scholarly journals CREATING SOCIOCULTURAL VALUES: THE PROBLEM OF LOCALIZATION IN THE URBAN SPACE

Author(s):  
Юрий Владимирович Преображенский

Рассмотрен вопрос о сущности социокультурного пространства и его пересечении с экономическим пространством города. Показано, что наиболее эффективная организация пространственного взаимодействия данных пространств во многом является географической задачей. Предлагается метод изучения социальных практик населения для локализации точек и линий взаимодействия социокультурной и экономической сфер. Рассмотрены практики, в ходе которых создаются социокультурные ценности, положительно влияющие на экономическое пространство города. Обсуждается проблема влияния пешеходных пространств (наиболее насыщенных практиками) на формирование имиджа города. The question of the essence of the socio-cultural space and its intersection with the economic space of the city is considered. It is shown that the most effective organization of the spatial interaction of these spaces is in many ways a geographic task. A method is proposed for studying the social practices of the population to localize points and lines of interaction between the socio-cultural and economic spheres. The practice is considered in the course of which socio-cultural values are created that have a positive effect on the economic space of the city. The problem of the influence of pedestrian spaces (the most saturated with practices) on the formation of the city's image is discussed.

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (48) ◽  
pp. 123-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcos Esdras Leite ◽  
Mônica Aparecisa Soares Silva de Melo

No Brasil, as realidades urbanas são desiguais e as condições de vida não são equânimes nas mesmas. As desigualdades socioeconômicas e espaciais marcam seu cotidiano e diminuem as possibilidades de desfrutar dos bens e fluxos existentes na cidade. Nesse meio, as juventudes brasileiras são múltiplas, e é a partir dessa pluralidade que elas vêem sendo compreendidas, uma vez que os jovens demonstram formas singulares de viver. Montes Claros é um polo regional que possui bens, serviços e fluxos acessados pela sua população e pelos munícipios do seu entorno. O objetivo geral da pesquisa foi analisar a distribuição espacial e social pela cidade de Montes Claros das juventudes de15 a29 anos. Sendo assim, a metodologia foi pautada na coleta, cruzamento e análise dos microdados do IBGE, de 2010. Para facilitar o processamento das informações foi utilizado o Sistema de Informações Geográficas (SIGs), o que permitiu gerar mapas temáticos para ilustrar e facilitar a compreensão dos resultados. Concluímos que, a cidade, com suas potencialidades e limites é um direito de todos que nela vivem. Nesse sentido, reafirmamos a importância de reconhecer as singularidades de seus habitantes, mas questionando as condições objetivas do meio social no qual estes estão inseridos. Dessa forma, a maior concentração de jovens está nas regiões com menor renda da cidade, em que se caracterizam pela infraestrutura deficitária.Palavras-chave: Juventudes urbanas; Espaço urbano; Práticas sociais.AbstractIn the Brazil, the urban realities are uneven and living conditions are not equitable in them. The socioeconomic and spatial inequalities mark their daily life and decrease the possibilities to enjoy the goods and existing flows in the city. In between, Brazilian youths are multiple, and it is from this plurality that they see being understood, since young people have unique ways of living. Montes Claros is a regional center that has goods, services and streams accessed by the population and by the municipalities of its surroundings. The overall objective of the research was to analyze the spatial and social distribution by the city of Montes Claros youths 15-29 years. Therefore, the methodology was based on collected, crossing and analysis of IBGE microdata, of the 2010. To facilitate the processing of information was used Geographic Information System (GIS), allowing generate thematic maps to illustrate and facilitate the understanding of results. We conclude that the city, with its possibilities and limitations is a right for all who live in it. In this regard, we reaffirm the importance of recognizing the uniqueness of its inhabitants, but questioning the objective conditions of the social environment in which they are inserted. Thus, the highest concentration of young people is associated with the low income of the city, which are characterized by deficient infrastructure.Keywords: Urban Youth; Urban space; Social practices.


Author(s):  
Carlos Machado

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.


2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
Caragh Wells

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.


Author(s):  
Jacob Kreutzfeldt

Street cries, though rarely heard in Northern European cities today, testify to ways in which audible practices shape and structure urban spaces. Paradigmatic for what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call ‘the refrain’, the ritualised and stylised practice of street cries may point at the dynamics of space-making, through which the social and territorial construction of urban space is performed. The article draws on historical material, documenting and describing street cries, particularly in Copenhagen in the years 1929 to 1935. Most notably, the composer Vang Holmboe and the architect Steen Eiler Rasmussen have investigated Danish street cries as a musical and a spatial phenomenon, respectably. Such studies – from their individual perspectives – can be said to explore the aesthetics of urban environments, since street calls are developed and heard specifically in the context of the city. Investigating the different methods employed in the two studies and presenting Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the refrain as a framework for further studies in the field, this article seeks to outline a fertile area of study for sound studies: the investigation of everyday refrains and the environmental relations they express and perform. Today changed sensibilities and technologies have rendered street crying obsolete in Northern Europe, but new urban ritornells may have taken their place.


Author(s):  
Ilaria Geddes ◽  
Nadia Charalambous

This project was developed as an attempt to assess the relationship between different morphogenetic processes, in particular, those of fringe belt formation as described by M.R.G. Conzen (1960) and Whitehand (2001), and of centrality and compactness as described by Hillier (1999; 2002). Different approaches’ focus on different elements of the city has made it difficult to establish exactly how these processes interact or whether they are simply different facets of development reflecting wider socio-economic factors. To address this issue, a visual, chronological timeline of Limassol’s development was constructed along with a narrative of the socio-economic context of its development.  The complexity of cities, however, makes static visualisations across time difficult to read and assess alongside textual narratives. We therefore took the step of developing an animation of land use and configurational analyses of Limassol, in order bring to life the diachronic analysis of the city and shed light on its generative mechanisms. The video presented here shows that the relationship between the processes mentioned above is much stronger and more complex than previously thought. The related paper explores in more detail the links between fringe belt formation as a cyclical process of peripheral development and centrality as a recurring process of minimisation of gains in distance. The project’s outcomes clearly show that composite methods of visualisations are an analytical opportunity still little exploited within urban morphology. References Conzen, M.R.G., 1960. Alnwick, Northumberland: A Study in Town-Plan Analysis, London: Institute of British Geographers. Hillier, B., 2002. A Theory of the City as Object: or how spatial laws mediate the social construction of urban space. Urban Des Int, 7(3–4), pp.153–179. Hillier, B., 1999. Centrality as a process: accounting for attraction inequalities in deformed grids. Urban Des Int, 4(3–4), pp.107–127. Whitehand, J.W.R., 2001. British urban morphology: the Conzenian tradition. Urban Morphology, 5(2), pp.103–109.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Carla de Lira Bottura

This article introduces partial discussions from a doctoral research in progress that has as object of study the tendency to paci cation and concealment of con icts veri ed in the production process of contemporary urban space - particularly in the most recent Brazil- ian cities - as well as its strategies and mechanisms of control. As a eld of study, it is proposed the city of Palmas, capital of Tocantins, last planned capital of the twentieth century, founded on May 20, 1989, a year that symbolizes the opening of the Western world to the neoliberal economic policy. Based on the observation of the absence of signi cant movements of resistance to the urban space production process at Palmas and interpreting it as a re ection of pacifying tendency of consensus and appeasement / masking of con icts as a feature of neoliberal city, we propose the hypothesis of physical and territorial con guration of the city as a laboratory of the neoliberal model of urban management, in which socio-spa- tial dynamics gradually developed in other contemporary cities through processes historically constructed, get explicit and take place, immediately or in a very short time. Through a historical ap- proach to the context of its creation and occupation, we propose an urban space production reading based on the recognition of char- acteristics relating to its conditions of New Town and neoliberal city as well as the incipient action of the social movements dedicated to the struggles for housing as social agents in this process. 


2020 ◽  
pp. 42-54
Author(s):  
Anna Cudny

Influence of social capital of inhabitants on shaping common spaces in a housing environment The last two decades of the century have brought unusually many changes in the built environment. These include not only changes directly related to the emergence of a new urban fabric, but also changes in social attitudes towards common spaces located in residential areas. The built environment has never been evaluated so strongly. This assessment translates not only into the everyday outdoor activities of residents (necessary, optional and social activities), but also to economic projects (purchase, sale and rental of real estate). At the same time, the city ceases to be, as it has been so far, mainly subjected to criticism, and the residents are gradually changing their demanding attitude concerning the development of space to participate in the process of its creation. Society wants to have a real impact on urban space, especially on the space closest to them. Thus, the right to the city is no longer a privilege or a duty, but it becomes a need. Trying to meet this need results in a phenomenon which we can increasingly observe in Poland, and which we have been witnessing abroad for many years: activities in public space are changing into activities for public space. They include the transformation of common spaces related to the place of residence—improving their aesthetic quality, functional changes, modernization of development elements. Observing numerous examples of public participation in shaping public spaces, it was noticed that the initiation, course and effects of activities largely depend on the social capital of the group undertaking said activity. Accordingly, there is a need for research on the mutual relation between the level of social capital and the issue of shaping and managing public space with the participation of local communities, which will be the main topic of the paper. To investigate the above-mentioned issue, qualitative research methods were used in relation to the relationship: site visit, non-participant observation and focus interviews. This contributed to a comparative study of three selected Warsaw case studies. They were analysed in terms of meeting the qualitative criteria selected for the study. These criteria have been indicated on the basis of the Social Capital Development Strategy 2020, which is one of the parts of the Medium-Term National Development Strategy. The result of the analyses is an indication of derived factors from within the group of space users and external factors that have a positive and negative impact on initiating, carrying out and maintaining the effects of changes in common spaces developed with the participation of local communities in Polish conditions. The conclusions can be used to improve future participation processes related to urban space - both by non-professionals participating in them, as well as experts - architects and town planners.


Author(s):  
Paulo Cruz Terra ◽  
Marcelo de Souza Magalhães

The city of Rio de Janeiro underwent profound changes between 1870 and the early 20th century. Its population grew dramatically, attracting migrants not only from abroad but also from other regions of Brazil. It also expanded significantly in size, as the construction of trolley and railway lines and the introduction of real estate capital powered the occupation of new areas. Meanwhile, urban reforms aimed at modernization transformed the social ways in which urban space was used. During this period, Rio de Janeiro went from being the capital of the Brazilian Empire to being the capital of the Brazilian Republic. It nevertheless maintained its position as the cultural, political-administrative, commercial, and financial center of the country. Against this backdrop of change, the city was an important arena for the political struggles that marked the period, including demonstrations in favor of abolition and the republic. Rio de Janeiro’s citizens were not inert during this period of transformation, and they found various ways to take action and fight for what they understood to be their rights. Protests, demands, petitions, and a vibrant life organized around social and political associations are examples of the broad repertoire used by the city’s inhabitants to gain a voice in municipal affairs. Citizens’ use of public demands and petitions as a channel to communicate with the authorities, and especially with city officials, shows that while they did not necessarily shun formal politics, they understood politics to be a sphere for dialogue and dispute. The sociocultural history of Rio de Janeiro during this period was therefore built precisely through confrontations and negotiations in which the common people played an active role.


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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (6) ◽  
pp. 819-834
Author(s):  
Yewon Andrea Lee

Critical scholarship on gentrification has contributed significantly to bolstering the rights of working-class residents against the forces that price them out of the city. However, working-class residents are not the only ones who suffer from dispossession and displacement with rampant hyper-commodification of urban space. Based on the case of Seoul, I examine how new agents—tenant shopkeepers—emerged at the forefront of challenging gentrification and successfully reframed the problem of gentrification. Within the new frame, the shopkeepers who make their livelihoods by using urban spaces are pitted against the property owners who attempt to profit at the expense of their tenants. Through this case, I ask ‘How can radical shifts occur in the ways that the problem of gentrification is constructed?’ My answer draws upon the framing theory in the social movement literature which identifies conditions under which a radical departure from institutionalized ways and social norms can transpire even when the radical shift means challenging the entrenched power structure—in my case, the property-ownership-based rights regime. I highlight the importance of further developing a gentrification scholarship on social change that unravels the rise of new locations of resistance, particularly at a time when the advance of gentrification seems inevitable.


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