, Quayson gives a discursive framework to his historical account of the material, social, and esoteric life of the city. Underlying the text is an implicit argument with other prominent accounts of African cities, which take a more utopian view and present these cities as mapping the innovative, exciting, and creative possibilities of urban space for the rest of the world. Quayson's mode of history is explicitly linked to storytelling in a number of ways beyond his disclosure that “[t]he retelling of Accra's story from a more expansive urban historical perspective is the object of Oxford Street” (4). From the start, it is also clear that his approach will utilize a broadly Marxian framework, which is to see (city) space in terms of the built environment as well as the social relations in and beyond it: “space becomes both symptom and producer of social relations” (5). But ultimately Quayson's apprehension of his city is Marxian because it recuperates ideas, desires, and creativity from the realm of the unique or inexplicable, of “genius,” to effectively insert them into various systems of production or into spaces that lack them. In so doing Quayson enhances, not hinders, our appreciation of those forms of innovation. Also Marxian is his employment of the “negative,” which refers to the way he splits apart many of the accepted relations between things in the scholarship on the development of the city, the postcolonial African city in particular, and pushes beyond the evidence of the “booming” or “creative” city. Quayson thus binds a more philosophical method of reasoning to his analysis of urban social relations while he straddles different disciplines. His work is illuminated when we locate a personal impulse, which we will track through the autobiographical narrative, to intervene not just in the ways the city is understood but also in the ways it is actually developing.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 19-23
Author(s):  
I.V. Manyshev ◽  
◽  
A.A. Trunov ◽  

Urban studies has occupied and continues to occupy a special place in the system of sociological knowledge. G. Simmel, F. Tennis and E. Durkheim paid great attention to the problem of the genesis and evolution of large and small cities, the devel- opment of urbanization processes, various aspects of integration, mobilization and social activism within a single urban space. Classics of European sociological thought laid a powerful theoretical and methodological foundation for the scientific study of the institute of public relations in the social space of European cities of the late XIX – first half of the XX centuries. Their fun- damental differences between the countryside and the city, the specifics of private and public life in small and large cities, the antagonism between community and society, organic and mechanical solidarity, the progress of civilization and the parallel growth of social deviations allow a more adequate approach to the study of the institute of public relations, but in re- lation to modern realities, which are characterized by the processes of digitalization and globalization, the rapid develop- ment of high technologies, new opportunities for social interaction, which become available not only for the elite, but also for ordinary citizens. Without effective public relations, it is difficult to imagine the activities of city authorities and services, trade firms, corporations, police, educational and cultural institutions. We consider public relations as a universal socio-cultural mechanism that allows us to establish and maintain effective public communications between management entities and segments of the urban social environment that are important for their activities (individuals and social groups) in the mode of dialogue and search for joint solutions to current problems.


2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laila Huber

This article explores the creation of new structures of participation and counter imaginaries within the city between the poles of arts and politics. On the basis of two case studies, one situated in the non-institutionalised artistic field and one in the non-institutionalised political field, I will explore narratives of a 'topography of the possible' in the city of Salzburg. Aiming to outline collage pieces of a topography of the possible and of counter-narrative in and of the city – the city is looked at in terms of collage, understood as overlapping layers of the three spatial dimensions materiality (physical space), sociability (social space) and the imaginary (symbolic space). These are understood as differing but interrelated spatial dimensions, each one unfolding forms of collective appropriation of a city. The focus lies on the creation of social relations and collective imaginaries on the micro-level of cultural and political self-organised initiatives, looked at under terms of narration and storytelling. My ethnographic project asks for the creative potentiality of a city and for the creative power of social relations and collective imaginaries.


1988 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
G Pratt ◽  
S Hanson

The social area analyses and factorial ecologies of the 1950s and 1960s have constrained the way in which scholars conceptualize urban space; in particular, one can trace contemporary arguments regarding the social reproduction of class to the notion of homogeneous neighborhoods that emerges from social area analyses and factorial ecology. It is argued that the growth in female labor-force participation, the fact of occupational sex segregation, and other recent demographic trends have important implications for the social geography of the North American city. With 1980 Census data from the Worcester, MA Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area, the impact of the gender division of labor on urban social space is described; in particular it is shown that occupational segregation is an important source of intraneighborhood class heterogeneity. The final section of the paper is an exploration of the implications of the findings for theories of social reproduction and for class-based urban politics.


Urban History ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 372-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAULA HOHTI

ABSTRACT:Historians of early modern Italy have traditionally viewed the city's public spaces, such as streets, quarters, taverns and marketplaces, as the chief locations in which claims to identity were launched into the broader urban community. Recent studies on the domestic interior, however, have shown that the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century urban space was much more complex. In this period, private urban houses became sites for an increasing range of social acitvities that varied from informal evening gatherings to large wedding banquets. Focusing on this ‘public’ dimension of the private urban house, this article explores how the middling classes of artisans and shopkeepers used the domestic space to construct identities and to facilitate social relations in sixteenth-century Siena. The aim is to show that in providing a setting for differing forms of economic and social activity, the urban home together with its objects and furnishings may have provided an increasingly important physical location for craftsmen, shop-owners and traders to negotaite individual and collective identities within the broader communities of the city.


Author(s):  
А.Н. ДЕМЬЯНЕНКО ◽  
М.В. КЛИЦЕНКО ◽  
В.Н. УКРАИНСКИЙ

В статье приведены результаты полевых исследований неформальных уличных рынков Хабаровска, имевших целью выявить и описать их пространственную организацию. В качестве тестируемой гипотезы было принято, что уличные неформальные рынки вписаны в социальное пространство города, а масштабы, сезонность и ассортимент реализуемой продукции, а также поведенческие паттерны участников обменов зависят от структуры городского пространства. Так как неформальные уличные рынки не наблюдаются и не фиксируются официальной статистикой, был использован традиционный метод изучения неформальных феноменов – полевые исследования, а также методы городской антропологии. При описании социального пространства г. Хабаровск были использованы методы как социально-экономического, так и вернакулярного микрорайонирования. Всего было выделено 15 внутригородских районов первого уровня членения социального пространства. Выявлено, что вернакулярные районы перемежаются лакунами, а их границы не имеют четкого характера. В ходе полевых исследований, продолжавшихся с апреля 2019 по июль 2020 г., было выявлено более 100 мест уличной торговли, которые объединены в три основных типа: постоянные, сезонные и эпизодические. Продавцы на неформальных рынках были объединены в три основные группы: «частники» (владельцы ЛПХ), «дачники» и «собиратели» (жители пригородов, реализующие на рынках «дары тайги»). Наблюдение за поведением отдельных социальных групп на неформальных рынках разных типов в различных районах свидетельствует в пользу того, что действительно существует связь между поведенческими паттернами агентов рынка и социокультурной средой. In the article, the results of field studies of the informal street markets in Khabarovsk intended to reveal and describe their spatial organization are presented. As the test hypothesis, it is anticipated that the street informal markets were incorporated into the social space of the city while the scales, seasonality and assortment of the realizable products as well as behavioral patterns of the exchange participants depend on the structure of the urban space. Because the informal street markets are not observed and fixed by the official statistics, the traditional methods of investigating the informal phenomena – field studies – as well as methods of the city anthropology were used. When describing the social space of Khabarovsk city, the methods of socio-economic and vernacular microzoning were used. In all, 15 inner-city districts of the first level were identified when dividing the social space. It was found that the vernacular districts alternate with lacunas and their boundaries are not of clear nature. In the course of the field studied continued from April, 2019, through July, 2020, more than 100 places of the street trading which were combined into three basic types: permanent, seasonal and episodic. The salesmen in the informal markets were combined into three basic groups: “private traders” (owners of personal subsidiary plots), “summer residents” and “gatherers” (suburban residents realizing in the markets the “gifts of taiga”). Observation of the behavior of particular social groups in the informal markets of different types in different districts attests to the fact that there is really relationship between the behavioral patterns of the market agents and sociocultural environment.


ILUMINURAS ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (37) ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivia Von der Weid

A cidade do Rio de Janeiro, com quase 12 milhões de habitantes na região metropolitana, é a segunda maior aglomeração urbana do Brasil. O artigo propõe uma reflexão a respeito das relações sociais em espaços públicos estabelecidas nessa cidade entre pessoas cegas e outras pessoas que circulam por ruas de bairros como Centro, Copacabana ou o bairro da Urca. Ao abordar os deslocamentos e as relações sociais estabelecidas ao longo do percurso, procura-se traçar a impressão espacial e urbana de pessoas cegas e o fluxo dos seus itinerários. Como se constroem os trajetos e a ocupação espacial da cidade por pessoas cegas? Qual o uso que fazem dos transportes públicos? Quais são os cenários eleitos, os bairros frequentados e as dificuldades encontradas no caminho? Ao questionar as representações que pessoas cegas fazem dos cenários urbanos, os fatores que promovem e os fatores que restringem sua mobilidade, procura-se também desestabilizar uma compreensão do espaço urbano centrada no olhar. Busca-se incorporar na descrição dos lugares os seus aspectos vividos, os elementos, as materialidades e os sinais não-visuais que possibilitam sua apreensão.Palavras-chave: Cegueira. Corpo. Deslocamento. Cidade. Teritorialização."Urca is the paradise of the blind": urban mobility, acess to the city and territoryAbstractThe city of Rio de Janeiro, with nearly 12 million inhabitants in the metropolitan area, is the second largest urban agglomeration in Brazil. This paper proposes a reflection on the social relations in public spaces established in that city between blind people and other people moving through the streets of neighborhoods like the city center, Copacabana or Urca. Addressing the displacements and the social relations established along the route, the article seeks to trace the urban and spatial impressions of blind people and the flow of their itineraries. How the blinds build their paths and how they spatially occupy the city? What is their use of public transport? What are the elected scenarios, frequented neighborhoods and the difficulties they find in their way? By questioning the representations of urban scenes by blind people, the factors that promote and factors that restrict their mobility, we also seeks to destabilize an understanding of urban space focused on vision. We try to incorporate in the description of places their experienced aspects and the elements, materiality and non-visual signals that enable their apprehension.Keywords: Blindness. Body. Displacement. City. Territory. 


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document