Urban Decay and the Metaphorical Cancer of Blight

2021 ◽  
pp. 109-127
Keyword(s):  
1997 ◽  
Vol 25 (5/6) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Vijay Kumar Thakur
Keyword(s):  

1992 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerzy Krupinski

The origins of social psychiatry can be traced to the age of enlightenment and to the effects of the industrial revolution. Social psychiatry deals with social factors associated with psychiatric morbidity, social effects of mental illness, psycho-social disorders and social approaches to psychiatric care. Since the end of World War II up to the early seventies it has been claimed that social psychiatry should concentrate on the fight against war, poverty, racial discrimination, urban decay and all other social ills affecting people's mental health, and that the psychiatrist should be responsible for the mental health of the society. In contrast, sociology of mental health questioned the expertise of the psychiatrist and the very existence of mental illness, claiming that it covers deviant behaviour rejected by the society. The paper refutes this approach indicating that not the existence but the perception and presentation of psychiatric illness are socially determined. Acknowledging the contribution of sociology and social sciences to psychiatry, it is suggested that the heroic period of social psychiatry and the iconoclastic approach of sociology of mental health are over. However, social psychiatry, enriched by the use of epidemiological methods, has still much to offer to the daily practice of psychiatry.


Author(s):  
Andrew Demshuk

This book illuminates how civic life functioned in Leipzig, East Germany's second-largest city, on the eve of the 1989 revolution by exploring acts of “urban ingenuity” amid catastrophic urban decay. The book profiles the creative activism of local communist officials who, with the help of scores of volunteers, constructed a palatial bowling alley without Berlin's knowledge or approval. In a city mired in disrepair, civic pride overcame resentment against a regime loathed for corruption, Stasi spies, and the Berlin Wall. Reconstructing such episodes through interviews and obscure archival materials, the book shows how the public sphere functioned in Leipzig before the fall of communism. Hardly detached or inept, local officials worked around centralized failings to build a more humane city. And hardly disengaged, residents turned to black-market construction to patch up their surroundings. Because such “urban ingenuity” was premised on weakness in the centralized regime, the dystopian cityscape evolved from being merely a quotidian grievance to the backdrop for revolution. If, by their actions, officials were demonstrating that the regime was irrelevant, and if, in their own experiences, locals only attained basic repairs outside official channels, why should anyone have mourned the system when it was overthrown?


Author(s):  
Gregory Marinic ◽  
◽  
Zeke Leonard ◽  

It has been over fifty years since the beginning of the decline of the American industrial city. After World War II, urban life in the United States began to fracture along social, economic, and demographic lines. The rise of the interstate highway system facilitated the simultaneous collapse of downtown retail districts; advancing urban decay stood in marked contrast to a thriving, homogeneous, trans-continental suburban culture. Today, widespread obsolescence has catalyzed and accelerated to embody the future of shrinking cities in the RustBelt.


The “New Hollywood” that emerged in the late sixties is now widely recognized as an era of remarkable filmmaking, when directors enjoyed a unique autonomy to craft ambitious, introspective movies that evinced a cinematic world of hard choices, complex interpersonal relationships, compromised heroes, and uncertain outcomes. The New Hollywood Revisited brings together a remarkable collection of authors (some of whom wrote about the New Hollywood as it unfolded), to revisit this unique era in American cinema (circa 1967-1976). It was a decade in which a number of extraordinary factors – including the end of a half-century-old censorship regime and economic and demographic changes to the American film audience – converged and created a new type of commercial film, imprinted with the social and political context of the times: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, economic distress, urban decay, and, looming, the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon presidency. This volume offers the opportunity to look back, with nearly fifty years hindsight, at a golden age in American filmmaking.


Author(s):  
Traci Parker

The book concludes with an examination of the relocation of department stores to suburban shopping centers and the Sears, Roebuck, and Company affirmative action cases. Mass suburbanization, the rise of discount retailers such as Kmart and Wal-Mart, and urban decay transformed department stores. Black workers found that the gains they had made in downtown department stores had virtually disappeared as department stores followed their preferred clientele—the white middle class—to the suburbs. Here, stores were able to return to their former racial practices in spaces that were inaccessible via public transportation, deemed private property, and prohibited civil rights demonstrations. The Sears cases thus reveal the ways that the department store movement modified its tactics, approaches, and strategies. These cases also exposed the industry’s ongoing transformations, ones that revolutionized, or rather diminished, the status of retail work and department stores, and facilitated the reconsolidation of racial discrimination.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1102-1138
Author(s):  
Edwin Joseph ◽  
Elizabeth O'Dea

Food security for the urban poor has been an important topic for both developed and developing countries over the last 15 years. Although South Bend Indiana is a city in a developed country, declining economic circumstances have caused the city to show significant urban decay somewhat similar to some cities in developing countries. In this chapter, we explore South Bend's history and economic development strategies, and review practices aimed at strengthening food security for the urban poor. The chapter documents how numerous disparate organizations have been trying to help alleviate urban poverty and hunger, and reviews previous strategies used to foster sustainable growth and development. The integration of spatial technologies will become a key factor for promoting community social networks, participatory planning, and collaboration. The case is presented for the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and associated technologies to help organizations, community leaders, local organizations, city planners, higher education institutions and the urban poor, work together to alleviate poverty and malnutrition through networking and sustainable urban agriculture.


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