scholarly journals The Authenticity Concept of Sh. Zukin: “Schizoid” Category in Urban Studies

Inter ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 8-28
Author(s):  
Kseniia N. Kalashnikova

The article is devoted to the consideration of the concept of authenticity set forth by S. Zukin in the book “Naked City: Death and Life of Authentic Urban Spaces”. The sources of the concept are traced in the author’s early works, the main subjects described in them are: the process of gentrification; power relations forming the urban landscape; symbolic economy and the power of cultural characteristics. These subjects became the basis of the idea of authenticity. Its manifestations are described by the example of “uncommon” and “common” urban spaces. A separate place in the article is considered by the development of individual ideas of Sh. Zukin, their interpretations, as well as applications for specific studies in the work of followers. The conclusion is drawn about the variety of interpretations offered by researchers and the ambiguity of using authenticity as a tool for analyzing the city.

Author(s):  
M.S. Parvathi ◽  

Burton Pike (1981) terms the cityscapes represented in literature as word-cities whose depiction captures the spatial significance evoked by the city-image and simultaneously, articulates the social psychology of its inhabitants (pp. 243). This intertwining of the social and the spatial animates the concept of spatiality, which informs the positionality of urban subjects, (be it the verticality of the city or the horizonality of the landscape) and determines their standpoint (Keith and Pile, 1993). The spatial politics underlying cityscapes, thus, determine the modes of social production of sexed corporeality. In turn, the body as a cultural product modifies and reinscribes the urban landscape according to its changing demographic needs. The dialectic relationship between the city and the bodies embedded in them orient familial, social, and sexual relations and inform the discursive practices underlying the division of urban spaces into public and private domains. The geographical and social positioning of the bodies within the paradigm of the public/private binary regulates the process of individuation of the bodies into subjects. The distinction between the public and the private is deeply rooted in spatial practices that isolate a private sphere of domestic, embodied activity from the putatively disembodied political, public sphere. Historically, women have been treated as private and embodied and the politics of the demarcated spaces are employed to control and limit women’s mobility. This gendered politics underlying the situating practices apropos public and private spaces inform the representations of space in literary texts. Manu Joseph’s novels, Serious Men (2010) and The Illicit Happiness of Other People (2012), are situated in the word-cities of Mumbai and Chennai respectively whose urban spaces are structured by such spatial practices underlying the politics of location. The paper attempts to problematize the nature of gendered spatializations informing the location of characters in Serious Men and The Illicit Happiness of Other People.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-390
Author(s):  
Paul Allatson ◽  
Andrea Connor

The Australian White Ibis (Ibis) ( Threskiornis molucca) is one of three endemic Ibis species in Australia. In a short time frame beginning in the 1970s, this species has moved from inland waterways to urban centres along the eastern and southeastern seaboards, Darwin and the Western Australian southwest. Today Ibis are at home in cities across the country, where they thrive on the food waste, water resources and nesting sites supplied by humans. In this article, the authors focus on Sydney to argue that the physical and cultural inroads of Ibis, and the birds’ urban homeliness, are resignifying urban surfaces and the multispecies ecologies in which contemporary Australians operate. They explore how the very physical and sensory presence of Ibis disrupts the assumptions of many urban Australians, and visitors from overseas, that cities are human-centric or human-dominant, non-hybrid assemblages. They also introduce to this discussion of disrupted human expectations a cultural parallel, namely, the recent rise of Ibis in popular culture as an icon-in-the-making of the nation and as a totem of the modern Australian city itself. This trend exemplifies an avian-led revisualization of urban spaces, and is notable for its visual appeals to Ibis kitsch, and to working class or ‘bogan’ sensibilities that assert their place alongside cosmopolitan visions of being Australian. Sometimes kitsch Ibis imagery erupts across the urban landscape, as occurs with many Ibis murals. At other times it infiltrates daily life on clothing, on football club, university and business logos, as tattoos on people’s skin, and as words in daily idiom, confirmed by terms such as ‘picnic pirates’, ‘tip turkeys’ and ‘bin chickens’. The article uses a visual vignette methodology to chart Ibis moves into Sydney and the realms of representation alike, and thus to reveal how new zoöpolitical entanglements are being made in the 21st century.


Urban Studies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 702-719 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harriet Bulkeley ◽  
Andrés Luque-Ayala ◽  
Colin McFarlane ◽  
Gordon MacLeod

As the 21st Century world assumes an increasingly urban landscape, the question of how definitive urban spaces are to be governed intensifies. At the heart of this debate lies a question about the degree and type of autonomy that towns and cities might have in shaping their economic, environmental, social and cultural geography. This paper aims to examine this question. Starting with the premise that the degree of autonomy any particular town or city has is inherently an empirical question – one which can only be conceptualised in relational terms vis-à-vis the distributed, networked and territorialised responsibilities and powers of the city and the nation-state and other zones of connection – we examine four different contexts where debates over autonomy have intensified in recent history (Brazil, UK, India and South Africa). Drawing on recent respective histories, we identify key elements and enablers in the making of urban autonomy: a characteristic that exists in a variety of guises and forms and creates a patchwork landscape of differentially powerful fragments. We reveal how, beyond its characteristic as a political ideal, autonomy surfaces as a practice that emerges from within specific sectors of particular societies and through their relationship with national and regional politics. Four alternative forms of urban autonomy are delineated: fragmented, coerced (or enclave), distributed and networked. We contend that the spatial templates for autonomy are not predetermined but can be enhanced in multiple different sites and forms of political space within the city. This enhancement appears essential for the integration and strengthening of capacities for sustainable and just forms of development throughout the urban.


AmeriQuests ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Armstrong

This is a paper on street art and its role as a form of artistic insurrection that challenges popular understandings of public space and urban visual culture. I would like to think of it as a field guide to urban seeing, a means of revising the way in which we view the cityscape and its imagery. It is a way of imagining the city as a canvas onto which ideas may be inscribed and reinterpreted, where resistance percolates up to those who look for it. It is here, in what Kathleen Stewart has called a “place by the side of the road” that the work of the street artist exists, slowly gurgling up through the cracks in the sidewalk and briefly illuminated by the yellow-white glow of the street lights. Street art most often takes the form of adhesive stickers, spray-painted stencils, and wheat-pasted posters, and while it shares many similar aesthetic and cultural characteristics with graffiti, street art embodies a unique ideology. Graffiti represents a territorialization of space (‘tagging’, or reclaiming urban spaces through the use of pseudonyms as territorial markings); street art represents a reterritorialization of space. Rather than taking space, street art attempts to re-purpose the existing urban environment. This paper seeks to reflect the changing dynamic of urban space through an analysis of the practice of street art. By examining the roles that street artists play in disrupting the flow of visual noise in the city, I will illuminate the cultural value and significance of this form of urban artistic resistance.


ILUMINURAS ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (47) ◽  
Author(s):  
Giancarlo Marques Carraro Machado

O artigo aborda como jovens skatistas resistem a certas relações de poder, assimetrias, desigualdades e segregações que calham na região leste de São Paulo e como eles se impõem em toda sorte de espaços a partir de suas manobras e táticas a fim de garantir as suas práticas citadinas e inserções na cidade.A realização do skate de rua constitui-se como foco de uma investigação que o trata não apenas como uma prática multifacetada que transcorre no urbano, mas, igualmente, como sendo uma própria prática do urbano transposta por posicionamentos díspares frente às governanças que são feitas dos espaços da cidade. Palavras chave: Citadinidade. Skate. Espaços urbanos. Antropologia Urbana. PERIPHERAL REVOLUTION: THE PRACTICE OF SKATEBOARDING IN THE EAST OF THE CITY OF SÃO PAULO Abstract:The article discusses how skateboarders resist certain power relations, asymmetries, inequalities and segregations that affect the eastern region of São Paulo and how they impose themselves in multiples spaces from their maneuvers and tactics in order to guarantee their practices and inserts in the city. The realization of the street skateboarding is the focus of an investigation that treats it not only as a multifaceted practice that occurs in the urban, but also as a practice of the urban transposed by disparate positions against the governances that are made of spaces of the city. Keywords:Urbanity. Skateboarding. Urban spaces. UrbanAnthropology.


2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 84-107
Author(s):  
Tadas Šarūnas

This article analyses the dominant discourses about cities in Lithuanian urban studies. Approach­ing urban processes in a different way, I suggest to study cities as a dense cluster of dwellings and consider housing as the main field (the Bourdieu’s concept) that structures the material forms of the city. In the first two sections of the article I consider the case of Vilnius and criticize the dominant natural and geopolitical categories and metaphors as limiting our understanding about urban processes. In the third part I argue how a historical genealogy of the symbolic forms of the city might reveal spatial manifestations and practices of power relations. Supplementing the genealogy of the symbolic forms with the analysis of social structures, it is possible to suggest a more relevant approach to study Lithuanian cities. Also, such an approach might facilitate productive cooperation between urban researchers working with different epistemological traditions.


Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110229
Author(s):  
Mikkel Bille ◽  
Bettina Hauge

This article explores how people choreograph spaces to feel particular ways through material objects and intangible phenomena like light and sound. Drawing on theories of atmospheres and ethnographic fieldwork in Copenhagen, we argue that while there has been a proliferation of research on atmospheres in urban studies, we also need to attend empirically to the processes through which they come into being, consolidate and coagulate. Through exploring the interplay between domestic and urban spaces, we highlight the volatility and inherently social character of atmospheres. This entails how people’s dynamic positioning within an urban atmosphere comes to matter for people’s sense of the city. We exemplify with one such sensation of the city through the concept of ‘midding’, as the feeling of comfortably being on the perimeter of a situation. Exploring atmospheric positionings and processes enlightens our understanding of the urban atmosphere and shows how shared atmospheric moments connect people in time and space, stressing the importance of urban design to allow for such sharing.


2020 ◽  
Vol 165 ◽  
pp. 04036
Author(s):  
Zheng Jia-Xin ◽  
Tu Hao-Ran ◽  
Lee Kun-Fa

Garden landscape is the basic construction of a city, which can effectively improve the ecological environment of a city, highlight the urban cultural characteristics and the quality of life of the residents. The landscape design project uses the internal space of the garden to improve the quality of the city, protect the ecological environment, improve the greening of the city and improve the quality of the urban living environment, and continue to develop green landscapes to improve the urban environment and improve the living comfort of living.


Author(s):  
Юлия Робертовна Горелова ◽  
Александра Мартановна Маматулина

Данная статья посвящена исследованию отражения образных характеристик архитектурной среды города в пейзажах художников. Анализируя индивидуальные образные интерпретации разных художников, авторы предпринимают попытку обозначить общие тенденции в отображении архитектурной составляющей городского текста в целом и в частности его отдельных элементов (архитектурных объектов и пространств) в изобразительном искусстве. При этом авторами актуализируется внимание на специфике отображения различных типов городских пространств как публичных, так и камерных. При анализе публичных пространств центральной части города, формирующих «парадный портрет города», основное внимание уделяется отражению образов так называемых «визитных карточек»: наиболее значимых в семиотическом отношении архитектурных объектов и пространств, формирующих позитивный и презентабельный образ города. Некоторые фрагменты городского пространства выступают излюбленными мотивами городских пейзажей, написанных омскими художниками. Именно эти пространства воспринимаются жителями в качестве визитных карточек города и представляют собой наиболее значимые в семиотическом отношении фрагменты городского текста. В Омске, несомненно, к таким ключевым пространствам и объектам следует отнести архитектурные ансамбли ул. Ленина (Любинский проспект) и ул. Тарской, ансамбли Соборной и Никольской площадей, здания Драматического театра, Серафимо-Алексеевской часовни и Речного вокзала и др. Можно констатировать наличие излюбленных ракурсов при изображении архитектурных пространств центральной части Омска. Одним из таких является вид из окон Дома художников на реку Омь, мост и перспективу Любинского проспекта на противоположном берегу реки. Изображение Любинского у разных художников отличается не только выбором ракурса, а более настроением и своим отношением к данному пространству. Некоторые художники в своих работах выходят на глубокий уровень философского осмысления пространства, другие – показывают его будничным и обыденным. Камерные пейзажи, как правило, изображают фрагменты городской среды, относительно изолированные от центральных городских публичных пространств. К таким можно отнести дворы, арки и др. Камерным пространствам характерна близость, интимность. Большинство камерных пространств являются анонимными. Самым ярким примером камерного городского пространства являются дворы. Мотив строчной рядовой многоэтажной застройки, характерный для большинства городских окраин, также находит отражение в работах омских художников. У некоторых художников образ окраины передается как пустынное пространство, где высотная застройка перемежается с пустынными пространствами. Другой вариант осмысления данного образа предполагает трактовку окраины как пространства привычного, обжитого, наполненного утилитарными функциями и обустроенного людьми под свои нужды. This article aims to examine the reflection of figurative characteristics of the city’s architectural environment in artists’ landscapes. By analyzing individual figurative interpretations by different artists, the authors attempt to determine global tendencies in the reflection of the city’s architectural environment in general, and in its individual elements (architectural objects and spaces) in visual arts in particular. The authors focus attention on the specifics of the presentation of different types of urban spaces, both public and private. Analyzing public spaces of the city center, which form the “grand portrait of the city”, the authors concentrate on the reflection of the city’s landmarks—the most significant semiotic architectural objects and spaces that form a positive and presentable image of the city. Some parts of the urban space are favorite topics of urban landscapes by Omsk artists. It is these spaces that residents perceive as landmarks; they represent the most valuable, in semiotic terms, parts of the urban text. In Omsk, undoubtedly, the landmarks of the city are architectural ensembles in Lenin St. (Lyubinsky Prospect) and Tarskaya St.; ensembles of the Sobornaya and Nikolskaya Squares; the buildings of the Drama Theater, of the Seraphim-Alekseevskaya Chapel and of the River Boat Station, etc. Artists have favorite perspectives in depicting the architectural spaces of the central part of Omsk. One of them is a view from the windows of the House of Artist on the Om’ River, the bridge, and the perspective of Lubinskiy Prospect, which is on the other bank of the river. Artists show Lubinskiy Prospect in different ways: due to not only the chosen angle, but also their mood and attitude to the space they depict. Some artists go to the deep level of a philosophical understanding of the surrounding space, while others illustrate it as ordinary. Private landscapes, as usual, show parts of urban environment that are relatively isolated from public central urban spaces. Yards and arches are examples of it. Private spaces usually have a close, intimate atmosphere. Most private spaces are anonymous. The most vivid examples of the private urban space are yards. Omsk artists also reflect the motif of multistorey buildings, mainly concentrated in the outskirts, in their works. Some artists depict the outskirts as an empty space, while others interpret them as a habitual, familiar space full of utilitarian functions and arranged by people to meet their needs.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 345-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Nagenborg

Abstract Robots are leaving factories and entering urban spaces. In this paper, I will explore how we can integrate robots of various types into the urban landscape. I will distinguish between two perspectives: (1) the responsible design and use of urban robots and (2) robots as part of responsible urban innovations. The first viewpoint considers issues arising from the use of a robot in an urban environment. To develop a substantive understanding of Responsible Urban Robotics, we need to focus on normative implications of city life as the context in which in robots are being used. I will refer to the desirable qualities of city life as “cityness” and will argue that we should design for cityness. The second approach asks how robots might be used to address challenges specific to cities. From the perspective of RRI, this may require participatory approaches in which the needs of the stakeholders are addressed. But we may also find inspiration in the work undertaken in architecture on expanding the concept and field to ensure that architects not only provide services to the lucky few but also create useful and beautiful spaces for the many. A dialogue with architects, urban designers, and urban planners may also be needed to successfully address the spatial issues raised by the presence of robots in the city.


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